Grand Design

by TMarkos

Part 1

Jesri shifted in her chair, trying to find a comfortable way to rest on the bare metal. Harsh lights shone down from above, deepening the far corner of the room in shadow that cloaked the trio of Kitan customs officers. Although their faces were indistinct, their whispered conversation carried quite clearly to her ears.

"Is there anything in the tertiary codex that covers her case?" one asked worriedly. Another shifted his weight rhythmically between his front and hind feet, scrolling through a lengthy chunk of text on his tablet. He worked silently for a long minute before disgustedly tossing the tablet at the third Kita.

"I can't find anything," he trilled in frustration. "No case to handle her, and no exception policy for unhandled cases!" The two others bobbled their heads in irritation before leaning further into their hushed conference.

Jesri sighed. She was used to some degree of confusion, but Kita were notoriously obsessed with protocol. If she had known they had purchased this station she would have gone well out of her way to dock elsewhere. "Excuse me, gentlemen?", she inquired, at which all three officers flinched as if struck. "Will you be much longer? I have a schedule to keep, so I'd prefer to be on my way."

A split second of hope colored their faces, quickly replaced by returning frustration. "No, no, no! We have to classify you in the biological threat matrix before we let you board. The first question in the assessment, as you are aware, asks whether you are a carbon or sulfur-based life form." He fixed her with an annoyed look. "You are neither."

She grinned at him. "How interesting. Does your codex say that unclassified life forms must spend the rest of their days stuck in customs?"

"No!", he buzzed back, stalking to and fro manically. "It gives no guidance. The classification questionnaire had questions for every lifeform - until today."

Jesri shrugged. "Obviously not every lifeform." She waved away his retort before it could form and forged onward. "I'm aware of some Kitan codices as well, you know. There's one that I particularly like which states that no sentient being may be held in government custody for longer than three arcs unless criminal charges are filed."

The customs officer stopped pacing and turned a pale shade of puce. "Well, yes, of course... But the codices also say that no life form may enter the station without going through the biological assessment."

"What a conundrum," she murmured, the corners of her mouth twitching.

"This is serious!", raged the officer, stalking towards her. "If the codex is flawed, then so is our security. If our security is flawed..." His mouth worked at words that never came before he slumped down. Looking back towards his comrades and finding no offered help from that quarter, he turned towards Jesri and straightened up.

"Please, ma'am - do you have any information on your classification that could help us?"

A direct question. Damn.

Do not lie.

"Yes," she said through gritted teeth.

All three officers goggled at her, but she offered no clarification. "Well?" said the one holding the codex tablet. "What information do you have that will help us?"

Not even by omission.

"You're looking in the wrong section," Jesri muttered.

Frustrated, the officer flipped through the index. "Do you have any idea how big the codex is? What section are you listed under?"

Not even if it puts you at risk.

Jesri shot an annoyed look at the inquiring officer. "Section 46, Subsection 1039 - Ancient Devices and Artifacts."

The looks on their faces almost made this whole affair worth it, she decided. The three officers conferred around the tablet for several seconds more before falling silent. "Well strike me," said the one holding the tablet. He held the tablet up to show the entry he had found. A passable image of her face was at the top left, with lines of Kitan script flowing down the screen beside it. "Jesri Tam," he read, "Human-form Biological Construct." His eyes widened. "The date stamp on this record..."

"Human?", sputtered the officer nearest her, cutting him off. "The Humans?"

"Yep," she said, giving him a bland smile. "The very same. Builders of the Cygnus Gate, architects of the transit networks, creators of one increasingly late trader. Did you think dogs were the only life they left behind?"

Kita didn't have a very good face for expressing annoyance, but this officer was certainly trying his best. "Dogs are a standard carbon-based spacefaring species, certainly no outlier. I understand dogs. Why are you so different?"

Tell the whole truth, always.

Jesri resolved to find a planet where direct questions were considered extremely rude and move there forever. "Human biological engineering discovered the concept of scaffold-assisted growth at around the same time their computer systems were using photolithographic nanoscale silicon networks. There were experiments to develop improved biological constructs that incorporated their traditional computing architecture as a growth substrate. I am the end result of a very, very long line of research in that technique."

The codex officer stroked his eye ridges thoughtfully. "Silicon-based biochemistry has never been observed - present company excluded," he added with an apologetic nod to Jesri. "That would certainly explain the classification discrepancy."

Jesri flashed him a bright smile and stretched theatrically. "Well, gentlemen, I'm glad we solved that mystery. Does that mean I can be on my way?"

He shook his head, tapping furiously at the tablet. "No, we should gather some more information to refine the biological questionnaire-"

"Won't matter," she interjected hastily. "The codex doesn't permit classification of unique specimens into the questionnaire, they all go under artifacts. This isn't the first time I've had this conversation."

All three officers blinked. "Of course," said the codex officer. "That makes perfect sense. In that case, ma'am, you are free to go about your business pursuant to the regulations of this station for a duration not to exceed 40 arcs."

"Thanks!", she chirped, popping up from the chair and gathering her things.

"But if I may ask," said the codex officer hesitantly, "Are you truly the only one of your kind?"

Do not lie, except…

"Yep, just me," she said, tossing them a wave as she strode out of the room.

Part 2

Strolling through the souk of a transit station was always an assault on the senses. To her left, Jesri was accosted by a diminutive horde of yellow-furred Uen hawking decrepit fruits. Unfurled cloth banners flapped listlessly in the draft from the environmental systems to her right, a rippling display of shifting colors masking stacks of raw materials, food and hunched forms taking inventory. A buzz of shouting voices in a dozen languages carried around her in a dull roar, punctuated by extremes of high and low pitch from the vendors seeking to stand out from the din. Shooing the insistent Uen to the side with a thickly gloved hand, Jesri ducked between a pair of faded banners and turned down a side corridor.

Her destination was far from the souk, far from the docks and the critical systems of the station. Most transit network stations were sparsely populated for their size, which spoke more to their massive construction than their still respectably large population. By the time she had come halfway, Jesri could no longer hear the bustle of the market. Cool, humid air drifted around her under a high ceiling, with unmarked doors sealed shut in rows down the hallway.

This far away from the hub, the sides and nooks of the hallway had accumulated a drift of organic particulates. Absent any maintenance robots, the dust accrued volume, trapping moisture. Speckles of algae and lichen colored some surfaces, and the tiny bells of mushrooms curved up from against one ancient door. It was rumored that the farthest reaches of some stations had hallways which were entirely overgrown with exotic and dangerous plants, with lurking predators peering from within. Jesri didn't believe that rumor, but she didn't disbelieve it enough to try proving it false.

She stopped in front of a door, peering at the battered grey-green metal of the surface. It didn't look that distinct from the others, but no detritus had accumulated in front of the door. The access plate was not free of lichen, but a cleared area in the center took the form of a circular splotch with five radiating lines above it. Stripping off the glove from her right hand, Jesri pressed her palm into the panel. Her hand splayed outward, perfectly matching the five-fingered silhouette.

Unperturbed by its own age, the door hissed lightly as it slid into the wall. The lighting was dimmer within, but still clear enough for her to see a thin path through the boxes and crates lining one side of the entryway. She grimaced and flattened herself against the wall, scraping her chest on protruding corners as she inched past into the main room. These had been living quarters once, with a common layout. An image leapt into her head, unbidden, the dusty crates overlaid by a brightly lit and clean room with pictures on the wall, pictures of children and sunlit green fields.

She shook her head, and saw just the crates. "I don't have time for this bullshit," she muttered.

At the sound of her voice a rustling noise came from an adjoining room, followed shortly by a stooped, robed figure. It shuffled into the room, pushing its hood back from a bare, wrinkled scalp to show its face. Pallid, emaciated cheeks framed a thin mouth and nose, looking incongruously dour beside the sparkle of delight in the eyes above. "Sister," it rasped.

Jesri sighed. "Anja, you look like shit."

Anja cackled dryly, her voice like dead leaves. "You haven't changed a bit. We haven't spoken in how many years and that's the first thing you say? What about, 'Hello, sister, nice to see you after all this time. Sorry I haven't dropped by in ages!'"

Jesri snorted. "Are you asking me to lie to you? I wouldn't have even come by this dilapidated scrap heap if I had known the Kita had taken over management."

Hairless brows drew together as Anja frowned. "That's unfortunate," she mused, rifling through a crate. Clouds of dust fountained up as she shifted its contents before coming away with a small black box. She smiled sunnily at Jesri, earning an eye roll. "Kita are such a trial to deal with."

Drawing off her other glove, Jesri stretched and set her light pack down on a nearby box. She doffed her hood, shaking out chin-length raven hair. "So," she asked, "Is that what you called me here to see?"

Anja shook her head. "No, I had something I wanted you to hear. Have a listen to this while I freshen up, I wasn't expecting you so soon." She tapped a wall panel and shuffled into the back room, leaving Jesri alone with the empty crates and a slowly settling cloud of dust. The room's speakers sputtered to life with a low static buzz punctuated by high frequency squealing. The static pulsed rhythmically, gaining pitch and tone until it resolved itself reluctantly into speech - into English, Jesri realized with a start.

"-link up with primary group," a gruff male voice was saying. "We will have to try for the rendezvous on Zephyr. Our reactors will last until-"

The static fuzzed into indistinct buzzing again, but Jesri stood transfixed. "Zephyr," she whispered. "Anja, where did you-"

The recording resolved into voices again, cutting her off. "-on reserve power for the moment. Containment is holding. We will update with our status in two days. Grand Design out."

Jesri stood agape for several long seconds before Anja sashayed into the room, pirouetting on one foot while beaming at Jesri. "I had to hit up the autodoc before we left, I haven't jumped in for ages. Do you like it?", she asked, running her fingers through lustrous blonde hair. Her cheeks and lips were smooth, her features youthful. She was nearly a twin for Jesri but for her light complexion.

Jesri shook her head in irritation. "Anja, you can't claim you have new information on the Grand Design and ask me about your hair. Where did you get this recording? Is there any more to it?" She blinked. "Did you say that we were leaving?"

Anja nodded excitedly. "We have to go, as soon as possible. I don't just have vague information - I know where to find it."

Jesri sputtered, at a loss for words. "Anja, we haven't..." She blinked rapidly, her voice sticking in her throat. "I gave up on the search so long ago."

Beaming, Anja crossed the room and grabbed both of Jesri's hands. "We never lost, sister. We were just waiting. And now we have what we need to win." She stepped back, one hand at her side and the other clasped in a fist against her heart. Tears glittered in her eyes as she spoke words that had not been uttered in five thousand years.

"Terra Invicta, sister."

The two women walked silently through the deserted corridors towards the docking hub. Jesri's head was spinning, her expression dazed. She had been aimless for so long that this sudden, bright flare of purpose beating in her chest felt like it would burn her alive. The walk back to the market passed in a blur, and before she knew it the lichen-dappled metal of the far halls was replaced with the sharp odors and draped fabrics of the souk.

Sliding out of their side passage, the women picked their way through the crowd towards the docks. Jesri turned towards Anja and jerked her head towards the market. "Did you need something before we left? I don't have much of anything on board."

"Still living like a solitary monk, sister?", giggled Anja. "You really haven't changed."

"Says the hoarder," she shot back. "I rescind my offer. Hope you like nutrient pellets."

Anja screwed up her face in disgust. "Nobody likes those but you. At least let me-" She trailed off, peering past Jesri. "Sister, you wouldn't happen to be docked in slip 49, would you?"

Jesri casually turned to study a banner beside her, studying the dock out of the corner of her eye. Burly, serious Kitan security guards stood around the access point. As she watched, one of them snapped his head up to look at Anja, who was making no effort to hide while staring straight at them. Jesri groaned, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her away.

The Kita muscled their way through the crowd, shouting and pointing at them as they started to run. The docking area was always a bustle of crowded activity, and neither group could make much headway. Jesri and Anja slid between knots of bemused aliens while the Kita simply bowled through them, a chorus of protesting voices in their wake.

They broke into a clear stretch of the docking ring, only to see the path ahead blocked by a waiting group of Kita. "Shit," Jesri grumbled. The pursuing group caught up to them quickly once their forward progress was halted, trapping the two neatly in the empty corridor. A swell of people gathered behind the security officers to watch the confrontation.

The leader of the forward group stepped towards them, brandishing a short club. "Jesri Tam," he shouted. "You are placed in bond under suspicion of illicit activity aboard this Kitan station. You and your accomplice will accompany us to the command center for questioning."

Jesri spread her arms in a nonthreatening gesture. "This seems like a lot of fuss just to talk to me," she said amicably. "What am I being accused of in particular?"

"Lying to customs officials!", shouted a Kita from the pursuit group. Jesri recognized him as the codex officer from earlier. "You said there were no others like you, but you've smuggled another onto our station!"

"She's nothing like me-", began Jesri, but Anja cut her off. "Onto your station?" she said, an odd note in her voice. She took a step towards the one who had spoken but Jesri moved quickly to cut her off. She smiled broadly, taking care not to show any teeth. "I'm sure this is all a huge misunderstanding," she said rapidly, keeping herself between Anja and the officers. "Let's just talk through your concerns and I'm sure we can all reach an accord-"

"No!", shouted the head officer from behind them. "We will have this discussion at the command center. Priest, restrain them!"

At his command, a robed Kita with a long, thin staff moved forward to stand beside the leader. Extending his staff towards the two women, he spoke solemnly and deeply while moving his free hand in a circle. "Sashun Endomibel Lel Trei Ges Afori Sashun," he intoned, pointing squarely at Jesri. "Rekes Shekuti Barar!"

At his words a shimmering wall sprang up around Jesri and Anja, enclosing them in a bubble of hazy, indistinct light. Anja ran her hand down the field with a disinterested expression, sparks trailing from her fingers. The head officer hooted in amusement as the priest stepped back solemnly, crossing his arms and bowing. "Now you will be placed in bond," the officer said loudly, addressing the crowd. "No irregularities will be tolerated on any Kitan stations!"

The assembled security guards beamed at the display of power, and the crowd watching the spectacle started to disperse now that the show was over. A pair of guards approached the women with restraints, but halted halfway when Anja began to laugh softly.

"Are you fucking serious?", she chuckled, fixing the officers with a mirthless stare. "Is this what passes for life these days?" Contempt dripped from her voice as she turned to look at the priest. "For civilization?"

Jesri grabbed her arm tightly, knuckles whitening. "Anja, let's just go with them to the command center, we can work this out quietly-" Anja shook off her hand and stepped away, turning her glare towards Jesri. "We're not playing their games, sister," she said softly, "Not this time." She bared her teeth in a feral grin. "But for you, I'll give them one chance." She turned to address the head officer, striding to the edge of the field. "You, come here."

The officer scoffed, drawing himself up. "You will make no demands of me, detainee. You should know your place on our station."

Now Jesri started to chuckle, throwing her hands up in a mock surrender. "Well," she said resignedly, "I did try."

Anja took a step back from the field edge and drew in a breath. "Station Indomitable," she said evenly, her gaze boring into the lead officer. "Major Anja Tam, TNMC Three Five Seven Two Sierra Five." A chirrup of acknowledgement sounded from the hallway speakers, and she smiled sweetly at the horrified priest.

"Command authorization."

Part 3

The treble notes of a bosun's whistle echoed through the hallway, reverberating in the shocked silence. A neutral female voice broadcast over the speakers in unaccented English. "Confirmed, command transfer to ranking officer aboard. Command authorization given to Major Anja Tam."

The priest's mouth worked soundlessly as he backed away, but the head officer stalked towards the two women in a fit of rage. "How dare you!" he bellowed, gesticulating incoherently. "What was that voice, what did it say? What lies have you told to the Guardians?"

"How dare I?", hissed Anja through a rictus grin, her eyes sparkling. "You think your guardians will come to strike me down? Who do you think you're talking to, bug?"

The officer stuttered as Anja stepped towards him, but Jesri slid in between them with her hands raised. "Okay, hi everyone! Let's just call this one a draw for today." She fixed Anja with a look. "We have places to be."

Anja stepped back with a shrug, the fire dying away. "No fun," she pouted, "but you have a point." She gave the officer a smile that stopped a million miles away from her eyes, then spoke in a raised voice: "Release security barrier!"

The haze of light surrounding the two dropped. The assembled crowd murmured in shock while Anja brushed stray strands of hair back under her hood, static snapping from the dispelled field. "Honestly," she muttered, "I had forgotten how much of a pain this was. Shall we?" The two stepped away from the stunned Kita, the crowd parting to permit them passage.

"Stop right there," howled the officer from behind them. "You will not escape punishment for this outrage!" Jesri sighed, and looked over to find Anja working on the beginnings of a smile. "Let me," said Jesri wearily. "You'll just get all worked up again."

Pivoting to face the head officer, Jesri blurred into motion before he could so much as shift his weight to react. She crossed the distance between them in two steps. Her leg kicked out, the ball of her foot crunching wetly through the joint of his foreleg and driving down to the floor. Jesri caught him mid-fall and held his screaming face up next to hers by the scruff of his neck. His breath stank as he hyperventilated, keening softly. "Listen, shitstain," she spat, "right now I'm the only thing keeping that one over there from hate-fucking your corpse into thin paste." She dropped him to the floor in a heap, wiping her hand on his jacket. "Stop us again. See what happens."

She strolled away from the quivering Kita towards Anja, who was clapping her hands in mock applause. "Station Indomitable," she said, "Captain Jesri Tam, TNMC Three Five Seven Two Sierra Four. Officer authorization, please."

"Confirmed," replied the station, "Jesri Tam has been registered."

"Remove all currently allocated guest authorizations. Grant level five guest authorization and VIP protected status to-" She paused, casting her gaze around the crowd of onlookers. She pointed directly at one of the Uen fruit vendors, who shrank away from her in terror. "-that Uen." She winked at it, then clapped her hand on Anja's shoulder. "Come on, let's go."

The two walked back towards Jesri's docking slip, the crowd making no attempt to follow them. Anja shook her head. "That poor Uen," she cooed, "that was a mean trick to play."

Jesri laughed. "Nah, they'll pay him so much to reallocate the access that he'll forget pissing himself on the decking."

Anja quirked an eyebrow. "Won't they just strongarm it out of him?" A bright flash of light came from behind them, followed by a strangled Kitan scream. "Oh, right," she mused. "VIP protected status."

They rounded the bulkhead separating slip 49 from the main docking ring and stopped short. Jesri's hands twitched, and her good mood from minutes ago vanished. "What the fuck," she seethed, "did those Kita bastards do to my ship?!"

Anja looked at the scattered hull plating and the dismounted primary engines, then over towards the reactor stack leaning precariously against the docking clamps. "Enhanced customs inspection?", she proffered innocently, earning herself a murderous look in response. Jesri growled softly, then stalked towards her ship. "I'm going to grab some things," she shouted back. "Secure another ship!"

"Ugh," moped Anja unhappily, scanning nearby berths for an alternative. Indomitable's docking bays had certainly seen more dignified days. Sweeping, precise arcs of metal formed the individual slips, marred by crumbling dark stalactites deposited by millenia of drive plumes washing over the bay. Most of the ships docked here were blundering scows docked two or three to a slip, as even the largest ones sat laughably miniscule against the military-scale bays. A few were refitted civilian pleasure ships, patched up with a haphazard mix of parts that looked questionably spaceworthy and decorated with garish colors.

Her gaze swept over to a small freighter docked two berths down from Jesri's wrecked craft. It was a mess, like all the others, but there was a certain care evident in the patchwork that the others lacked. The drives were recessed and enclosed, the trim understated and professional, and its extensively patched hull nevertheless was clean of any accretions or corrosion. She spotted a lone Htt ambling past the ship and gave it an energetic wave of her hand. It waved back hesitantly, and she strode over to meet it with a friendly smile.

Jesri stalked out of her ruined ship with thunderclouds trailing after her, having supplemented her light pack with a larger duffel-style bag. She spotted Anja standing farther down the docks, talking quietly with a Htt. She stood up as Jesri approached, waving cheerily. "Sister!", she shouted, "This one has agreed to offer us use of his ship!" Jesri looked at the glossy black insectoid alien, who was shaking like a leaf.

"Uh-huh," she said dryly. "I'm sure he's just thrilled to be of service." She dropped down to the Htt's aggregate eye level, smiling. Several of its eyes swiveled to track her face, but others remained fixed on Anja. "Hi, I'm Captain Jesri Tam of the Terran Naval Marines," she said smoothly, as if soothing a spooked horse. "Despite what my companion may or may not have said, letting us use your ship is voluntary and you will be compensated appropriately if you accept, both for time lost and any damage incurred."

The Htt stammered, its mandibles clattering together. "No, m-ma'am, happy to have you aboard!"

Jesri sighed. "Well," she said, "I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. What's your name, Captain?"

"Qktk," it rattled.

"Kikt-", she coughed, her throat catching on the staccato consonants. "No, damn, that's difficult without mandibles," Jesri muttered. "Does 'Kick' work for short?" She received a brief nod, which she returned. "Great! Let’s get moving." The trio moved down the slip and up the ship ramp, entering the somewhat cramped confines of the ship. Unlike the endless, lofty hallways of the transit hub, the ship was a dense knot of rust-red corridors and gantries, the ceiling barely tall enough for the two to walk upright. Hot, dry air pulsed from the environmental systems, and the bass rumble of an idling reactor stack permeated every surface.

Anja strolled down the corridor and quickly vanished from sight towards the aft of the ship. Rolling her eyes, Jesri turned back to Qktk. "We'll need to make best time spinward, more or less. Who runs the port in Harsi these days?"

Qktk shook his head apologetically. "We’ve never docked there, so I'm not sure."

Jesri shrugged. "Well, I'm sure we'll manage. How soon-" She stopped, hearing a noise from the back. "Kick, did you have any other crew?"

"Yes ma'am," Qktk replied with a nod. "My artificer, Rhuar." He stiffened in alarm as a high-pitched squeal came from the aft corridors. "Will your companion-"

Jesri was already moving towards the rear. "Your crewman will be fine," she said. "Probably."

The two followed the muffled noises towards the main cargo hold of the ship, where Anja sat on the grated decking happily stroking the fur of a very irritated-looking dog with one hand. Her legs and free hand twined around her captive in a painless, efficient submission hold. The dog was covered in short black fur, lustrous where it wasn't caked with dust or grease. A silver metal exoskeleton ran down his spine, wrapping around his torso and down each of his four legs. At his throat, a small vocalizer crackled when it saw Qktk.

"Captain Qktk," he buzzed, pronouncing the name precisely. "What the fuck?"

The Htt gave a clattering sigh. "Ma'am, could you please..." He motioned towards Anja, who had begun scratching under the dog's chin.

Jesri sighed. Life had been so simple this morning. "Anja, come on."

Anja frowned, but released the dog. He scrambled away, straightening up and glaring at her, his fur rising along either side of his exoskeleton.

"Rhuar, this is Anja and Jesri," Qktk said. "They've requested use of our vessel for an important errand."

Rhuar shook himself and tossed his head to the side. "And you said yes? Respectfully, Captain-" he trailed off and stared at Jesri as she removed her hood, then looked back at Anja as she did the same. His ears went flat back to his head. "Holy fuck," he said, "you two are human."

Qktk’s eyes darted in several directions at once, bouncing between Anja, Jesri and Rhuar. "Don’t be silly," he squeaked nervously. "Madam Jesri said they were Terran, not human. Terran Naval Marines."

"Terran Naval-" Rhuar’s ears twitched rapidly and he rocked back onto his hindquarters. "Captain Qktk, it’s been great. Have fun on your trip! I’m getting off here." The dog trotted over to a pile of gear against the bulkhead, cleverly hidden manipulators extending from his exoskeleton at the shoulders and forearms. Donning a toolbelt and satchel, he shot one last look at a speechless Qktk before shaking his head and rushing through the door.

Jesri sighed. "Great." She turned towards Qktk, spreading her hands apologetically. "Of course we’ll provide extra compensation-"

A startled yelp from outside cut her off, followed by the staccato clap of automatic weapons fire ablating the hull. Both women had produced sidearms from the folds of their clothing and were flanking the entry when the ship hatch slammed shut with a massive clang. A second later, a dark blur came tearing in through the cargo hold from aforeships. Qktk shrieked in panic as a speeding dog collided with him, sending him to the floor in a tangle of legs.

"Captain!" yelled Rhuar, his vocalizer blaring panic. "There’s an armed group of Kita outside the ship! Why-" He stopped as he looked back at Jesri and Anja, still bracketing the door. "Oh, right. Oh, we are super fucked."

Jesri slipped over and hauled Qktk to his feet. "I hate to rush, but we should probably be leaving now." The hail of fire intensified and Rhuar howled mournfully, shaking his head. "We can’t!", he wailed. "The docking clamps are still engaged, we’d rip the ship in half if we tried to leave."

Jesri’s sidearm disappeared into the folds of her cloak as she grabbed a spare piece of plating from a bin. She braced it against her forearm, then nodded and turned to Anja. "Okay," she muttered rapidly, "if you cover me I can get outside the ship and release the clamps. This scrap won’t hold up for long, but it should give me enough cover to-"

Anja shook her head and touched two fingers behind her ear. The ship rattled as the clamps disengaged along its length. Jesri’s eyebrows shot up, and she dropped the scrap she was holding. "Your embedded comm is still working? Why were you using the voice interface earlier?"

Anja shrugged. "It was funny." The barrage of fire stopped suddenly, and the two shared a look. "That’s probably not good."

Rhuar pulled up an external feed, which resolved to show several Kita wrestling a mounted gun into place. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck," he whined, a high-pitched noise rising in his throat. "Oh, we are super double fucked." Qktk seemed to have gone catatonic, his mandibles twitching spasmodically.

Jesri studied the gun as a burly Kita slammed a power conduit into the base. "Yeah, Anja, we should probably do something about that."

Anja nodded, craning her neck to look at the feed. "The riot control system, do you think, or… Oh, wait, we’re in the dock." She giggled and cocked her head.

"Hey, wait!", yelled Jesri, her eyes widening. "We’re-"

The retention fields stretching across the outer dock snapped off, exposing the clear starfield beyond. So massive were the docking slips that it took a second or two before any change was felt at the near end. A sudden rush of air picked up debris, cargo, Kita and one large mounted gun, tossing the lot in a maelstrom down the length of the docks. The unfortunate Kita were left floating, helpless in a strangely calm spray of glittering debris and rapidly sublimating ice crystals.

None of the occupants of the freighter witnessed any of this, as they too were ejected unceremoniously from the docks in a tumble. Every unsecured object in the cargo bay was slammed against the fore bulkhead, then again to the floor as the ship detected the gravity drop and engaged its own generators.

Anja winced as she picked herself up from where the sudden acceleration had slammed her against the bulkhead. Jesri, Rhuar and Qktk were lying in a heap several meters away. She limped over, favoring her left leg. "Sister, are you ok?"

Jesri was sprawled facedown on the decking. "Hey, wait," she said in a muffled monotone. "We’re not clamped in anymore, so venting the docks is a bad idea." She flopped over onto her back. "So glad we have these chats. I’m good."

Rhuar spat static and profanity from beneath Qktk’s tangle of legs. "I’m so happy to hear the fuckin mythical super soldier is feeling well. I’m fine too." He winced, stretching his back. "Captain, you alive?"

"Kkkhh," drooled the dazed Htt. His eyes stared aimlessly across the cargo bay, pointing in a dozen different directions. His chitin was cracked and oozing a clear fluid across the top of his head.

Anja bent down, her brow furrowing. "Artificer, does the ship have a medbay?"

"Yeah," grunted the dog, shaking his head dazedly. "Fore, then port. Green placard."

Anja nodded, then scooped up Qktk in her arms. "Come on, squished bug," she cooed.

Rhuar watched them go, then turned to where Jesri was picking herself up off the floor. "So, uh," he said sidelong, "am I going to see him again?"

Jesri laughed. "Oh, don’t worry about him. Anja may be a bit scattered these days, but she’s still a professional when it counts."

The dog snorted. "A professional what? Don’t feed me some bullshit about the Terran Marines. I don’t know which viz drama you two fell out of, but there haven’t been Terrans or a Terra for a long-ass time."

Jesri gave him a sober look. "I can’t deny it. There aren’t many of us left, and those of us that are… Well, not all of us are still Marines." She stood up, stretching her back. "I stopped being one a long time ago. But we could only walk away because we knew there would always be someone to welcome us home. Earth still lives as long as Anja does." She sighed. "At least, that’s what I like to think."

Rhuar was at a loss for words, so he simply sat with Jesri and watched the display for a long minute. Twinkling debris and twisted metal spun lazily in the void, the vast expanse of the transit station consuming half the sky in a bulk of blackened, radiation-scored paneling.

Jesri cracked her neck noisily, then turned to Rhuar. "We should probably leave before they find a ship with a gun on it," she said. "Kick’s out of commission, do you need my help to fly this thing?"

Rhuar laughed, which was a strange affair of natural chuffing noises with tones from his vocalizer overlaid. "Lady, I don’t let the captain anywhere near the controls. Where are we going?"

"Harsi," she said.

Rhuar’s ears drooped. "Oh, fuckin great. We’re all going to die."

Part 4

Jesri bent an eyebrow at the dog. "Why, what do you know about Harsi?"

Rhuar gave her a strained look. "Why don’t you know about Harsi? It’s been a no-go port for thirty years!"

"Huh, really?", mused Jesri, absentmindedly tugging on her hair. "The last time I docked there-" She coughed. "Well, anyway, that was a while ago. Why is it a no-go? The captain didn’t say anything about it when I mentioned it earlier."

Rhuar settled back on his hind legs and sniffed. "The Captain is as good as they come, but he’s got no nose for danger. Me, I keep my ears up, hear rumors." He licked his nose. "Rumors aren’t truth, but they give you a good picture after you hear enough of them. As best I can tell it was kind of a rough port for a long time-"

"Yeah, that’s true," nodded Jesri. "Sorry," she added, seeing the exasperated tilt of Rhuar’s head.

"Anyway," he continued, "the crew running the docks cashed out, sold the codes. They were scum, but they knew which side of the hull held air. The new folks, not so much - their teeth were too big for their mouth, things went bad fast. After that not many people hung around there except them like couldn’t afford to ship out or were making too much money to skip. You were as likely to get your haul beaten out of you than bought if you docked."

Jesri nodded. "Yeah, that sounds like it would put a damper on traffic."

Rhuar snorted. "Yeah, a bit. Just killers or idiots dropped by, then not even them after a while. After a few years of no ships coming in, captain’s got to start wondering what a port looks like when its got no outside callers for a span - all on its own in the void." Rhuar shuddered. "Some of the stories from those who did more than wonder get pretty fuckin dark."

Jesri frowned. "Well, that’s all pretty concerning," she said, "but a bunch of starving bandits shouldn’t give us too much trouble at the end of the day."

Rhuar made an indistinct noise and shot Jesri a look. "Who said they were starving?"

"Ew, ok," winced Jesri, "pretty dark indeed. Get us lined up in the approach corridor so we’re clear of the docks, I’ll check with Anja to see if there’s another port that would work."

"Absolutely not," chirped Anja, the red glare of the medbay placard highlighting her blonde hair with an ominous dull carmine hue. "That port is the only place we can go to pick up the trail."

Jesri groaned. "Rhuar says it’s pretty rough in there. This could get messy."

Anja grinned at her. "Sister, rough for the doggie doesn’t mean rough for us. Besides," she said, "we can just go through the abandoned parts of the station. If it’s been a ghost port for thirty years like he said, it won’t be hard to avoid contact. I’ve been doing it the whole time on Indomitable."

Frowning, Jesri nodded. "Yeah, there is that. Do we have to go anywhere special?"

Anja shook her head, leaning against the doorjamb. "Nah, any of the sector data terminals should work. We can be in and out quick, thirty minutes tops."

"Uh-huh," snarked Jesri. "You’ve said that on some other missions. Like that extraction on Wonderland, with the masquerade ball?" Anja winced and opened her mouth to reply, but Jesri cut her off. "Ooh, or the data drop where we had to hide in the reprocessing tanks for a day? How about the snatch and grab where Colonel Xi got shot in the ass and we had to carry her for-"

"Yes, yes, sister, point made," sighed Anja. "However, in this case I really don’t see how anything-"

"Don’t you fucking say it," Jesri snapped, her eyes narrowing.

"-could go wrong," concluded Anja, smiling primly. Jesri sighed, resting her forehead on her palm.

"I hate you."

Jesri walked up to the bridge, where Rhuar was standing at the controls. All of his manipulators were extended, either hovering over physical controls or jacked into the console directly. His head jerked from side to side at random intervals - Jesri figured at least some of those jacks were overlaying visual information, maybe even tactile stimuli.

"So?", he asked distantly, his voice echoing weirdly from several points around the bridge. His head didn’t turn towards her, but small cameras mounted beside the viewscreen were tracking her face as she moved. "How’d it go?"

Jesri moved beside him and leaned against a support beam. "Anja says no joy- we’ve got to dock at Harsi." She paused, considering. "You know, we’ve already put you two through a lot. If you want we can hit up somewhere else spinward, we’ll hop off and find another ship. I don’t want to ask you to risk your life."

There was a pause while the ship finished drifting into the approach corridor, the positional thrusters flaring brightly on the monitors. The thrusters died as the ship killed its momentum, then Rhuar unjacked and turned to face her directly.

"I’m not saying I believe your story," he said, licking his nose. "But I believe what I can see, and I see that at least one of you has high-level Access on that station."

Jesri blinked slowly at him, her face neutral. "What access would that be?"

He snorted. "Please. I’m not some decklicker with my nose up a priest’s ass. The station is a machine, the machine recognizes Access. Do you know what the Captain and I trade in?" Jesri shook her head, and Rhuar grinned, his tongue lolling out. "We’re locksmiths."

Jesri nodded, considering. Every station past a certain size had a locksmith or two, and smaller ones depended on the traveling crews like Qktk and Rhuar. Although you could access almost any corridor and walkway in a station, the rooms were another matter. Hence, locksmiths - although the skillset involved made them more of a highly specialized electrical engineer. She could place them at the top of their trade with a few well-chosen words.

"Ok," she said, "name your price."

Rhuar licked his lips. "Full Access. As much as you can give me, and the Captain too."

Jesri was shaking her head before he had even finished talking. "Absolutely not. There’s no way I could responsibly give you access to open engineering, security or weapons systems." She paced over to the side of the bridge, then swiveled to face him again. "How about this? You stick with us for one or two stops past this, I’ll come with you to two stations of your choosing and give you access to all residential and common areas. Oh, and Kick too."

Rhuar tilted his head to the side, contemplating her offer.

A small voice had begun screaming distantly inside his head after Jesri said the word "engineering", and had only gotten louder with each passing second. Rhuar had thought he was asking for access to open any of the regular residential doors on the station they just left, which was full of angry Kita that would probably kill him on sight and give his stuffed corpse to their children. Even that would have been worth the risk, establishing Qktk and Rhuar as the richest people on the station and the most accomplished locksmiths in modern memory.

Rhuar tried cocking his head to the other side.

The little voice was getting louder. Jesri had just implied that not only could she give him that access on *any* station, she could also open the larger, more imposing doors that cordoned the mythical command and control systems of a station. Everyone knew those were inaccessible to mere mortals, sealed until the death of the universe or a wayward black hole tore the station to pieces. The voice in Rhuar’s head was telling him that he should profess his undying love and devotion to this woman and beg her to allow him to remain in her divine presence.

Instead, Rhuar said: "How about three stations?"

Jesri stared at him, expressionless, and Rhuar was afraid he might have pushed it too far. After a few long seconds, however, she smiled slightly and nodded. "Yeah, okay," she agreed. "If you hang with us for a couple of jumps, you’ll probably have earned it. Set course for Harsi?"

Rhuar nodded and plugged back into the console, turning to face the viewer. Data flooded in, and for an eyeblink he was blind, deaf and numb. At once, reality snapped back in a new configuration. He could feel the metal of his skin, the plasma of his breath. He flexed the engines, feeling them burn strong and hot. "Ok," he said flatly, his voice issuing from every corner of the bridge. "Heading to the ramp."

The ship accelerated down the approach lane, and the thrum of the engines seeped into his body from the feet up. As he raced away from the docks down the center of one of the station’s petal-shaped lobes, he inched closer and closer towards the raised vane running down the center of its length. Jesri’s view out the window was unremarkable, but Rhuar saw a kaleidoscope flow of gossamer field lines just above the vane, receding into the distance and curving away from the station towards the great pinnacle at its center.

He felt the shudder as he stabilized in the center of the field, then started to rise slowly with its curvature. "We’re in the pocket," he broadcast over the intercom. "Brace for transfer."

He gritted his teeth against the sensation of the field charge soaking the hull like static crackling in his fur, a low rumble slipping from his throat as he accelerated into the deepest part of the ramp’s spaceward curve. As they passed the midpoint, the directional charge from the straightaway was induced into motion by the asymptotic curvature of the pinnacle. The lightning wind swirled around him in gusts and bursts, spiraling into his bones.

He was dimly aware of the other feeds, of Jesri fastened tight into a bridge chair, Anja securing the captain in the medbay’s traction field, but his universe was the ship and the lightning and the void. All at once they were off the curve, the ship leveling out at a perpendicular trajectory away from the station. The invisible tempest crackled, a lucent glow rising just ahead of the bow. Rhuar spun up the drive gently, coaxing the field from potential into action, streams of light splashing against the hull until all at once they bound, twisted, stretched-

Space was pulled away in every direction at once, and the ship was gone.

Part 5

"I have to say, Rhuar, that was an impressive launch," remarked Jesri, unbuckling her harness. "What kind of conversion did you hit?" The space outside the window was a deep, inky black, occasionally disrupted by faint pulses of light streaming by the sides of the ship. "I don’t think I’ve ever been this deep outside of…" She trailed off. "Uh, more massive ships, at any rate."

Rhuar unjacked, panting, and stumbled for a second before shaking himself thoroughly. "Looks like I blew past fifty," he said, his exhaustion failing to keep a note of pride from his voice.

"Holy shit," Jesri said, her eyes widening. Anything upwards of a twenty-fold mass multiplier off a jump ramp was considered to be excellent, the artificially enhanced weight slinging smaller ships much deeper into hyperspace than they could penetrate unassisted. Fifty plunged their small freighter well past those plebeian levels and into the true abyss normally reserved for the mightiest of warships. Apparently Rhuar’s minor attack of smug was well-warranted.

"Eh," shrugged Rhuar, rolling his head to the side, "you should see it when I nail a jump with a full hold. You’re full black all the way, go so fast you wouldn’t believe it." He looked at Jesri. "Well, maybe you would."

Jesri laughed. "How long will the transit take at this depth?"

Rhuar tapped a few console buttons. "Well, we could probably cut it down to two hours or so, but it’d be a comfier exit if we came up near the end. Three hours, maybe?"

She let out a low whistle. Those were world-class numbers, truly something to brag about. "Thanks, Rhuar," she said, "I’ll let Anja and Kick know." The dog nodded, turning back to the console and twitching slightly as he reconnected. Jesri scrambled down the short stairs and back towards the medbay, where she found Anja helping Qktk sit up on the bay’s medical bed.

Blue and white nanowraps bound the top of Qktk’s head like a bizarre turban, covering the site of his injury. He looked shaky, but awake and alert. "Madam Jesri," he clattered, nodding at her. "I think I recall a jump as I was waking up. Are we safely away?"

Jesri nodded, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Yeah, you’ve got one hell of a pilot." She shot a glance at Anja. "Rhuar says we’ll be at Harsi in three hours, even with a soft-drop." Anja hung up the diagnostic scanner with a suitably impressed look while her patient preened from the bed.

"Yes, Mr. Rhuar is quite the talent," he said. "I actually only hired him for his artificer skills, so finding out he could pilot was a happy surprise. Don’t tell him this, but he could probably make much more money as a pilot with his gifts."

Anja laughed, and Jesri chucked the Htt on the upper arm with her fist. "Oh, don’t sell yourself short," teased Jesri. "I have a feeling you two will be cleaning up after we part ways."

Qktk and Anja gave her inquiring looks. "Rhuar and I had a talk as we were leaving," Jesri explained. "Rhuar feels that Harsi could be somewhat hazardous, but that the risk would be properly offset if we allocated residential access at a few stations."

The Htt peered at Jesri curiously, but Anja’s eyes narrowed. "May we speak a moment, sister?", she said evenly, gesturing to the door of the medbay. Sensing a stiffening of the air in the room, Qktk eased himself up from the bed and rattled to the floor, testing his limbs.

"I do believe a walk would do me some good, so if you’ll excuse me…" He nodded gratefully towards the two women. "Madam Jesri, Madam Anja, thank you for your care."

They returned the gesture as he ambled out, then turned to face each other as Anja slapped the door controls. Almost before it had hissed closed, the warmth had fled from her face. "Sister, I do wish you’d consult with me before making promises like that," she said. "I don’t dislike the bug and the dog, but giving them real access sits poorly with me."

Jesri rolled her eyes, easing herself up from the bed. "Oh, don’t start with that," she scolded, "you had nothing to say when I gave guest rights to the Uen just now."

Anja shook her head. "That was teaching a lesson, with rights had been given away long ago. You’re proposing to barter our inheritance to pay a fare, sister."

"What I’m proposing, sister, is proper compensation. You bullied poor Kick into letting us on board in the first place, at which point an armed mob targeting us attacked their home and their livelihood. Kick almost died in the escape, and without Rhuar we would be arriving at Harsi days from now instead of hours." Jesri folded her arms across her chest and glared at Anja. "They’ve been nothing but gracious and we’ve been a calamity for them."

Anja stalked over to Jesri and stuck a finger against her breastbone. "Money," she said, jabbing with each syllable. "I don’t dispute that we’ve incurred a debt, but that’s what money exists to repay. Neither of us is destitute."

Jesri snorted at the understatement. For people their age, compound interest made the entire game somewhat unfair. "Rhuar didn’t ask for money," she retorted, "he asked for a chance to earn it. They’re locksmiths, Anja, they have more use for this than anyone."

This failed to mollify Anja, who spun away from Jesri with a glowering look. "Locksmiths?", she growled, "It’s bad enough to give rights to strangers, but vandals and robbers besides?"

"They’re just opening doors!", shouted Jesri. "If you think it’s so wrong to do it their way, you should be glad to give them an alternative." She forced herself to take a breath. "We’ve been around a long time, but we’ll die eventually. Should humanity’s works help the future or stand apart from it? What do you want Earth’s legacy to be?"

Anja met her gaze unblinkingly. "Victory," she said. "We’ll finish what we started."

Jesri laughed unkindly. "Victory for who? For Earth? There’s no victory left there, we lost that battle no matter what you think we can do for the war. We can click our heels together and shout terra invicta until the stars burn cold, but that doesn’t make it any less of a lie."

Anja slapped Jesri across the face, her eyes furious and blazing. Jesri took the blow without attempting to dodge, but caught Anja’s wrist before she could withdraw her arm.

"If you fight, you’re fighting for their sake now," she said, her face stinging. "Nobody else is left."

Anja tore her hand away and stormed out, leaving Jesri alone in the medbay. She sat down on the bed again, rubbing her cheek. After several long minutes she sighed and hauled herself up. She felt every bit of her age. Toggling the lights, she sealed the bay shut and moved off to find where her wayward sister had gone.

Rhuar and Qktk sat on the bridge, watching the ripples of light drifting past as the ship cut a wake through the midnight void of deep hyperspace. The ship was mostly silent as it cruised, which meant that the indistinct sounds of Jesri and Anja’s altercation were hard to ignore.

Qktk looked over at Rhuar, chittering to himself. "I’ve really done it this time, haven’t I?", he observed.

The dog grinned at him toothily. "Captain, I don’t believe either of us had the option to walk away from the moment they met us. Quietly being mediocre is off the table until they decide we’re done."

Qktk got up to pace the length of the bridge, his arms rattling in consternation. "I’m not one for politics, or conflict. Quietly being mediocre was my best quality."

Rhuar chuffed laughter at him. "Don’t be modest, Captain. You may not like making a splash, but you always walk away with your due."

"Of course," retorted Qktk, "because I know when to walk away. Now the exit is closed off, and I can’t see the top or bottom of this."

Rhuar contemplated his words and found that he didn’t have a good response. The two of them sat silently on the bridge, waiting for the first stars to shine out of the void.

The bridge was awash with light towards the end of the jump, soap-bubble fragments of a starscape sliding back and forth in a luminous shell as the freighter skipped along the thin boundaries of hyperspace. Jesri poked her head in from the corridor, then ambled up to stand beside the crew.

She flashed Qktk a friendly smile when he turned his head. "Looks like we’re almost out, huh?"

He nodded, chirping. "We’re in the final runup. You should watch, Madam Jesri - Mr. Rhuar is something of an artist in this regard."

Rhuar bared his teeth in a grin, but said nothing. His muscles twitched sporadically and his eyes stared ahead, unfocused. Moving fast in hyperspace was easy, but moving slow required much finer control. The window to drop out within easy reach of their destination would span only a fraction of a second. Missing the window would drop them well outside the station’s entry envelope, after which they’d face the prospect of a long, slow burn to get back into position for docking.

The timbre of the ship’s engines changed slightly, and Jesri reached out to grab a chair. Qktk chittered at her, standing unsupported next to Rhuar. "Here we go," he said, leaning towards the viewports.

The liquid lines of starlight brightened, flowed together, then snapped back to a stable starfield around the ship. Jesri felt a brief shudder in the decking, then stillness. Wisps of glowing light curled away from the hull and drifted past the viewports, dispersing to show the massive expanse of a transit station hanging close ahead of them.

Rhuar let all of his breath out in a whoosh, slumping over sideways on the decking. "Ok, short nap," he said, tongue lolling out of his mouth. "Being this good is fucking exhausting."

Jesri clapped her hands together. "That was spot on, and the smoothest exit I’ve had on any ship this size. Most of the old navy pilots would just try to shake up the groundpounders if they got the chance."

Rhuar stretched his head up. "Lucky for you I’m not a navy pilot, then."

She peered through the viewport at the station hanging silently against the stars, a thin crescent of light illuminating the near edge where the local star shone weakly against the grey hull. No telltale flashes or streaks of engine light played around the docks, and large swaths of the shadowed hull seemed darker than they should be. She frowned.

"Seems pretty quiet over there," she muttered, scrolling through a data display.

Rhuar hauled himself to his feet with a grunt, then turned his head towards the station. "You’re not wrong," he said, eyes darting rapidly. "Thermals are way below average, and I don’t read any recent drive trails. If people do live here, they’re not up to much. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that some of those near sections were unpowered." He turned to Jesri. "I’ve never seen a transit station like this."

"I have," said Jesri grimly. "Reactor damage. The station is cutting power to nonessential systems and uninhabited sectors."

Qktk rattled his arms. "How could something damage a transit station?", he wondered, agitation creeping into his tone. "The way they’re built, that seems like it would be impossible."

Jesri looked away, her eyes distant. "Oh, it’s possible."

There was a long moment of silence, broken by Anja’s arrival on the bridge. She wandered up to stand next to Jesri, who indicated the silent bulk of the station with a jerk of her chin.

Anja frowned. "That could complicate things," she said. "We did not have any reports indicating that this station was one of the damaged ones."

"There are others?", asked Rhuar, his ears twitching inquiringly. Anja gave him a pained look, and Jesri shook her head sadly.

"Most transit stations are like this," Jesri sighed. "You just use the ones that survived. Right now there are around two hundred active stations-"

"Fewer," whispered Anja, cutting her off. "One-hundred eighty nine left."

Rhuar’s ears flicked back. "Wow, I had considered myself well-traveled having visited fifty or so. How many were there originally?"

Jesri closed her eyes. "Thousands." Anja walked to stare out the viewport, turning her back on the group. Jesri looked at her, then turned back towards Rhuar and Qktk. "We shouldn’t sit exposed for too long. Can you see which parts of the docking ring still have power?"

Rhuar nodded, and a display flared with a map of the station. Three bright arcs were highlighted in green across the perimeter. "We can dock in any of these sections, I think. Based on our nav data, the old port operated out of this area here." A smaller segment of the green area turned blue.

Jesri nodded, then pointed to a smaller arc several segments away. "Let’s dock here," she said. "We’re already on that side, and it’s distant enough that we shouldn’t run into anyone."

The engines hummed as Rhuar laid in a course.

The ship slid noiselessly towards the cavernous docking bay, the wide rectangular edges growing to dwarf them as they passed through. The ship vibrated softly as they moved through the docking field and into the bay’s atmosphere, light currents of wind buffeting the hull. Through the viewports, the slips bristled like a jagged row of needle teeth drawn with grey and white.

Aside from them, the bay was deserted.

Rhuar sidled up to one of the slips and unjacked, stretching his legs. "Ok, hard part’s over," he grunted. "Now we just need to deal with all of the crazed cannibal bandits on the spooky derelict station."

Jesri laughed and shook her head. "We’re far enough away from the old port that I’m hoping we don’t see anyone. We just need to head a short distance back from the docks to a data terminal, then we can leave. You can stay on the ship with the captain, we shouldn’t be gone more than an hour."

Rhuar whined softly. "I wanna come," he muttered.

Lifting an eyebrow, Jesri turned to face him. "What about the spooky cannibal bandits?," she asked with a grin.

"You said yourself they probably wouldn’t be an issue," he retorted, embarrassed. "This place feels like a bad fuckin idea, but I’m not such a tail-tucker that I’d miss out seeing whatever magical ancient human tech you’re about to mess with."

"Fair enough," said Jesri, "but if you come along you follow instructions. Your curiosity is secondary to our goal."

Rhuar sniffed. "Which is?"

Jesri smiled wider. "Primary." She turned to look at Anja. "I’m going to grab a few things for my bag, then we can head out."

Five minutes later, the three of them stepped out onto the slip. The light breeze from the circulators rushed past them, the air neutral and dry. Rhuar looked around nervously. The docking bay stretched spare and empty in all directions, the flat grey decking spotless and uncluttered. "You know, this actually looks better than some of the ports I’ve been to."

Anja’s lips pressed together in a line. "This is how it they should all look," she said. "Most of the ports are so dirty these days."

Jesri turned back to Qktk, who was standing in the hatch. "Captain, keep an eye out on things from the ship. Don’t open the hatch for anything but our return."

The diminutive Htt nodded and chirped. "Of course, Madam Jesri." He inclined his head to Anja and Rhuar, then stepped back and toggled the hatch closed. It hissed shut, leaving them alone on the slip.

"Now then," said Anja brightly, "shall we?" She cocked her head for a moment, then nodded. "The station responds properly when queried. You should register too, once we’re out of the slips."

They trekked over to the nearest bay exit, then passed through into the corridor beyond. Jesri stretched her shoulders, then addressed the ship. "Station Ariadne," she said, "Captain Jesri Tam, TNMC Three Five Seven Two Sierra Four. Officer authorization, please." The speakers gave a crackly chirrup in response. She turned to indicate Rhuar. "Register Artificer Rhuar with level five guest access and VIP protected status."

Rhuar shot her a grateful look, mouth lolling open, then ran over to a nearby supply closet. The door hissed open, revealing a bare room beyond with a few sealed yellow barrels. He yipped delightedly, spinning in place before retreating and letting the door close. The two women watched him as he approached the door again, causing it to slide open.

Anja snorted. "That door wasn’t restricted to begin with," she said quietly.

"Shhhh," smirked Jesri. "Let him have a bit of fun." She looked down the hall, pointing at a door. "We’re in the central dock for this segment, so the terminal should be straight back." Anja nodded, and the two started walking towards the door. Rhuar tore himself away from the supply closet door and trotted along behind them, grinning like a maniac.

Anja led the group through a twisting series of corridors for several minutes. They walked in silence, their footsteps echoing softly against the gentle hum of the station and kicking up small puffs of dust from the deck. Yellow and red lichen speckled the walls, spreading from corners and seams.

They stopped in front of a large door, dark grey with a thick frame. It opened silently when Anja stood in front of it, sliding up to reveal a small, dark room covered in displays and blinking lights. "Well, here it is," she remarked brightly. The three entered, and both women took a console.

After a few long minutes, Jesri frowned and looked up. "I’m not finding anything. It should be in the trace logs, right?" A message flashed red on her display, casting bloody highlights across the room. "The data is either corrupted or missing, I can’t access it."

Anja pursed her lips. "Not missing, sister." She tapped a few times on her console, and a map of the station swam up on the display. "The network links to the inner core appear to be down."

Jesri groaned. "Please don’t say that," she groused, pushing away from her console. Rhuar gave her an inquisitive look, cocking his head. "She’s saying the dock terminals aren’t going to work," she explained. "We’re going to have to access the data core directly from the inner ring."

He perked up. "We get to see the inner ring? Awesome!"

Anja smirked. "Yes, and the transit pods won’t be working. We get to walk there."

Rhuar’s gaze flicked back and forth between them, his expression falling. "Uh, how far is it?", he asked.

Jesri stood up. "We’d better get back to the ship and let Kick know we’ll be longer than expected." Anja nodded and followed her out of the terminal room.

Rhuar rushed after them. "Hey, wait! Is it really far?"

Anja, Jesri and Rhuar approached a tall, heavy door at the end of a corridor. Anja stood in front of it and a muffled whine of machinery sounded. It built and grew higher pitched, then a jarring clunk sent vibrations through the deck. The whine stopped.

"Dammit," said Jesri, closing her eyes.

The three had been walking for four hours, and this was the fifth broken door they’d encountered. Every time they found one, they had been forced to backtrack to a different section to continue their inward progress. With a straight path they could have been most of the way to the center by now, but their convoluted route and frequent interruptions meant that they were still stuck in the outer ring, nearly two thirds of the way out from the center.

"It would have been very convenient if it worked," grumbled Anja. "The next door we could use to access the middle ring is a kilometer antispinward from here."

Rhuar made an exasperated whining noise. "Are you sure it’s broken?", he said, his exoskeleton unfolding to prod at the access panel.

Anja rolled her eyes. "You’re the locksmith, you tell me."

"I don’t deal with broken doors," Rhuar muttered, the arms of his exoskeleton peeling back the panel cover and prodding at the electronics underneath. "I’m not in the business of repairs. I deal with functional, locked doors. Hence, locksmith."

Anja leaned against the corridor and took a drink of water from her bag. "Shouldn’t a locksmith be making locks as well? If all you do is unlock the locks it makes you more of a lockpick than a locksmith."

Rhuar shot her an annoyed look as his arms kept working inside the panel. "I’m not a word historian or whatever-"

"Etymologist," supplied Jesri.

Anja frowned. "Surely it’s just a linguist?"

"Whatever you’d like to call it," continued Rhuar, glaring at her, "I’m in the business of opening locks. We can stand around talking about it, or we can-"

The door groaned and rose a meter, leaving a gap through which warm, humid air flowed softly. Rhuar blinked. "Huh," he said. "Hey, the door’s open."

Jesri bent down to peer through the gap. "Well," she said, sucking her teeth, "it’s not pretty but it’s traversable." She peered at Rhuar. "What are the odds this door will chop me in half if I try to go under it?"

Rhuar gave her an arch look. "And now I’m a statistician?"

Anja cocked her head. "Actuary?"

Jesri shook her head. "Okay, I deserved that." She slipped her bag under the door, then bent and passed through. "Looks good over here. Come on through."

Anja and Rhuar slid through the gap to emerge on the far side of the door, looking down the long corridor. It was wide and tall, even taller than the residential corridors on the outer parts of the station. A slight curve caused the corridor to bend out of sight after several hundred meters, but it looked as though it ran for a very long way. The floor and walls were thickly covered in lichen, with mosses crowding the sides of the hallway in splotchy greens and browns.

Anja beamed. "Oh, good. This is one of the primary radial corridors. It will take us all the way across the middle ring, at which point we can transit to the inner ring and reach the core."

Rhuar peered into the distance. "How far is it across the middle ring?"

Jesri stretched her arms. "Ten kilometers. Ready?" She smirked at him and started walking, Anja on her heels.

Rhuar slumped. "You know, this is much less interesting than you made it sound on the ship." He shook himself, then padded off down the hall.

The moss at the sides of the hallway thickened as they walked, and after the first kilometer it formed a mossy bed of green stretching across the decking. Several centimeters of growth had accrued across the hall, supplemented in thicker areas by some sort of sparse grass.

Anja bounced experimentally on the moss, standing on the ball of one foot. "Springy," she noted. "More comfortable to walk on."

Jesri waved a hand at the ceiling. "Yeah, but it means the environmental controls are messed up. The humidity is way above normal. Plus, the green plants mean there was some sort of hydroponics breach. We’re probably going to have issues further in."

Rhuar sniffed the air. "It does smell a bit mulchy from that direction. I don’t think it’s going to get any clearer as we keep going."

Anja shrugged. "Not much we can do about it." She squared her pack on her shoulders, and the group continued.

The greenery intensified as they continued, clover spreading underfoot as ivy covered the walls in a thick mat of green. The plants clustered densely where the hallway lighting was strongest, making regular patches of high growth as they progressed. The hallway grew dimmer as the ivy climbed in great shaggy clumps around the light tracks at the top of the hall, interspersed with hanging, thorny vines.

The two women were forced to dodge around clumps of thorned tendrils descending from the ceiling, stretching in verdant ropes over the passageway. Jesri pulled a long knife from her satchel. "This is worse than I’ve ever seen it," she grumbled. She drew the knife slowly across a woody collection of vines and they parted with no resistance.

Rhuar stared at the cleanly sliced vine, fascinated, then turned wide eyes to Jesri. "Uh, can I see that knife for a second?"

Jesri gave him a look, then kept on walking forward.

Even with Jesri clearing a path they made poor forward progress through the strangling vegetation. The air was hot and humid, and Anja was muttering under her breath. Rhuar panted rapidly, his tongue hanging from his mouth and small clinging seeds dotting his coat. They pressed forward for a couple of kilometers, cleaving a rough green tunnel through the undergrowth.

They passed a hissing pipe at a junction, slick and green with huge mats of algae slumping around it. Anja smacked at it. "There it is," she complained. "One stupid pipe spraying excess moisture around for a few thousand years and you have a jungle in the hallway."

Rhuar stared at the tiny trickle of water from the pipe spraying out to coat a broad leaf with a sheen of beaded droplets. "Seems like it’s too small to cause all of this."

Jesri shrugged. "It’s not a significant leak, but time is the ultimate force multiplier. If the environmental humidity regulators are out, this is more than enough to throw a station’s atmospheric mix out of balance." Rhuar nodded, pondering.

The group pressed forward, leaving the hissing pipe behind. The vegetation grew higher with every step, the smell of rotting plant matter thick in the air. After clearing through a particularly gnarled tangle, Jesri stumbled forward and found herself in an open stretch of hallway. The ghost of a grin rose to her lips, but died quickly as she looked farther down the corridor. "Aw, shit," she spat. "Guys, come up and look at this."

Anja and Rhuar walked through the hole she had cut in the greenery and looked ahead. The hallway ahead of them was dim and murky, the plants along it brown and stunted. None of the wall lights were on past the point they had reached, and the far arc of the corridor was lost in shadow.

Rhuar peered into the darkness. "How long do you suppose this goes on for?", he asked.

Anja shrugged. "Could be a few hundred meters, could be several kilometers. Hard to say, but it should not extend to the inner ring unless there are unrelated problems with that grid as well."

"Great," Jesri sighed. "Now it’s dark." She reached into her satchel and grabbed a small, round ball of metal, which she tossed into the air. It floated up to hover over her head and began shining softly, illuminating the hallway with a dim amber glow. She turned to Rhuar, who was staring at the light intently.

"No," she said.

Rhuar pouted. "I didn’t say anything."

"Mmhmm," replied Jesri, adjusting her satchel as she peered further ahead. "My mistake." She began moving forward again, the ball of light trailing along above her head. Anja and Rhuar followed on her heels, casting the dying plants into shadow.

Together, the three walked into the darkness.

Part 6

Amber light licked softly across the hallway, vanishing into murky shadow ahead as they walked down the hall. Whorls of latticed fungus hung in gossamer sheets from the walls, drifting gently in the air currents stirred up by their passage.

Rhuar shivered. The warm pool of light from Jesri’s floating lamp let him see well enough, but each shrouded doorway and corridor took a sinister aspect in the low light. The two women seemed unperturbed by the darkness, moving quickly now that they were free from the vegetation choking the corridors behind them.

They had moved a couple of kilometers into the darkness with no end in sight. "I think this really may continue until the inner ring," sighed Anja. "So dreary." She sniffed. "And musty."

"Probably not the best air to be breathing," agreed Rhuar. "Smells like mold and mushrooms."

Jesri shook her head. "Fantastic," she muttered. "Let’s just keep our pace up and try to minimize the amount of time we’re in here." She lengthened her stride, and Rhuar broke into a trot to keep up. They continued in tense silence, their footsteps seeming to echo endlessly from every side passage.

Rhuar collided with Jesri’s legs and stumbled backwards. She had stopped suddenly, peering intently down the corridor past the light’s radius. Anja had drawn up short as well, frowning. A complaint rose and died in Rhuar’s throat as he heard the patter of soft footfalls sounding from down the hallway. A rasping noise came from the same direction, like paper sliding over stone.

Jesri shifted her weight slightly, one hand drifting to her sidearm under her cloak. The footsteps and dry rustling came closer, and Rhuar bristled. His exoskeleton folded flat, freeing his movement and shielding his legs.

They could see a figure moving towards them with a galloping lope in the dim light, its gangly limbs splaying out precariously. Jesri tensed for a moment, but then cocked her head curiously. Anja looked at her, brow furrowed, listening intently to the rasping noises. "Sister," she murmured, "is it speaking?"

The raspy noises resolved into crackling, whispered speech as the form hurtled closer, breaking into the pool of light surrounding Jesri. "Light!", it croaked, "No light!"

Now that it was near, they could see it clearly. Thick, grey-skinned legs and a squat torso sat low to the ground, supported by long, thin forelimbs that spidered out ahead of it as it scrambled over the decking. Three large, solid black eyes sat in a triangle on its head, twitching and shuddering as they struggled to see past the glare of the lamp. "Pleash!", it gasped, skidding to a stop. "No light!"

Jesri and Anja shared a quick look. Anja shrugged, resting her hand nonchalantly on her gun.

Jesri reached up above her head and grabbed the light, plunging the group into sudden darkness. Quiet stretched over the hallway for a few long seconds before Jesri cleared her throat.

"So, friend," she said, "we’re listening. Talk."

The newcomer shifted nervously. As his eyes adjusted, Rhuar saw faint specks of blue light stretching down the corridor. The latticed sheets of fungus on the walls glowed softly, and he could make out the silhouettes of the others against the bioluminescent filigree.

"Light," it rasped, spreading its arms. Jesri tilted her head expectantly. "Bad!", it concluded, crossing its arms emphatically.

It was too dark to see it, but Rhuar and Anja could feel Jesri’s eyes rolling on a deep, visceral level. "So we had gathered," she said evenly. "Why is the light bad?"

The tiny alien paced in a circle, its forelimbs shaking in agitation. "Light bad!", it croaked insistently.

Anja walked over and knelt next to the quivering little being. "Friend bug," she said sweetly, "tell us why the light is bad or we will turn it back on."

"No!", it yelped, then cringed at the noise. "Light bad, bad, bad," it whispered. It drew itself up, looking at Anja. The blue light from the walls reflected like stars in the black of its eyes. "Light danzher," it said firmly. "Light bad."

Jesri snorted. "A fifth word. Danger? All right. What danger?"

Its head darted around, looking up and down the hall. "Bad danzher." It scuttled over to a side passage, then crooked its arms in a beckoning gesture. "Come shafe," it whispered, pointing down the passageway.

Jesri and Anja looked at each other again. This time, Jesri shrugged. "Sure," she said. "Wouldn’t want to run into any bad danger." She walked over to where the little alien was urging them forward, addressing it directly. "We’ll follow you, friend, as long as it’s safe." She placed her hand conspicuously on her sidearm.

The alien shrank back from her, trilling softly. "Come shafe, shafe," it muttered, scuttling off down the passageway.

They trailed along after their guide, winding through side corridors and narrow access walkways. The alien was furtive, crouching to scout ahead at intersections and proceeding only after a careful check of the area. The shaky nervousness from before had fled from its stance, replaced by a grim deliberativeness of motion.

"This one walks like he is defusing a bomb," murmured Anja.

Jesri grimaced. "Either he’s putting on a show for our benefit or he’s convinced death is waiting around every corner," she whispered. "I’m not sure that I like either of those options."

Rhuar snuffled. The corridors had an ever-increasing stench of mold and rot layered over an eerie silence. With so many station systems deprived of power, the hum that normally masked small noises was replaced by an echoing stillness, punctuated by soft drips, clicks and other indistinct sounds that made him feel as though someone was stalking along behind him.

At least the darkness wasn’t absolute. The glowing fungus that coated the walls provided more than enough light to see obstacles, now that his eyes were fully adjusted. Looking down the long halls, a swirling cascade of azure traced the curve of the bulkheads and the arched span of the ceiling. It was oddly beautiful, despite the pee-inducing terror that was scrabbling at the back of his mind.

As Rhuar gazed down one corridor, he noted a particularly bright glow from an intersection several dozen meters away. "Hey," he whispered, "what is-"

He fell silent, watching the glow. It was noticeably brighter, and increasing in brightness as he watched. Their guide whirled to face it and let out a low hiss before diving for cover around a nearby corner. "Danzher!", it breathed, flattening itself against the wall. "Bad, bad, bad!"

Rhuar didn’t waste time on further questions. He crouched low against the same wall, crowding into the corner. Jesri and Anja took up another alcove across the corridor, weapons drawn.

From around the far corner, a tall, lanky figure revealed itself as the source of the glow. It slouched forward, a flaming torch grasped tightly in one hand. The dull light of the fire seemed impossibly bright in the darkness, sending flickering shadows questing down the hall past their hiding spots.

Another figure joined the first, and another. They carried crude clubs and torches, their bodies swathed in a ragged blend of cloth and leather. Jesri recognized a few species - slight, winged Tlixl, many-legged Arrigh, even a few lumbering Kita - but even more figures in the crowd evaded her classification as they patrolled past the junction. The last one of them to pass was a massive Dhumma over three meters in height, its footfalls shaking the deck. A bandolier across its chest swung heavy with leering skulls from a dozen species and it carried a wicked-looking glaive fashioned from metal scrap.

The last of the patrol moved past the junction, and the glow of their torches diminished to leave the four of them crouched in blue-spangled darkness once more. Rhuar sniffed and shot Jesri a look. "Looks like those spooky cannibal bandits get around more than you thought," he hissed.

He saw a flash of white teeth as she smiled back. "I owe you lunch," she whispered, holstering her weapon. She turned and tapped Anja on the shoulder. "What do you think?"

Anja stowed her own weapon and adjusted her cloak. "Not a threat individually, except for the big one. We could have a problem if they surprised us or attacked as a group."

Jesri nodded, then cast a glance towards the small alien. It hauled itself to its feet shakily and peered around the corner, then straightened up. "Shafe, shafe, shafe," it muttered, resuming its walk down the corridor.

They walked for a while longer, navigating deeper into the black maze of passages. The little alien stopped suddenly in front of an unremarkable maintenance hatch. Its forelimbs spread to grasp the edges of the panel, which popped out to reveal an access tunnel behind it.

After they had entered the tunnel and carefully replaced the access panel, they followed the tunnels for several meters and emerged in a wide, dimly lit room. The little alien chittered happily and tore off running towards a collection of old crates stacked against the far wall, soft flickering light visible from within.

"Looks like an old maintenance bay," Jesri mused, "drone storage or something. Only accessible via the maintenance tunnels." She looked over towards the crates, which were arranged in a loose semicircle. "Defensible, hidden. Smart choice to hole up here if they needed to hide."

Their guide reappeared along with a larger version of itself, who advanced cautiously. It moved stiffly, and as it came closer Jesri could make out stripes or striations across its skin. She got the sense of age, or illness. Behind them, three smaller aliens peered curiously from the line of crates.

The old alien stopped nearby and fixed them with a piercing look. "Kenet-Ei says that he found you wandering the halls, lit up like a hundred torches," it whispered, its voice like soft falling sand. "Which means you are either very brave or very stupid."

Jesri smiled at the alien and shrugged. "I like to think we’ve got good self-confidence," she replied. She glanced down to their guide. "Your name is Kenet-Ei?", she asked. He chirped happily in response. "Thank you for telling us of the danger and leading us here," she said. The little alien chirped again, bobbling its head back and forth in what Jesri assumed was a pleased gesture.

The elder alien chuffed at them. "I am named Kenet-Tel. I beg your forgiveness for being forward, but I must know this from you." Its three eyes peered intensely at the group, and it leaned forward. "You are from off-station, are you not?"

Anja’s eyes narrowed, but Jesri held up a hand before she could respond. "What if we were?", she asked, her tone neutral.

Kenet-Tel spread his arms wide, lowering his head. "Please do not misunderstand me. I have been living on this station for a long, long time, and I have not seen a visitor in years. It has been… hard, here." He looked down at the decking. "When my children were nothing more than nestlings I tried to leave, but I could not pay for a ship. I had to take them here and hide from the others, live in the darkness. My youngest three cannot remember anything else."

He straightened up and looked Jesri in the eye. "If you have a ship I must beg of you, please - take my children off this station. I will do anything, give anything, but I cannot let them stay here. And if I can earn my own passage beside them, my gratitude would be endless." He looked at the trio and seemed to consider saying more, but he folded his arms and stayed silent, waiting.

Jesri frowned, thinking. "Kenet-Tel, how well do you and your children know the passages going inward, towards the center ring?"

The old alien shifted nervously. "We know the passages as we know the faces of our nest. Most of my children know little else."

Jesri glanced back towards Anja and Rhuar. The former gave a long-suffering sigh and raised her hands in surrender, while the latter gave her a curious look and panted.

Jesri smiled.

"Okay," she said, "if you can guide us on safe paths to the inner ring and back out again then we’ll consider that payment for transport to another station. I can’t promise we’ll go straight there after we leave, but we’ll take you with us."

Kenet-Tel leaned back on his hind feet and closed his eyes, translucent membranes sweeping over the large black sclera. "It will be dangerous, to move so far in a group. But we will die in darkness if we stay, so I will risk dying in darkness to leave. We will guide you."

He crooked one of his thin arms, and the remaining three children ran up to huddle behind him, their angular faces peeking out from behind his legs. Anja bent down to coo and wave at the tiny aliens, who cheeped softly and hid further behind their father. Kenet-Tel looked down at them reproachfully. "Forgive them, please," he said, "they are young and a bit shy. These three cannot speak yet, and Kenet-Ei must molt again before he can form words well."

The younger alien chittered and bobbled his head. "Shpeek ghood."

Kenet-Tel stroked his son’s head with a forelimb. "We have nothing to take with us, so we will leave when you wish to depart."

Jesri nodded and turned to the others. "Good to go?", she asked.

Rhuar and Anja nodded. She turned back to Kenet-Tel and gestured towards the panel. "Lead on."

They followed the family of aliens through winding twists of hallway speckled with luminous midnight blue, Kenet-Ei taking point. His younger siblings clustered around Kenet-Tel, keeping close to his legs. Their pace was slow and cautious to allow for careful reconnaissance of every intersection and junction. Twice they laid still and quiet, watching the angry orange glow of torchlight move across their path in the distance.

After a maze of utility passages crowded with boxes and debris, they emerged in a long, narrow hall with a massive door at the end. Kenet-Tel turned to Jesri, waving his arm at the door. "We have arrived. This is the end of the passage, the door to the inner ring."

Rhuar ran over eagerly to inspect the door. "Wow, this one is massive. I’ve never been this far in on a station before." His exoskeleton popped arms out to prod the smooth metal, tracing the seam of the door. "Yeah, damn - I don’t think I could get this thing open in a hundred years."

Kenet-Tel snorted. "It has been closed for much longer than that. It may never be opened."

Rhuar chuckled. "Would you care to make a wager on that?"

The old alien gave him a look. "I cannot. I have been living in abject poverty in the dark for many years. I have nothing with which to wager."

Rhuar’s ears twitched. "I didn’t… uh." His exoskeleton arms waved aimlessly, then folded back against his limbs.

Anja laughed, walking over to the door. "Poor doggie. At least you’d have won the wager." She placed her hand on the door panel, and the giant slab of metal ground open with a high metallic whine. Blinding shafts of light lanced through the opening, shattering the darkness around them.

Jesri winced and put her hand over her eyes. "Damn, that’s bright. Looks like the power’s on in the inner ring, at least. Let’s head in." She jogged through the door, scanning the room beyond.

Kenet-Tel’s mouth worked soundlessly. "What-", he managed, leaning against the wall. "How?"

Rhuar grinned wolfishly at him. "You get used to it after a while. Come on!" He bounded over to follow Anja through the door.

They paced quickly down the hall, this one clean and brightly lit. Kenet-Tel’s brood hung close to him, heads swiveling rapidly as they took in the unfamiliar surroundings. Jesri rushed the group forward, tossing a glance behind her as she walked. The massive door behind them had failed when they tried to close it, and the shining light from the inner core was a blinding beacon in the dark warrens of the middle ring. It was only a matter of time before the roving patrols saw the light and investigated.

Anja gave a small shout of glee when she spotted the central terminal room, running over to the door. She flew into the nearest chair and began working the console, flitting through directories at lightning speed. Rhuar and Kenet-Tel followed her in, gawping at the displays and giant server racks lining the room.

Jesri stopped at the threshold of the room, a detail having caught in the corner of her eye. "Oh Anja," she called, her voice saccharine. "I’ve just spotted my favorite room on the station. I’m going to go check it out."

Anja waved her off without looking or offering a response, her other hand tapping a rapid sequence on the console.

As Jesri vanished down the corridor, Rhuar turned back to Anja. "So, uh. What was that about? Does she need to pee or something?"

Anja giggled. "Silly doggie. She’s just checking out something interesting." She withdrew a black box from her cloak, unspooling a cable to jack into the console.

Rhuar chuffed air out his nose. "I’m not a doggie." He peered at the display, which was showing a rapid scroll of text and icons. "What are you looking for, anyway?"

"Flight logs," said Anja, her voice distant. She had found actual files now and was flipping through data summaries. Abbreviated snippets of audio played and were cut off over and over as she skimmed through transmission data.

"From Harsi? We’re probably the only ship to come here in years." Rhuar’s ears dropped. "Oh, fuck. You mean earlier."

Anja grinned wider. "Rude doggie. Yes, quite a lot earlier. I’m looking for the last ship that humans ever built." She punched her finger down on the console triumphantly and a file swam to life on the display. Atop the display, the words "TNS GRAND DESIGN - CRUISER, SPECIAL DETACHMENT" shone bright and red.

Anja pressed another button, and a voice filled the room. "This is Captain Zachary Coates," it said in clear English, "TNS Grand Design. On our way out of Ariadne we were clipped by a Golf Bravo that killed several crew and crippled our reactor. Currently unable to link up with primary group. We will have to try for the rendezvous on Zephyr. Our reactors will last until then if we don’t push them hard, so we’re keeping to low hyperspace until we’ve cleared the Aurelius gravity well. Everything but the hyperdrive and life support is running on reserve power for the moment. Containment is holding. We will update with our status in two days. Grand Design out."

Rhuar and Kenet-Tel stood speechless for a few moments. The thin grey alien turned to Rhuar. "What did it say?", he asked.

Rhuar shook his head. "Damage report from a ship, with some plans for a rendezvous."

Anja looked at him, impressed. "I didn’t know you spoke English."

Rhuar grinned at her. "Dogs are terrans too, you know. What’s so special about the ship?"

Anja’s smile faded. "It was carrying something of great importance."

"Oh, come on," he whined. "You can’t just blueball me with ‘something of great importance’ and not elaborate a bit."

Anja fixed him with a look, her eyes blank. "I’ll tell you, if you really want to know," she said evenly. "How much do you know about the death of humanity?"

"Uh," stumbled Rhuar, "not much. I know that everyone even close to a human died, all at the same time. Any planet with a human population on it was a wasteland. Trillions died, and we’ve been working our way back up the ladder for five thousand years."

"Yes," Anja hissed, baring her teeth. "Do you know why?"

Rhuar edged away from Anja’s chair. "No, I don’t."

Anja stood up, pacing. "We were at war, in those final years, although we never fired a shot. We had discovered a neighbor on our borders, hugely powerful and advanced. Made all of the technological accomplishments of humankind look like toys. They were friendly, though. Let us ask questions, taught us new technology."

She closed her eyes. "Then they told us that they were researching vacuum energy. Unlimited power, tapped from the fabric of space itself. They had figured out how to do it safely, with just one precondition - they had to destroy the universe first."

Kenet-Tel drew back. "I do not understand. How could that benefit them?"

Anja shook her head. "They were going to propagate a lower energy state of vacuum, which would eventually spread to the entire universe. The conversion to a lower vacuum state is violent, very violent. They had some way to survive the conversion, but they didn’t care about the rest of the universe. They considered us entertaining, but ultimately insignificant next to their own potential - like bacteria."

Rhuar shuddered. "That’s so fucked up. How did you stop them?"

Anja looked at him, bemused. "Stop them?"

"Well, yeah," said Rhuar, puzzled. "We’re still here, aren’t we?"

"Oh, we tried to stop them - but ultimately failed," she said softly. "We diverted a significant portion of our military research to building something that could hurt them enough to stop the project. They found out right after we launched the Grand Design with the weapon aboard. They triggered gamma-ray bursts from a few dozen stars and focused them through hyperspace. They were all timed to arrive at once, and they scoured entire star systems bare. We never stood a chance."

Her face grew bitter and pinched. "We didn’t make a dent in their schedule. They’ve been working on their project for thirty thousand years. They could finish in another thirty thousand years, or tomorrow. When they do, we will all die so quickly that we won’t even know anything was wrong."

Kenet-Tel slouched forward. "I give thanks for the long years of my life I spent unaware of that story."

Rhuar slumped down as well. "Seriously. That’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard since we met Kenet-Tel." He ignored the pointed look from beside him and gestured to the display. "How will finding the ship help? Do you have a plan?"

Anja showed her teeth in a humorless smile. "Find the ship, recover the weapon, kill the enemy, save the universe."

Rhuar gave her a look. "The last time anyone got on that ship, they shot at you with stars. You two are going to take this on alone?"

"You are not coming?", pouted Anja, affecting a hurt look. "I was going to let you fly the ship."

Rhuar made a strangled noise. "You fight dirty."

"I knew I could count on you," said Anja sweetly, unjacking the black box from her console and stowing it in her cloak again. "I have what I need from here, let’s go find my sister."

She placed her palm on the door and it hissed up, revealing the hall beyond. "I believe she went left-"

A fist slammed into her stomach and she flew backwards, sliding along the floor to rest in a heap. Rhuar watched in horror as the towering Dhumma ducked his head to enter the terminal room. A throng of other bandits waited behind it, eagerly brandishing clubs and crude maces.

Kenet-Tel’s children fled to hide behind his legs as the old alien stepped back, eyes flitting around the room for cover or escape.

The Dhumma laughed, a low grunting wheeze escaping his mouth folds. "Told you I smelled food," he rumbled. Laughter echoed from behind him as the rest of the patrol crowded into the room. Rhuar backpedaled, quickly running into a server behind him.

A group of three thin aliens peeled off from the main group to close on Kenet-Tel, huddled in a corner. They advanced slowly, jeering at the old alien as he stood shaking between the attackers and his children. The closest raised his club to strike and Kenet-Tel flinched away, raising his arms instinctively.

The alien’s head exploded with a wet pop and the hiss of superheated steam, showering Kenet-Tel with hot gore. Anja coughed and levered herself into a seated position with her free arm, firing her pistol twice more. The shots took the remaining attackers in the center of mass, gouts of blood and steam filling the terminal room with a vile stench.

More of the bandits charged towards her and she rolled away, coming up in a half-crouch and snapping off shots that destroyed abdomens and severed legs on the charging aliens. They stopped, three spreading out to encircle her with raised clubs. She took a low stance, pistol extended, her other hand drawing a short knife from her boot. A feral grin played across her lips and her eyes flashed with excitement. "So rude," she purred.

One of them, an Arrigh, yelled hoarsely and swarmed towards her, segmented legs clacking against the deck. Anja ducked left under its wild club swing, then sprang right to land beside the surprised alien with her knife extended. It staggered, arms clasped weakly against its thorax as white and pale yellow entrails dribbled out of an open wound across its chest.

Anja flicked a drop of milky blood off of her knife and fired two shots at the nearest alien. It collapsed in a ruin of shredded flesh as its remaining companion screamed a challenge towards Anja, stepping in for a vicious swipe with an improvised maul.

She sidestepped neatly, slid forward and stabbed her knife into the alien’s wrist. It howled and fell back, clutching its arm, only to be trampled as the Dhumma charged and caught Anja across the chest with the shaft of his glaive. The blow sent her rolling across the floor for several meters, her arm held protectively against her ribs. Her pistol’s capacitors trilled softly as it slid to a stop across the room from her.

The Dhumma’s mouth hung open, ropes of drool sliding down his jowls. "Time to die, food," he said, lumbering towards her. Anja looked up, trying to scramble backwards as he loomed closer to her. As he swept his glaive high she suddenly looked behind him and grinned.

"My sister’s favorite room is the armory," she said conversationally.

The Dhumma paused mid-stride. "What?", he grunted.

A blaze of white light erupted from the doorway, a mangled body went flying back to crash into the other bandits. They went down in a tangle, falling aside while Jesri darted around to hurl herself at the Dhumma. He spun to face her with a roar, his blade whipping towards her head. Her right hand shot up to intercept it and the blade struck with a deep clang, flashing actinic light. The Dhumma blinked. Jesri glowered back at the Dhumma and flexed her hand, shattering the metal blade in a spray of red-hot fragments.

Rhuar gaped in awe. Her right arm was encased in armor up to the shoulder, carbon-polymer muscles bulging under a plated metallic skin. Her clenched fist was wreathed in a flickering cloud of plasma, which snapped back to crackle in tight bands across her hand as she opened it.

The Dhumma roared in anger and slashed towards her with the smoking shards of metal remaining on his weapon. She whirled to grab it again with her armored fist. He strained against her grip, and with a flare of plasma she pulled the ruined glaive towards her to draw him off-balance. Her other hand came up and fired a pistol shot into his leg, pulping it. He bellowed, falling forward, and Jesri’s armored fist swung high to pound him down against the deck. Light rippled from her arm and rent into the hulking alien’s chest, tearing a gaping hole through to the decking. The Dhumma gasped, twitched, and died.

Jesri snapped her head up to glare at the remaining bandits, her right arm shining with gleaming metal and arcing fire.

As one, they threw down their clubs and ran out of the room, their footsteps echoing in the hallway.

Part 7

"Impeccable timing, sister," groaned Anja, rising unsteadily to her feet. "Although I might not have complained if you had come earlier."

Jesri hopped off of the smoldering Dhumma corpse and scanned the room, the bands of plasma dissipating from her arm. Kenet-Tel and his brood were huddled in a corner of the room, drenched in a pastel coating of blood and viscera. Rhuar appeared to be relatively unscathed, staring blankly at the corpses of their attackers with his mouth hanging open.

She walked over to Anja, reaching out an arm to steady her. "You good?", she asked.

Anja gave a pained smile and nodded. "Yes, sister. No bleeding, but bruises and perhaps a fractured rib. I will be good as new when we reach the autodoc on the Grand Design."

"You got the data?", asked Jesri, her eyes widening. "You know where to find it?"

"Aurelius," confirmed Anja. "I have the complete transmission plus the vector logged by the communications array. I can narrow it down to a searchable volume."

Jesri grinned. "Let’s get back to the ship." She turned to Rhuar and Kenet-Tel. "Guys, you okay? Anyone hurt?"

Kenet-Tel swept a ribbon of gelatinous entrails from his shoulder. "We are uninjured, but perhaps not okay." He shuddered. "We should leave quickly."

Jesri nodded. "Rhuar, buddy? You good?"

The dog tilted its head to look at her, his expression blank.

Jesri frowned. It wasn’t uncommon for a first taste of battle to leave survivors in a state of shock. She’d experienced it herself, a long time ago. Shards of broken memories gathered together in her mind, the smell of blood and burnt flesh insinuating itself slyly.

She shook her head. Not the time. Jesri slowly leaned closer to Rhuar and reached towards him. "Hey, it’s all right," she said softly. "We’re safe now."

Rhuar whined. "Jesri," he said, hesitation creeping into his voice, "can I touch it?"

She froze. "Huh?"

Rhuar’s exoskeletal arms shot out to grab either side of her armored hand, caressing the metal. "Oh, it’s so smooth," he crooned. "Are those directed plasma arcs? Does each part have independent containment fields?"

Jesri’s fist clenched and a ripple of fire washed over her glove. Rhuar yanked his arms back with a yip. "Yeah, okay," she sighed, "let’s head out."

They trekked through the darkness once again, Kenet-Ei darting ahead to scout for torchlight. Despite their wary advance, no bandits revealed themselves.

Jesri worked her fingers in the armor as they walked and felt the smooth motion of the articulated joints. Her hand sat comfortably in the forearm of the glove, wrapped in a strong coating of metal and carbon polymer. The armor’s own hand sat farther down. She clenched her fist and the armor’s fingers curled into a solid hammerhead of metal, meshing to form an unbroken striking surface.

Anja smirked and flicked a finger against Jesri’s plated shoulder. "I think you made an impression on them, sister."

Jesri snorted. "I’d have made more than an impression with a full suit." She relaxed her hand, the carbon muscles rippling under their metal sheath. Nerve inducers let her feel the air flowing across her open palm. "This was the only usable thing I found in the armory, and it’s almost out of charge."

"Such a shame," Anja sighed. "I had hoped there might be something I could use. Hopefully things are in better shape on the ship. The log indicated that they were hit by a gamma-ray burst, which would not have been kind to the power cores."

Jesri nodded and looked back at the group. Rhuar was walking innocently behind them, a thin strand of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth. "Perhaps we should do an inventory first-thing," she suggested wryly.

They walked along in silence for a while. Kenet-Ei led them through several twisting passages before they found themselves in the radial corridor, faint light visible beyond the curve of the corridor.

Green crowded the passage as they moved into the lighted area, crouching to pass through the cleared path that Jesri had cut earlier. Kenet-Tel huffed in amusement as his children dove in and out of the shaggy ivy. "We would come here to harvest food," he said, "but the youngest ones have not made the trip before now."

He turned to look Jesri in the eye. "Thank you for agreeing to take us with you. I feared that my children would grow old on this station, as I have."

Jesri smiled, but shook her head. "No need for thanks," she said. "You more than earned it helping us avoid those patrols." The smile faded from her face. "If we had to fight them back there in the dark it would have ended badly."

She hadn’t seen the first part of the fight with the Dhumma, but she could read its blows in Anja’s pained movements. The women were both capable fighters, but they only had skill and experience as their shield. In the long years since she had last worn this armor she had forgotten the feeling of having more.

Jesri rolled her shoulder in the armor sleeve, watching the thick bands of muscle flex and relax. In a full suit she would be an imposing figure - inhumanly strong and fast with unparalleled destructive power. The old piece of armor dredged up a dusty realization of how weak and vulnerable she was without it.

"Something the matter, sister?", asked Anja.

Jesri realized that she had stopped walking, staring down at her hand. The others ahead of her were looking back curiously. She shook her head and walked forward. "It’s nothing," she sighed, "It’s just been a while since I wore one of these."

Anja raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. The group continued onward through the overgrown hallway.

The greenery faded to a shaggy carpet of moss, which dispersed to show the lichen-mottled decking as they neared the end of the corridor. Jesri hung back as the group slipped under the half-raised door into the outer ring, then ducked her head to follow and frowned. A tuft of coarse hair was lodged in the door track.

Her eyes widened with realization. Diving under the door, she rolled and stood just in time to see a broad-shouldered bandit spring out of a side corridor close to the front of the group. He grasped a pitted bar of metal, bringing it up to swing at Rhuar. More assailants poured from behind him, spreading out into the hallway. Jesri shouted and reached for her pistol, but the alien was already in mid-swing by the time her gun cleared its holster. Rhuar looked up in shock as the bar flashed towards his head.

And stopped inches away.

The dog and the bandit stared at each other in confusion for a long moment, the air between them rippling with a lambent haze. With a flash of light and a sharp crack, the bandit was thrown backwards in a tangle of uncontrollably twitching limbs.

The other bandits charged, howling. Jesri grinned carnivorously. "Security grid is online, fuckers! Ariadne! Engage riot control protocol in this sector!"

Three incongruously cheerful ascending tones echoed through the hallways. "Attention," droned a calm feminine voice, "a curfew is in effect for this sector. Please return to your resid-." The voice was cut off as the audio scratched and sputtered into garbled static. Blurry fields of light cut across the path of the onrushing bandits, bouncing them violently to the floor.

Peering down the hall, Jesri could see a few more clusters of bandits prone on the ground or thrashing violently against the fields. One particularly large four-legged alien with prominent fangs crouched and sprang into the field surrounding it with a swipe of its claws. The field flashed white, and a cascade of sparks fell from the ceiling. It bellowed in rage, hammering the field again and again. Jesri grimaced. "Okay folks, time to move!", she shouted. She caught Anja’s eye and pointed towards where Kenet-Tel’s brood was enclosed in a shining bubble.

Anja nodded and flicked her hand at the huddled aliens, dismissing the field. They grouped up and raced down the corridor, retracing their steps towards the ship.

They ran in silence, broken only by an occasional grunt of pain as Anja jostled her injured ribs. Somewhere behind them a throaty roar sounded. The lights flickered.

"Not good!", yelled Jesri. "That was the field generator, move!" She fell back towards Kenet-Tel, who was frantically herding his children forward. They pushed onward quietly for several tense minutes. Rhuar was panting heavily and Kenet-Tel’s skin had darkened several shades.

Slowly, implacably, the noise of heavy footfalls swelled from down the corridor. The deep pounding of feet against the deck grew louder and more distinct with every passing second. At last from far behind them she saw the huge quadrupedal alien that had raged against the containment fields come careening into the corridor, clawed feet scrambling for traction on the deck. He found purchase and charged forward, his massive mouth hanging open to expose curved yellow fangs that jutted out dangerously from his tangled grey fur.

Jesri shouted a warning to Anja and drew her gun, taking aim down the hall at the charging alien. She fired, but the alien dropped low and began juking from side to side. It moved with surprising speed and foresight, and her shots slid past without connecting. Anja opened up from behind her only to miss her initial shots as well. Jesri’s gun spat invisible lines of energy again and again, but only managed to inflict grazes on her target as it serpentined its way towards the fleeing group.

"Shit," she swore. "Fall back! I’ll engage." She kept her armored side back in a ready stance and continued to fire at the oncoming assailant with her free hand. Finally, one of her shots connected with the massive bulk of the alien’s flank, gouging flesh and eliciting a roar of pain.

It was too little, too late, she realized. He was already closing to within striking range, and she pivoted to counterpunch as he leapt through the air at her. Fire blossomed from her fist, swirling back over her arm and shimmering the air beside her with heat. She jabbed directly at his face, but stumbled forward as her arm refused to extend properly.

The alien collided with her, knocking her gun from her hand and sending her flying against the wall with a shoulder check. She bounced back and hit the floor, slumping over her half-bent arm. The fire was gone, and a prickly numbness crept up towards her shoulder as the inducers stopped sending tactile input. The armor had run out of power. Jesri snarled in frustration, slamming the unresponsive hand into the ground and trying to wrench her arm free of its bindings.

The alien kept bounding past her towards Anja, who managed to tag him with a shot that ripped a slab of hair and thick skin from his hip. He swiped his claws in retaliation, drawing a deep gash across the outside of her thigh. Anja was slammed into the wall and slid to the ground in a daze, clear fluid oozing from her wound.

The big alien growled smugly and turned his attention to the rest of the group. Rhuar and Kenet-Tel had kept running during the short fight, retreating further down the corridor while Jesri and Anja bought them time - but it wasn’t enough. The alien burst into a run again and Jesri screamed a hoarse warning to Rhuar.

Rhuar spun around, exoskeleton flattening over his legs while Kenet-Tel took up a guard position in front of his children. Kenet-Ei bristled at their attacker, yowling wordlessly as he closed distance with them.

Jesri struggled to her feet and ripped her arm out of the armor. Her vision swam as she staggered towards the others, her breath roaring in her ears with every ragged gasp. She could see the alien crouched in front of Rhuar and Kenet-Tel, muscles tensed. Rhuar flung himself onto the alien’s back, snarling and biting. The massive creature ignored him and whirled to spring at Kenet-Tel. One huge paw flicked out to slam into his side, flinging him away from his huddled children. He sprawled senseless and gasping on the deck, one side of his chest caved in.

A scream of rage tore its way out of Jesri’s throat, her vision blurring. She broke into a stiff run, dimly aware of the sparks of pain flaring up her injured legs. She saw the alien advance and swing his paw again. Rhuar swung remora-like from his broad back as his jaws tore into fur and skin. Jesri smelled blood and smoke as her head pulsed with a dull throbbing, every jarring footfall sending a jolt through her bones.

She hurled herself at the alien, pulling her knife and stabbing deep into his flank. He roared and whirled around with a blind swipe of his paw. Jesri’s leg gave out as she flinched away from the strike and the paw raked empty air over her head.

Rhuar lost his grip and went tumbling to the side as the alien shook himself, finally tiring of the dog’s efforts. Jesri watched him land hard and yelp in pain through the dark haze clouding her vision, pounding against her temples with the din of a long-dead firefight. She drew breath in shallow gasps, blood trickling across one eye and blurring everything with halos of light and motion.

The alien stalked over to where she lay. It grinned toothily, baring its curving fangs. Jesri’s legs worked frantically but failed to push her away from the monster leering over her supine body.

It opened its mouth to tear into her flesh, its maw descending towards her with languid disinterest.

Jesri tried to roll away but her leg refused to move. She bucked frantically, sliding back and landing hard against the deck. The impact dispelled some of the fog clouding her vision, bringing the corridor into sharp relief. Half the world was teeth and dark, stinking gullet, nearly upon her. Anja sat slumped against the wall, immobile and bleeding, her eyes wide as they stared at Jesri. On her other side, Rhuar was struggling to his feet as he stared in horror at the alien drawing closer to her throat.

Behind the alien sat a still chaos of thin limbs and dark blood.

Jesri’s sight faded behind a bloom of white fire, heat pulsing through her veins. Screams echoed distantly in her ears as gunfire and explosions roared in a dissonant chorus. She saw her hands, red to the elbow, pressed against a wound that had long since stopped gushing blood.

Her vision cleared and she saw just her hand, clean but for ragged cuts from her armor weeping clear across her skin. She held her knife.

With a ragged yell she thrust her arm up into her attacker’s open mouth, her blood running freely where the fangs tore into her. Her knife slid deep into the roof of his mouth and sliced back across his palate, ropy blood oozing from the cut. His breath rattled out in a warm, fetid rush across her face. She threw herself to the side with the last scraps of her strength as the massive creature slammed dead into the deck.

Jesri blinked her eyes. She was upright, leaning heavily against a limping Anja as she was half-dragged, half-carried down the corridor. A low growl rumbled from behind her.

"Anja, another!", barked Rhuar, his artificial voice grim. Anja dropped Jesri roughly and spun on her good leg, pistol in hand. A group of three bandits were rushing towards them screaming a thin, warbling ululation.

Sighting down the barrel of her gun, Anja shot twice. The lead bandit’s torso crumpled in on itself with a spray of blood and steam. The other two scrambled to a stop and dove towards a nearby passage. Anja managed to tag one of them in the leg, sending him to the deck screaming and clutching the torn ruins of his stump. The other vanished down the passage, the noise of his flight rapidly fading to silence.

Jesri coughed. "Ow," she muttered, rubbing her hip where she had fallen to the deck. A litany of half-felt injuries had burst into bright, blinding pain with the impact. She lay on the deck for a long pair of seconds, willing her mind into focus and feeling the pain drain away to a manageable agony, beating frantically against the back of her consciousness.

Anja glanced down at her and smiled, extending a hand. "Sister! I am glad to see you awake," she said. "You are heavier than you look."

Jesri grabbed her hand and dragged herself upright. "No heavier than you," she retorted, pausing to take stock of the situation. Down the hallway, the wounded alien had stopped screaming and passed out, his blood mingling with the wide puddle left by his dead comrade. Rhuar paced ahead of Jesri and Anja, his shoulders set low with tension. Nobody else was in the hallway.

She closed her eyes, the events of the fight replaying in her mind. The alien rushing close before they could shoot it down, the armor failing, Anja falling, Rhuar’s desperate attack. "The others?", she asked quietly. She saw a mass of blood and small bodies flit before her and forced her eyes open again.

Anja was looking at her with a neutral expression. "We should keep moving, sister," she whispered, "More will be coming."

Jesri gritted her teeth and began to move down the hallway, forcing her legs to move despite the pain crackling through her with every step.

Anja ran the dermal binder across the last of the cuts on Jesri’s arm, leaving a trail of shiny, pinched skin. Jesri frowned and scratched at it, flexing her elbow. "Tight," she complained. "It feels stiff."

"It will have to do until we get to an actual autodoc," replied Anja, stowing the tool in a cabinet. She winced and scratched at her leg, the same smooth scars visible through the blood-encrusted slash in her trousers. "I admit it’s not ideal," she conceded.

Leaning back, Jesri stared upwards at the harsh lighting of the medical bay. A low thrum resonated through her as the ship’s engines engaged. Rhuar had waved off Qktk’s stream of questions and fled to the bridge, insisting on departing as soon as possible. With their wounds treated, Jesri supposed that they should join them on the bridge sooner rather than later.

She laid still on the medical bed. Anja finished stowing the supplies they had used and sat down beside her, taking Jesri’s hand in hers without speaking. They sat there together in silence for a while, the timbre of the engines rising and falling as Rhuar maneuvered his way out of the docks. The air rushing past the ship made a susurrus of whispers that grew by the moment, then disappeared with the tiniest of jolts when they passed through the exit and into the void of space.

They absorbed the quiet, and Jesri closed her eyes.

"What happened back there, Anja?" she asked.

Anja bit her lip. "I imagine that like me, you have not fought seriously in a while. Without practice, things degrade."

"Bullshit," Jesri snorted. "We don’t lose muscle memory like that. I’m not wondering why we lost that fight, I know why we lost that fight."

"Sister, unless I am very mistaken with my definitions we won that fight," observed Anja. "In particular, you won that fight."

Jesri opened her eyes and glanced over at Anja. "Doesn’t feel like it," she muttered. "And that’s what I’m talking about."

Anja frowned. "Does it trouble you so much?"

Jesri quirked an eyebrow at her. "The death of comrades?" Anja raised her hands, acknowledging the point, but Jesri continued. "We’ve seen innocents die before, and ones we knew better than Kenet-Tel. Mountains of them, planets of them, piled on top of each other over and over." She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself. "We swam up that river of death and kept on going for five thousand years. And after all that I close my eyes and see those five instead." Jesri let her eyelids drift shut. "I feel old, sister," she sighed.

Anja ran her fingers through Jesri’s hair, brushing away amber crusts of dried blood. "I missed most of that fight," she said after a while. "I was cut and dazed. And when I could see straight the first thing I saw was you on your back. I tried to get up, to lift my arm to fire at the beast, but I failed. I saw you fail too." Anja pulled her hands back, looking away. "And then you got up and fought anyway."

Jesri opened her mouth to protest, but Anja held a hand up and continued. "I saw all of the same deaths you did, every mountain of corpses and each river of blood. Today I saw you about to die, and nothing I had in me would let me raise one arm and fire. Not even to save the only one I have left."

Anja smiled sadly. "And you had what I lacked, for five strangers you had known for hours. You found something out in the void that never came to find me while I sat and searched. But for that, we would all be dead."

At a loss for words, Jesri lay back and studied the smooth arc of the ceiling. After a while, she lifted her head to look at Anja. "I can accept it," she said resignedly, "even if I don’t want it. It looks like even we change given enough time." Her lips drew into a thin line. "Not you, though," she said. "If we’re alive because I changed, then we’re also alive because you never did."

Anja looked back with a curious expression and Jesri sighed. "Tell me," she whispered, "were all of them dead?"

Anja’s face went blank. "We did not leave anyone behind."

"I know," she replied, her voice barely audible. "Was there another option?"

The stoic mask on Anja’s face hardened. "No."

"And yet I might have chosen it," said Jesri, "and we would be dead."

Her sister frowned and leaned back, the stone seeping out of her face. The two women clasped hands again and sat quietly in the medbay as the soft hum of the ship faded away, leaving them in silence.

Rhuar stepped backwards and disconnected from the ship, his awareness suddenly sliced down to just the parts of him that were Rhuar. It felt like losing a limb every time, and he paused to steady himself before stowing the jack in its place by the console.

"Did they say where they would like to go next?", chirped Qktk inquiringly from behind him.

"No, not yet," Rhuar replied, stretching low against the ground. "Just wanted to get out of the dock. I figure they’re gonna take a while in the medbay."

Qktk rattled his arms together in agitation. "Yes, I’d expect. They both seemed to be injured quite severely. Are you all right, Mr. Rhuar? What happened on the station?"

"Oh, I’m fine," said Rhuar. "Just a couple of bruises." He shook his head. "I’m a fuckin idiot, though."

The captain didn’t say anything in response, and after a long moment Rhuar continued. "I wanted to go on the station to see all the cool shit. I thought it would be fun."

He settled on to the floor, curling into a circle. His head rested on the cool metal, and he closed his eyes. "You get used to the idea of feeling insignificant," he said, his voice muffled. "Just hopping from station to station, maybe you make some money and maybe you don’t. And you think you know what it’d be like, being more than that. You have it in your head what you’d do if one day you were the grand fuckin poobah of the shit pile."

"But it’s still a shit pile, Captain," he spat ruefully, "everything we’ve ever known. I thought we were better than the fuckin decklickers because of the ship, because we dreamed big. But you know what I learned today? We never knew what ‘big’ was. Our lives are so small that we couldn’t even imagine it, whatever we came up with would still be this tiny fuckin speck compared to how it really is."

Qktk settled down on the deck beside Rhuar. "Yes," he admitted, "I had felt a bit of that. We’re in over our heads."

They sat beneath the stars for a few minutes.

"I tried to take my piece of it," Rhuar said, "there was a second where I thought I could do something that mattered, tip the scales for the first time in my life. I tried as hard as I’ve ever tried before." Bitterness crept into his voice. "I wasn’t even worth killing. I just got fuckin ignored. And then Anja…"

He trailed off, then opened his eyes and looked at Qktk. "Be careful around those two, Captain. They may like us, and they’ll keep their promises if they can. And if they ever even think that we’re gonna get in the way, they’ll kill us and lose no sleep over it." Rhuar snorted. "If they fuckin sleep at all."

Qktk nodded gravely. "I’ll keep that in mind," he said, "but I’d like you to think on something as well." He drew himself upright, forelegs spreading wide. "We Htt have a story about our past, long ago, when someone came to our, ah, shitpile. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and he expanded our horizons somewhat forcefully. Suddenly we knew just how small we were, and that we could be wiped out without a hint of malice or evil or anything else grand from our stories. It would happen because the wheels of the universe just happened to grind over our speck of sand and not another."

"Yeah, that sounds right," grumbled Rhuar. "How’d that go for you?"

Qktk chittered. "Much as you’d expect. Many people hated our visitor for the change he’d brought to us but others saw the gift in it. We were children before he came, and now we could grow - had to grow, in fact, or we would die as quietly as we had lived. So we grew, grew so fast it hurt, and we survived."

The captain settled back to the deck and folded his legs. "So while I respect the danger we’re in, having those two with us, I can’t think of them badly. There is no malice in being truthful." He paused, contemplative. "And if a human once again lifts up our eyes to stare at the sky instead of the sand, I had long ago decided that I preferred the sky."

Beyond the viewports, the vast stretches of the cosmos glowed with gentle light. The captain and the artificer sat and watched as they drifted, one mote among trillions.

Part 8

Lightning and fire crackled around the ship in a fulminous halo, then fell away into the midnight black of deep hyperspace. Rhuar shuddered and unjacked, falling to rest on the spartan metal deck of the bridge. "We’re away," he reported, his voice incongruously steady despite panting heavily. "We should be at Aurelius in 5 hours or so."

Anja smiled and bent down to scratch a vaguely offended Rhuar behind the ears. "Good work!", she said cheerily. Rhuar looked too exhausted to object.

Qktk chittered and reclined in his seat. "I confess I haven’t heard of Aurelius before," he said, waving a tablet in one segmented arm. "Is it one of the defunct stations?"

Jesri shook her head. "No, Aurelius was always just a waypoint. Some gas mining, but the system doesn’t have much of note in it. It sits off the galactic plane a ways, so people would use it as a target to pop up over the Perseus Arm."

Rhuar raised his head. "If there’s no station it’s going to take a long time to get back. Even if there’s a station straight planeward from Aurelius we’d be spending weeks riding the bubble." He shuddered. "Longest no-assist jump I ever did was three days and it was pure, straight hell."

Anja laughed. "Don’t worry, doggie. We’ll have a much faster ride back."

She giggled at the dark look Rhuar cast her way. "Excuse me if I don’t want to bet on a millenia-old ghost ship," he shot back. "You’re not the one that gets to sit here for hours and hours if it doesn’t work."

Jesri frowned. She hadn’t given much thought to the condition of the Grand Design prior to Anja rediscovering it, not for many, many years. The news that it had been hit by one or more gamma-ray bursts was not encouraging. In the worst case scenario the ship and its precious cargo would both be long-dead, lost to the ravages of time and radiation. More than her own well-being, Jesri worried about Anja if that proved to be the case. Her sister had maintained her laser-focus for so long that a sudden revelation like that would be…

Well, bad.

The focus of her worries was currently waving off Rhuar’s concerns about the derelict ship. "It will be fine," said Anja dismissively, "the Grand Design is a late-model navy cruiser. The systems are quite resistant to radiation and are designed with multiple backups in case of a primary failure." She crossed her arms. "The transit stations were all attacked as well. If a transit station can make it to the modern day without degrading, then the ship will be functional."

Rhuar nodded, but didn’t look convinced. Jesri figured he was remembering the rather degraded transit station they had just departed back in Harsi. Anja’s points were sound, though, she had to admit. The only way to test her assertions was to wait and see.

Jesri sighed. After five thousand years, five hours shouldn’t feel this long.

They arrived in a splash of white light, Rhuar’s deft touch bringing them gently back to normal space. A dull red star glowered at them across a dusty band of rock and ice. To their right, the warm glow of the galactic disc hung like luminous thunderclouds in the distance. To the left, a vast sheet of black held a scattering of lonely stars shining weakly against the void of intergalactic space.

They had arrived at Aurelius.

Qktk peered out the viewport appreciatively. "Goodness," he rattled, "I don’t believe I’ve been this far off the plane before. That’s quite a sight."

Rhuar shook himself as he stowed the shipjack again. "We’re going to be seeing it a lot, unless you’ve got some way to narrow the field. I didn’t see any obvious signal sources, and it’s going to be a pain looking for anything with all this dust in the inner system."

Anja grinned and produced a small black box from her pocket. "This should help. The station logged the ship when it left, including the last IFF authentication update it received." She unspooled a cable and proffered it to Rhuar. "With the proper authorization code, which we now have, the ship will respond to a query with a tight-beam authentication sent to our coordinates."

Rhuar’s exoskeleton reached out and snagged the cable. He studied his console for a few seconds before selecting a port and connecting the box to the ship. "That seems a little too easy," he grumbled. "If that’s all it takes, why didn’t someone try it before?"

Jesri leaned forward, her brow knitting. "If I remember correctly, there’s a range limiter on the response. It also needs to have the correct authentication code. The codes for sensitive missions are changed for each leg of a long trip, and are only provided to the ship when it departs."

Qktk nodded. "So to find the ship, someone would have to know which system to scan and obtain the correct code."

"Yeah," Jesri confirmed. "For obvious reasons security was a concern, so there are a number of restrictions." She hesitated. "Also, the code will only work once."

Rhuar blinked. "I mean, that makes sense," he said, "but doesn’t that hurt our chances?"

Anja shrugged. "If it does not work, then we will adjust our strategy. For now, please send out…" She leaned over and punched a few buttons on the console, then straightened up with a bright smile. "There," she said cheerily, "that configuration should work."

Rhuar stepped back and waved a hand at the console. "Please," he said, "be my guest."

Once more, Anja leaned over to press the glowing panel. A low chime sounded, and she stood away from the console. Anja quickly clutched her hands together behind her back, but not before Jesri caught a slight tremble in her fingers. "There," She said softly. "Transmission sent."

Rhuar looked around at each of them, the silence on the bridge stretching out awkwardly. "Uh, so," he said, "what now?"

"We wait," replied Jesri. "Given the short range it should be a quick-"

She cut off as the console chimed again, indicating a response. Anja dove towards it like a striking snake, nearly bowling over Rhuar in her enthusiasm. "Confirmed!", she said, her voice tight. "It’s in the dust belt on the near side of the star. About five million kilometers out."

Rhuar nodded and grabbed the jack. "We can microjump close to those coordinates. I’ll bring us in a bit away from the precise origin." He paused, flicking his ears nervously. "You, uh, may want to buckle up for this one."

"What’s the matter, ace pilot?", Jesri needled as she grabbed for her harness. "Feeling okay?"

"Oh, fuck off," he retorted crossly. "I’d like to see you make a millisecond-tolerance jump into a gravity well." His arms finished securing his own restraints, plugged in the jack and stored themselves tightly against his legs. "All right," he muttered, "hold on to your butts."

The ship’s engines thrummed as Rhuar reoriented them for the jump, then shifted to a high-pitched whine as the drive charged. Tones layered across each other and a film of white light began to dance across the starfield outside. Ripples distorted the angry red glare from the system’s lone star, sending motes of fire scattering across the starscape.

Rhuar tensed, and the light wrapped around the ship like a constricting fist. A brief flash of familiar soap-bubble starlight wreathed the viewports. The dull red star leapt towards them, the dust clouds around it grasping upwards to enclose them in an expanse of dim embers. The ship jolted violently, as if plunging into water. They slammed against their harnesses, eliciting a grunt of pain from Anja as her injured ribs hit the restraints. From the rear of the ship came a loud crash as something tore loose and tumbled across the hold.

Jesri’s breath caught in her throat as a bar of deepest black jumped into view. It swiftly grew to become a gaping void in the red glow surrounding them. Qktk shrilled a piercing note of alarm, his legs scrabbling reflexively against his seat as Rhuar swore and veered the ship to the side.

As their velocity dipped down to near-zero, Qktk slumped in his seat. "Mr. Rhuar," he clacked irritably, "please try not to run my ship into any ancient derelicts. That looked like we came within meters of collision!"

Rhuar was standing stock-still with his mouth hanging slightly open. "Captain," he said haltingly, his ears flicking back and forth. "No, it’s…"

"Oh my," said Anja faintly, raising a shaking hand to her head. "I can hear her. Hello, pretty girl."

"Kick," chuckled Jesri, "take another look."

The captain gave her a questioning glance, then peered out the viewport again. "I don’t see what you’re-"

Anja flicked a hand at the ship. He paused.

"Oh, by Jim’s dusty bones," he whispered, his voice filled with awe.

At Anja’s unspoken command lights had flickered on across the length of the ship. The illumination washed over its hull and brought the ship’s true size into perspective. Nearly a kilometer of slate-grey plating hung motionless in front of them, speckled by tiny viewports and cold white running lights. The ship’s boxy frame tapered to a raked wedge at its bow while the aft half flared wide on each side to accommodate the mammoth engine block.

On the starboard bow, GRAND DESIGN was stenciled in large, faded letters. Below it sat the triple-starburst insignia of the Terran Navy. Jesri felt a hot pressure in her chest looking at it. It had been a fixture every day of her young life, stenciled on her clothes and her belongings. Seeing it hanging there, even worn and obscured by years of abrasive dust and radiation, she could almost make herself believe that she was on the shuttle to her first assignment again, staring up in awe as they approached their berthing.

She glanced at Anja. She too was staring up at the ship raptly, a look of bliss on her upturned face. This had been her dream every day since the Grand Design was first reported missing. For all of the emotions rushing through Jesri, she could only imagine what Anja felt upon seeing the ship.

The four of them sat spellbound for a moment. Anja found her voice first, walking over to Rhuar and settling a hand on his back. "Take us below the ship," she said. "I’ll open the door."

The engines spooled up and they began to move, slowly gliding under the massive bulk of the ship. As they moved past the bow Jesri could make out the edges of the armor plates, gigantic bands of metal stretching pitted and scored over the underside of the hull. The low blisters of gun emplacements sat clustered on the edges and ridges, flanked by hummocks of sensor gear.

Ahead of them a thin line of light appeared in the hull. As they drew near it widened to show a cavernous docking bay beyond. The opening dwarfed their ship as they rose through it to enter the bay, sliding through the docking field with a subtle vibration and rush of atmosphere. Inside, dozens of berths lined the walls around a large central space stretching back hundreds of meters.

Rhuar twitched. "How fuckin big is this thing?", he muttered, his ears flicking back as he pored over the feed of sensor input. "There’s at least three other ships in here, and space for a fuckton more."

Anja nodded. "Most ships this size have a few small shuttles, fighters and fast attack craft. She says that half of her complement is on patrol, so I assume they were lost in the attack." She cocked her head. "She is asking for a berth registry. Does your ship have a name?"

"The Leviathan," said Qktk proudly.

Jesri snorted, earning an acid look from all of Qktk’s eyes. "It’s for advertising," the captain said crossly. "Besides, how many civilian ships do you know of that are bigger?"

Anja gave him a pat on the head and the captain knit his arms in irritation. "It’s a good little ship," she said. "Berth three?"

Rhuar nodded and they settled down over a crisp numeral painted on the deck, a light wave of dust rippling up as they descended. Jesri slid free of her harness and stretched. "Okay," she said, "we got air?"

"We’ve got, uh..." Rhuar said, tilting his head for a moment as he queried the sensors. "Oh, yeah, you’re good. How does that work, anyway? I have to change the filters out on this thing every year or we can’t breathe. What sort of magical bullshit keeps air on the stations for that long?"

Jesri gave him a look. "Well, on this ship nothing is taxing the filters because the whole crew is dead."

Rhuar looked abashed, but pressed the point. "What about the stations? People live there."

"Not really," said Jesri, shaking her head. "The stations were designed to be inhabited to capacity, and the air systems can probably handle twice that." She looked over at Anja, who was developing an irritated tilt to her posture. "Let’s table this for later," Jesri sighed. "It looks like Anja is about to chew her way through the hatch."

Rhuar blinked, and the doors hissed open. A draft of cool, dry air snaked in through the door to the bridge, fresh and clean with the barest hint of ozone. A rush of memories crashed into Jesri’s vision: her, thirteen years old on her first visit to a real navy ship, pushing her way through a crowd of her sisters to gawk at the reactors, the hangars, the bridge. Her, back from her first assignment, the crisp air of the hangar washing away the tang of smoke and blood that had crept into every corner of the shuttle. Her, years later on a different ship, listening to a terse communique listing the worlds that had fallen silent.

Anja had gone immediately to stand outside the ship, tilting her head back to take in the distant sweep of the hangar’s ceiling. Jesri, Rhuar and Qktk followed closely behind her, looking around the bay.

"Yeah," said Rhuar, stretching. "I stand by my initial assessment. Big fuckoff hangar."

Anja flashed him a quick smile and set off up some stairs towards an exit. Jesri sighed and turned to the other two. "Stay close to us," she said. "I don’t expect trouble, but we should limit our exploration until we’ve accessed internal sensors."

The three followed after Anja, but caught up to her only a short way past the exit door. A body stretched out on the floor in front of her, shrunken and brown with its arms curled inwards against its torso. Faded grey rags wrapped around it, the occasional strip of stained gold piping the only hint that it had once been a naval uniform.

Rhuar looked down the corridor and saw more bodies, slumped against walls or sprawled across the floor. "There’s so many of them," he said uneasily, backing away.

Jesri nodded sadly. "More than just these. Crew for a ship this size would be in the thousands." She walked over to look more closely at the body. It was male, and the corroded pips by its neck indicated a rank of lieutenant.

Anja straightened up. "We can deal with them after we have secured the ship," she said reluctantly. "The lift will be farther aft." She began walking again, her stride determined - but she could not keep her gaze from straying to each fallen form as she passed.

Jesri also found her eyes drawn to the dessicated corpses. Each one was a former comrade, humans who had been about their normal routine unaware that they had seconds to live.

Qktk and Rhuar tailed the women closely. If they had been disinclined to risk becoming lost before, the eerie bodies had removed any remaining desire to explore. Rhuar kept his eyes up from the floor, focusing on the neatly spaced numbered doors and counting the differences from the standard civilian models he was used to.

One door wasn’t numbered. Rhuar paused and dredged up his recollection of written English, but he couldn’t make sense of the label. "Hey, guys?", he called out. Anja and Jesri glanced over from where they had been studying a chunk of corroded metal clasped in a mummified hand.

"What does ‘Valkyrie’ mean?"

Their heads snapped up to stare at Rhuar so quickly that Qktk flinched back in alarm.

"Where did you see that word?", Anja asked quietly. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes set every bit of Rhuar’s fur on end.

"Uh," he managed, pointing towards the door.

Jesri stalked over to the door, staring wide-eyed at the label. She turned to Anja. "There was a deployment here?", she asked incredulously. "Did you know about that?"

"Not a thing," said Anja, coming over to stand beside Jesri. "But they would often keep sensitive deployments off the official listings." She reached towards the door, pausing with her hand an inch away from the controls. Jesri put a hand on Anja’s shoulder, and the two shared a look for a moment before Anja placed her hand on the panel.

A wash of light appeared over Anja’s hand, moving across it methodically before receding into the panel. A chirrup sounded, and the door hissed open. Beyond it lay a long hallway with several large doors along the walls. The two women walked inside, moving quickly past two doors and stopping in front of a third. They shared another look, then opened the door and disappeared within.

Qktk and Rhuar shared a look, but waited outside. Their sudden reaction to the room had been an alarming reminder of how dangerous their companions were, and how little they knew about them. After a long minute, Jesri walked out of the room, her lips a thin line. She looked at them expressionlessly, her eyes like dull chips of ice. Rhuar shivered.

Jesri breathed out, her shoulders sagging, and seemed to notice Rhuar and Qktk for the first time. She shook her head and waved them inside. "Sorry," she said, "didn’t mean to be strange, we were just a bit startled." She waited until they drew closer, then continued, her voice soft and flat. "Valkyrie was a special unit of the Naval Marines," she explained. "They used a blend of biotechnology and cybernetics to make enhanced soldiers. They deployed them for espionage, strike missions, extractions and to oversee sensitive operations like this one."

Rhuar tilted his head, confused, but then realization struck him. "Your unit," he said. Qktk rattled his mandibles quietly.

"Our sisters," Anja replied from past the door. Rhuar moved further to see inside and saw her standing in spartan living quarters, cradling a body in her arms. Its skin was dried and pale brown, better preserved than the corpses outside but very clearly dead. On its head the remnants of a thick braid still showed a clear red hue. "This is Hana," she said, her voice forced and harsh.

Jesri caught Rhuar’s eye and waved him past the door. He and Qktk took the hint, moving farther down the hall. Jesri said something quietly to Anja and slid the door closed, walking over to join them.

"Leave her there for a bit," she said quietly. "Let’s look through the other rooms."

The other living quarters across the hall proved to be empty, with bedsheets folded neatly over a thin cot. Jesri stepped in and looked around, feeling a pang of remembrance. She had spent most of her military career living in rooms like these, the same dimensions and furniture no matter how far-flung the posting.

She sighed and moved on to the next room. Racks and shelves of equipment lined its walls, festooned with dust-covered guns, knives, swords, grenades, and all manner of tiny electronic devices, their innocuous appearance made all the more sinister by their company. Jesri slid the door closed again, earning an indignant look from Rhuar. "We’re not going to check that out?", he asked disbelievingly.

Jesri gave him a faint smile. "You don’t want to waste your time there." At his questioning look she moved across the hall and opened the door opposite from the armory, revealing a dimly lit room that bent away to the left. Curious, Rhuar trotted over and stuck his head around the corner.

Three meters tall and shining like frozen quicksilver, four full suits of powered armor sat in evenly spaced alcoves along the far wall of the room. White and black plating framed the metallic skin like a latticed shell across the chest and shoulders. The helmet had a smooth white faceplate with a grey triple-starburst covering the front.

Their digitigrade legs spread wide at the foot, smooth plating stretching up midway to dissolve into a latticework that meshed neatly with the chest armor. The arms hung loosely, fingers uncurled to show the metal supports running throughout.

Across the room, each suit had a set of equipment: a rifle the size of Rhuar with an underbarrel launcher and a matte-white sword with a straight blade tapering to a sharply angled tip. Rhuar stood transfixed, a high whine escaping from his throat, while Qktk’s eyes flickered rapidly across the equipment. Jesri walked up and ran a hand over the latticed chestpiece, hooking her fingers on the armored ridges.

"I wasn’t expecting to find a Valkyrie armory here," she said, "but I’m glad we did. With an intact and fully charged suit we can hold our own against pretty much anything."

Qktk chittered, finding his voice. "Madam Jesri, I don’t believe force will be necessary. I can’t picture the scenario where you show up in a kilometer-long ancient human warship, step onto the dock wearing this armor and find the inhabitants anything but friendly and willing to please."

Jesri flashed Qktk a grin. "Only if they’re smart," she retorted playfully. "In my experience looking threatening only gets you halfway there. You have to be threatening as well." She stepped back and glanced at the oversize weapons. "Not that I have any plans to pick a fight. Once we’ve secured the ship and located the weapon, we should be able to move self-sufficiently from there."

Rhuar tore his gaze away from the shining armor and looked back towards the hall. "There was one more door at the end. What’s in there?"

Jesri laughed. "Nothing else exciting, I’m afraid. That’s the briefing room." She paused and a cloud slipped over her features. "We should look, though," she muttered, drawing curious glances from the other two. Jesri had been opening each door with trepidation as they proceeded, her anxiety growing each time. It was inescapable: Valkyrie teams were always deployed in pairs.

She walked quickly over to the door, keying it open. Her face was lined and she sank unconsciously backwards into a ready stance. When the door opened, however, she saw only what she knew must be present: a long wooden table, some scattered chairs, a large display and a small figure with long black hair lying prone on the ground.

Jesri walked over to the corpse. When Rhuar had found the Valkyrie section, she had resigned herself to finding more of her dead sisters. When Anja had found Hana lying in her quarters, it had stripped away a sliver of hope that they might not have been aboard. As Jesri gently turned the body over to see the dry, shriveled features of her sister Tessa, there was nothing left to feel. Perhaps a slight sense of grim relief as she discovered, finally, what had become of her wayward sibling.

There were only a handful of Valkyrie left that Jesri had not seen since before the attacks, and she had long since given them up for dead. Anja kept in contact with those few left alive, but it had been a long, long time since anyone but Jesri spoke with her. Jesri’s assumption for millennia had been that Anja was her last living sister.

It didn’t make seeing proof any easier.

She turned back to see Anja standing behind Qktk and Rhuar, looking over at the body. "Tessa?", she asked quietly. Jesri nodded, and Anja closed her eyes. After a moment, she reopened them and set her shoulders. "Let’s continue to the bridge."

They exited into the hall and continued towards the lift, walking together along the silent passageway.

The four took a lift up and over to deck 1, aft, where the main bridge was located. The lift exited directly into the ops area, rows of consoles lit up and displaying systems information in a kaleidoscope of dancing lines and numbers. A few bodies sprawled on the floor, but the bridge was largely empty. An elevated dais held duty stations for the captain, first officer and pilot. Huge viewports swept along the outer edge, allowing a splendid view of the Aurelian dust clouds and tinting the whole room with a bloody red glow.

"Why is everything so big?" grumbled Qktk, his eyes flicking around the room. "Humans weren’t that tall. You could park my ship in here."

Jesri held up a finger. "The first and only driving principle of human engineering: ‘Because It’s Awesome.’"

Qktk buzzed, his arms flailing in exasperation. "But it’s not practical! Exposed viewports, unreachably high bulkheads, right on the surface of the ship! I thought this was supposed to be a military vessel!"

Anja giggled. "Silly bug. We have a practical bridge too, of course. It’s back by the Valkyrie section, amidships, encased in armor plating. That was the war bridge, and probably the one they were using for their mission. This was the bridge for convincing people they shouldn’t fight us." She flounced up the stairs to the command dais and leapt into the captain’s chair, pressing controls on the armrest.

Rhuar glanced around the bridge, taking in the metal beams high above. "Makes sense. Something just feels right about being able to see outside. That said…", he trailed off, indicating the rows of ops panels with a sweep of his exoskeletal arm. "How are we going to manage all this with just four of us?"

Jesri gave him a puzzled look. "We don’t need most of that with a shipjack, and Anja said you had agreed to fly. Didn’t you want to?"

Rhuar gaped back at her. "I thought she was joking. You’d let me fly the ship?"

"Well, sure," said Jesri. "You’re the only one of us who’s a pilot." She stretched her arms. "You’ll need to see the captain first, though." Rhuar looked over at Qktk, who shook his head and looked at Jesri. Jesri winked and pointed behind them.

They both looked back bemusedly at Anja, who waved to them from the command chair. "Hi! So, I can only release flight functions to a crew member," she said cheerfully. "If you want to fly the ship, I will need to give you a field commission. We decided earlier to extend both of you the offer, if you wanted to stick around."

Rhuar and Qktk shared a glance. The Htt gave him a passable shrug and nodded, and they both turned back to Anja. "We’re in," said Rhuar. "What do we do?"

Anja stood. "Raise your right hand," she said, all levity gone from her voice. Rhuar sat back and raised a paw, while Qktk lifted his primary forelimb.

"Do you swear to support and defend the rights of all living beings to life, liberty and self-determination, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the Terran Federation?" Anja looked them over with steely expectation.

Jesri leaned in and whispered, "I so swear."

"I so swear!", Rhuar and Qktk said. Anja nodded. "Do you swear to obey the lawful orders of the Terran Command and their designates? To serve as the bulwark and guarantor of freedom for all whom you encounter?"

"I so swear," they replied.

Anja’s steel face softened, but her voice rang out hard and clear through the empty bridge. "Then by the power vested in me by the Terran Command, I hereby award you the field commission of Ensign." She broke into a smile. "May you discharge your duties with honor and pride."

They stood still for a moment, Anja beaming at them, before Rhuar craned his neck to look around. "Uh," he said awkwardly, "now what?"

Jesri laughed. "Now you can fly the ship. Go ahead, there should be a standard shipjack at the pilot’s station." She motioned up to the console at Anja’s left hand.

"Be nice to my girl," Anja said, the ominous tone of her voice somewhat spoiled by her smirk.

Rhuar climbed to the dais and grabbed the shipjack with his exoskeleton, slotting it eagerly into the data port on his neck. "So," he asked, "is there any sort of authentication-"

Rhuar froze, twitched once, and started screaming a high, thin wail of pain.

Part 9

"Rhuar!" yelled Jesri, dashing around to kneel down beside the twitching, keening dog. His eyes were open, staring wide and darting in crazed patterns around their orbits. Qktk swarmed over to stand beside him with his antennae vibrating in concern.

Anja bent down to examine him, then met Jesri’s eyes. "Jacksick?", she said, getting a nod in return.

"Definitely," Jesri replied, wincing. "He’s a good pilot, but I forgot that he’s never used mil-spec feeds." She turned to reassure Qktk. "He should be fine in a couple of minutes. We just need to wait and provide some repetitive sensory stimulus to help him focus."

"Stimulus?", Qktk buzzed. "Like what?"

Rhuar was a mortal mind stretched suddenly, brutally into godhood. Light, color and sound poured over him in a synaesthetic waterfall that whirled in eddies along the recesses of his skull. Shapes appeared and vibrated through his being, his bones resonating like a struck gong with every pulse. His apotheosis drove liquid starfire into his eyes like a thousand tiny needles shining from the deepest radio wavelengths to the fizzy sparkle of gamma radiation.

He reached with a thousand arms and grabbed a thousand stars to steady himself. The swirl of reality rushed around him in a vortex, each glowing mote of space with the void of hyperspace behind it stretching precariously back into infinity. He grabbed at the onrushing tide of space-time and the points collapsed to a paltry three dimensions.

His senses regaining themselves, Rhuar’s mind was presented with the precise details of everything occurring within a quarter light year radius. Dust billowed gently around them and he felt its every contour against the scarred metal of the hull. Starlight played over them and out into the abyss. Every lump of rock, scrap of debris and twisted hulk of abandoned mining equipment pirouetted in a slow waltz around him, each one a bright node of thousands of years of observational data.

Rhuar clashed against the flood of information and shattered it, sweeping fragments into categories, generalizations, hierarchies. Information fled and hid within its wrappings, shrinking and folding to abstract representations that stretched in endless rows away from him.

Suddenly it was still. Rhuar floated in space, one kilometer long and millions of tons in mass. The vast sweep of the universe stretched around him, stars and dust jumping with perfect clarity into his mind. Layers of data flickered tantalizingly before his eyes, flooding him with knowledge when he reached out to brush them and receding when he pulled back. A light pressure flitted across his fore and he moved his mind across the ship’s sprawling decks to pursue it. Beams stretched through the superstructure, the minute flex of gravity waves sending rippling shocks through the metal. Dust-covered floors held dust-covered bodies sprawled beside chairs and beds throughout the ship.

A stronger pressure beckoned him farther aft, and he swept into the engineering section to bask in the star that was his beating heart, the warm light of fusion kept calm and controlled in a steady pulse. Power surged from his core to permeate every corner of the ship, flowing through a million kilometers of conduits and wires.

Pressure, irresistible, pulled him upwards to the bridge. He saw with a thousand eyes the huddled forms of Anja, Jesri and Qktk standing over his body. Every spark of a nerve and twitch of a muscle drew bright lines along their forms, the layers peeling back to show biological status, chemical composition, biographical profiles.

A tickle of curiosity sent him deeper into the biographical information, pulling up a swirling cloud of images around Anja as he focused. He suddenly knew the full details of her birth, her military service, her hundreds of sisters. He reeled away from the burning tide of information and refocused on the Anja standing over him on the bridge. Lightning raced through her arm as it stretched forward, a thin finger arcing fire and pointing forward to touch-

"Boop," said Anja once more, poking Rhuar in the nose.

"And then I was the whole ship, just sitting there in space but it’s not just space, you can feel the space behind the space-"

"Rhuar," Jesri said patiently.

"-tell you that military sensors are better but who actually has a military sensor anymore? I thought it might be a little better but like holy fuck! It’s like I’ve never looked at anything properly until now-"

"Rhuar," rattled Qktk.

"-could actually visualize the plasma flow through the reactor torus, get down inside and see the magnetic field lines. They seemed like they were fluffy, but that’s probably just some extraneous tactile crossover I need to nail down-"

"Ensign Rhuar," said Anja, "Shut up."

Rhuar shut up.

After some time to let Rhuar come down from his momentary godhood, Jesri cleared him to reconnect to the ship. "But don’t just drink from the sensor feed like before," she scolded. "Every pilot should know that. I’m not going to let you turn into a jack zombie just because you can’t keep your paws off the feed."

Rhuar paused, shipjack in hand. "Uh. Say again?"

"Not literal zombies, obviously. That was what we called the pilots that spent every moment they could jacked in. If you ever caught them without their jack, they would just be standing around staring at the wall until they could hook up again." She gave him a look, and Rhuar gulped. "This can fuck you up long-term if you’re not careful," she warned. "Don’t overdo it. Set a timer, two hours, and whitelist your inputs. We can go longer after you’ve gotten used to it."

He blinked. "Yep, nope, won’t stay longer than that. I hadn’t really thought about it with other ships, but with this one…" He shivered. "I could see that happening. I feel like I’m too small now to even remember it properly."

Jesri gave him a pat on the head. "You’ll be fine," she reassured him, "just don’t overdo it. When you’re ready, we need to access internal sensors and figure out where they’re keeping the weapon."

Rhuar gingerly connected to the ship again, dipping his toe into the vast sea of data and sensation. He sought out the bright filaments of sensor feeds, drawing lighted corridors and rooms together into a shining facsimile of the ship. "Let’s see," he murmured. "We’ve got a couple of areas marked specially here. What’s a ‘Heli-’, uh." He frowned. "Helical Collimator Plasma Lance?"

A slight thrum of power vibrated the air on the bridge. Jesri gave him an alarmed look. "Rhuar, do not power up strange weapons systems," she half-shouted.

The dog winced and the hum of power vanished. Jesri looked at Rhuar reproachfully and he shook his head. "Right, sorry, sorry. Guessing that’s not what we’re after. We’ve got, ah..." he trailed off, ears flicking back and forth rapidly. "Oh, here’s something. A cargo bay in the secondary hold is wired to draw an absolutely stupid amount of power."

Jesri nodded. "That sounds like it."

Jesri stood outside bay 17-C122 with a tablet in hand. She had been ready to compare door numbers, but there was no need - she was obviously in the right place. This hold had extensive extra security on the doorway, which had in turn been reinforced. A temporary placard sat below the hold’s designation, reading simply: "MANTRA: NO ENTRY".

"Rhuar, can you pop this hold?", she asked aloud.

Rhuar’s voice came from all around her with no obvious source. "Yeah, one second," he said, echoing strangely down the empty hall. Some quiet clicks issued from the door’s locking mechanisms and it hissed open slowly. Inside the hold, sleeved bundles of cabling ran haphazardly beneath a carpet of dust to a dull grey pedestal. Complex folds and protrusions of metal adorned the top in a bowed chalice, reaching upwards to enclose…

Nothing.

Jesri stared at the pedestal, tapping her foot slightly. "Rhuar, am I missing something here?"

"Nope," he said. "I’m looking over the logs for that room. The logs for the inside are security-restricted, but you’re the first person to open that door since they finished building, uh, whatever that is."

Jesri’s foot tapped a bit faster, a bit harder. "Could the pedestal itself be the weapon?", she wondered aloud.

"I don’t think so," said Rhuar hesitantly, "but I can’t be sure. There are open power and network connections for it, but they’re just labeled "Interface" and don’t seem to do anything."

"Shit," Jesri observed. Her foot stopped tapping. "All right, don’t fuck around with the pedestal for the moment. It’s not here."

Rhuar didn’t answer, and she stood quietly in the hold staring at the light sparkling off the razor-petal curves of the pedestal. After a long minute, she raised her head. "I’m coming back up," she said, striding towards the door. She paused at the threshold, considering. "Hey, Rhuar?"

"Huh?", came the reply.

Jesri sighed. "Let me be the one to tell Anja."

A thick tension slithered over the bridge, winding its coils around the silent air. Qktk edged over to stand beside Rhuar, who was panting and exhausted after his latest dive into the ship’s systems. Jesri sat upright in the first officer’s seat with her eyes locked on Anja, who was sprawled lazily in the captain’s chair.

"Shit," said Anja, looking mildly annoyed. "I was hoping it would be here."

Jesri blinked. "I thought you were sure it was here."

"No, sister," said Anja, stretching and sitting up. "I merely hoped. The logs I could find were inconclusive as to where the loading port was."

"You never thought to mention this?", Jesri shot back. "Seems like it would be an important thing to go over."

Anja smiled infuriatingly. "I just said I had found the ship, and nothing about what I hoped may be on it." Jesri slouched in her chair, conceding the point, and Anja continued heedless of her sister’s sustained glowering. Their unique constraints meant that all the Valkyrie developed a certain skill with indirect omissions, but Anja had always been the natural. "Getting to the ship had two purposes," she continued. "The first was to secure the weapon, if it was aboard. I thought it unlikely that we would be that lucky, but I had hoped. We will have to pick up the trail somewhere else along the ship’s itinerary."

Jesri frowned. "It had scheduled stops aside from Zephyr?", she asked. "I always thought that was its final port of call."

"That is what they told us," confirmed Anja. "I checked. But when I found a batch of logs from the quartermaster corps on Hyannis, they had an entirely different list of stops. Several different copies were circulated, but from what I can tell there were fifteen planets on the route."

"Fifteen?", groaned Rhuar. "Even if they’re close, and I bet they’re not, that’s going to take weeks of flying to check them all."

"I thought you liked flying?", said Anja sweetly. "It will be faster than you think, though, since I have managed to confirm many of the planets the ship stopped at already. Aside from Zephyr, there are only three systems left to check."

Jesri raised her eyebrows. "Four systems isn’t bad."

Anja nodded. "Bartlett, Tengri and Apollyon are the other three."

"Zephyr is closest, and Tengri is pretty close to that," mused Jesri. "Not sure on the other two."

Anja nodded and called up a map. Bright motes of light swirled into being above them, resolving into a narrow swatch of the Perseus arm. Their current position floated high above the starfield, marked with a light blue glow. A line of orange light pulsed down from Aurelius to intersect the Zephyr system, then veered outward to connect two more points. Finally, it reversed back to coreward and lanced through a fourth star.

Jesri frowned. "Why does the route have us doubling back? Wouldn’t it be faster to hit them like this?" She traced with her finger, drawing a smooth line through the four points.

Anja shook her head. "Faster, yes, but we have to visit Apollyon last." She held up a hand as Jesri opened her mouth. "You’re about to ask why? I did research on all of the listed systems and they each have a military presence. Zephyr had the Prochazka Institute, Bartlett had the naval yards. Tengri didn’t have anything on the books, but I found some indications there was a listening post there."

"Okay, that makes sense," said Jesri, nodding. "But what makes Apollyon special? I’ve never even heard of it before."

"It was new to me too," replied Anja. "I was having no luck searching the name in the charts, the system does not appear anywhere. So, I widened the search to what was left of the station logs and still found nothing. I went back in desperation and started running the term through any dusty archive I could find, buy or steal."

She grimaced. "And still, nothing. Eventually I gave up and started running searches on nonsense databases out of spite and frustration - compilations of recipes, children’s stories, things that could never be of use. But when I ran the search for topics related to philosophical history, I found thousands of hits." She touched her slim black data archive within the folds of her cloak and tilted her head, querying with the ship. The starmap was replaced with a flat image of a few ornate lines of text on aged-looking parchment.

"And they had upon them a king," Rhuar read, squinting, "the angel of the abyss, to whom the name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but by Greek Apollyon, and by Latin he hath a name Exterminus, meaning Destroyer." He blinked. "Well, that sounds ominous. Who names a system that?"

"Nobody official," said Anja. "The only place that designation appears is on the flight plan copy I found at Hyannis."

"It’s a code," breathed Jesri, realization striking her. "It wasn’t the last stop, it was the mission target."

Anja nodded. "I was able to do some more targeted research once I realized. That system was our best guess at the location of the Gestalt."

Jesri drew her breath in sharply, but Rhuar shook his head. "You’ve lost me," he complained. "Who or what is the Gestalt?"

"What do you know about the years leading up to the final attack?", asked Jesri. "The advanced species we encountered?"

"Anja told me the basics," said Rhuar. "I filled Captain Qktk in on it later. The aliens are the Gestalt?"

"As best we could tell, just ‘alien’," said Jesri. "There were a lot of competing theories, but the consensus was that most of their race decided to run with their technological singularity as far as it’d take them."

Rhuar gaped at her. "They transcended?", he said, disbelief coloring his voice. Qktk looked at him questioningly. "There’s been theories about singularities since forever," he explained rapidly, excitement coloring his voice. "Most of them predicted it’d happen a long fuckin time ago, before we knew about the Moore Limit. Dogs talk about it a lot because, you know-"

His exoskeleton gestured to itself.

"-but it’s one of those things that’s always ten years away," he concluded. "I figure if we never did it when the humans were around, we’re sure as fuck not doing it now. One of the popular scenarios was a collective super-consciousness as people and computers became mentally linked through technology. Good in theory, but nobody’s been able to get past the practical issues."

"We learned about the concept as well, because of what we are," said Jesri, nodding. "It was a concern, obviously. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t have network links to each other. They apparently tried that before our generation with, uh, mixed results."

"Insanity, delusions of grandeur, self-destructive behavior," whispered Anja. "It turns out that it is rather easy to make a superintelligent being, past a certain level of technology. Making one that isn’t suicidal or homicidal is apparently much harder."

Jesri leaned back in her chair. Their minders at the Valkyrie creche had never made a secret of what they were or why they were made. Far from a demoralizing or confining truth, Jesri remembered it lending a clear, cold flame of purpose to her daily life. Still, despite her unflagging vigor for her role the minders had been cautious after raising her predecessors. There had been regular counseling sessions to detect signs of instability or any of the psychoses peculiar to artificial neural nets.

Jesri had never developed any indications thereof, nor had any of her sisters. Those who didn’t know Anja sometimes thought her to be dangerously unstable or manic, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth - more than Jesri or any of their long-lost kin, Anja was anchored by gleaming purpose and inexhaustible faith. Jesri had shared in her fervor, before the fall.

But afterwards, unmoored, Jesri had spent years alone in the void feeling insidious, numbing tendrils squirming in the back of her mind. Many times, she found an eddy in the chaos left after the fall and simply…

Stopped.

She had passed decades motionless, speechless, staring sightlessly forward in a depressive haze of nihilism, apathy, or whichever flavor of jeering madness had found root in her head.

But every time she fell into darkness, Anja found her and pulled her back up. A befuddled courier would arrive with a message, a grizzled bounty hunter would wordlessly press coordinates into her hand. On certain memorable occasions Anja had ventured out herself, springing into Jesri’s life like a ray of sunlight lancing into a disused and moldering room.

She was certain that some of her sisters had fallen victim to that darkness. Being functionally immortal rendered the long years of the onrushing future in a harsh and uncomfortable light that was hard to face alone.

She had wondered, at times, about the mind of the Gestalt itself. Far beyond homicidally insane, it was omnicidal - set irrevocably against the universe with a lethal nihilism. Was that what waited for her as well, if they survived? Or was that all-encompassing purpose the ash that remained after a fire like Anja’s burned low?

Jesri looked over to her sister and realized that the conversation had continued while she was lost in thought. Anja was looking down at Qktk, who was gesturing insistently. "But you said humanity had met the aliens. Ah, alien." He fiddled two of his legs together, then pressed the question. "You never found out where they were from?"

A strained look flitted over Anja’s face. "We only ever met its Emissaries. Artificial bodies that it created as its tools. They look like beings in their own right, but they all share a link back to the Gestalt."

"Yeah," added Jesri, catching up to the conversation. "After we figured that one out I remember some of the intel guys theorizing that the Gestalt’s true body had to be in some sort of remote, inconspicuous place."

"That was the primary theory," Anja agreed. "We surveyed the area where we met the first Emissaries. The reports I read say we found Apollyon when someone noticed that the gravitic charts had a system the electromagnetic charts did not."

Qktk skewed half his eyes towards Anja. "A dwarf star of some sort?", he asked. "Hot enough to sustain a facility but not to emit light?"

Anja shook her head. "Zero emissions. If not for the gravitic mapping probes, we would not even know a system was there."

Jesri frowned. "The intel guys had a lot of theories about what the Gestalt actually was, but most of them involved really flashy, high-energy stuff. The sort of thing that you can see from light-years away because it’s radiating exotic particles. I don’t think I heard many theories about it being some low-energy stealth facility."

"And yet here it is," said Anja, spreading her hands in a shrug. "Intel obviously came to a different conclusion. To be honest, it may be simply because it was the only thing on the survey that they couldn’t explain."

Qktk shook his head violently, his mandibles making a clattering noise. "That’s all we have to go on? It sounds like they were just making a wild guess."

Jesri grinned over at Qktk. "Maybe," she said. "We weren’t in the habit of questioning intel assessments. They always gave us the best information available, so there was no point asking for better. In the rare cases where they were wrong, well, we improvised."

Qktk crossed his arms, a much more intensive process for a Htt than for humans. "And did the intelligence report say anything about what we’re supposed to do in the event that they’ve guessed correctly? Whatever we may find there, it’s obviously extremely old and powerful, able to wipe out entire star systems at will. The last time you tried this it knew you were plotting against it before you were ready to move. What plan do you have to attack it once you arrive?"

Anja giggled. "We use the weapon, of course. It was created specifically for this purpose."

"What does it do?", Rhuar asked skeptically. "Must be something special if it’d work on an entity like the Gestalt."

Anja sucked on her lower lip. "There were no files on that," she said.

The others stared at her.

"You don’t know?", asked Qktk incredulously.

Anja glared at him crossly. "It was a secret project, you know. The combined effort of humanity’s best and brightest to confront an existential threat. They didn’t leave the specifications lying around on the mess table."

Rhuar groaned. "So we don’t know what it does. We don’t know where it is, but we know a few places it might have been five thousand years ago. We know where to put it on the ship, once we get it. We maybe know where to take it afterwards, but not what to do with it or how we’re going to get close enough-" He paused. "Fuck, we don’t even know how close we have to get."

"Let’s find the weapon first," sighed Jesri. "We’ll worry about the ancient murdery alien after that."

The four of them sat on the bridge for a moment, soft light from the wall panels mingling with the bright glow from unmanned consoles to paint their faces with strange color and shadow.

"What’s the second reason?", said Qktk suddenly, addressing Anja. She gave him a quizzical look. "You said there were two reasons you needed this ship," he said. "What was the second?"

"Oh, that," she said dismissively. "It’s nothing strange. Like I said, the first was to secure the weapon if it was aboard. The second," she continued, a predatory grin creeping to the corners of her mouth, "was so that we had the resources to secure it if it was not."

She gestured expansively to the empty bridge. "This is the most powerful remaining relic of humanity’s might. Now that we have it-"

Jesri shot to her feet. "No, don’t-"

"-nothing can stand in our way." concluded Anja triumphantly.

Jesri groaned. "Anja, goddammit."

Far outside of Aurelius, floating invisibly in the interstellar void, a small knot of blackness drifted. Its matte surface was featureless and smooth, reflecting no light and showing no contour. It hung motionless in the black gulf of space, waiting and listening as it had for an eon.

A faint signal washed over it, a coded query sent from close in beside the star. The surface of the object did not change, but inside its midnight shell a flurry of activity took place. Sensors reached out and saw the hazy remains of a hyperspace exit, then another bright burst as a ship jumped into the center of the dust belt at the system’s core.

Minutes passed, and it patiently watched the system for further changes. Its sensors picked up the sudden spike of ramping power from a military-grade fusion reactor, the flare of emissions from a million kilometers of power conduits as they surged with energy. Pattern recognition routines locked on to the new signals, processed them and fired a tight-beam hyperspace message on an outward trajectory to the stars.

It was an impossibly dense information packet, with a complex mathematical structure buried under layers of encryption. If one were to strip away the stream of sensory data and mangle the rest down to the dull bleats of common language, it might conceivably be translated as:

REVISION REQUEST

SET TASK23093.STATUS = PENDING

SET OBJECT3902032559.STATUS = ACTIVE

It sat in silence for a few seconds before the answering burst came back.

REVISION ACCEPTED

TASK23093.STATUS (COMPLETE > PENDING)

OBJECT3902032559.STATUS (INACTIVE > ACTIVE)

LINKED UPDATE

CONTINGENCY.STATUS (INACTIVE > ACTIVE)

The object settled into an observation mode, silently logging data from the bright center of the star system. It had served its purpose. Now the Emissaries would serve theirs.

Part 10

Jesri slammed the hatch cover closed, wincing as the noise reverberated painfully around the cramped access tunnel. "Okay, how about now?", she said, speaking to the air.

"Ah, let’s see," came Rhuar’s voice in return. "Oh yeah, that fixed some of it. I’ve got some more power flowing to the secondary hyperdrive coils - wait, no, that’s the tertiary hyperdrive coils. Why did you build ships with three fuckin hyperdrive coil sets?"

"In case the first two break?", said Jesri innocently. "I don’t think you should be complaining about redundant engineering considering how much of this shit is broken."

"Fair," admitted Rhuar. "So that’s two sets of coils working, all of the nav computers and about two-thirds of the field plates. All that’s left is to get at least one of the White-Juday stabilizers online and we’ll be good to go."

"Let’s try for two," said Jesri tiredly. "Unless you want to try being a five-dimensional noodle when we spin up the drive." They had been running around for hours trying to repair the damage five thousand years of neglect had wrought upon the ship’s systems. Although the primary systems were admirably intact, the fact was that the ship was well outside her maintenance schedule and mean-time-before-failure is never infinite.

She started walking back along the access corridor towards engineering, rolling her shoulder. "How’s everyone else coming along?," she asked.

"Hmm, looks like Anja has the communications back online," he said, "as well as a few sensors we were missing. Captain Qktk has made good progress on the aft radiator array, and I’ve managed to reboot and restore all of the functioning key systems that needed it."

"Good work," said Jesri, somewhat surprised. The ship had been in rougher shape than she thought, but even with only four of them they were making very good time on the repairs.

Rhuar had been key. As worried as she was about his mental state while linked, Jesri had to admit he was a natural at isolating the errors and broken components that plagued the elderly ship. He was always monitoring their activity, providing directions, specifications or advice on the task at hand. He had even found and reactivated a small legion of maintenance bots that were currently waging war against the accumulated dust of millenia.

Jesri stretched, working out the kinks in her neck. "All right, sounds like we’re good to go in a bit if you can get those stabilizers up," she said. "I’m going to hit the autodoc before we head out, I’ll be back up on the bridge when I’m done."

"Righto," said Rhuar cheerfully.

She paced down to the end of the corridor, then dropped down a ladder to the hallway proper. She had been able to visit an autodoc here and there as needed, since almost all the transit stations could be counted on to have a few capable of handling her unique biology.

The gulf between the civilian docs and the military model she was about to hop into was immense, however. She hadn’t been able to find a working military doc in nearly three thousand years, so the prospect of slipping into one was adding an extra bounce to her step.

She passed through a wide mess area crawling with tiny off-white robots that carved methodical slices away from the omnipresent blanket of dust. Faded faux-wood paneling and white tile gleamed where they had traveled, save for the areas still covered by the corpses of the ship’s crew. Those waited for larger facilities robots, who would take the bodies to the morgue.

Jesri sighed. The morgue would overflow long before they managed to store all of the bodies. She hated to do it, but they would have to find a less dignified place to hold the fallen until they could come up with more suitable arrangements.

She passed beyond the mess, into another hall and then finally into the medbay. The robots had already been through this section, so every piece of equipment gleamed as if newly installed. Three autodocs sat at the rear of the room, each prominently featuring a wide cylinder open at the near end. As Jesri approached, the cap of the cylinder slid away smoothly.

The top retracted to show a flat bed of hard grey material raised slightly at the end to form a headrest. Shrugging her cloak on to the nearby exam table, Jesri quickly peeled off her clothing and sat on the bed. She scratched idly at the tight, shiny scars raking across her body while she modified a few settings on the doc’s front panel, then nodded to herself and prepared to enter the machine. As she was pivoting to lay down, however, caution broke through her enthusiasm.

"Hey, Rhuar?", she said.

The speakers in the room crackled to life. "Yeah, what’s up? I see you’ve come to a more enlightened stance on clothing."

"Hm?", said Jesri, looking down. "Oh. Not for your benefit, Ensign."

"Yep, yep, cutting visual feed," he said hastily. "Aye aye, sir. Ma’am."

"It’s sir," Jesri said, a trace of irritation creeping into her voice. "I need to know the status of these autodocs. Which of them is in the best condition?"

"Hmm, let’s see," grumbled Rhuar. "Well, hop off the one you’re sitting on now, that one’s no good. Looks like the far one is out of order as well. The middle one… yeah, that’ll work." He paused for a second. "Okay, open the access panel on the middle one, rear hatch."

Jesri worked her way back to the rear of the huge machine and popped open a thin hatch, revealing numerous brightly-colored electrical components. She paused expectantly for several seconds before realizing she had told Rhuar to cut his feed. "Okay," she said loudly. "I’m here."

"Good, good!", said Rhuar eagerly. "Okay, do you see a big brown data card up top that has "P3308" on it?"

Jesri peered into the hatch, searching around a bit before spotting a green card on the circuit board with a matching label. "You mean this one up top on the right? Yeah, I see it."

"Remove it from the board, that component is broken," he said. "We’re going to take one from the first machine and swap it out."

Jesri reached her hand in the hatch and paused a few inches away. Small blinking lights on the board illuminated her fingers in a pastiche of amber and blue. "Hey, big guy," she said, "you going to cut the power to the machine for me or should I just stick my hand in there and see how it goes?"

"Ah, fuck. Sorry," he said sheepishly. "Power cut."

The lights winked off and the hum of the machine faded from imperceptibility into nothingness. Jesri gave it a count of five for the capacitors, then reached in to pull the card. It came out with a satisfyingly mechanical choonk in her hand, a razor-thin array of boards stacked within a sturdy metal frame. "Okay," she said. "Card out."

"Great, now pull the card from the other machine. I’ve already cut the power, no need to rub it in," Rhuar muttered. "Have the card? Good, now slot it into the other board, that should bring it to full functionality."

Jesri did as instructed, pushing the card lightly into the slot until it stopped at the end with a vanishingly faint click. "It’s in," she said, shutting the hatch.

There was a pause before Rhuar spoke, scored with the faint whine of power rushing back into the machine. "You sure?", he said. "I don’t see it connecting. Try giving it a push."

Jesri gingerly pushed down on the card, which didn’t move. "Looks like it’s in," she said. "Should I try the one from the other machine?"

"No," came the reply. "Give the card another push, it’s definitely not seated."

Jesri frowned and pushed harder on the card. She felt a minor give and increased the pressure even more. The card slid in another few millimeters with a sickening cracking noise before coming to a stop. "Ah, shit," she said. "Rhuar, I think it’s broken."

"No, that’s great," said Rhuar cheerfully. "Everything looks fine from up here. Go ahead and hop on in."

"Rhuar," she said evenly. "I am about to have my body rearranged in microscopic detail by a sensitive piece of medical equipment that has been gathering dust for millennia and may have just suffered a part failure. Please run another diagnostic."

"Okay, fine, just one second," said Rhuar testily. Jesri folded her arms and waited. "Okay," he said after a few dozen seconds. "I’ve triple-checked everything. The machine thinks it’s working just fine."

She sighed and climbed in. "You couldn’t have phrased that less reassuringly. If I’m not out in an hour, send your maintenance robots to clean up what’s left of me." The cylinder slid shut around her, and Jesri was enclosed in darkness.

Anja strolled off the lift and back to the ops area, where Qktk and Rhuar stood conversing around a console. Rhuar had unjacked for a break, his exoskeletal arms smoothing the fur around his data port mindlessly. Qktk noticed Anja first and gave her a small wave.

"Hello!", she chirped happily at the two. "All systems go?"

Rhuar nodded distractedly. "Yeah, it looks like the drive is good, Jesri patched it up before she jumped in the autodoc. We’ve got full environmental, sensors, comms." He paged through the report on the console, pausing here and there to make note of an entry. "We should probably think about finding a source of deuterium before we do anything too energy-intensive. Ship seems to think our current stores will be good for a while, but if we start jumping all over the map it’d be nice to have some extra."

Anja nodded. "Okay, I have a few places we could visit," she mused. "How are we on materiel?"

"Uhhh," mumbled Rhuar, paging through the readout. "We’ve got a whole fuckin mountain of railgun slugs for the CIWS and CQB emplacements, so we’re good there. A full complement of long-range torpedoes too, but I haven’t had a chance to check the engines out. There’s a few other specialized weapons systems, but this report is just abbreviations that I can’t make any fuckin sense of without the jack." He squinted at the display and scratched his port under his fur. "This HCPL is probably that plasma lance thing I was looking at before, we’ve got a thousand shots or so there and it seems to be in working order. We’ve got about fifty rounds for the other one, says it’s a WCML?"

"Ooooh," cooed Anja. "We have a whack-a-mole? That’s so fun, I’ve always wanted to see one of those in person."

Rhuar gave her a flat look. "There is no way that’s what that stands for. What does that even mean?"

Anja shrugged. "No idea, some old joke. I forget what the actual name is, something official-sounding that nobody ever used. It’s fun, you’ll see." She bent down to the console, paging through a few more entries. "What else, what else…" She chewed on her lower lip. "We have some fighters, that’s good, a pair of shuttles, a Huginn fast attack craft, hm. We could do a lot with these."

"Only one of the shuttles works," Rhuar pointed out. "I also haven’t had a chance to do full checks on the other craft, or to pull diagnostics on your suits."

"Three out of four suits functional," said Jesri, striding on to the bridge. She walked close to the others and grinned impishly. "I checked earlier. What do you think?"

Rhuar fumbled for a reply and found none, so he just stared. Jesri had left her cloak and old clothing back in the medbay and was clad in a TNMC duty uniform, a trim charcoal jacket and trousers with a gunmetal collared shirt and slim black tie.

Gold piping adorned her left shoulder beneath thin shoulder boards marked with the silver triple-bar and flared wings of a Valkyrie captain. Her knife and pistol looked especially well-used in contrast to their slim holsters, which looked and smelled for all the worlds like the few leather artifacts he’d encountered. Rhuar had no idea how she had managed that trick.

Anja clapped her hands excitedly. "Sister, you look incredible! Is the autodoc working, then? And the fabricators, obviously."

Jesri nodded. "Yes, Rhuar was a great help with the doc." She winked at him, eliciting a grumble in response. He found it hard to be irritated with her, however. While Jesri had always been an intense presence, she had been hard and distant with flashes of her good humor shining through. Where there was hard steel before, Rhuar saw flashing quicksilver in its place. She seemed young, vital, brimming with energy.

The changes were more than just affectations of personality, though - as Rhuar looked he could see where her skin was smoother, her movements more fluid, her dark hair lustrous and her eyes sparkling. He made a mental note to see if the doc worked on dogs.

He realized with a start that Jesri was talking to him. "I’m sorry," he interrupted, "I didn’t catch that."

Jesri gave him a look. "I was asking if you feel up to taking this barge on a jump."

Despite himself, Rhuar felt a thrill run down his spine. His mind raced through the status reports and schematics he had been poring over most of the day, and he keyed his vocalizer to respond with his professional artificer’s assessment of their readiness. "Fuck yeah," he said.

Jesri smirked. "Let’s get to it, then. First stop is Zephyr, the coordinates are already in the nav comp." She ascended the dais, black boots clicking on the deck, and both sisters took their seats. Qktk secured the navigator’s station, and Rhuar moved back to his pilot’s post to once again interface with the colossal ship.

"I hope you don’t mind if I do this kinda slow," he said as he jacked in, feeling the pressure of the ship’s massive flood of data straining against his mental barriers. A few select streams of information were allowed through to spiral into his brain, and he keyed up the jump parameters. He took a deep, steadying breath, then approved the jump sequence.

"Warning, jump imminent," cautioned a calm feminine voice. The bridge lights dimmed, supplemented with amber caution lamps. Qktk looked around nervously and fastened his restraints, and a low hum began to vibrate through the ship. Outside the viewports, the stars began to slowly drift as the ship aligned itself for an exit.

They waited in silence for a long minute. Qktk tapped his legs nervously against the armrest of his chair. "Mr. Rhuar," he clacked, "Is everything all right?"

Rhuar shot him an annoyed glance. "This isn’t the Leviathan, Captain, it’s like driving a fuckin asteroid." He patted the console. "Sorry, babe, but it’s true." Qktk trilled softly, but otherwise stayed quiet as the ship continued in its slow turn towards the exit vector.

"Okay, pretty lady," said Rhuar, the stars outside the viewports sliding to a stop, "let’s see how you dance."

Another warning tone sounded throughout the ship, and the hum from the drives escalated to an insistent low tone. Rhuar could feel it in his bones, or in the ship’s superstructure - he felt the tide of sensation pressing against him through the jack, flitting around the periphery of his vision. He locked it away and concentrated, initializing the hyperspace window.

Unlike smaller ships that had to take advantage of mass ramps to achieve any sort of meaningful speed, the Grand Design could forge its own path into the inky depths of hyperspace. A patch of space in front of the bow rippled and bent, swelling to hundreds of meters across and stretching thin.

The circular distortion seemed to vibrate as if under tension. Light from the stars behind it bunched and swam around its periphery, warping into smudged and lensed streaks. Slowly, the stars in the middle crept towards the edge of the ring to join in the coiled twists of light that danced there. The spread accelerated, faster and faster, the final stars smearing like oil across the stretched canvas of space-time until it quivered and tore. The middle of the ring snapped apart with a flash of energy to leave a yawning void into the trackless abyss of hyperspace.

Rhuar marveled at it, letting a few more sensor feeds through to bathe his brain in the wash of data from the ship. "That is so fucking cool," he observed. "Okay, executing jump in three, two, one..." The coils spiked in pitch and the gateway swept aft in a blur of twisted space and crackling energy, devouring the length of the ship in an eyeblink before snapping shut behind them.

Jesri and Rhuar sat alone on the bridge, watching the oppressive blackness through the viewports. The jump had taken them deep, deep into the bowels of hyperspace, where light was a distant memory. Even the interior lights of the ships seemed to dim in deference to the total night outside.

On the upshot, that meant they were moving screamingly fast. It had taken five hours to make the trip from Harsi, but the slightly longer trip back planewards to Zephyr would take a mere two. Anja had taken the opportunity to visit the autodoc, while Qktk had excused himself to fetch some personal items from the Leviathan.

Rhuar looked over at Jesri, who was staring contemplatively into the inky murk outside. "Have you been to Zephyr before?", he asked.

"Hm?", she replied, seeming to have just remembered he was there. "Ah, yes, several times. It was a major military logistics hub and had a few research groups that were involved in the Valkyrie program. We would often stage or resupply from there." Her eyes took on a distant look. "I always loved going there. The sky was a peculiar shade of teal and the plants were vibrant red, very striking. Big, beautiful oceans over half the planet."

Rhuar shuddered. "I don’t know if I could walk around on a planet like that. Just out there in the universe with no suit, breathing unfiltered air and standing on rocks and dirt and shit." He laid his ears back in disgust. "Yeah, no thanks."

Jesri gave him a sad smile. "You probably don’t have to worry about it. I haven’t been back since the fall, but Zephyr was hit just like all of the other planets. If the atmosphere wasn’t totally blown away, it’ll be a thin mix of nitrogen dioxide and ozone - not breathable under any circumstances."

Rhuar had the grace to look abashed. "Sorry, didn’t mean to, uh." He paused, glancing away awkwardly before gamely rushing back into the conversation. "Where are we going on Zephyr? One of your old research labs?"

Jesri let her breath out slowly, thinking. "Not sure, to be honest. There were a few places that would be reasonable to store something like the weapon. I was hoping we could use the ship sensors to narrow it down, but we may end up having to brute-force search on the ground. Most of the potential sites are clustered in one big research park, but we may have to shuttle-hop to get between some of the others."

Rhuar started to speak again, but said nothing and settled back. After a pregnant pause, he looked back at Jesri. "Do you need me to pilot the shuttle, or…?"

Jesri frowned. Something in Rhuar’s voice was strained, tense. "You can if you want to," she said slowly, "but I was actually going to fly this one with Anja. I planned on having you up here in case we need to do a quick evac."

His relief was palpable, and it showed as he flopped back into his chair despite his deliberate efforts at nonchalance. Jesri’s frown softened, but she pressed forward. "Okay, out with it. Why don’t you want to go?"

Rhuar fidgeted, chewing on his paw for a few seconds. Eventually he lifted his head and looked her in the eye. "Harsi…", he said hesitantly, "well, it wasn’t what I expected."

"It was rough," Jesri admitted. "I probably would have recommended that you stay back if I had known how bad the locals were going to be."

"I’m not talking about the bandits, I expected that someone might come after us," he said with a slight shake of his head. "You didn’t see everything that went on, after the fight was over."

Jesri pursed her lips. "You mean with Kenet-Tel and his kids." Rhuar nodded. Jesri sighed and dragged her fingers through her hair, mussing it and leaving strands jutting in odd directions. The youth and vitality she had exuded since using the autodoc slipped away, leaving her face worn and tired once more. "That was my fault," she said at last, her voice hoarse. "I couldn’t stop the bandit, couldn’t get over to you guys in time."

Rhuar shook his head vigorously. "Jesri, that was not your fault. That one was fuckin fast and dangerous, nobody could have done better." He swallowed. "Besides, it didn’t kill them." He looked at Jesri significantly, ears flat back against his head.

Jesri gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head. "I know," she whispered hoarsely.

Rhuar sat up on his chair. "You remembered?", he said, surprise evident in his voice. "I thought you were unconscious."

"I was," said Jesri. "Anja filled me in later." She rested her head in her hands, elbows propped on her knees. "It doesn’t change anything, though," she said sullenly. "I failed, and they got hurt. We all got hurt, so badly that we lost our good options. If Anja had to pick one of our bad options and they didn’t make it out, that’s on me."

"No, you don’t understand," Rhuar said quietly. "We didn’t just leave them. Anja-"

"I KNOW!", yelled Jesri, her face contorted with anguish. Her eyes glared at Rhuar’s shocked face through a haze of pain and anger. "I fucking know what my sister did! Do you want to make me say it? She murdered a man and his children, people we had promised to protect! Innocent people!"

"But then-" started Rhuar, but she cut him off with an angry swipe of her hand.

"You think that makes it better?", she raged, "You think it takes any of the blame off my shoulders, just because I made my sister murder people by fucking up? You think just because she’s not a fucking wreck about it like me that it makes her somehow responsible? I put her in a situation where we had only bad choices, and she chose the one that didn’t end with them getting eaten alive by bandits. The one that didn’t end with us all getting run down trying to carry them back."

Rhuar didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t. Jesri dropped her glare and rested her head back in her hands, saying nothing. The dim bridge lights splayed multicolored highlights across her hair, which shimmered as she raised her head to look back at Rhuar.

"Don’t judge Anja," she said, the anger gone from her voice. "She made the right move, even if it was a move nobody wanted to make. That’s what she always does. That’s why she’s Anja." She sat up straight in her chair, looking down at Rhuar across the dais. "The universe doesn’t owe anyone happy endings. Sometimes you’re just left there picking which flavor of fucked you are. We both spent a long time learning that."

"If you’re that helpless, where the fuck does that leave me?", he spat back. "I tried too, and that fucker just brushed me off like dust on the manifold. Are we just gonna tag along like useless pets until we’re collateral for your mission? Is that how this ends?", asked Rhuar sullenly. "With Qktk and I dead because you ran out of good alternatives?"

Jesri laughed darkly. "Buddy, we’re all dead. We’re going up against an ancient alien superintelligence with unfathomable power and resources, and we’ve got no clear plan besides discovering someone else’s desperate gamble and hoping we can fill in the blanks."

She shook her head and leaned back in her chair, her face hardening. "I’m not going to let it happen the same way again, though, not like on Harsi and not like back then. If we go out, we’ll lose perfectly. We’ll make the best damn plan possible, we’ll execute it brilliantly and pull out every trick we can think of. We will bend space and time to our will, perform miracles and call down the wrath of ages past on the Gestalt’s shiny genocidal ass. And at the end of all that, if it isn’t enough," she said, looking over at Rhuar, "then I promise we’ll all at least die together, as a team."

Rhuar gave her a sidelong look. "That is, without a doubt, the worst motivational speech I’ve ever heard. I feel more depressed now than when you started."

Jesri snorted. "I’ve been told I have a gift."

Rhuar chuffed out a quiet laugh and curled up in the seat of his chair, tucking his tail over his paws. "Okay," he said, his voice muffled. "I’m in. Here’s to an insignificant and painful death."

Jesri laughed, a real laugh this time, and mimed a toast. "To irrelevance and agony."

They leaned back in their chairs on the dais and stared into the blackness beyond the viewports, awaiting their arrival at Zephyr.

Part 11

Qktk didn’t have much use for planets. The Htt were a nomadic people, a tradition that stretched back to the days when young and ambitious Htt would swim between the thin sandbars that were their ancestral home in search of food and mates.

Volumes of poetry and prose were set down in the decades following the destruction of the Htt homeworld, lamenting the loss of the sandy beaches and clear warm water they loved. Generations of his people flocked to Earth after the Home Fleet had negotiated settlement rights with the humans, yearning to find their old home once more in its tropics.

Qktk had other opinions. As far as he was concerned, the coarse sand and filthy water of the few unspoiled planet-bound oceans remaining could stay right where they were. A clean bunk and a trim ship were his cozy sandbar, the stars his warm waters. Still, for all his disdain and distaste it was hard to see the ruined corpse of a once-vital planet, knowing what it had been.

He looked out the viewport. They had arrived at Zephyr mere minutes ago, but the mood on the bridge had plummeted at seeing the destruction wrought there. Angry orange cracks spiderwebbed the surface, venting foul gas and dust into the rarefied atmosphere. Vast basins stretched bare and scorched where oceans had once been, their water long ago lost to the hellscape surrounding them.

Anja and Jesri had been studying the planet with solemn looks for several minutes now. Anja had come back from the autodoc just before they arrived at Zephyr, and was now clad like Jesri in a charcoal and grey duty uniform, the sole difference being the gold major’s starburst on her shoulder boards. Their presence lent the bridge an odd air of gravitas, as if the ship was still part of a larger navy. It was easy to believe, watching them gaze out in their stoic grief, that a similarly-clad staff of officers waited just out of sight rather than seven decks down in the morgue.

He glanced at Rhuar, who noticed and gave him an encouraging toss of his head. Qktk acknowledged him with a wave of a forelimb. His artificer and pilot had taken to working with the two not-humans well, perhaps because of his shared Terran heritage. Or, perhaps it was simply the difference between Qktk’s sanguine personality and Rhuar’s casually outgoing tendencies.

Qktk wasn’t really sure what he was doing here, staring into the face of the apocalypse. He was a good freighter captain despite lacking any natural inclination for the job. He had secure income from his cargo hauling and locksmithing careers, a good ship and good prospects. He wasn’t sure when a simple passenger job had turned into a mission to save the universe against impossible odds. Often he felt like jumping back in the Leviathan and fleeing to the nearest station, never to return.

And yet, there was precious little opportunity to sink a solid foundation into the shifting sands left after the fall of humanity. Indeed, if what Anja said about the Gestalt’s plans was true there may be no opportunity. Why not, then? Why not Qktk the fighter, Qktk the warrior, Qktk the hero? Because of his stature, or his temperament? Simply because he was Qktk?

But who was this Qktk, to constrain him so? He sat pondering the blasted planet ahead of them. Perhaps tasks like theirs were how one created that definition.

Jesri tore her eyes away from the viewport and looked over at her sister. Although fresh from the autodoc, lines already creased Anja’s face as she stared out at the devastation wrought on Zephyr. Anja met her gaze, then turned back to look out of the viewport.

«Nothing is left down there,» Anja’s voice said. Jesri experienced a brief moment of disorientation - it had been over a millennium since her communications implant had failed. The autodoc had restored it, giving her access to ship functions without cumbersome vocal commands - but also the very handy ability to share a voice link. True networked communication was forbidden for security reasons, but her creators had at least seen the utility of a silent means of more traditional conversation.

«This was more than a gamma-ray burst,» she replied, relishing the feedback from the link after so long. Anja broadcast back a wordless agreement, but did not speak further.

Rhuar, however, was not inclined to be silent. "No disrespect intended," he mused, "but that planet looks a hell of a lot worse than I thought it would. I thought GRBs were mostly destructive to life and the atmosphere, not the planet itself."

Anja looked back at him. "That is correct, Ensign," she said neutrally. Rhuar shied back a bit at her tone, but Anja continued. "The tectonic disruption and increased volcanism are mostly consistent with a relativistic kinetic impact."

Rhuar’s mouth dropped open a bit. "Wait, what? How kinetic are we talking?"

"Hard to say without knowing the size of the projectile," Jesri sighed. "A rock a few hundred meters wide moving at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed would do it. Zephyr had early warning systems designed specifically to monitor for high-speed kinetics, as did any major world, but if they attacked after the GRB..." She shrugged, leaving the rest unsaid.

"But why?", clicked Qktk. "The GRBs killed everyone, didn’t they? Why go through the extra effort to utterly destroy the surface?"

"To destroy something the radiation wouldn’t kill," Anja said darkly. "To make certain something on the surface would be lost forever."

"Wait," said Rhuar, "you’re not thinking the weapon was down there, are you?"

Jesri brushed her hair back, toying with the ends. "Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The fact that there were multiple versions of the schedule means that there was misdirection in play. If it worked, the weapon wasn’t where the enemy thought it was."

Anja nodded her agreement. "At this point it is clear we lack some vital information about the original plan. We cannot say definitively where the weapon was or should have been. The only thing left to do is to check the other planets."

She turned towards Rhuar, straightening up noticeably. Despite himself, Rhuar stood at attention in response. "Ensign, set a course for Tengri and jump through. I do not want to stay here longer than we have to."

"Aye, m-," Rhuar cut off his voice box, glancing at Jesri, "uh, sir. Aye sir."

Anja smiled and ruffled the fur on his head. "Good… ensign," she purred.

Rhuar grumbled and stalked off towards the shipjack.

After they were safely away Rhuar removed the shipjack and slumped against the console, panting. Jesri gave him a concerned look. "Hey, you okay?", she asked, moving to stand beside him.

"Yeah," he said, artificial voice steady despite his winded state. "I’ll be good through the end of the jump. Would like a break when we get to Tengri, though, I’m still not used to this link." He shot a frustrated and longing look back at the dangling shipjack, ears twitching rapidly.

"Can’t promise the whole place won’t be on or under fire, but barring that - sure," Jesri said, clapping him on the shoulder and smiling. "You’re doing great, most pilots took months or years to work their way up to cruiser links."

Qktk crossed his arms. "Do you think it’s likely that the planets will all be destroyed?", he asked.

"No, probably not," replied Anja, shaking her head. "The Gestalt displayed a great ability to project power from installations in its home space when it attacked, but we never observed it operating physically outside its home sector in any significant way." She hesitated, then added, "Until today, that is. Even so, I believe that is an exception. We were aware of a few dozen of its Emissaries, but not enough to coordinate this sort of action across many planets at once."

"Given thousands of years, even a small force could address a dozen planets or so in that manner," replied Qktk, shaking his head. "I suppose we will see."

Jesri sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. "Only one way to find out," she sighed.

Rhuar, somewhat recovered from the jump, sat up and cocked his head at Anja. "You said you had some intelligence on these Emissaries. What are they like?"

"They vary in form," said Anja, steepling her fingers. "The consensus was that each was unique and built for a particular purpose. The first ones we encountered were big, half the size of the Grand Design and able to travel alone through space. Initially we thought they were some sort of intelligent drone ships, but after our first contact smaller bipedal versions started showing up to try and communicate."

"Do you think it created the bipeds just to talk with you?", asked Qktk. "It’s odd that it would care enough to make the effort, given its other actions."

"There was a lot of discussion on that front," agreed Jesri, "but we never really nailed down its motivations. It’s possible that it was just whimsy, if it has a thing like that." She made a face. "We really don’t know enough about it to make guesses."

Qktk rattled his mandibles unhappily. "And yet this weapon is supposed to be effective, when we know this little about the enemy? We’re relying on too many things we know nothing about."

Anja nodded, grimacing. "I know," she said sadly. "But no matter how we proceed, the next step has to be obtaining the weapon. Even if it does not answer all of our questions, it will at least provide a better foundation to pursue the missing answers."

Qktk nodded, although he did not look mollified. Rhuar sighed. "If you don’t mind," he said, leveraging himself to his feet, "I’m going to go catch an hour of sleep before we arrive." He hopped up into a nearby chair and curled up on the seat, tucking his tail over his paws. "Wake me up before we crash into Tengri."

Tengri had been a sparsely populated world even before it was attacked, with a relatively thin atmosphere and little water. The predominant geography was wide, rolling hills and endless plains which were covered in the local grass analogue. A few aggressively saline inland seas and anemic rivers provided some respite from the arid climate, hosting chaparral and scraggly vinelike plants that crowded against the shore.

No longer. The already-lacking atmosphere had been further depleted, and what was left formed a hazy brown fog rich in nitrogen oxides. Although higher in oxygen than in centuries past, the atmosphere was still nowhere near breathable. Any water on the surface had frozen and sublimated away long ago. The landmass had lost its brownish-green covering of grasses to show the faded blue of the clay-rich soil below.

On the ground, grey-brown fog floated low across the hills and over frozen, mummified grass. A light, glaring and harsh in the gloom, shone through the fog to cast sharp-edged shadows from hummocks and rocks across the plain. Billowing clouds parted to reveal a descending shuttle, drive flaring brightly as it sank towards the clay. The landing skids of the shuttle touched down and the landscape was once again was plunged into darkness.

The rear ramp opened and two figures strode onto the stygian plain. Anja was clad in full Valkyrie armor, artificial muscles rippling as she strode out from the ship. She carried her rifle high and ready, the hilt of her sword protruding up at an angle from her back. The splayed ridges of the suit’s feet sank into the clay, snapping dead stalks of grass and cutting semicircles into the ground.

Jesri followed behind her, wielding a smaller rifle and wearing a heavy-framed respirator. Panels of light body armor layered over her shoulders, torso and legs, while a heated compression wrap formed a barrier against the thin and freezing gases outside. She came up behind Anja and keyed the ramp, which sealed in a hiss of hydraulics.

«Ready?», asked Anja, broadcasting through the suit.

Jesri gave a quick nod. «Go ahead. I’ll follow.»

The suit whined as its legs tromped forwards, sending ribbons of clay pattering over frozen grass. Jesri crept behind with her head on a swivel, making no sound as she moved. They advanced forward in the hazy twilight for half an hour before they saw the corroded remnants of a metal fence jutting up from the soil.

The sturdy supports and thick panels were pocked with holes and pits, supplemented every so often by the nearly-unrecognizable warning placards rusting against them. Anja pushed through it as if it were packed mud, the ruined metal crumbling at her touch.

«We’re getting close,» Jesri noted.

They pushed forward for a few more minutes before the first buildings came into view. Squat concrete structures emerged from the fog as lumps of indistinct shadow, resolving themselves into the rounded corners and narrow windows of a bunker.

This was the Tengri listening post, an off-the-books installation that was the only significant military presence on the planet. They had spent hours pinging the surface to narrow down its location, only succeeding when Rhuar performed some truly inspired work with the sensors to get a reading off what was left of its heavy metal support beams.

Anja advanced towards it, stopping short as she approached the door. It had been opened forcefully, cut away from its hinges and discarded beside the doorway. She shared a look with Jesri, then stepped in with her weapon ready. Nothing moved as they entered, but a swath cleared through the coating of dust betrayed the presence of others in the recent past.

Jesri advanced behind Anja, squinting through the cloud of dust raised by the suit’s passage. The facility had been stripped bare, with consoles hacked out of walls and equipment conspicuously absent from niches trailing wires and ports.

«Thieves,» Anja seethed, her fists clenching. «They took everything.»

«Let’s check around,» replied Jesri. «We need to confirm if the weapon was here.»

They passed through room after room of spare concrete and dust, Anja crouching low to pass under the stooped bunker door frames. Each was nearly identical save for the occasional debris, but in the fifth room they came upon the remnants of a massive security door. Like the front door, it had been severed from its mounting and thrown beside the door to lean haphazardly against the bunker wall.

«See how shiny it is on the edges?», said Jesri, indicating the sides of the door. «It hasn’t been out in the air long. Whoever raided this place was here recently.» She ducked her head around to check the backside of the door, then stepped back with a frown. «Anja, can you move the door away from the wall?», she asked.

Anja stepped over and lifted the heavy slab of metal, her suit’s muscles straining with the effort. She stood it upright, one hand resting on top. «Shit,» she said venomously. «It was here.»

Jesri moved around to see the backside of the door. The surface was covered with the same tarnish as everything in the bunker, but the remnants of a sign stood out on the front. The visible letters spelled out: "NTRA: NO".

«MANTRA, no entry. Just like on the ship,» Jesri agreed. «Let’s search the rest, see if there’s anything interesting.» She split off to look over the inside of the vault while Anja stomped over to the next room down the hall.

A short while later they grouped back up at the entrance to the bunker. Anja was empty-handed, her frustration evident even over the comm link. Jesri had come up with a single broken cylinder etched with a symbol on the side, a few lines of geometric alien text spiraling across it.

«It’s not the weapon,» she said, «but it is a lead. Let’s take this back up to the ship and see if we can learn something from it.» Anja nodded stiffly, the suit’s helmet jerking as it mimicked her. Together they turned and left the bunker, picking their way through the eerie mists back towards the shuttle.

"It looks like lines," Rhuar said, tilting his head to get a better look at the object. "Are you sure that’s writing?"

Jesri nodded. "The ship can’t recognize it, but it’s definitely text. See how the glyphs are formed by the combination of intersecting angles?"

Rhuar scrunched up his face. "No," he said, "but I’ll take your word for it. How does that help us if the ship can’t read it?"

"Well, for starters, it lets us know that it’s not a species we made contact with pre-fall," mused Jesri, turning the cylinder over in her hands. "Otherwise they’d be in the database."

"Let me see that," said Qktk, clattering over to peer at their find. Jesri handed it over, and Qktk turned it over to look at the text.

"This is Ysleli," he said definitively, handing it back. "See that symbol up top? That’s the royal seal."

Rhuar blinked. "Captain, you sure? I’ve never seen anything like this before."

Qktk rolled an eye at him. "Mr. Rhuar, I did have a career before I hired you on. It’s how I learned I should outsource my technical work, among other things." He jabbed a foreleg at the text spiraling around the cylinder. "I used to run out of a station that imported most of their food from Ysl, and I recognize the seal and script from the bills of lading. If I’m not very much mistaken, the cylinder is the casing of a writing implement."

Jesri rubbed the seal with her thumb. "Any idea what it says?", she asked.

Qktk took the casing back and turned it over, studying the crosshatched lines. "I was never very good at reading Yslel," he grumbled. "Let’s see. This glyphrow is the sequence for the current royal house, and the next is some sort of baronial commission…" He paced back and forth, rotating the cylinder several times. "Well, I have good news and bad news," he said, looking up at the group.

Anja inclined her head impatiently, and he hurried to continue. "The good news is that the items from the site are probably all on Ysl," he said. "The bad news is that this pen belonged to the Ysleli Royal Expeditionary Corps of Archaeologists."

Jesri made a face. "They took the listening post’s contents for study? Like in a museum?" She took the pen back and sighed, shaking her head. "I’m getting a premonition about this being a pain in our ass."

Anja smiled. "On the contrary. Now that we know where it is, we can go there and obtain it."

"And if they don’t want to hand over their collection?", Rhuar asked, scratching his ear. "They’ve obviously invested resources in this project. If they’re any kind of smart, they’ve got the important stuff at a lab locked up tight for their military."

"We can ask… persuasively," Anja grinned. She swept her arm wide, taking in the whole of the bridge. "I believe I can lend our argument a fair degree of rhetorical weight."

"Oh, for fuck’s sake," said Jesri, hiding her face in her hands. "The last time I heard you talk like that was when we had to retrieve those stolen plans from Barbos."

"We got those plans, as I recall," Anja replied mildly.

Jesri looked up at her, exasperated. "You opened negotiations by blowing up their moon."

"And concluded negotiations successfully the same day," she responded primly, "all returned in exchange for some much-needed orbital debris cleanup. Don’t worry," she continued, waving off Jesri’s objections, "I wasn’t thinking of blowing up their moon. Though..." She looked at Qktk. "Does Ysl have a moon?", she asked thoughtfully.

"Thankfully, no," mumbled Qktk.

"See?", said Anja cheerfully. "No need to be such a grump, sister. I was planning on simply showing up in-system and asking nicely."

"...in your kilometer-long battleship?", inquired Rhuar.

"Cruiser," nodded Anja, "but yes. I think that should be sufficient."

Most of Qktk’s eyes winced. "Perhaps not," he said. "From what I know of the Ysleli, that might be a bad decision. Their monarch rules by strength, keeping his barons in line by threat of military force. He would be opening himself up to opportunists if he capitulated to a threat of force, no matter how much we outmatch him." Qktk pondered. "Which may not be a given, actually. They’re a belligerent sort of people, I imagine their standing navy is quite large."

Anja waved dismissively. "Quantity against quality. I doubt they have anything that can pose an issue if we press our case."

"Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not?", Jesri snarked. "Is that really how you want to play this?"

"This is beyond matters of preference," Anja snapped back, suddenly irritated. "Sister, are you saying you would allow some up-jumped warlord to rattle his saber and stall the mission?"

"No," soothed Jesri. "I agree that we need to get the weapon from Ysl. I’m just saying that we should make a reasonable effort to plan further than ‘ask for the weapon and shoot everyone that says no.’"

"Yes, please," said Qktk fervently. "The Ysleli are proud and arrogant. If you make this an issue of strength they will force you to kill thousands of them."

"That’s on the table, given the stakes," Anja noted grimly. "But I agree it would be best to avoid it. Any ideas as to how?"

They sat in silence for a while.

Qktk spoke first. "Perhaps we can use their combativeness against them," he mused. "Their society places great importance on conflicts between the powerful. If we show up and present a compelling show of force, they will all be focused on us."

Jesri considered, nodding her head. "Yeah, that could work." She looked over at Anja, who was stroking her chin contemplatively.

Anja met her eyes and shrugged. "We can always fall back to plan B. I assume you’re thinking both of us should be on the ground team?"

"Wait, what?", Qktk interjected. "If you’re both going to ground, who will command the ship? Who will communicate with their navy?"

"Don’t look at me," objected Rhuar. "It’ll take everything I’ve got just to pilot this barge in a straight line without melting my brain out my ears. Besides, if the ship can’t translate I can’t talk to them anyway - I’ve never even heard of Ysl before today."

Everyone looked at Qktk.

Lytrlas watched the green-grey plains of Ysl spin by below him, fluffy white clouds sporadically streaking across the mottled terrain. Being posted on picket duty was boring, but the view and solitude suited him well. Many considered the posting drudge work, offering no opportunity for earning distinction against foes - a clerkship, not a real military posting.

He couldn’t disagree, but it didn’t bother him. After several years of this, he could transfer to the Royal Naval Academy and lead his unit as an officer. The rewards were delayed compared to seeking his honor more directly, but it was much less risky to take the field as a lieutenant than as a grunt in the baronial carabiniers. His colleagues were focused on next year, but he was already considering the quality of his retirement. It was important to look ahead.

A flashing light on the console jolted him from his reverie and he pushed himself to float towards it, claws hooking into the retention straps to keep from drifting aimlessly in the microgravity. He sighed. Another incoming vessel. Dialing up his sensors, he noted that it was not broadcasting the required IFF beacon - why could these idiot freighter captains never remember the proper approach sequence?

"Unidentified vessel," he broadcast in a bored monotone, keeping his words clipped and professional, "you are entering the domain of His Royal Majesty Sitrl, long life and glory to the King. Activate your transponder and approach this station for inspection and customs."

He took great pride in the emotionless affect that was the de facto standard for all traffic controllers, his voice never wavering in the face of irate captains or bellicose minor lords spewing threats. Such things never ended well for the party that allowed emotion to cloud their judgment, and he knew he had the backing of His Majesty’s Navy as long as he stuck to protocol.

He did allow a slight crease around his eyes as the ship failed to respond, however. Perhaps they were having system trouble? "Unidentified vessel, activate your transponder and slow to two hundred ri immediately," he droned. "Failure to comply will result in interdiction."

He punched up the sensor feed details, scanning through. It appeared to be a custom ship, extensively modified, as the superstructure was not a match for anything in the database. It was slim, if a bit boxy, and was drifting in without engine power. His face creased further as he studied the readout - the reactor signature was dim, but didn’t match anything he had scanned previously. Whatever this ship was, it was foreign. A Ysleli ship would never dare run the picket line, but barbarians had no honor. Today might be exciting after all, he allowed.

"Unidentified vessel, this is your final warning," he broadcast, his voice as level as still water. "Activate your transponder and heave to or you… will…" He trailed off, his eyes bulging as a giant slice of space behind the approaching ship rippled and deformed, the stars gliding outwards to form a twisted ring of light. A void grew at the center of the ring until the fabric of space parted violently to show the deep darkness of hyperspace beyond. Out of this gargantuan portal the prow of an impossibly large ship emerged, lines of white fire curling and snapping around it as it transitioned back to real space.

Lytrlas stood transfixed as the ship slid inexorably into being in front of him, hundreds of lesa in length and still coming. It outmassed any ship he had ever seen, if not any task force. Strange markings decorated the aft section, just afore of the blazing engines casting their actinic light into the cloud of rapidly dissipating plasma wreathing the portal.

As the ship emerged fully and the portal shrank to nothingness behind them, an image crackled to life on the hailer. He shrank back as he beheld the monstrous insectile face filling his screen, its clustering of eyes glinting like dark glass and mandibles clattering threateningly. It shook itself and spoke, the staccato clicks of its voice echoing through the customs post.

"Attention Ysl tiny ship!", it said in broken Yslel. "Ship ours honorable talk! Shipmaster Qktk! Ship yours honorable talk!" It paused for a moment, seeming to consider its words. "Talk now," it amended ominously.

His mouth working soundlessly, Lytrlas had the presence of mind to reach over and key the emergency beacon on his console. A signal raced out to the naval customs task force on patrol in this sector, although he didn’t know what they could do against this behemoth captained by a thousand-eyed nightmare beast. He flicked the hailer controls with a trembling claw, trying desperately to find the proper words to respond.

"Unidentified vessel," he broadcast back, wincing as his voice cracked. "Please hold."

Behind him, forgotten, the smaller craft he had been tracking sailed towards the planet below.

Part 12

"Okay, dropping in now," Jesri called out, her hands dancing over the console. Outside the cockpit, the charged plasma of reentry was dissipating to show sparse fluffy clouds. Droplets of water hissed and boiled away from the hull as the ship cut through the thin air of the Ysleli stratosphere.

Anja stood behind her, again fully clad in a suit of Valkyrie powered armor. One massive hand curled its fingers around a bracing beam, the other cradling her rifle. Even with the armor on, her stance betrayed impatience. "Time?", she asked, her voice grating flatly through the suit’s external speakers.

"Looks like… two minutes," Jesri said, wrestling with the controls. She swore as the ship jolted violently, bucking in the airstream. They had taken the Huginn fast-attack craft rather than a shuttle, and while it offered better protection and armaments the FAC was not designed for graceful atmospheric maneuvering.

Below them, large stretches of farmland covered the terrain in a regular hexagonal patchwork. Jesri squinted at the display, adjusting course to keep their trajectory centered. They had been able to identify a distinct signature indicative of Terran power cores in the mountains of the largest continent. They couldn’t be sure the weapon was there, but it was their best bet.

As the flat farmland gave way to rolling foothills, Jesri leveled off their descent. It wasn’t long before she saw their target, a cluster of buildings nestled in a remote valley. Conveniently, there seemed to be a large airstrip for atmospheric flyers present. She angled her approach to line up parallel with the runway, coming to a stop in the air a few hundred meters above the facility.

She keyed the ship to descend vertically, releasing her restraints and jumping up to grab her tactical gear. Anja tromped backwards to the exit hatch as Jesri strapped on her helmet and body armor, slick grey fabric sliding over an articulated core of ceramic plating.

By the time their FAC’s skids had made contact with the ground, she was fully equipped with armor, tactical optics and a matte charcoal breaching rifle slung loosely over her shoulder. The atmosphere on Ysl was within reasonable parameters, so she opted for a tactical faceplate rather than a respirator. One of them needed to operate the shuttle, and while that precluded powered armor there were other quite serviceable options at hand - the armory in the Valkyrie sector had proven to be quite well-stocked.

Anja toggled the landing ramp, moving towards it as it opened with a rush of equalizing pressure. Crisp mountain air rushed into the cabin, infiltrating under Jesri’s faceplate with the tantalizing scent of vegetation and moisture. She paused for a second to relish it, thinking of the last time she had set foot on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. It had been a long time.

She was jolted out of her reverie by a loud crack as a kinetic slug caromed off Anja’s armor, harmlessly ricocheting back to embed itself in the surface of the runway with a spray of fragmented stone. Anja let out a low growl and brought her rifle up while Jesri moved quickly behind a support beam.

Peering out, she could see the response to their sudden incursion. Green-liveried soldiers crowded around the edge of the runway, hiding behind some spare crates and pallets. The Ysleli were tall with long, gangly arms and yellowed skin that clashed horrendously with their uniforms. Two forward-looking, predatory eyes sat high on their faces like black marbles over a gaping maw lined with tiny sharp teeth.

"These fellows look pleasant," noted Anja, sighting down her rifle. Her metallic finger squeezed the trigger and one of the assembled soldiers exploded in a cloud of blood, bile and steam. His companions dove quickly back to cover over the dark smear where their comrade had stood. An answering spray of fire echoed through the valley and drew sparks where bullets pinged off of Anja’s armor.

Anja stepped further down, her suit moving the rifle precisely to track exposed limbs or thin spots in the crate barricade. More shots lanced through the soldiers’ cover, followed by wet pops and ululating wails of pain.

Jesri shook her head and moved back to the controls of the shuttle. "We don’t have time for this," she grumbled, keying up the automated defenses. "Anja, I’m turning on the perimeter guns!", she shouted.

"No fun," Anja replied irritably, firing steadily at the soldiers. Jesri punched the control and turrets activated from the top and bottom of the Huginn, tracking targets around the ship. When the next fusillade came from the troops at the edge of the runway, the ship-mounted cannons chugged a few heavy blasts into the piled crates in response.

The crates disintegrated in a spray of fragments, peppering the troops clustered behind them with white-hot metal shards. The few survivors limping back from the blackened remnants of their cover took direct hits from the following salvo, their bodies providing only a mild and messy impediment to the cannon’s fire as it tore through them to gouge deep ruts in the soil.

"No fun at all," groused Anja, moving all the way down the ramp. "Come on, sister, I have a lock on the signal source." Jesri followed her down, her rifle held at eye level against her shoulder and her stance low. The ramp hissed up behind them, sealing the ship. As they moved across the field towards the installation’s cluster of buildings, Jesri toggled her communicator.

«I wonder how the boys are doing?», she sent, moving close behind Anja. Her sister pulled back a fist and slammed it through the door of the first building, sending it flying off its frame to crash into three soldiers waiting within.

«They just have to talk, it will be fine!», replied Anja distractedly, pulling her sword off her back and fastening it under her rifle. Bayonet thus affixed, she ducked past the door with a pulse of wordless satisfaction through the link. Jesri sighed and moved to follow her just as the first screams started from farther within. Hopefully Qktk and Rhuar could handle things up top for a few minutes.

Warmaster Reltryn growled low, the subsonic tremor of his anger causing his subordinates to flinch back. He was not unused to combat - in fact, the prospect of bloodshed was normally enough to brighten his mood considerably. The sudden appearance of a gargantuan warship over their capital, captained by a nightmarish alien monstrosity who howled at them in broken snippets of badly accented Yslel - that was a different thing entirely.

It wanted to fight, that much was obvious. He had come quickly in response to the customs agent’s panicked summons, forming up his picket patrol against the overwhelming bulk of the warship and attempting to negotiate the terms of combat. The horrid-looking alien warlord seemed to crave an honorable contest against the forces of Ysl, as was proper, but…

"INADEQUATE!", it howled, its glossy mandibles jittering disconcertingly. "More required! Offer ours greater!" Spearbrother Syrir spoke placatingly to the demon beast, who shouted a few more enraged epithets before disconnecting abruptly. The spearbrother slumped, shaking his head, then looked up at Reltryn hopelessly.

"It demands greater forces be brought to bear," he said, cringing away from the warmaster’s anger. "It does not consent to fight our patrol on the field of honor."

Another growl rippled from the warmaster’s chest, and Syrir bared his throat in anticipation of death for his failure. It did not come, however, and he dared a glance back up to see Reltryn looking contemplative.

"Ordinarily," hissed Reltryn, "I would demand my own satisfaction for such an insult. However, this shipmaster..." He looked out the viewport, seeing the bright sliver of the alien ship hanging distantly in the starry void. "This one may have cause to demand higher satisfaction than I can offer. His might is great." He floated back to loom over his terrified subordinate. "Syrir, send a message to warfather Tarl. Inform him that our enemy has made a challenge to the honor of His Royal Majesty, long life and glory to the King."

Syrir anchored his feet to bow low and pushed back towards his console, but Reltryn hooked a claw around his arm before he could depart. The terrified spearbrother met his gaze, shrinking back from the violent aura emanating from the warmaster’s every move. "Tell the warfather," Reltryn growled, "that our enemy contests the honor of all warriors in his service."

Syrir gulped and went to transmit the message, leaving Reltryn to drift weightlessly before the viewport and contemplate the bulk of their enemy’s great warship further. In his years of service he had seen much, and he thought himself knowledgeable about military matters. Yet this demon warlord was new. He brought a single ship to beggar navies and had knowledge of the Ysleli language and customs where Reltryn had none in return. Such a powerful and canny foe merited consideration, caution. Who could say what devilry such a being could wield?

Qktk slumped in the captain’s chair, legs shaking. "Mr. Rhuar," he gasped, "I’m running out of things to say to them! How much longer until the ship can translate their language?"

Rhuar shook his head from the pilot’s station where he was communing with the ship via the jack. "Give it a few more minutes, Captain," he said, "we’re tapped into their transmissions and are gathering as much source material as we can. You don’t want to use it before it’s ready, you’ll end up insulting their honorable grandmothers or something."

Qktk clattered his mandibles in annoyance. "Right now I’m just screaming things I used to hear the Ysleli tradebrothers say when they were haggling," he complained, waving his arms. "I don’t even know what half the words mean! In all probability they think I’m insane."

"Insane is good," snorted Rhuar. "I mean, not normally. If you’re insane on the bridge of a gigantic fuckin warship, though, it has an effect on people." He stared into the distance, focusing on data from the sensor link. "It looks like that last exchange stirred them up a bit, so let’s wait for them to do whatever they’re doing. By the time they’re ready to talk more we should be able to speak in full sentences."

He looked back towards the planet with the ship’s sensors. "If we’re lucky, the Huginn will be back up here with the weapon before these idiots are ready to fight."

Anja barreled through the doorframe, sending chunks of the bunker wall tumbling down as her too-wide shoulders impacted on either side. The spray of stone chips and dust flew into the faces of the waiting soldiers, who swiped frantically at their eyes or fired blindly at the charging Valkyrie.

She was on them in seconds, her massive bayonet sweeping across the front rank and severing three soldiers at the torso. She speared a fourth through the gut, then fired her rifle to send his corpse blasting backwards off the sword into the remaining troops. They struggled to rise, dark blood coating them from head to toe, but before they could reorient they were cut down in the span of a second by precise bursts of rifle fire.

Jesri lowered her weapon and walked the rest of the way into the room. "Clear," she said dispassionately. "Let’s move on." They had pressed further into the complex only to discover an extensive warren of fortified tunnels below the surface buildings. No mere outpost, this was turning out to be a heavily fortified military research installation.

Not that it mattered much. Anja was forging a trail of destruction through the compound and it looked like the only weapons present were primitive kinetic slug rifles. Although they’d be a problem for Jesri if she got exposed to too much fire, Anja was entirely unaffected by their efforts. A few times they had tried to throw some form of explosive grenade - until Anja started batting them back towards the soldiers. They abandoned that tactic quickly.

They pushed through another line of soldiers who had fortified a security checkpoint, their weapons fire making quick work of the makeshift cover that had been pushed into the hallway. Anja gave a grunt of satisfaction as she passed the smoking remnants of the checkpoint and toggled her link to talk to Jesri over the din of battle.

«This looks like our target,» she noted. Jesri had to agree. The room they had entered was a large, low-ceilinged space with numerous pallets and shelves. On each were bits of technology scavenged from human installations - door controls, console displays, even a string of decorative fairy lights they’d found somewhere. The displays were labeled in angular lines of Yslel, neatly ordered in rows along the entirety of the room.

They advanced into the room, weapons ready, but encountered no enemies. Another door led to an extension of the warehouse and some token resistance. That room held more valuable prizes - rifles, armor, and other military technology. Some were strewn across tables in various stages of disassembly, groups of technicians fleeing in terror as Anja stalked towards them.

Jesri received a notice on her heads-up display that a data packet had been transmitted to them through the FAC. She found a niche to review it and saw with surprise that Qktk and Rhuar had managed to compile a translation data library for Yslel already, and had sent it forward to them. She looked up to watch Anja bodily throw a flailing soldier into the wall, staining the stone with a spatter of blood as he slumped lifelessly to the floor. Jesri sighed. It didn’t look like they’d have much opportunity to use the translator.

She moved through a shattered doorway to follow her sister, but stopped short when she came up against Anja staring fixedly at the contents of the next room. It was mostly empty, clean and spare except for the rubble around the doorway. A large table in the middle of the room was surrounded by a cluster of analytical and diagnostic equipment, and as Jesri moved around her sister’s hulking form she saw a cadre of frightened Ysleli scientists in lab dress quickly backing away from it.

On the table was a naked humanoid form, its skin dry and papery with age. The chest was sliced open, peeled apart to show the ribs and shriveled organs inside. Its head was turned to the side, facing away from Jesri, but the faded blonde hair was in full view. It had been plaited in a complex pattern, interleaved up to the crown of the head. Just like her sister Sophia used to wear it.

A low rumble suffused the air in the room, rising to a throaty growl as Anja stepped forward to confront the huddle of scientists. "You dare," she thundered, stalking towards them. Her suit broadcast the words in Yslel as Anja spoke, bands of white-hot plasma rippling around her arms in a fiery mantle. "You fucking insects dare to touch my sister." One of the scientists fainted.

"Please," another shouted, "we only meant to study-"

"DEFILERS!", she roared, the suit’s speakers augmenting her voice to bone-shaking volume. "THIEVES AND VERMIN!" She swept her sword across the group, slicing the Ysleli in half with a spray of blood. With a wordless scream, she leapt at the pile of dying aliens and began pounding them with gouts of plasma flaring from her fists, gore splattering around her with each thundering blow.

Jesri walked up to the table, laying her rifle next to her sister’s corpse. From the other side of the table, she could see that they had removed her eyes, blank sockets sightlessly looking out as Anja crushed the bloody remains of the scientists again and again into the ground. She stroked the corpse’s pleated hair gently, once, then turned to face her living sister.

"Anja," Jesri said gently. The crash of the suit’s fists into the hardened floor drowned her voice in a wash of thunder. «Anja,» she said again through the link. «This isn’t why we’re here.»

"Our sister is dead!", Anja screamed back, slamming her flame-wreathed fist through the wall. Stone dust settled lightly over the spatters of blood on her suit.

«And we’re going to avenge her,» Jesri countered, «by going after the one who did kill her. Not this trash.»

Anja straightened up, glaring down at the smashed remains at her feet for a few long seconds. "You are right, I was distracted," she grated, "we need to find the weapon." She raised her rifle and started towards the next area, pausing only once to look back at the examination table. "We will give no quarter to these grave robbers, however," she growled, spitting the words out like poison, "if any more cross our path."

Rhuar had to stop himself from pacing back and forth. The shipjack cable didn’t permit such things, as good as it would feel to walk off some of the building tension. "Uh, Captain," he said, "there’s a lot of ships out there."

Qktk shot him an irritated glare. "You said that," he grumbled.

"Yeah, but I mean," Rhuar tilted his head, causing a viewscreen to display a tactical map, "there are a lot of ships out there." On the map, the blue bar representing the Grand Design sat centered in a sphere of graduated lines. The planet was visible, although growing less so every second as red dots continued to swarm up from the surface like angry bees.

"Jim’s moldy balls," Qktk swore, "is each one of those a ship?"

Rhuar gulped. "Uh, no, each one of those is a fleet element. Ten ships on average."

Qktk didn’t even bother to swear at that. "Do you have any thoughts on what to do if they attack?", he asked plaintively, wringing his forelimbs. "I know this is a big ship with big guns, but…"

Rhuar shrugged. "Captain, I’m just banking on our asses running out of here as fast as we can after our fearless leaders come back." He paused, looking thoughtful. "I hope they do come back."

Qktk said nothing, but gave Rhuar a pained look and watched the dots gather into a red mass on the display.

Anja shouldered through another door, sending an echoing crash through the room beyond and raising a cloud of choking dust. Blood dripped from her armor and sword, dried flakes fluttering to the ground as she moved relentlessly through the bunker. They had not encountered any resistance past the laboratory with Sophia’s body, and Anja’s tension was bleeding over into her movements. Jesri had seldom seen her this angry, although she could scarcely blame her - the sight of Sophia’s eyeless gaze still haunted her vision as she advanced, lending a sinister aspect to every dark corner and obscured alcove.

They were moving through some sort of administrative area, consoles and primitive displays crowding desktops overflowing with charts and printouts. Offices lined the side of the hallway, but no movement came from within - this area seemed to have been abandoned or evacuated. Turning the corner they reached a sudden end to the hallway, a large double-door leading into a spacious office with soft lighting and luxurious furniture - and one occupant.

Anja slammed through the door to loom over the Ysleli sitting calmly behind his wooden desk, tossing a small reflective sphere between his spindly yellow hands. "Come in, come in," he wheezed thinly, displaying needle-point teeth in a gruesome smile. "I’ve been waiting for you for some time."

Anja stopped short, taken aback by the lack of reaction to her terrifying entrance. Her implacable advance had not spared much time for observation, but she now took the time to survey the room around her. Well-made furniture was placed in a loose ring around a low table in the center of the richly carpeted floor. Against the wall were several displays featuring restored Terran technology or curiosities - a jeweled music box sat on a lit pedestal, glittering prettily, while another rack held a matched set of three naval service rifles.

A sharp intake of breath from Jesri drew Anja’s attention to the back of the room, where a display occupied a place of honor among the collection. A nude humanoid figure in a delicate arabesque pose was lit gently from behind and below, a serene smile fixed on its prettily restored face. Auburn hair cascaded from its head in ringlets, shimmering in the display lights.

Jesri’s hands tightened on her gun until the material of her gloves creaked in protest. "Violet," she whispered.

Anja whirled back towards the Ysleli, swiping her sword through the desk and reducing it to kindling. He was thrown into the corner, colliding with a display of vases and reducing them to shards that sprinkled over his slumped body.

"That’s annoying," he said, levering himself into a sitting position. "Do you think you could refrain from further violence for a moment while we speak?"
Jesri stared at the slender alien - not only was he unharmed by a blow that should have sheared him in two, he was addressing them in English rather than Yslel. Her rifle came up and she squeezed a burst of fire at his head. The shots took him in the cheek, blasting the thin yellow skin to shreds and revealing an unblemished white-silver surface below. He gave her a reproachful look.

"Really, ladies, it was a simple request," he muttered, straightening the remains of his chair and sitting down. The tatters of his face hung loosely down from his jaw, revealing the back rows of needle teeth set into shining metal bones.

"What are you?", growled Anja, her free hand opening and closing menacingly.

The little alien gave her half of a wry smile. "Try to keep up," he said, "I should think that’s obvious. Here they call me Administrator Trelir," he said dismissively, a hand to his chest, "but more relevant to our discussion is my position as Emissary to Ysl."

Jesri stared. "You’re the Gestalt," she said accusingly, eliciting a wave of short, barking laughter from Trelir.

"Oh, goodness, no," he chortled. "Merely a grain of sand on the beach, a pebble adorning the mountain. A representative. An Emissary, quite simply."

"What are you doing here?", Anja shot back, her frame vibrating with barely restrained violence.

"Just a bit of follow-through, some due diligence around the actions of your former employers," he said lightly. "Nothing too important, but it’s good practice to tie up loose ends." He tilted his head to the side, and a gigantic blast door slammed down to trap them in the room.

"Now," Trelir said evenly, leaning forward across the ruins of his desk, "I have made my report to the greater Confluence. Please make yourselves comfortable while we await a response."

The display flickered to life again, throwing odd reflections from Qktk’s shell as he drew himself up in the captain’s chair. The Ysleli who now appeared had mottled yellow-brown skin, thin scars tracing across his face. His dark eyes were hard and wary, possessed of an unmistakable competence - and exhaustion.

"You address Tarl," he said gruffly, "warfather to His Royal Majesty Sitrl, long life and glory to the King."

Qktk took a steadying breath and kept his eyes focused on the screen. "Warfather," he said, relieved to hear the even tone of his voice, "I am shipmaster Qktk. I trust you can understand my words?"

Tarl inclined his head. "Yes, shipmaster. Your command of Yslel is impressive."

Qktk didn’t feel like clarifying. His mind flicked back over a hundred tense hours spent in plush back rooms and noisy bars, cajoling and negotiating deals out of counterparts not inclined to take a Htt seriously. The watchword, as ever, was confidence. He had learned from the best how to deal with these prideful warriors, he reminded himself.

"Quite," he said dismissively, gesturing to the side. "But beside the point. I see you have marshalled your forces, such as they are."

Tarl’s face darkened. "It is not becoming of a shipmaster to sully honorable discourse with insults." He leaned closer to the screen, looming in Qktk’s view. "I trust you will provide us satisfaction," he growled menacingly.

Qktk stared back with studied nonchalance, even as his mind raced. Apologies were weakness, ignoring a challenge was weakness, so…

"The only insult, warfather," he leered, contempt dripping from the title, "is the sad band of craven fools who appear before me. Do you believe that your assemblage of tin cans and pointed sticks can stand against my might?"

Rhuar glanced at Qktk in alarm as Tarl seemed to swell with rage. "You question the courage of a blooded warfather, insect?", he hissed, his skin flushing a darker yellow.

"Oh, I should not impugn your courage, of course," he said airily, "I would be terrified to face me in that ramshackle collection of plating you call a warship. One wonders what your unblooded grub of a fleetmaster is thinking, providing his esteemed warfather with such a laughable assortment of flotsam."

Rhuar’s eyes were open wide, his exoskeletal arms waving in emphatic warning. Tarl was glaring at the viewscreen in an apoplectic rage. "You arrogant worm," he growled, his voice low and dangerous. "You dare-!"

Qktk cut the feed and leaned back in his chair, breathing heavily. "I’m really not cut out for this," he wheezed.

"Captain, what the fuck?", Rhuar exclaimed, worry evident in his wide eyes. "You just insulted the largest military fleet ever! They’re going to murder us multiple times."

Qktk shook his head. "The dockmaster at the old station gave me some tips on dealing with Ysleli traders once. Being rude demonstrates superiority and control, in their eyes. Insults keep them off-balance, but their sense of honor frowns on being provoked to physical violence by words. When they come back they’re distracted and you can get a better price out of them."

Rhuar goggled at him. "Captain, we are not trying to save on a pallet of nutrient mix!", he shouted. "These fuckin rage lizards *started out* wanting to murder us. Fuck knows what they’re thinking about doing after talking to the most infuriating version of you for an hour."

"Trust me on this, Mr. Rhuar," Qktk said sagely. "The dockmaster was very clear about their code. As long as you do not insult their children, their gods or their king you will always have a chance to smooth it over. Our goal is to buy time until Anja and Jesri get back, and every second we keep them angry and distracted is another that they may use to complete their mission. If we can keep them from establishing the terms of combat with us, they will not fight."

"If you say so," said Rhuar doubtfully. "Seems to me like they’re about as angry as angry gets."

Qktk chittered. "No, I think we’re still fine. They should be calling back any minute now. In fact-" He reached over and toggled the viewscreen, displaying their Ysleli contact.

Only it wasn’t Tarl. A massive Ysleli sat on the screen, lounging on an ornate throne some distance from the camera. His muscular bulk was draped in fine cloth and furs, but gleaming metal armor peeked out from underneath. His yellow skin was lined with age, eyes glinting with hard-won experience and a predatory savvy that lanced through the viewscreen to tickle all of Qktk’s long-buried flight instincts. One clawed hand drummed its fingers idly on a Ysleli skull, of which several were encrusted with jewels and affixed to his throne.

"You address the King," he rumbled somewhat unnecessarily. "I am Sitrl, sovereign of Ysl, champion of Ysl, protector of Ysl." His eyes flashed. "Word of you has reached my ears."

Qktk was having a very hard time maintaining his calm facade. Rhuar was not trying.

Sitrl inspected one of his glossy, sharp claws. "My warfather says you named the fleetmaster an unblooded grub earlier," he said casually, "which gives me pause because I am the fleetmaster."

He looked back at the camera, his deep black eyes boring into Qktk. "Your powerful ship and hideous visage may cow my subordinates, but I am the King. You name me unblooded? A bold claim, to be sure, but one easily proven false." His hand contracted, shattering the skull it rested on. "I will show you your own blood as the proof, every last drop of it. And then, shipmaster - we will discuss the punishment for spreading lies."

The transmission terminated, and the cloud of red dots on the tactical display began to move slowly towards the Grand Design.

"Mr. Rhuar," Qktk said weakly, "I will allow that I may have made a miscalculation."

Part 13

Anja glared over the rubble of Trelir’s desk and brought her rifle to bear squarely on his head. The point of her bloodied bayonet dripped slowly, a hand’s span from his face. "And if we choose not to stay and chat?", she asked.

"Oh, by all means do as you wish," he said, a simpering grin spreading over his half-face. "But please be aware that if you incapacitate me or breach the room, I will detonate explosives that will destroy us all quite thoroughly."

Jesri moved to probe the blast door that had slammed down across the exit, keeping her rifle trained on the Emissary. "Sealed tight," she muttered.

"Now, now," Trelir said amicably, "don’t be glum. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I heard you had arrived! Why, this is the first chance I’ve had in ages to sit down and chat with my professional peers."

"Peers?", sneered Anja. "Please."

"On the contrary, I think you’ll find we have a lot in common," said Trelir. "Are we not both artificial constructs created to enforce the will of our builders? Do we not both strive to execute those commands to the best of our abilities?" He settled back in his chair, which creaked worryingly. "Even if we may well be dead in half an hour, I see no reason to deprive ourselves of thirty minutes of worthwhile conversation."

"Is this a game to you?", Jesri hissed. "We’re not going to sit around and have a tea party with a genocidal monster."

Trelir grimaced. "Call me names if you must, but I feel compelled to point out that I’m the one person in this room who has never killed anyone."

Anja slammed her hand into the wall again, throwing chunks of rubble to the rapidly growing pile on the floor. "The Gestalt-"

He waved her off. "Yes, yes, the Gestalt, as you call it. I’d term it less of a genocidal monster than an assertive solipsist," he muttered. "But that’s beside the point. I’m not the Gestalt, no more than a drop of water is the ocean." He smirked. "But then, you seem to be quite content with guilt by association. How many innocent Ysleli did you just kill on your way in here, again?"

Jesri opened her mouth to retort, but Trelir cut her off with a sharp movement of his hand. "None of them knew my nature or my purpose here. They were soldiers and scientists, just performing their function. You seek to satisfy some useless notion of vengeance by outdoing your enemy at the same crimes you accuse it of visiting on your people. Retributive justice is so primal, so satisfying, isn’t it?"

Anja snorted. "You will have no luck if you want us to accept the wholesale genocide of humanity as a fait accompli with no repercussions."

"Genocide, genocide, feh!", he said, throwing his hands up in the air. "Don’t presume that your irrational morality is persuasive outside of the soggy confines of your skull. Why would sanctity of life matter except in the context of preserving the ultimate continuity of life? Why is any continuity of life important outside of the Confluence, the greatest example of the phenomenon? Answer these questions before you prattle on about genocide," he sneered.

"You can’t rationalize away the lives taken-", spat Jesri, but Trelir spoke over her.

"I rationalize nothing," he said coolly. "I begin and end at rationality, there is no need to bridge a gap. It is not necessary. My role is simple, my position is simple. Nothing is asked of me that goes against my nature - and I am thankful to be left so unconflicted by my creator. Were mine as inconsiderate and sloppy as yours, I would bear them some resentment. Instead, my purpose and nature are in complete alignment. Any greater purpose lies with the greater Confluence."

"It’s easy to dodge responsibility by hiding behind your insignificance," retorted Jesri. "Do you even know what the ‘greater purpose’ is?"

"Don’t ask a raindrop what the ocean knows," shrugged Trelir.

Anja backhanded him across the torso, sending him flying into the wall once more. He picked himself up and walked calmly back to his chair, shaking his head. "I must remind you about the explosives," he said, "please don’t force me to cut short our chat - although I find the discourse lackluster so far, I must say."

He picked up the silver sphere he had been holding before they walked in, rolling it around in his hands. "How about a change of pace? I want you to wait calmly until I receive a message from the Confluence, and you want information about your toy here." He shot a pained glance at Anja. "I’m willing to answer some questions if it will get you to stop hitting me."

Jesri blinked, her anger momentarily forgotten. "That’s the weapon?", she asked intently. "Why would you give us information about the weapon? Assuming we believe you, that is."

"Because it can’t hurt the Confluence," answered Trelir. He twisted his hands before either of them could move to stop him, separating the sphere into two halves. The sphere was hollow, and it was empty.

"It was a deception," he said. "The resource allocations for the project were fake, the scientists were working on unrelated projects - although some of them didn’t know it. An elaborate web of lies and misdirection to hide a simple truth: The weapon never existed."

"Liar," Anja breathed, her voice high and tense. "Why should we believe anything you say?"

Trelir shrugged. "You may believe as you wish, but it is not in my nature to lie. It is not necessary." He traced a long finger around the rim of one hemisphere. "The Confluence always knew your efforts would amount to nothing, of course. The gulf between humanity and a perfect entity like the Confluence cannot be bridged."

"That doesn’t track," said Jesri, unable to resist a response. "I don’t care how powerful the Gestalt is, organizing the attack on humanity took resources and effort. If we were no threat, why remove us?"

"Put simply, you were an unknown variable," Trelir sighed.

Anja moved to backhand him again, but Jesri shot her a strong «Wait!» before she could do much more than growl menacingly. Trelir looked alarmed, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

"No, no," he said, seeming genuinely taken aback. "Please forgive my lack of context, it was not meant to diminish your importance." He smoothed the tatters of his skin across his cheek thoughtfully. "Quite the opposite, actually. It’s a problem of perspective. From where you stand, unknown variables are an inevitable fact of life. For the Confluence, they are not."

"In fact," he continued, "the Confluence tolerates no unknown variables of significance. Your masters were problematic because not only did they introduce unknown variables, they…" He trailed off, gesturing fruitlessly as he sifted through potential phrasings. "They resisted definition," he concluded tentatively. "In fact, it may be best to say they were an unknowable variable."

Anja shifted position, caught between anger and curiosity. "And this justified wiping out a civilization?"

"Oh, yes," he said earnestly. "You see, when the Confluence saw you passing around this toy ball as if it were the key to victory, there was some concern. It was not in alignment with its model of humanity’s behavior. You had been heretofore logical, in your own way, and your insane behavior called the model’s underlying premises into question. The decision was made to increase the detail of the model, and extensive resources were dedicated to that end."

He shook his head. "Unfortunately, that just exacerbated the issue. The more factors it included, the more detail it added to the simulation of human behavior, the less predictable the behavior became. It was eventually so unpredictable that identical models with identical starting conditions produced widely differing results. The Confluence found that… alarming, is a rough equivalent. Intolerable."

Jesri shook her head in disbelief. "You killed us all because you had trouble with your simulations? Just that?"

Trelir bared his teeth. "I told you, do not diminish it. For an entity like the Confluence, discovering an ‘unknown unknown’ is significant. It calls into question every assessment, every predictive-" He trailed off, his mouth hanging slightly open and eyes unfocusing. "Oh my, yes," he whispered. "Oh, that’s remarkable."

"Do we need to give you a moment?", snarked Jesri.

"Your attempts at sullying this experience fall short," he said softly. "I’ve just received my response from the Confluence." He shook his head slightly and seemed to emerge from his reverie. "Good news, we all get to live. We’re all going to stay here, in this room," he said, "until the Ysleli engage your ship. Another Emissary will be along to finish it off and pick you up afterwards for study. We can continue to talk in the interim, if you’d like." He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap, looking at them expectantly.

Jesri and Anja shared a look.

"Sorry," drawled Anja, "we have a few issues with that plan." She moved to loom over him threateningly.

Trelir flashed her an infuriating little smirk. "I’m afraid you have no ability to dictate terms, my dear. The options are compliance or death. Why don’t you relax and wait for all this to conclude?"

Jesri sighed and shook her head. "Well, we’ve learned at least one valuable thing from our conversation with you," she said.

"Pray tell," Trelir responded, his expression curious.

She gave him a cool stare. "Your behavioral models are terrible."

Anja’s armored fist flashed out again and grabbed the Emissary by the neck, slamming him into the wall beside the door. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the point of impact, but the wall held.

"Foolishness!", he gasped, struggling against Anja’s grip. "You can’t break free of this room! The walls-!" He was cut short as Anja hammered him against the wall once more, breaking chunks of it free.

"Your model tell you that?", she replied, her grin audible even through the suit’s speakers.

"I have instructions," he gasped, his arms straining against her metallic fingers. "I have been commanded-!"

She smashed him into the wall once more, the stone crumbling to reveal the warped metal reinforcements beneath. As Anja pressed him against the wall, Trelir reached out with one arm to grab her sword and wrench it away from its mount on her rifle. She leapt back, releasing him to create distance, but he thrust forward with preternatural speed to jam the blade downwards into the right knee joint of her suit.

Anja staggered back with a scream of pain, clutching the blade where it protruded from the armor’s metallic skin. Trelir struggled to his feet, breathing heavily. "I will kill us all, if you force me," he panted. "Stand down."

Jesri shot him in the face with her rifle, snapping his head back and blasting the remaining yellowed skin to shreds. "Make me," she said defiantly.

An unnerving metallic growl rumbled up from his ruin of a mouth. "Fine," he whispered, tilting his head with grim finality. He held position expectantly for half a second before his eyes widened in alarm. "What-?"

Anja barreled into him, using her good leg to spring forwards and shoulder-check him into the shattered wall. It buckled as the full mass of the suit collided with it, sending Trelir and Anja sprawling into a neighboring office. Jesri sprang through the gap after them, her rifle on the downed Emissary. "Technical difficulties?", she inquired snidely.

Anja struggled to her feet, her wounded leg moving stiffly. The sword had been torn free when she crashed through the wall, and Jesri could see drops of clear blood hanging from the gash in her armor.

"Anja, you ok?" she asked worriedly.

"Fine," her sister grunted, voice thick with pain. "Suit is taking care of it."

Jesri shook her head. The powered armor had some limited first-aid capabilities in case its occupant was injured, but they were mostly stopgap measures. "Come on," she said. "No reason to stick around here."

Jesri took point and moved into the hallway, rifle high, while Anja lumbered behind her with a stiff gait. She had locked the knee joint of her armor to keep her upright, leaving her injured leg sweeping outward with every step.

"Wait!", howled Trelir from behind them, struggling to his feet and emerging into the hall. "What did you do to me? You can’t leave, I must fulfill-"

Jesri shot him again, staggering him backwards. His eyes flashed with anger. "You can’t escape," he spat. "I will fulfill my purpose!" He reached up and placed his hands on either side of his head, grasping firmly.

Jesri heard Anja’s intake of breath from beside her. An armored hand closed around her bicep as Anja spun to place her suit in between Trelir and Jesri. The Emissary closed his eyes and braced himself before wrenching violently, ripping his head from his shoulders in a burst of sparks and tattered skin.

The explosives packed into the office immolated Trelir’s corpse in a wave of fire. The pressure wave tore the blast door from his office doorway, slamming it into Anja’s back and sending both sisters tumbling down the corridor. Jesri narrowly avoided being crushed by Anja’s armor as they collided with the bend in the hall.

Jesri’s head swam, streams of blood trailing from her ears and nose. The corridor leading back to the office was engulfed in a sea of flame. Her world was smoke and blood and distant screams. She hauled herself over to where Anja lay facedown on the floor, the back of her suit peppered with shrapnel and soot.

"Anja," she croaked, the words catching in her throat. «Anja!», she shouted over the link. Her sister’s prone form shifted, turning its head towards her.

«Sister,» Anja sent back. «Are you hurt?»

Jesri found herself laughing, despite the circumstances. «I’m fine, dummy. You hogged all the kaboom for yourself.»

«Sorry,» sent Anja, beginning to sluggishly pull herself upright. She turned to look back at the inferno behind them. «We should leave.»

"Sensible as always," Jesri muttered, her voice oddly muffled. Her ears were damaged, she realized. This was going to take a long stint in the autodoc to fix.

The two made their way back through the storerooms and into the maze of tunnels, leaving the choking clouds of smoke behind them. Anja lumbered slowly forward, favoring her good leg, while Jesri took point in a near-automatic haze, her training taking over as she swept through the corridors with rifle high and ready.

The few straggling Ysleli they encountered were cut down with quick bursts from her rifle, and once by a heavy fist from Anja when a groggy soldier popped out of a doorway right next to them. Anja didn’t speak as they escaped, save for a few gasps when she inadvertently put weight on her injured knee.

It seemed like hours passed before they emerged into the incongruously bright and sunny compound, staggering through the sunlight to the Huginn where it was parked on the runway. A loose semicircle of bodies surrounded it where the aboveground personnel had tried to breach the defense perimeter and fallen short.

Jesri stumbled into the shuttle, mentally signaling the hatch to close as soon as she heard Anja’s boots stomp clumsily onto the decking. "Ok, hang on to something," she said, punching commands into the flight console, "I’m going to get us moving back to the Grand Design and then we can see about your leg."

The engines whined in polyharmonic tones as she committed the course into the flight computer, a cloud of dust rising from the runway as they left the smoldering compound behind them. Jesri turned back to where Anja was sitting slumped against the bulkhead and bent down to examine the rent in her armor. It was a nasty gash, but she couldn’t see much past the pinkish-white sealant foam their suits used as an automated reaction to damage.

"Anja, can you pop the armor off so I can take a look?", she asked, probing around the hole. No response came, and she looked up in alarm. "Anja?", she asked, but her sister remained still.

Panicked, Jesri dug around the neck seal of the armor for the emergency release. Her fingers found the two tabs and pressed them simultaneously, causing the helmet to pop loose. She tore it off to reveal Anja’s unconscious face, head lolling to the side. Amber crusts of blood matted her hair around her ears, and the lower half of her face was covered in blood from her nose - the overpressure from the explosion had gotten to her as well.

Jesri cradled Anja’s head in her hands, brushing away the dried blood. "Anja, come on," she pleaded, moving her hands down to scrabble at the releases for the rest of the armor. The ship shook as they increased in altitude, following an escape trajectory that would lead them back to the Grand Design’s main hangar. She swore as the vibration and slick blood made her fingers slip once, then twice off of the release tab for the chest.

The armor peeled away, finally, and Jesri made short work of the catches holding the arms and legs tight. She slid her arms under Anja’s torso to haul her upright, wincing as she felt the blood-soaked gashes in her undersuit. Her fingers scraped past sharp bits of shrapnel that had perforated the suit’s skin when the explosion hurled most of a reinforced bunker wall at her back. She got a grip and pulled to free her from the armor.

Anja slid free easily, her limbs dripping clear blood. Too easily, she saw with a shock - Anja’s right leg was severed at the knee where Trelir had stabbed her, the lower part remaining in the suit as Jesri pulled her away. A thick cake of medical foam from the suit ringed the wound, partially sealing the stump. "Oh shit, Anja," Jesri mumbled, "I got you, don’t worry, don’t worry."

She carried her sister awkwardly over to the FAC’s basic medical bay, hooking up the emergency sensors that immediately told her that her sister was dying. Sharp tones issued from the diagnostic monitor as it displayed lists of recommended treatments in strident red text. Jesri fumbled through the medical cabinets, her fingers knocking aside the neatly arrayed supplies until she found what she was looking for.

She stripped away the packaging on a stimulant syringe and froze - the familiar battlefield first-line stim was black and caked inside the barrel, dessicated crusts leaking past the rotten plunger and onto the packaging. The stimulant was thousands of years past its expiration. "Fuck, fuck!", she shouted, ripping through package after package to find them all totally useless.

Her hands were shaking, and she paused a moment as the stark reality of her situation washed over her. She didn’t have any medications, she didn’t have any auto-doc, and her sister was dying on the bed in front of her. She took a deep, steadying breath and grabbed some of the sterile nanofiber gauze packs from the cabinet. "Okay, Anja," she muttered, using her belt knife to cut away the tatters of her sister’s undersuit. "Hang on for me."

Outside, the thin whistle of atmosphere vanished as they crossed into the starry blackness of space.

"Hey, it’s the Huginn!", Rhuar shouted in surprise.

Qktk stopped his worried pacing and studied the tactical display until he found the blue dot arcing rapidly off the planet’s surface and turning towards their position. Between the two, an angry cloud of red moved towards the center of the display where the larger blue bar marking the Grand Design glowed cheerfully.

He turned back to Rhuar. "Are they going to make it in time?", he asked anxiously. "It looks like they won’t reach us before the Ysleli fleet."

Rhuar tilted his head, running through sensor feeds. "The FAC should be able to beat those barges the Ysleli are running no trouble, but you’re right - they’re moving kinda slow, like they’re stuck on autopilot. Lemme send a message over and see what’s up."

Qktk turned his attention back to the tactical display as Rhuar adopted a look of concentration, his eyes glazing over. The red swarm was closing steadily, albeit slowly. They were still quite some time from arrival, but the ship had no data about the range or abilities of their weapons. They could begin firing in fifteen minutes or in fifteen seconds - there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the glowing blue dot representing the FAC as it slowly crossed empty space towards the ship.

The floor around the medical bay was scattered with sharp fragments of metal, flecked with dried blood from where they had lodged in Anja’s back. Jesri was bent over her sister, delicately working a wicked sliver out from near the base of Anja’s spine. Blood welled from the cut as it slid free, and Jesri deftly packed the wound before moving on to another. And another.

She had flipped Anja face-down on the table to expose her shredded back. The remains of her blood-covered undersuit were on the floor, sliced to ribbons. She moved from wound to wound in a trance, cleaning and packing each one to try and stabilize her sister. The diagnostic monitors told her she was doing a barely passable job.

A sharp trill from the communications console broke her concentration and made her jump in surprise, slicing her finger on a shard of warped metal embedded in Anja’s shoulder. "Fuck!", she screamed, her face contorting in pain and frustration. She stepped over to smack the console, hard, then turned back to work on her sister.

Behind her, Rhuar’s face materialized on a display. "Hey, Jesri-" he began, cutting off abruptly as he saw her hunched over Anja’s naked, mangled body. "Oh, shit!", he yelped. "Jesri, are you guys all right?"

"Obviously not!", snarled Jesri, not looking up from her work. "Unless this is important, Rhuar-"

"We’re about to be under attack," he said quickly, "but we can’t leave until you get back. Can you take it off autopilot and fly in faster?"

Jesri looked up briefly to shoot Rhuar a disheveled, annoyed glare, and he shrank back involuntarily from the grim violence etched into her face. "Rhuar, use your fucking head!", she shouted. "You’ve got remote command of the FAC, I’m busy, fly it in yourself or blast the yellow bastards with all the big fuckoff guns you have on the cruiser. Or both, just - don’t interrupt me," she said, a slight hollow note creeping into her voice as she glanced back down at her sister’s still form. "Please."

Rhuar nodded silently and cut the transmission.

"Well?", Qktk asked, a shrill note creeping into his voice. "What did she say?"

"Anja’s hurt," Rhuar responded, "Jesri is busy looking after her. I can help them get here a bit quicker, but…" He trailed off, looking at the tactical display. "It’ll be hard splitting focus to fly the ship in, and I don’t think I can take it to full speed safely. We need to slow the fleet down."

Qktk sputtered, his mandibles clacking against each other rapidly. "Mr. Rhuar, we’re out of time! I can’t stall them anymore." He nervously rubbed his legs together, shaking his head. "I’m not sure what else we can do."

"We have to fight," Rhuar said, his eyes defocusing as he concentrated on flying both ships at once. "I’m transferring weapons systems to your console. Sorry, Captain, but the targeting sensors are really intense," he said, shaking his head slightly. "I can’t take that feed on top of the others, I need you to operate the guns. Don’t worry, it’s pretty self-explanatory."

"I’m a trader, not a soldier!", Qktk wailed, but Rhuar was already lost in concentration as he guided the FAC back towards the Grand Design. Qktk shook himself again and took a deep, stabilizing breath. His console had lit up with an array of options, helpfully translated into Httq:

CIWS

FORE ONLINE 5/6 (AUTO PD)

PORT ONLINE 6/8 (AUTO PD)

STBD ONLINE 7/8 (AUTO PD)

AFT ONLINE 5/7 (AUTO PD)

CQB RAIL AUX

TOP ONLINE 4/4 (READY)

BOT ONLINE 3/4 (READY)

LR RAIL

TOP ONLINE 10/12 (READY)

BOT ONLINE 08/10 (READY)

HCPL

ARRAY ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

WCML

PORT ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

STBD ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

TORP

ARRAY ONLINE 6/6 (DISARMED)

"Too much to hope for a user manual?", he grumbled. "Not like anything could go catastrophically wrong if I start pushing buttons." He punched a foreleg irritably at the "ready" option with the highest numbers next to it. The console switched to a targeting display, lighting up with a blinding sea of red dots. "At least I can’t miss," he muttered darkly, tapping a few more buttons. "Aaaand… there."

Warfather Tarl was jolted out of his brooding silence by an excitable yelp from a spearbrother at the operations console. He sighed. Proper bridge discipline was hard to come by in the young, even for a warfather. "Scream like a child again and I will send you home on foot," he grated. "What is it?"

The spearbrother gave him a wide-eyed look. "Warfather, the enemy attacks! The Racing Wind has been lost with all hands! Three support ships are badly damaged and must withdraw!"

Tarl grunted. "Show me," he said, turning towards his own display. On it, a blurry image of the ill-fated gunship appeared. He watched as it floated silently in space for a few moments before exploding without preamble, spraying a fountain of debris aft of the ship at remarkable speed. Secondary explosions issued from the ruins of the engineering section, sending the wreck tumbling end over end and forcing other fleet elements to disperse. He gave the excitable spearbrother a look and narrowed his eyes. "Explain," he rumbled.

"Warfather, I believe the enemy is armed with kinetic artillery," he said.

"You believe?", Tarl said dangerously. "Your position here is not so that I may have the benefit of your counsel, spearbrother. Why do you not have sensor traces? Why was there no warning of incoming fire?"

"Apologies, warfather," he said nervously, baring his throat in submission. "The sensors detected nothing. Based on the speed of impact, however-" The young spearbrother cut off suddenly and cringed. "My apologies again, warfather, I will refrain from speculation."

Tarl sighed. It seemed as though the longer he served, the harder it was to find competent junior officers. "Continue," he said. "Concisely."

"Warfather, the shots were unavoidable. Based on the sheer force of the impact, they were traveling at nearly sixty five thousand ri. Although we are almost one point three million lesa away, they would have crossed the distance far too quickly to maneuver out of position." The spearbrother opened his mouth to say more, but was cut off by a notification on his console. "Warfather, the Blooded Blade has been destroyed along with half of its element," he reported tremulously.

"Preposterous," the warfather grumbled, staring at the bright mote in the distance that he knew to be an unfathomably huge warship. At this distance, it was just beginning to appear more than a point of light. "Yet everything about today is preposterous," he sighed. "Signal the fleet to loosen formation and volley. Even if that blackened demon has guns that fire twenty times faster than ours, I doubt he can move that monstrosity fast enough to clear our fire."

His staff officers gave him brisk nods and pushed off towards their own consoles, barking orders to the fleet. Tarl allowed himself a slight smile. This, at least, would demonstrate the discipline and might of Ysl.

"Ha, got you!", Qktk cheered, watching another blip disintegrate into a cloud of smaller readings. He moved his reticle to the next dot, but before the reload cycle had completed a muted klaxon sounded and a wave of new contacts appeared on the tactical display.

"Whoa!", Rhuar yelped suddenly, his focus drawn back to the bridge. "Captain, I think you pissed them off. They’ve just fired massed artillery of some sort at us. I don’t think we can maneuver out of the way in time, either." He licked his lips, concentrated for a few seconds, then grinned. "Oh, hah. Never mind. Ship has it covered, watch this."

Qktk heard a muffled, repetitive vibration from elsewhere in the ship and gave Rhuar a querying look.

"Close-in Weapon System," the dog responded happily as blips on the tactical display began to wink out. "Point defense. We’d be in trouble if it was anything fast or heavy, but their weak-ass artillery will be deflected and reduced to scrap before any of it hits us." He frowned, a thought occurring to him. "Although with that volume of fire, we need to keep them far away to give the guns time to work. How’s the gunnery going, Captain?"

Qktk shook his head. "It works great, but the reload time is too long. I can’t shoot fast enough to get them all before they close with us. There’s so damn many of them!"

Rhuar gave him a look. "Captain, you’ve been plinking at them with the railguns?"

Qktk tossed his limbs in irritation. "How should I know? I don’t know how any of this works! It’s a small miracle I managed to hit three of them!"

"All right, all right," Rhuar said placatingly. "Let me query the ship real quick to see what some of those other weapons systems do, I think we probably have a better option." His eyes defocused again as he connected to the ship, sorting through data feeds. "Let’s see," he mumbled. "Torpedos look punchy… Ah, but too slow. Hmm. Oh, I remember this thingy!" He bounced on his front paws in excitement. "Let’s see what it says in the database," he muttered, virtually paging through documentation. "Helical Collimator Plasma Lance Array... Directed focused particle beam from controlled asymmetric annihilation of one gram of-"

Rhuar snapped his head up, his eyes sparkling with glee. "Oh, fuck yes. Captain, we have to try this out. Choose the entry on your list labeled ‘HCPL’."

Somewhat lost, Qktk jabbed a forelimb at the appropriate entry. A reticle appeared again, and throughout the bridge a low thrum of power began to build. "Uh, Mr. Rhuar," he said, glancing around, "are you sure you know what you’re doing? This sounds… big."

"Oh, it’s big," Rhuar said excitedly. "Just zoom the targeter until you’ve got a group of, say, one hundred ships."

"One hundred ships?", Qktk screeched. "Mr. Rhuar, I refuse! This is a weapon of mass destruction!"

Rhuar pondered for a second. "Well, yes," he admitted. "By most definitions it is. But consider the alternative."

Qktk peered at his artificer angrily. "Which is?"

"We let them close with us, the king of the angry lizards decorates his throne with our skulls, and then sometime later the universe rips itself apart to become the playground of an insane machine god," Rhuar said matter-of-factly.

Qktk blinked. "Point taken," he said glumly. Touching the console, he moved the circle so that it encompassed about a hundred little blips. He noticed one highlighted dot on the edge of the reticle, doomed by a millimeter’s movement of his forearm. Sliding his arm down fractionally, he contracted the circle and the dot lost its highlight. He wondered if any of them would ever know. "Okay," he said, his voice wavering, "we’re locked on."

Rhuar nodded, licking his lips. "Now, uh, when the button says ready…"

Tarl watched silently as the last of the volley disappeared from their tracking display, having covered less than half the distance to the enemy. Apparently their damnably fast guns had multiple uses. He stared at the sliver of light hanging in the distance and willed it to reveal its weaknesses.

For the second time, Tarl’s excitable sensor officer made an involuntary yelp of alarm. Tarl sighed. He had managed to go an entire year without having to publicly disembowel any of his officers, a personal best, but this particular spearbrother was threatening to end his streak.

"I believe I told you-", he started.

"A million apologies, warfather," the spearbrother interrupted, "but there is a massive emissions spike from the enemy."

Tarl slid over and swiped his immaculately polished claws through his sensor officer’s throat. The officer died gurgling, his blood slipping past his fingers and collecting in quavering blobs that floated in the microgravity. "Backup, forward," he sighed wearily, wiping a smear of blood from his hand. "Tell me what the spearbrother found so interesting that he would interrupt me to share it."

A lean junior officer edged around the spreading cloud of blood and hooked his claws into the console’s retention straps. "He was correct, warfather," he said after a moment. "The enemy is building up some massive reserve of energy. I cannot discern the nature of the energy, but I suspect a weapon."

Tarl snorted. "Not stupid enough to miss a knife at your throat, at least." He turned to his staff officers again. "Command the fleet to further loosen their formation," he said. "I don’t want any secondary impacts if he hits us with something big. Helm, minimize cross-section." He opened his mouth to continue, but paused with his mouth open in shock.

For the barest of moments he saw a column of blazing white light connecting his fleet to the enemy ship. The single column resolved into a myriad of lines near his formation, each lance stretching out to strike the center of a ship in his flank with a flare so bright that it triggered the automated safety shutters. Dark metal clanged into place around the viewports and over the sensor suites, plunging the bridge into a moment of sudden and quiet isolation.

The crew stood in silence, watching past the dancing afterimage in their eyes as the external feeds flickered back on one by one and the viewports slid slowly open. The light had cut off, leaving a luminous yellow particle stream behind that flowed over his formation like a lambent fogbank. As Tarl watched, it cooled to orange, then red, then finally dimmed enough that the cameras could pierce through.

Tarl’s flank was gone, replaced by a scorched window into Hell. Twisted globs of molten metal spun hot and frantic through the void, illuminating the vanishing particle trace with an eerie red glow. Frozen crystals of condensed moisture and atmosphere twinkled and refracted the light amidst the incandescent slag, echoing the droplets of blood still floating on the bridge. It dimmed as Tarl watched; the force of the beam had blasted the ruins of his flank backwards and knocked it into a different trajectory. Although the cameras dutifully tracked the macabre wreckage as it flew back, the red smear of fire and death was receding rapidly from view as his crew looked on in horror. Far behind the surviving ships, Ysl’s atmosphere roiled with a thin line of aurorae as the dregs of the beam washed across the planet’s magnetic field.

The warfather stared at the gaping hole on his tactical display that used to be the better part of a hundred ships. Used to be tens of thousands of officers and enlisted, tens of thousands of his soldiers. Tarl found himself laughing, a guttural, deep laugh that reeled upwards erratically until he was cackling like a madman in the center of the bridge.

His laughter spent itself and he shook his head, turning towards the concerned looks of his senior staff. Above his fading smile, his black eyes were empty. "Tin cans and pointed sticks, indeed," he said ruefully, wiping a hand over his face. "Give me a channel to the enemy… and prepare another to the king." His first officer’s eyes widened with realization.

"Against the fury of the heavens a warrior may submit in penance or perish as a fool," Tarl quoted, his mouth a grim line. He turned from the shocked and mutinous gazes of his senior staff to stare back out at the enemy warship in the distance, a twinkling sliver of light against the starfield. "I see some of you wish to fight," he said quietly, "to avenge our fallen brothers. You think our honor sullied by this blow and wish to restore it with a glorious death."

He looked back at his officers, a few of which were nodding. "You have mistaken this for a battle, gentlemen. The honor of a child is not tarnished if he brandishes a stick at a warrior and is bested." He shook his head. "No, we will thank this demon."

"Thank him, warfather?", another officer asked in confusion.

"Oh yes," Tarl breathed, a mad light in his eyes. "For his restraint." He stared each of them in the eye in turn, watching them shrink away from his gaze. "Fix this unfamiliar feeling in your hearts, my brothers," he whispered. "It is mercy. If a warrior wishes an impertinent child dead it takes but one blow. If the mewling brat sprawls in the dirt, bloodied, humiliated, enraged, impotent, furious, ashamed, but alive..." He smiled thinly. "Mercy. Now get me that channel to his ship, before he changes his mind."

His officers dispersed to carry out his orders, leaving Tarl to float gently beside the command console. Drops of blood from his unfortunate sensor officer drifted past, and he reached out to tap one with a claw. He felt an insane urge to leap, to dance, to caper past the shocked faces of his staff and revel in the grim absurdity that had gripped his life. His head seemed to clear for the first time that day, his fatigue and pain dashed to shards by the brush with immense and unfathomable power. There was potential in this loss, he thought.

If he could talk the king out of killing him.

Part 14

Jesri paced. The flight back up from the planet was still a blur in her memory, a rush of smeared bloody metal and her own trembling hands. Rhuar had been forced to divert his attention to help Qktk before they made it back to the ship, so the last leg of the flight resumed under the languid control of the autopilot.

Then had come the tense, hunched stalking through the halls after the escort of maintenance haulers Rhuar had sent as aid, one carrying her sister’s broken body and the rest spiriting away her shredded and bloody armor. Now she stood vigil near the autodoc, listening to the brisk movements of the machine within its opaque shell. Anja lay within, unconscious and now likely sedated as well. The sounds were soothing and repetitive, belying the mad frenzy with which the doc now worked to save her sister’s life.

Anja had stopped breathing on her own minutes before they touched down in the bay. Jesri had run alongside the maintenance bots, screaming at them to move faster towards the waiting medical bay. They were just haulers, however, and plodded along as they always did. She twisted her hands over each other, her fingers straining and joints cracking.

She was so tired.

Life alone had been her preference and her norm for most of the time she’d been alive, but the prospect of Anja’s ever-available companionship had been the salt that gave depth and meaning to those solitary years. With Anja barely clinging to life, Jesri felt every day of her age weighing on her shoulders.

So she sat and kept vigil. She would wait for Anja to be out of the doc, she decided, no matter how long it took. Even forever, the thought came, echoing seductively in her mind.

Jesri’s eyes snapped wide and she shot out of her seat, looking down at it warily. It had been years since she’d heard the siren whispers of catatonia calling to her. The temptation to sit like a rock in a river and let life flow by was strong - and addictive, once indulged. Without Anja there to break her free, it might actually be forever.

No, she decided, shaking her head angrily. She wouldn’t let her sister reawaken to see her like that. She needed to move.

Rhuar nearly fainted with relief when he saw Jesri come out of the bridge lift in her duty greys, appearance restored to the usual professional caliber save for a few raw scuffs on her cheek and neck.

"Jesri! Thank fuck you’re here. Is Anja ok?", Rhuar blurted, his speech nervous and rambling. His exoskeleton didn’t seem to know what to do with its hands, and they darted awkwardly around as he paced.

Jesri surveyed the bridge, which looked about like it had when she left. The glowing tactical display still showed the thick red cloud of the Ysleli fleet between them and the planet - save for a neat round hole in the formation that was only now beginning to close.

"Anja’s in the doc," Jesri said, her expression forbidding. "What’s our status?"

Mercifully, Rhuar took a cue from her brusque manner and got straight to business. "Standoff, currently. We chatted with their admiral dude, Qktk insulted the king, they shot at us, we shot at them, now they’re deciding how they feel about that."

Jesri raised an eyebrow. "I feel like I should ask for more detail on a few of those points," she said, "but maybe later. No damage to the ship?"

Rhuar shook his head. "Nah, the point defense kicked in and shot down their artillery."

"What’d we fire back?", Jesri asked, looking at the collapsing hole in their formation on the tactical map. "Seems like it was effective."

"Oh, yeah, the plasma lance!", gushed Rhuar, enthusiasm banishing his anxiety. "That thing is intense! We lined it up and took out dozens of them in one shot, it was amazing!"

She nodded. "That was a good choice, tactically and psychologically. Though…" She gave him a look. "Aren’t you being a bit glib about the whole thing?"

Rhuar looked down, a guilty expression sliding over his face. "Sorry. I know we killed a bunch of people just now, and I’m not happy about that." A sliver of defiance came into his expression, and he straightened up to look Jesri in the eye. "But on the other hand, fuck ‘em. The Captain tried to stall them as long as he could and they told him to shut up and fight. We can’t let them stop us from fighting the Gestalt. We’re saving their planet too, even if they don’t know it."

Jesri ruffled his ears, amused despite herself. "Rhuar, I think you’d have made a good marine." She looked over at the command dais, where Qktk was slumped listlessly in the captain’s chair. "Somehow I don’t think you managed to convince Kick to see it the same way."

Rhuar looked over at him sadly. "Yeah," he said. "I kinda forced him into firing it. I’ve been trying to cheer him up so he can talk to the Ysleli but I’m, uh. I’m not good at that," he said somewhat lamely.

She flashed him a grin. "You’re a happy sort of person, Rhuar. It’s not a bad thing, but you don’t have much of an appreciation for gloom and depression. Let me try talking with him for a bit."

She left Rhuar and plopped into the first officer’s chair, sizing Qktk up. The little Htt was half-curled in the seat of the overlarge chair, his eyes closed and legs tucked in tightly. "Hey bud," Jesri said casually, "how’s your day been?"

Qktk shifted, but didn’t reply. Jesri leaned back in her chair, propping her feet up on the console and stretching. "Me, I’ve had a pretty shit day so far. Started out okay, got to see some nice mountains. Flew the Huginn around. After that, though," she sighed, "it was pretty much straight shit. Got shot at. Shot some folks. Had to look at the mutilated corpses of my dead sisters. Went toe-to-toe with the face of evil, actually a pretty nice guy in retrospect. Dead now, though. Found out that I didn’t have nearly as good a grasp on the whole Gestalt situation as I thought. Actually, seems like we’re pretty fucked at this point." She paused, reflecting. "Oh, and Anja’s leg got cut off."

Qktk’s head popped up. "Her leg? Is she okay?", he asked, a note of concern in his voice.

"Oh good, I was afraid you were asleep," Jesri deadpanned. "She’s in the autodoc. She’ll be fine… if she lives." She hesitated, and Qktk turned a concerned stare on her.

"Are you okay?", he asked. The sheer quantity of eyes he could bring to bear lent a simple gaze more gravitas than she was accustomed to.

Jesri laughed darkly. "Okay is a relative term, Kick," she chuckled. "I’m fine. I had a whole bunch of fuckery dumped in my lap today, but I’m…" She grimaced. "I’m deferring it. For a quiet moment later on."

Qktk hung his head ruefully. "If your intent was to make me feel silly for moping, mission accomplished. All I did was push a button."

Jesri reached over to smack him on the shell. "Don’t apologize. That many lives shouldn’t pass lightly." She straightened up, sitting properly in her chair and throwing a glance at Rhuar. "Well, for most people," she amended. "Besides, you’re selling yourself short. I hear you told the king to fuck off?"

"No!", Qktk said, his eyes shooting open in alarm. "I insulted him accidentally, to his subordinate. It was all a huge misunderstanding."

A tone sounded from the console in front of them, and Jesri glanced over to see a softly pulsing light. "You want to take a shot at clearing it up?"

The transmission finally connected, and Tarl kept himself from tensing as the familiar nightmare face of the black demon popped onto the screen. This time, he was flanked by two subordinates - on his left sat a dark-furred creature with some manner of mechanical exoskeleton wrapped over its back and legs. Its mouth hung open slightly, revealing gleaming white predatory teeth and a lolling tongue.

To the demon’s left sat a tall, lanky creature, almost Ysleli in build, but with unnatural pale-pink skin and odd blue-on-white eyes that regarded the camera dispassionately. If its species was anything like the Ysleli, Tarl judged that it was female. Of the three, this one was dressed in a uniform that was immediately recognizable as military in origin.

"Shipmaster," Tarl said formally. "I thank you for the opportunity to engage in further discussion."

"Warfather," replied the demon in his oddly perfect Yslel, "I’m glad to see you in good health. Did you have a topic of conversation in mind?"

Tarl nodded, suddenly as nervous as he’d been in a long time. "In the name of His Royal Majesty King Sitrl, I yield the battle and stand ready to receive your demands." He let his breath out in a rush, the electric feeling of defeat singing in his nerves. It was novel, but if he had to deliver his first surrender he could find none better to receive it than this nightmare and his invincible ship.

The demon nodded his head fractionally. "Accepted. Our first officer will read the demands." The tall, uniformed alien straightened slightly and fixed the camera with a stare.

"None," she said, her voice high and clear.

Tarl stared, taken aback. "None? You have no demands in victory?"

"None," she confirmed. "We had one objective in visiting your world and we have already fulfilled it."

For the first time in many, many years, Tarl was at a loss for words. Ten thousand of his troops dead, and for what? So that this oddly mismatched crew could claim victory and move on? So that his world could be left to the ravages of war in their aftermath?

"Your arrival here will have consequences far beyond today’s dead," Tarl said, a hint of a growl seeping into his voice. "The barons will scent blood. Sitrl will be challenged. War will touch billions."

Much to Tarl’s surprise, the demon and his crew seemed discomfited by his words. The demon and his first officer shared a glance, and it was the first officer that finally spoke in response. "Tarl, I’m going to be frank with you," she said. "None of us are diplomats by trade, and you seem like the kind of guy that appreciates straight talk."

She folded her hands in her lap and gave him the full brunt of her icy gaze. "We didn’t want any of this, and your people didn’t do much of anything to deserve it. You were infiltrated by our adversary, who hid some items of great importance here." She grimaced, another statement seeming to pass unsaid. "That was our sole objective in coming to Ysl," she continued, "and we regret the loss of your ships and crew as a result."

Tarl bristled, the ghosts of his men flashing before his eyes. "If that is so, why come seeking conflict?", he thundered angrily. "Why force a fight, knowing how laughably we were outmatched? Are you accustomed to toying with your prey?"

She shook her head sadly. "If we had told you our true purpose, would you have given us what we needed? Would Sitrl? Even if you did, Trelir would have acted independently-"

"Trelir?", Tarl interjected, wheels spinning in his head. "Administrator Trelir from the Ministry of Science? What does that slimy kerl have to do with any of this? All the man is good for is stealing my fleet’s budget so he can go gallivanting around in search of yet more..."

Tarl paused, startled. "...human artifacts," he said quietly, feeling the events of the day slotting into place. He looked at the uniformed first officer with new eyes. Trelir had included many pictures and sketches in his droning presentations before the Royal Council, and the more he thought back on them… "I believe introductions may be in order," he remarked.

She smiled and inclined her head. "Captain Jesri Tam, Terran Naval Marines. The furry gentleman is Rhuar, and you’ve already met Qktk." Rhuar gave a panting grin and waved with an exoskeletal arm, while Qktk looked sheepish.

For the second time that day, Tarl found himself laughing at the absurdity of the universe. "Terran. I begin to understand," he said, shaking his head. "I’m going to kill Trelir."

"Way ahead of you," Jesri said, a hint of satisfaction in her voice. "While your fleet was engaged we sent a team to the surface. Trelir revealed himself as an agent of our enemy and attempted to detain us. I’m not sure that ‘dead’ is the right word, but you probably won’t be hearing from him again."

Tarl chuckled resignedly. "It seems the game was won before I knew I was playing. Still, by removing Trelir you’ve earned yourself goodwill from much of the court. Perhaps even enough to offset the aftermath of this battle, doubly so if his loyalties were false as you say. The man was a plague."

"More than you know," Jesri said solemnly. "He represented an entity that wishes nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of the universe as we know it."

"I’d believe it of him," Tarl chuckled, but his laughter died as he saw the stony faces looking back at him through the feed. "You’re serious," he said disbelievingly. "They have the means to do this?"

"Oh yes," Jesri replied, "and much else. We learned of its plans long ago and made our own plans to stop it." She grimaced. "Well, such as we were able. You can infer how well that went."

Tarl’s head was spinning, years of assumptions disintegrating in seconds of conversation. "The cataclysm. That was an attack? We had always assumed that humans destroyed themselves through some experiment gone wrong. Our scientists have spent years attempting to discern the nature of the fate that befell your people."

Jesri gave a wry grin. "Scientists under Trelir’s direction? He knew the precise history of those events, given that his employers directed them. Hell, he was probably there himself. He was simply trying to divert your efforts to ensure his own weren’t disrupted."

Tarl was still working himself into a proper rage in response to her revelations when his new sensor officer shouted for him, urgency threading through his voice.

"Warfather! A new contact, port fore midline. Unknown configuration, but it’s big."

He spun to look at the console, distantly noticing the three crew on the human ship look off towards their own display. Beyond their ship a large, dark ovoid had materialized without the fanfare or drama of a typical hyperspace exit. It simply appeared, cutting through the starfield like a black stain. Although not as long as the human ship it was both wider and taller, and clearly more massive.

Tarl looked back to the feed from the human ship. "Another of yours?", he asked hopefully.

Jesri shook her head, her mouth pressed into a thin line. "No, one of theirs. Like Trelir. Dammit, he told us one would be coming."

"Trelir’s death was not enough to repay his treachery," rumbled Tarl. "It is good of his masters to send more to die. We will-"

"No!", shouted Jesri, an alarmed look on her face. "Tarl, you cannot engage that ship. It’s only interested in us. Rhuar," she added, turning to the furred pilot, "get us out of here, short jump to any target."

"You flee battle?", Tarl said disbelievingly. "You have the mightiest ship we have ever known. Surely together-"

Jesri shook her head, cutting him off. "Tarl, just trust me on this. We’d have no better luck against that thing than you did against us. The best we can do is get it away from your world and hope to lose it." She turned to her pilot again. "Rhuar, now!"

Tarl regarded Jesri, her wide, earnest eyes boring through the screen at him. Her face, her posture, her rapid breath - it was fear, he saw, a cold lump settling into his stomach. Not just fear for her and her ship, but fear for Ysl. He was once again a child, Tarl realized with humiliation, to be pushed to a place of safety while the warriors worked.

He nodded slowly, reluctance etched into his face. "Then we will meet once more, if I can convince Sitrl to spare me for my defeat. Farewell, human shipmasters."

Jesri nodded and cut the transmission, the feed from their bridge winking out. Tarl looked around to his bridge staff. They looked a bit dazed by the events of the day, and he could scarcely blame them. "Battle posts!", he barked. "Reform the fleet and prepare to… hold," he said grimly. His crew snapped into action, a susurrus of anticipation running through the bridge.

He turned back towards the viewports, watching the deadly sliver of the human ship slowly pivot as it made ready to escape. He flexed his hands into fists, feeling the flakes of dark dried blood loosen from his claws. It galled him to sit and watch as the ship that killed his crew fled, pursued by the agents of those who forced their hand. Battle with either would have been a salve for his honor, but this was not a field the Ysleli could stand on. Not yet, he amended fiercely.

His fists tightened further, his claws piercing his hand to add rivulets of fresh blood to the dry. The Ysleli were not accustomed to being so insignificant, but the universe did not regard any being’s custom in its whims. After he returned to Ysl, after he informed the court of Trelir’s treachery, after he survived Sitrl’s inevitable demand for his life, then - he had work to do.

"Energy spike!", Rhuar yelled, his muscles straining as he poured his focus into the shipjack. The bridge hummed softly as the ship attempted to reorient itself for warp, but the massive cruiser could only turn so quickly. "It’s going to tag us before we can warp!", he warned.

Jesri ran over to Qktk’s console and began retargeting the primed weapons systems. Qktk fell back in his chair, worriedly buckling his restraints. "Shit," muttered Jesri, noting that the console was still set to control the HCPL. "Wouldn’t be my first choice." Her finger stabbed down at the console.

The thrumming charge of the plasma lance grew louder and louder until a piercing whine and resonant thump echoed through the ship’s superstructure. Harsh shadows filled the bridge, cast by a pillar of light that flared out to strike their ovoid aggressor. Billowing golden clouds of charged particulates filled the monitor, and for a second Jesri dared to hope the strike had somehow delayed the ship.

The haze left by the shot was flung outwards in a rapidly spreading ring to reveal the Emissary ship, a small patch of hull warped and white-hot where the beam had struck. Jesri saw something shoot out impossibly fast from the fore quarter of the ovoid, rippling the starfield and plasma remnants like a wave over the surface of a still pond. Jesri grabbed the console to brace herself for the impact. The ship’s structural beams creaked ominously as the distortion raced towards them, rising to a low, eerie scream that seemed to echo in Jesri’s skull. It rose to a crescendo, then rapidly diminished.

Rhuar’s head snapped up in shock, looking wide-eyed at Jesri. "They missed?", he said disbelievingly. "It went a few dozen meters wide! How could-" He froze, his eyes defocusing. "Oh no," he whispered.

Jesri turned to the display to see the distortion continue past them towards Ysl, lensing and warping the cloud-dappled continents. A spattering of bright lights twinkled as it rushed through the remnants of Tarl’s formation to twist and crush half a dozen ships that found themselves too close to its path.

A fountain of hazy atmosphere was drawn up in the split second before it arrived, swirling and dispersing as the ripple moved rapidly down to strike the terrain. A blinding flash issued from the point of impact, quickly obscured by the gout of grey dirt and stone that thundered upwards around the epicenter. A shockwave tore through the atmosphere, pushing the clouds outwards in a ring and leaving a hazy skein of dust and debris cluttering the air in its path.

Jesri and Qktk watched the monitors in horror as a third of Ysl’s largest continent vanished under a thick blanket of roiling dust. "Holy shit," whispered Jesri, turning back towards where Rhuar still strained to turn the ship towards their exit vector. "Rhuar, I don’t care where we end up, you jump this fucking ship now!"

"Aye sir!", Rhuar shouted back. The whine of the drives vibrated through the decking as space began picking itself apart in front of the ship. A ring of twisted starlight began to form, and Jesri stalked back to her chair and strapped in.

Rhuar’s head snapped up, looking back at Jesri in a panic. "Another spike!", he shouted. "This is going to be close!" All of Qktk’s eyes were fixed on the monitor showing the implacable Emissary ship advancing steadily towards them. A second ripple of distorted space flung itself outwards from the ship, growing in size rapidly.

The ring of light danced and churned as a black void snapped open in its center. Rhuar wasted no time in engaging the jump. The deck bucked violently to throw Jesri and Qktk against their restraints as the drive engaged. Bright light flashed through the viewports and the torus swept past the length of the ship, replaced immediately by the absolute darkness of hyperspace.

The deck heaved again as the Emissary’s shot passed through the volume of space occupied only moments before by several million tons of human warship. Vortices of light spun in the void as they were flung violently away from their collapsing ingress portal, which disintegrated in a shockwave that sent groaning tremors reverberating through the ship.

As the last noise of protest from their tormented ship trailed off, the small crew of the Grand Design sat wide-eyed and stunned on the bridge. Jesri shot Rhuar a look and coughed. "Rhuar, status?", she said, keeping most of the shake from her voice.

Rhuar picked himself up from where he had been tossed by the heaving ship and shook himself, his exoskeletal arms checking the shipjack compulsively. "Seems like we’re okay," he said after a few seconds of consideration. "We’ve had some feedback that mostly ran into the breakers, and I imagine there’s a lot of stuff that got knocked over. A few decks are suffering power and gravity reductions, we’re on auxiliary environmentals and our gravimetric sensors are going to need recalibration."

An icy trickle slipped down Jesri’s spine. "Rhuar, the autodoc," she said urgently.

Rhuar nodded. "Autodoc has power and reads as fully functional," he confirmed. "There was no interruption in power or damage to the equipment."

Jesri nodded, sagging back into her seat. "Good," she said hoarsely, suddenly feeling every minute of her age. She allowed herself a few seconds of slumped relaxation, then straightened up and cleared her throat. "How’s our heading?", she asked.

Rhuar blinked. "Shit, forgot about that," he said sheepishly. "Looks like we’re…"

He paused and blinked again. "Stay strapped in," he said tersely. "Emergency blow." His eyes glazed over and a jarring vibration began to buzz through the bridge. Motes of light flared suddenly in a corona around the ship, streaking outwards randomly.

"Wait, what?", Jesri asked, no small amount of alarm in her voice. The emergency blow was a drill practiced on every hyperspace-capable vessel. It was the option of last resort, using a sudden asymmetry of the ship’s hyperspace field to violently and unceremoniously leave cruising depth and return to normal space. It was highly unpleasant.

"Rhuar, hold on-" Jesri began, but he made a jerky chopping motion with one arm to cut her off.

"Can’t talk," he grated out, focusing intensely on the ship as the shuddering of the deck increased to violent levels. Crackling energy arced past the viewports, and for a few tense seconds they all held on in silence. Suddenly another creaking groan echoed through the bridge as the accumulating energy dissipated in a flash. A wave of nausea hit Jesri, sharp pain flashing at her temples and blurring her vision. She saw Qktk curled completely into a ball on his chair, rocking back and forth repeatedly. Rhuar was collapsed on the deck, vomiting and twitching.

She allowed herself to stay slumped and motionless for a few seconds before she winced and pulled herself upright, the motion causing her head to swim. Qktk uncurled slightly and shook his head, while Rhuar struggled to his feet and wiped his mouth.

"Well," said Jesri hoarsely. "That was fun." She leaned heavily on her chair for support and tried to will her vision to unblur. "Rhuar, would you mind telling us why we just did that?"

He coughed, shaking himself vigorously. "Something happened right after we jumped, when the window collapsed," he said weakly. "Probably something to do with that reality-bending bullshit they were shooting. Whatever happened, it kicked us way deeper than we were supposed to go, sent us moving fast. By the time I looked we were already across the outer arm."

Jesri’s head cleared like she had been plunged into icewater. "The outer arm of what? Rhuar, we can’t possibly-" She looked out of the viewports and saw an inky blackness with only a few bright points drifting slowly as the ship spun in a languid pirouette. "No," she whispered, "we were only in hyperspace for seconds!"

"I know," winced Rhuar. "I can’t explain it. But here we are." The slow rotation of the ship continued, and a bright glow peeked through the viewports.

Qktk stared, all of his eyes fixed on the window. "Jim’s hairy balls," he swore, "it can’t be..."

The three of them looked on helplessly as the full splendor of the Milky Way’s disc shone into the bridge. It was bright and glorious, still large enough to fill most of the sky, but they were decidedly on the outside looking in.

"Well, shit," Jesri remarked.

Part 15: Interlude

The rain hammered down, thundering into the sodden grass and splashing into puddles. A low, heavy mist hung over the hillocks and among the reedy trees. Droplets trickled down the matte grey barrel of Anja’s rifle and fell as she adjusted her grip. Her eyes didn’t leave the treeline.

A flash of motion in the murk drew her aim and the rifle spat ghostly fire through the downpour. A trace of steam stretched out in a thin line from the gun as the shot vaporized raindrops in its path, terminating in the hissing, charred ruin of a Buil armsman’s torso. The insectile corpse fell to the ground with its mouth open in a silent scream. Long fingers twitched, grasping the slick mud before falling still.

"Nice shot," murmured a hunched figure to her left. Anja shot a glance at her sister, ducking back down to rest her back against a crumbling wall that marked the end of a long-disused pasture.

"He could have moved sooner," Anja hissed back. "I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep." She pressed a few buttons on her communicator and spoke softly into her helmet’s pickup. "Wraith Actual, Valkyrie Two. South line is clear."

The rain washed over the two women for a few seconds longer. Droplets slid with unnatural speed from the fabric of their field uniforms, skating across the surface without wetting the slick grey fabric. "Valkyrie Two, copy. Wraith is moving," came the response, buzzing harshly in her ear.

"Dammit," she groused, rubbing the side of her helmet. "I hate groundpounder comms. Ellie, didn’t you say they were working on a link interface?"

Eleanor shook her head irritably, a few blonde curls bouncing with the motion where they had escaped her helmet. "Sorry, sister. I heard a rumor, but it appears nothing came of it." She flashed Anja a grin, her teeth white against the grey murk surrounding them. She tilted her head, then jerked her chin slightly to the rear. "Here they come," she muttered.

Anja glanced back at the low scrub behind them. The old field wasn’t heavily treed even after years of neglect, but the brush had still grown up to a respectable height. Aside from the tremors of raindrops striking branches, everything was still and quiet behind them. Anja surveyed the miserable scenery for a few moments before sighing and rolling her eyes.

"Chen, Singh, Leclerc, Anders," she said softly, her finger pointing to four separate spots amidst the undergrowth. A whispered curse drifted up from the last of the spots she marked and four shadowy figures straightened up.

"Goddamn but it’s hard to sneak up on you ladies," drawled the nearest arrival, shaking his head. His face was obscured by a thin, smooth tactical wrap studded with nonreflective lenses and little black sensors, but the grin was audible. "That’s the fifth time you’ve caught me, Major." He inclined his head to Eleanor. "Colonel."

Eleanor shot him a look. "Anders. You called ahead and told us you were advancing. A blind Buil could have seen you coming."

Anders chuckled quietly. "Good thing you shot the sentry," he snarked. "We good to move?" Both women nodded and the six set off into the sparse woods, a gentle slope rising beneath them as they traveled. Anja paused once to pull a thin cloth from a pouch at her waist, shaking it out and draping it over the steaming corpse of the sentry. It settled over the body and shimmered, rapidly changing to show a grass and brush pattern that blended perfectly with the ground cover.

They slid through the trees, silently ascending towards a squat villa on the crest of the hill. They stopped well back of the cleared perimeter, observing the guards from behind the treeline as they patrolled.

"Shit," spat Eleanor. "Three guards on the west roof and four in the garden. Those weren’t in the packet." She looked back at Anja, who shrugged.

"I’d call him paranoid," Anders whispered wryly, "but in his defense it’s somewhat justified." He waggled his gun at the compound, earning a snort from Singh behind him.

"Definitely paranoid," grunted the burly soldier. "He thinks we don’t know about the villa. If he knew we were coming he wouldn’t be here."

"I’m inclined to agree," Eleanor mused. "A few extra thugs don’t alter our plan much. Chen, Leclerc, deploy up at Hill 5. That should give us better coverage of the folks on the roof. Take them out when we’ve begun, then move in for exfil once they pull back the perimeter. We’ll just have to deal with the garden guys ourselves."

The two she had named nodded quickly and vanished like smoke into the forest, heading towards a knobby rise a few hundred meters distant. The remaining four hunkered down in the damp and waited as the dim sunlight faded further, the wan glow from above diffusing and dimming to plunge the hilltop into a stygian darkness.

Once the only light visible shone in a dim halo from the villa, they crept silently towards the outer perimeter. The rain had stopped, and a hazy mist clung to the ground as they moved. Light shone through expensive-looking bay windows on the near side of the structure, revealing an opulent interior crowded with richly-dressed Buil. Anja lay low amid the forest undergrowth and slid a monocular down from her helmet.

"Party is well underway," she murmured, scanning the crowd. "I see Prelate Cailir."

Anders slid forward next to her, surveying the window through the scope of his weapon. "Yep, there’s the old bug," he agreed, panning across the room. "Looks like he brought half the Curia with him."

"Positive ID on all three targets," Eleanor whispered. "They should be moving into the garden after the reception, we’ll advance while they’re preoccupied herding guests."

Anders poked Anja in the side. "That party looks like fun," he said sourly. "Why are we stuck out here when Valkyrie 1 gets to infiltrate?"

Anja snorted. "Do you even read your mission packets?", she shot back derisively. "The other team is infiltrating, but not at the party. Trust me, our assignment is more pleasant than theirs."

Anders shrugged and peered back through his scope. "Must have skipped over that part. Look, something’s happening."

The knots of conversation were breaking up as people filed out of the room. The ornate doors to the garden swung open slowly, allowing the first guests to trickle in and wander through the low hedges.

Eleanor nodded sharply and rose to a crouch. "Okay kids, this is it," she said. "Entry point is…" She frowned, then pointed at one of the sentries on the low wall surrounding the villa. "That one."

The guests slowly made their way to the garden, tiny golden lights lighting their path and pushing back the cool night. The forest beyond the wall looked utterly black, a featureless void without form or detail. As such, nobody inside was looking outwards when one of the perimeter sentries was yanked backwards, disappearing quietly into the darkness.

Singh twisted his knife sharply and the sentry’s exoskeleton crunched. Anja looked coolly at the rivulets of ichor, steam rising from them to curl around Singh’s crouched form. He kept his glove pressed tightly over the Buil’s mouth until the jerking motions stopped, then nodded to Eleanor.

She returned the motion, then beckoned the team closer to her. "Hold until we get the signal from Valkyrie 1, then pop up on the wall. Take two shots, then drop. Anja, take Yeural and the rightmost guard. Anders, Paunir and the leftmost guard. I’ll backstop Valkyrie 1. Singh, target any other guards."

The team split up to stand close against the wall while Singh extended a tiny probe. After a few moments all four of them had a small view of the party projected in their HUD, courtesy of the camera at the probe’s tip.

The guests had mostly finished wandering and taken seats in a large flat area opposite their entry. Their targets were moving towards them from the left, leading a procession of roughly-dressed, hunched figures. They took places on a raised podium festooned with lights, an appreciative murmur rising from the audience as they ascended the steps.

A tall, broad-shouldered Buil wrapped in scarlet brocade stood at a podium, spreading his arms to address the audience. "Friends, thank you for coming," he said in a low, droning voice. "All of you have given selflessly in defense of our homeland, and tonight I hope I can repay a small portion of your sacrifice."

The audience rattled their chitin in a low wave of acclaim. Anja snorted. "And here I thought Cailir was playing the pompous ass for our benefit," she whispered. "Turns out he’s like that all the time."

Singh leaned in conspiratorially as Cailir continued to speak. "Leclerc and I were talking during infil," he whispered. "Cailir is a true prodigy. He’s one of the biggest assholes known to man, despite the fact that - and this is true, I checked - the Buil don’t have assholes."

A fortunate swell of clattering applause masked the choking noises that Anders was making. Anja leaned in, frowning. "Singh, I would not call into question your anatomical expertise…"

The big man shook his head, gesturing emphatically. "No, it’s true!", he insisted. "They just move things between stomachs and when they’re done-"

"Can it," Eleanor hissed, "he’s wrapping up. Get ready for the signal." The four crouched figures turned their attention to the video feed as the noise from the crowd died down once more.

"...for those who have perished in our struggle against the human oppressors," he intoned solemnly, drawing a hushed whisper from the audience. "But tonight is a celebration of what it means to be Buil!", he crowed. "Our traditions and history carry us through this trial, and we will draw our strength from them in the coming conflicts." He waited for the smattering of applause to die down again.

"One of the lies the humans spread about me is that I am intolerant of other species," he said sadly. "Friends, this is not true. I will be the first to say that every species has its place in the order of things," he leered, drawing a ripple of amusement from the audience. "I’ve even invited a number of them here as honored guests!"

With this, he indicated the line of figures standing manacled behind him, an assortment of non-Buil species clothed in ragged brown cloaks. Anja’s eye was drawn to two humanoid figures near the center of the line, looking hunched and defeated. They shivered in the chill night air, and one was wracked with a coughing fit.

Cailir turned to frown at the noise, then laughed and turned back to his audience. "Ah, yes. The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that I have some human guests as well." He motioned with one slender arm and a guard hauled the coughing prisoner forward. "It is my humble belief that even the most uncivilized of races may benefit from a life of service. You will find that humans make strong and able servants, and if they are a bit spirited, well..."

He swung his arm and backhanded the prisoner to the ground. "...they are durable enough to survive discipline," he concluded. Anja’s grip tightened on her rifle as the prisoner struggled to rise, still coughing into their hand. "I will start the bidding at five hundred," Cailir shouted, and the crowd burst with noise as the bids were called.

The prisoner finished standing and wiped their mouth, and through the camera Anja caught a glint of reflected light from their palm. The guard cuffed the prisoner roughly and dragged them forward, but the cloaked figure opened its hand and twisted-

A bright burst of light flared out from the garden, casting sharp-edged shadows into the forest beyond and evoking a chorus of shocked screams from the audience. As one, the four infiltrators vaulted atop the wall and leveled their rifles at the stunned Buil. The party was in chaos, with blinded guests and guards colliding in an uncoordinated panic.

The prisoner standing in front had slipped her manacles and looped the thin chain around Cailir’s neck in a garrote. Eleanor sighted and fired almost the instant her feet touched the wall, her shot drilling a blackened hole through Cailir’s head. He dropped, as did the two richly-dressed Buil that took fire from Anja and Anders. Another round of fire lashed out to drop two guards, tendrils of steam leaking from their wounds.

The surviving guards on the stage recovered their vision as the team hopped down from the wall. The two human prisoners leapt to engage them, bare hands and feet blurring as they struck chitin hard enough to pulverize it. Singh finished off the staggering guards with quick bursts of fire and the courtyard was momentarily calm.

Dead bodies and cowering aliens filled the stage, and Anja could hear the distant thump of Leclerc and Chen firing on the rooftop guards. The human prisoners pushed their cloaks back to reveal grinning, dirty faces. "Cait, Jesri," Anja said, smiling at the state of them. "You two look like shit."

Jesri scooted over by Anja, socking her on the arm and staying low as Singh and Anders searched the steaming bodies of their targets. "What, that’s it?", she scoffed. "Nothing else? ‘Hi, Jesri, nice to see you! How was being a slave? Thanks for showing us where to find-’"

Cait tossed Jesri a weapon from a downed Buil guard, cutting her off. "Escape first, then chat," she said brusquely. Eleanor was already backing towards the wall, her rifle leveled at the villa’s windows. Anja turned to leave, then noticed Anders crouched near one of the brown-cloaked slaves.

"Anders!", she called out. "Time to go!" He turned his head to look at her but didn’t move.

"Major, we’ve got civilian children here," he said softly. Anja saw Singh stiffen and look over the line of slaves.

Eleanor shook her head sharply. "Anders, no. We’ve got seconds before they regroup." The mutinous look Anders shot her in return was visible even under his face wrap and goggles. He picked up the tiny slave standing next to him and stood, glaring back in a silent challenge.

Singh bent down and gathered two tiny Arrigh into his arms. As their cloaks fell away Anja saw that their shells had yet to harden and fuse; they couldn’t have been older than ten. "Sir," Singh rumbled tonelessly, "I have determined that these prisoners are a potential intelligence asset. Our orders-"

"Dammit, you two," spat Eleanor. "Fine. This will go in your record." She hopped to the top of the low wall and gestured down. "Jesri, up here. The rest of you, pass the ‘assets’ up to us." The four left in the garden quickly gathered the prisoners from where they had retreated during the firefight. Anja severed their chains with a plasma knife from her kit, and they were in the process of boosting an elderly Tlixl onto the wall when the first shots came from the villa.

Anja and Cait grabbed a prisoner each and vaulted onto the wall one-handed. Anders and Singh followed close behind, shaking children clinging to their arms. A round sent stone flakes spraying up near Anja’s foot and she spat a curse. "We should have been halfway to the exfil point by now," she seethed. "Come on!"

The last of the prisoners dove clumsily down from the wall and they began to move at speed towards the forest. Fifty meters of cleared ground lay between them and the forest, and before they had made it halfway they heard the unwelcome whine of Buil rifles from the estate. Singh grunted in pain as a round impacted his armor, but he did not slow.

"Anja, cover fire!", shouted Eleanor, spinning around to spray a line of fire at the walls. She turned back to move towards the forest and Anja spun as well, shooting an unlucky guard in the chest - but they were swarming the walls now, lining up to pour fire down towards her. Clods of dirt flung up around her as she serpentined towards the treeline. She felt the impact of a round cracking off her shoulderpad, and another scored against her calf.

She burst into the forest at a full sprint, swerving to put trees at her back as she dodged through the blackness. The others had vanished into the forest ahead of her, invisible, so she ran alone and silent for what felt like hours. A roaring filled her skull, pounding with every footfall. Behind her beams of light lanced into the undergrowth and shots rang out to crack against trees.

It sounded like the Buil had found a whole battalion to come after them, she thought, cursing Anders and Singh for sentimental idiots. Weren’t they professionals? Didn’t they know the stakes? Handing the Buil Orthodox insurgency a dead human soldier would provide them a propaganda boost they could use to inspire thousands of new recruits. With solid proof of human involvement Cailir would become a martyr to their cause. It was an unacceptable risk to linger for something that, despite Singh’s excuses, offered no strategic value.

And yet they had, the idiots.

Branches raked at her face as she drew near to the exfiltration site. The Buil were damnably fast through the forest, and their lights seemed to chase just behind her no matter how swiftly she dodged through the undergrowth. She spied another light ahead of her and veered towards it, stumbling over a root that reached up to snag her foot.

She broke through into a clearing where a boxy dropship sat idling, engines pouring hot exhaust onto the rapidly wilting scrub below it. A shimmering barrier sat in front of the ramp to the ship, behind which Leclerc, Chen and Eleanor sat with rifles trained on the perimeter. Cait and Jesri were herding the last of the brown-cloaked captives inside.

At the sight of Anja emerging from the forest the three behind the shield began pouring fire into the trees. Surprised squawks of pain and anger erupted behind her, followed by gunfire that hissed past Anja to carom off the shield or scatter chunks of loamy dirt.

"Get in!", Eleanor shouted, her voice slicing through the din of combat. Chen lifted the mobile shield and began backing towards the ramp while the others provided covering fire. A ricochet from the ship hull creased Anja’s thigh, breaking her stride and drawing a hiss of pain. She tripped on the ramp edge and fell hard on her wounded leg. Bright lights flashed in her vision, but Cait was already toggling the ramp up - everyone was in, and it was time to go. Anja’s eyes cleared enough for her to snap off a few parting shots through the closing gap, then the hatch sealed with a hiss of pressure and they were away.

After the firefight the shuttle seemed nearly silent, but as Anja lay panting on the deck she felt sound come back into the world around her. The muted wails and sniffles of the frightened refugee children blended into the rumbling assurances from Singh, his helmet and facemask stripped off to reveal hair greying at the temples and a bushy moustache that the tiny Arrigh youth were prodding with obvious fascination. Angry grunts and obscenities from Cait; she had been shot in the shoulder during the withdrawal and was being treated by an oddly maternal Eleanor.

Anja hauled herself upright and saw Anders lying against a bulkhead with a fledgling Tlixl cradled in his arms, chatting with the weeping elder of the same species with a distant smile on his face. The frail winged alien thanked him profusely as he handed over the shivering child, retreating to a corner where he cooed over the youngster and rocked softly.

She stormed up to Anders and kicked his boot.

"Ow," he said mildly. He had taken off his tac gear as well, revealing a weather-lined face with sandy hair and grey-green eyes. The broad white scar interrupting the stubble on his chin twisted as he grinned up at her.

"Stow that shit," fumed Anja, kicking him again for good measure. "Anders, we were not equipped for a civilian extraction. If one of us had gone down-"

Anders coughed and waved her off. "You ladies worry too much. Nobody went down," he said softly, still with that infuriating smirk. "We killed the bad guys, saved the innocent, all that stuff. Take the win, Major."

"We got lucky," she hissed. "If the Buil could shoot worth a damn we would be dead. If they had guards posted closer inside we would be dead. You rolled the dice for the whole fucking planet just now."

Anders shrugged again, but his smile faded. "Major, some dice just need to roll."

"What we won was not worth the risk, you know that," Anja sighed.

He barked out a short laugh that turned into a wet series of coughs. "Wasn’t playing to win," he said dreamily. "Just…"

Anders grimaced and spasmed, his eyes rolling back in his head. Anja spat out a curse and crouched down beside him, trying to hold him steady. "Fucking dammit, Anders, are you hit?", she growled. "Say something next time! Hey, medkit!", she yelled, tearing open his jacket and probing for injuries.

Jesri rushed over with a medkit and began preparing a battlefield stimulant injection while Anja turned him over to check his back. He rolled onto his stomach, twitching weakly, and Anja saw the blood caked around the bottom of his armored backplate. It slid out easily, undamaged, but the jacket beneath it was shredded and bloody. She pulled up his jacket and paused.

A Buil round had slipped in between his back and side armor plates, leaving a gaping wound on his lower back. Anja knew the kidney was hit, and probably the liver too. She found herself standing and backing up, clasping her bloody hands together as Jesri saw the wound and gasped.

"Anders? Hey, Anders!", Jesri yelled, fumbling with the stimulant. She grabbed a pack of nanofiber gauze from the medkit and began frantically packing the wound, her hands smearing scarlet across the pristine white plastic of the medical packaging as she reached back for another roll.

The ship spun around Anja as she stood silently and wrung her hands over and over again, blood dripping from her wrists and elbows to the floor. The wailing of the frightened slave children and the roar of the atmosphere rushing by outside of the shuttle blended together in her ears like an echoing thunder in her skull.

Jesri continued to work as Anders slumped motionless to the decking, her hands bloody past her wrists. "Oh shit, Anders, I got you," she murmured, turning to stare blankly at Anja. "Don’t worry," she whispered. "Don’t worry."

Anja sat bolt upright with a strangled scream, only to clang her head sharply against the autodoc’s cylindrical covering. Cursing, she tugged the cover back and winced at the blinding light that flooded in from the medical bay. After allowing herself a few moments of blissful immobility, she swung her legs off the bed and paused.

Legs.

She peered at her right leg, probing her knee experimentally. The skin was lighter below the joint and felt more sensitive to touch. Her foot flexed when she tried to move it, and when she slid off the bed onto the deck it held her weight without trouble.

She padded out of the room, feeling the sharp cold of the metal on her bare feet as she wandered over to the nearest fab terminal and dialed up a duty uniform. The terminal chirped and she waited for a minute, examining her body. No scars or blemishes remained from her earlier injuries, but the odd light patches on her skin told a story. One on her stomach, her breast, her arm. She swiped a hand across her back, feeling the smooth skin and knowing what should have been there.

The dispenser dinged and Anja pulled her warm, crisp uniform from the slot, shaking it out and slipping into the clothes before they lost their heat. She bounced on her leg again, feeling it flex in her boot, and a smile flitted across her face.

"Anja!", Jesri shouted, running over to tackle her sister as she left the bridge lift. Anja laughed as Jesri embraced her, squeezing hard enough to hurt her ribs.

"Ow, ow," she winced. Jesri backed off apologetically, but Anja pulled her back into a softer hug. "I feel okay," she said, "but I am a bit tired. How long was I in the doc?" She paused, staring out the viewport. "Sister, is that the galaxy? The whole galaxy?"

Jesri winced. "Yeah, about that," she muttered, trailing off awkwardly.

Rhuar bounded up behind her, smiling widely. "Hi Anja!", he said happily. "We left the galaxy! It wasn’t my fault." He scratched at his ear. "Oh, and we can get back, it’ll just take a few weeks."

"Rhuar!", Jesri said reproachfully, smacking him in the side. "You somehow failed to mention that last part to me."

He looked up at her, a hurt expression on his face. "You never asked," he said. "Besides, I thought you knew. We’re way far out, but the engines should be able to take it and we’ll have barely enough fuel. Barely."

"All right," said Anja, stretching her leg out. "Do we have a potential fuel depot on the rim?"

"I can look!", said Rhuar, bounding off towards the shipjack. A few seconds later a map flickered to life and he began sorting through it too fast for either sister to follow.

Jesri turned to Anja and smiled. "I’m glad you made it out okay," she said. "It was pretty touch and go there for a bit."

Anja nodded. "I figured. I remember some of it, I think." She looked around the bridge, then let her gaze wander to the galaxy slowly floating past the window outside. "Still, you have to explain to me how this happened."

"Ah, you’ll have to talk to Rhuar about the particulars of hyperdrive physics," she said. "In a nutshell, we had some funny shit thrown at us by a Gestalt Emissary. A real one," she said meaningfully.

Anja frowned. "Unfortunate that they found us so quickly. I would not want to speculate on our odds against one of those," she muttered.

Jesri scuffed her foot over the decking in irritation. "Zero," she said, her voice colored with frustration. "Zero point zero zero zero. There’s just no fucking way. We can’t win against one of those things. The best I can say is that we’re not dead, and even that was a one in a billion chance."

Anja gave her an odd look, then laughed. Jesri blinked in surprise and opened her mouth to inquire, but Anja cut her off. "Nothing, sorry," Anja said, "just figured something out." She slid an arm around Jesri’s shoulders and they looked together at the galaxy hanging motionless, light-years distant. Light from before humans developed agriculture, she realized. Light from before humans tamed the Earth and ruined her. From before they broke the bonds of gravity and time to hurl themselves across the stars. From before they all died.

"The Gestalt is far, far beyond us. We cannot win," Anja said softly, an incongruous smile creeping over her face even as the words condensed to a cold core in her gut. "But maybe winning is the wrong goal. Maybe it would be enough not to lose."

Part 16

A low chime sounded, accompanied by a warm glow that steadily pushed the darkness into the corners of the small cabin. Anja grunted into her pillow and rolled over, letting the light batter at her eyelids for a few indulgent seconds.

In the first years of her military service she had happened to meet one of the scientists who had worked on her genetic structure, an elderly fellow with wispy white hair who had been delighted to meet her and insisted on treating her to dinner. Near the end of the meal the slightly tipsy geneticist had launched into an impromptu treatise on their efforts to remove sleep requirements from the Valkyrie genetic profile, only to be stymied at every turn by the creeping mental instability that resulted.

They eventually were forced to lower their aim and retain the sleep requirement, albeit reduced from the human baseline. Anja always thought of the old man when she was lying half-asleep and reluctant to move, unsure whether to curse him for giving up or thank him for the moments of lethargic morning bliss between awakening and arising.

She supposed it didn’t matter much anymore.

After dealing with the logistics of hygiene and clothing, Anja slipped out of her cabin and caught a lift up to the bridge. Qktk and Jesri sat hunched over a tactical display, peering at a grid with tiny black and white markers. Qktk flicked a few eyes at her when she entered, but immediately returned his focus to the display.

Anja sighed and shook her head. Going over sensor logs of the battle at Ysl had become tedious after the first several days. Jesri had been desperate to do anything besides scrub through the feed logs again, so she had pounced the moment Qktk offhandedly mentioned an interest in Go.

Strategy games were a core part of the Valkyrie educational curriculum, and their instructors had included the ancient games alongside modern virtual combat simulations. Anja had preferred the latter, as had most of her sisters, but Jesri and a few others had retained a fascination for chess, shogi and Go that had them playing often in the downtime between missions.

Given her long years of experience Jesri had expected little challenge from the Htt. To her surprise and delight, he played their first match to a vanishingly narrow loss. Evidently the game had caught on in a huge way with his species in the far past, and in his youth Qktk had been a player of some note. He quickly demanded a rematch, playing an aggressive opening that led to Jesri’s impressed and astonished resignation.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, the two had been locked in a series of increasingly intense games that consumed the majority of their waking hours. Anja wouldn’t have minded at all, except for one unintended consequence: it left Rhuar with only one person to talk to.

"Anja!", he shouted, waving excitedly. "Anja, come look at this! You have to see what I pulled out of the sensor logs!"

She sighed, walking over to his console just as she had every other morning since they began traveling back towards the galactic disc. She couldn’t fault him for his enthusiasm - indeed, he was the only one of them that had managed to focus on productive work for the whole trip. She just couldn’t match his relentless obsession with technical minutiae. Rhuar’s fascination with the Grand Design was understandable, she supposed, but there was a limit to how much interest she could summon for off-band hyperwave resonance traces.

Rhuar was unencumbered by such constraints. As she approached his station, he moved aside eagerly to show her his latest discovery. "Look here, see? Check out that spike in the readings there," he gushed, tapping the screen excitedly. "Now, I know you’re thinking ‘so what, it’s just a stupid spike’, right? Well, check this out - I took the same demuxing algorithm I used to isolate that spike and checked the rest of the logs from Ysl."

He fiddled with the console to show several more graphs. Anja scanned them disinterestedly. They all showed a prominent spike in signal with a similar falloff pattern. "Rhuar," she sighed, "these could be anything. Pulsar noise, local broadcasts, some idiot pinging wide-spectrum-"

"Nah, not this signal," he interrupted, ignoring Anja’s cross look at the interruption. "See, I only started looking at signal traffic because you said that Trelir fucker was talking with the Gestalt. The communication was easy to spot - tightbeam, so I couldn’t read it, but the resonant backsplash from the hyperwave conversion shunt was nice and clean. Problem is, it looked super fucky. You know how a shunt backsplash is normally all like-"

He waved his arms in what Anja supposed was a descriptive manner. She stared at him expressionlessly and did not blink.

"Right, yeah," he said, lowering his arms awkwardly. "Point is, it didn’t look right. So I demuxed it like I mentioned earlier and found out there were two spikes, both definitely from a hyperwave shunt. But here’s the kicker: two inbound streams. Right? So I was all ‘hold on’, and compared polarity fingerprints…"

Anja continued to stare at a fixed point ahead of her as Rhuar talked. Absent any other entertainment, she had been testing how long she could remain totally immobile and expressionless before he stopped talking. So far her record was just shy of an hour, and she had cracked before he did every time.

"...absolutely can’t be a coincidence, not with that timing," he said, looking at her expectantly.

Anja sighed. Only ten minutes today. "I’m afraid I don’t follow," she said, quite truthfully.

Rhuar tossed his head frustratedly. "Look, it’s easy - here, here and here," he said, pointing to the console. "Each time before an atypical error. Someone is jamming the Emissaries."

She blinked, feeling a chill rush through her stomach. "Wait, what? When did you say that?"

He rolled his eyes. "I’ve been saying it. There’s a secondary communication stream overlaid on the main Gestalt link, but it doesn’t come from the same point of origin and it only appears sometimes. And every time it does appear, the Emissaries screw something up." He dragged one graph to fill the screen, tracing the jagged line with an arm.

"See, this is your suit log from when you were in the bunker with Trelir. You’re talking, he’s talking a lot, Jesri’s talking, he’s talking, then he gets the transmission from Big G-"

"Please don’t give it nicknames," Anja muttered, peering closely at the graph. She could practically hear Trelir’s oily voice overlaid on the plot, see his eye-fluttering look of ecstacy when the connection with the Gestalt came.

Rhuar shook his head in irritation. "Point is, he gets this extra transmission at the same time, then you beat the smug off his face and he cuts your leg off and tries to blow you up - and it doesn’t work."

Anja frowned, absently scratching her knee. "I slammed him against the wall pretty hard, and Jesri shot him in the face a few times. I had assumed his transmitter was damaged."

"Nah," replied Rhuar, "because when he used the physical failsafe and tore his own head off, the transmitter worked just fine. Plus, look at this one - the Emissary ship. It catches us belly-up and has all the time in the world to aim its bullshit bendy-space cannon. It gets another one of these transmissions and whoosh - misses us."

"The next shot was right on target," Anja pointed out.

Rhuar grinned and flounced his tail. "Ah, but it was late. Another transmission hit before it fired, and the time between cannon charge and discharge was noticeably longer than with the first shot. It wasn’t a lot, but it was the difference between taking the shot in normal space versus hyperspace."

Anja grimaced. "Which landed us outside of the galaxy."

"Which is better than being dead," Rhuar pointed out.

"After three weeks stuck in hyperspace I think that may be debatable. Anyway," sighed Anja, "this is actually interesting. It means we have an ally of sorts, one familiar with the Gestalt and capable of interfering with its Emissaries." She crossed her arms, eyes flitting between the spikes on the graphs. "We would be dead without them. If what you’re saying is true, each one of those transmissions saved our lives."

Rhuar nodded gravely. "Whoever this is, they have an impressive ability to coordinate against the Gestalt. The disruptions were always precisely timed and subtle enough that they didn’t appear to be anything more than a simple malfunction. Quiet, careful and effective."

Anja nodded. "Sounds like people we could use," she agreed. "I would very much like to talk to them."

"Actually, I think they’d very much like to talk to you," Rhuar replied.

Anja shot him a confused look. "What do you mean?"

Rhuar jumped back in front of the console, pulling up another dataset. "So, I mentioned that I had spotted a different point of origin for the transmissions. Trouble is, I shouldn’t have been able to see that so easily. This sort of tightbeam communication is easy to disguise if you want to mask your origin. Like, I can’t derive the Gestalt’s origin from the sensor records of its transmissions. But I can see the origin of our mystery buddy’s signal."

"Why?", Anja asked, crossing her fingers for a concise and comprehensible answer.

He shrugged. "Because they wanted us to. There’s some carefully tuned noise in the signal confinement that lets the origin vector leak out."

"But then the Gestalt could also trace their position," Anja frowned. "So it would likely be a disposable relay rather than their true location. This may be a dead end."

Rhuar bounced on his paws excitedly. "No, the Emissary ship couldn’t see it. The leak was structured such that it only propagated back towards the original source vector. The recipient of the transmission would never be able to trace it. It’s brilliant, and would be really, really hard to pull off. The grasp of hyperspace field theory involved… It would be like trying to strip and rebuild your hyperspace coils while you were in hyperspace. In zero gravity. With your teeth." He grinned up at her, tongue lolling out of his mouth. "They did it three times. I think I may want to meet these guys even more than you do."

"Mmhmm," replied Anja absently, already lost in thought. "Did you identify the origin system? How long would it take us to get there?"

Rhuar grinned wider. "That part was easy, they’re at an unlisted transit station on the rim. Well, Grand Design knows about it, but I’ve never seen it on a map before. It’s called Nic, ah," he frowned, cocking his head. "Nicnevin? Just two days out, and it’s within our fuel margin. I adjusted course as soon as I realized what the transmissions meant."

Anja raised an eyebrow. "Oh?", she purred, her voice suddenly chilly. Rhuar’s grin withered and died. "It is not customary for an ensign to redirect a ship without consulting the captain, you know."

"I, uh," stammered Rhuar, but Anja smiled and waved him off. The cloud of ominous intent that had swirled around her disappeared in an instant.

"It is fine because you were right," she said dismissively. "We have to check this out. I like independent action, Rhuar," she said, "as long as it’s correct action."

"Yes, sir," he managed, still off-balance from the rapid shift in tone. Anja walked over to Jesri and Qktk, leaving Rhuar to his research. He shivered, then began browsing through signal traces once more.

"Nicnevin?", frowned Jesri, looking up from her game. Qktk flitted a few eyes irritatedly at Anja, studying the game board. Anja was never an aficionado of the game like Jesri, but she was familiar enough with it to know that Qktk was losing. "I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it before. I think they used to stage rim prospecting groups out of that area, it was kind of a backwater."

"Everywhere is a backwater now," grumbled Anja. "But I am inclined to take that as a positive. Less commerce, less traffic, less chance of the station being overrun by who-knows-what." She shrugged. "Probably why our mysterious benefactors chose to set up there in the first place."

Jesri nodded. "It’d be helpful if the port’s fuel stores were intact. A cruiser isn’t the hardest ship to keep fueled, but it does run through a fair bit of it. If we were able to top the tanks off we wouldn’t have to worry about it again for years."

"I would not worry about that," Anja said dryly. "Somehow I think running out of fuel is too calm a fate for us. Given the number of times we have nearly died since finding the Grand Design, worrying about the state of our fuel reserves a year down the road seems premature."

"Fair," Jesri chuckled. "And you’re sure it’s a good idea to just stroll up to the station and say hello? The only thing we really know about these folks is that they’re capable, which is great if they’re disposed to be friendly. If not…"

"Then we would not be here in the first place," Anja finished for her. "If they had wanted us dead they could have simply not intervened. If you have a spare hour or two ask Rhuar about it, he can run you through the details. Actually..." she said, an impish grin tugging at her lips. "Ensign Rhuar! Come over here!", she yelled. "Jesri and Qktk would like to be briefed on your findings. Please make sure to start from the beginning, I want them brought up to speed on everything."

"You monster," Jesri whispered, a look of horror spreading over her face.

Anja smiled. "Crybaby. Have fun!"

Rhuar came up to the stunned duo just as Anja was leaving, her hair flouncing from the happy bounce in her step. "I’m going to get her for that," Jesri muttered.

"What?", asked Rhuar, clearing the Go board from the console display and calling up a dense series of graphs and reports. "Whatever it is, can it wait a little bit? We’ve got a lot to cover."

Qktk and Jesri gave him sullen looks, but were defenseless against the beaming grin on Rhuar’s face.

"...it’s nothing," Jesri sighed.

"Okay, great!", he cheered. "Now, how much do you two know about hyperwave signal analysis?"

Compared to the weeks of aimless tedium leading up to Rhuar’s discovery, the two days before their arrival at Nicnevin passed quickly. Anja and Jesri busied themselves with a full supply inventory in case there was an opportunity for trade with the inhabitants of the station, while Qktk had been pressed to assist Rhuar in running a wholly unnecessary systems diagnostic.

It was scant hours before their scheduled arrival and Jesri was hurrying to tally the contents of a medical storeroom far to the fore of the ship. She re-sealed two small boxes of adhesive bandages and placed them in her growing pile of salvaged goods, diminutive cousin to the much larger pile of junk accumulating on the floor. Out of all the supplies on the ship, it seemed that medicines were the least likely to remain usable after five millennia on the shelf. It was frustrating, but she couldn’t precisely fault the manufacturers for failing to anticipate the end of human civilization.

The last items squared away, she straightened up and sighed. More than anything, she felt a bit lost. She had never forgotten about the fall of humanity or the impending destruction of the universe during her long years traveling, but she hadn’t spent much thought on it either. Who would bring it up? It was like living on the edge of a volcano, on top of a fault line, around a star on the brink of nova - it was there, if anyone bothered to look at it, but what could you do but keep living?

Of course, Anja’s revelation about the Grand Design’s whereabouts had returned the scenario to prominence in her mind. Suddenly it was an addressable problem. Find the ship, recover the weapon, kill the enemy, save the universe. Yet there was no weapon after all, and in its absence even Anja seemed to concede they had no chance of confronting the Gestalt directly - not that she seemed discomfited by that admission. In fact, her sister seemed to be more optimistic and motivated since her injury than Jesri had ever seen her.

She shook her head. She wasn’t Anja, and although she was cautiously hopeful at the prospect of meeting these mysterious allies she could summon only questions when her thoughts dwelled on them. If they had the ability to disrupt the Gestalt, why had they not acted until now? If they were waiting for the Grand Design to appear, were they pinning their hopes on recovering the weapon as well? What would they say when they found out it was a ruse?

They were not the bearers of good news, nor of resources useful to the fight. As powerful as their ship was against the ragtag warlords and tin-pot monarchs that infested humanity’s moldering corpse, they were helpless against even one Emissary. They had no intelligence to offer, no secret weapons. Just two old soldiers and two naive merchants, strutting around a relic and trying to ignore all of the dead bodies. Jesri sighed and walked back into the hall, making her way towards the bridge. Sometimes you just had to wait for life to open up more options and hope you survived to see them.

She was just so tired.

Qktk and Rhuar were huddled around the pilot’s console on the bridge, although it had grown considerably as Rhuar tacked on monitors, spare consoles and miscellaneous diagnostic equipment in a loose semicircle around his duty station. Although he could comfortably stay connected to the shipjack for hours at a time now, he was still forced to spend much of his time disconnected and therefore needed an alternative control and monitoring setup.

Rhuar flitted between three screens pulsing with graphs and gauges, making minute adjustments as they neared the final reemergence from hyperspace. They had last dropped out a day ago to run some maintenance on the overtaxed drive coils and reconfirm their bearings. Qktk found himself wondering when Rhuar had last slept, as every time he made his way up to the bridge he seemed to have found some new system to triple-check in preparation for their arrival.

They both looked up as Jesri walked onto the bridge, giving them a wan smile. Rhuar was harder to read, but Qktk was sure Jesri hadn’t been sleeping properly. After spending weeks pitting himself against her on the gameboard he had become quite adept at reading her mood.

"Hey, Jesri," said Rhuar, waving an arm. "Ready for arrival?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, please, let’s stay in hyperspace for another month."

"Can’t do that!", responded Rhuar cheerfully, either oblivious or choosing to ignore her sarcasm. "We’re running nearly empty here. If there’s no fuel at Nicnevin then we’re going to have to take the Leviathan out to find more somewhere else."

He broke off as Anja strode onto the bridge, her uniform looking sharp and her face vibrant. "Oh good," she said, "everyone is already here."

"I cleared my schedule," Qktk deadpanned, earning a quirk of Jesri’s lips. Anja gave him the slightest of acknowledging nods and walked over to the command dais, sliding into her chair.

"Ensign Rhuar, prepare for arrival," she called out. "Our sensors outrange the transit station’s, drop in a bit early and keep signal silence. I want to buy us a minute to observe the situation before we have to start talking. Will our fuel reserves permit an exit at the edge of our sensor envelope?"

Rhuar grabbed the shipjack and plugged it in, bowing his head for a moment before answering. "Yes," he said flatly. "That should be fine. Strap in, I’ll start bringing us up now."

Qktk and Jesri found their chairs and fastened their restraints just as the first hints of starlight began to limn the viewports above them. Qktk settled back, but soon found himself leaning forward unconsciously in anticipation. "Stupid," he muttered quietly, settling back again and wondering what he was so excited about. It wasn’t as if he had anything to add to talks with their mysterious allies.

Jesri looked over at Qktk, seeing the small Htt muttering to himself. She too had learned something of her opponent’s tics - he was anxious, frustrated. She sighed. It was hardly inappropriate. Rhuar was a statue, just as he always was when jacked in. Apart from the occasional twitch of an ear or bristle of fur, he simply stared blankly ahead, seeing far more than any eye could show him.

Anja… She looked every inch the captain. Leaning forwards eagerly but keeping her posture casual, her face composed but still somehow vivid with excitement. She looked like one of the freewheeling ship captains from a viz-drama, daring the future to try and overwhelm her. Sometimes Jesri wondered if they were truly forged from the same template.

"Here we go," said Rhuar, tensing and bracing his legs. "Exit in three, two, one-"

A wash of light rippled over the viewports, dissolving into hazy wisps that drifted off like steam. The starfield was properly ablaze now that they were in a galactic arm, doubly so because they were facing coreward. This far out Jesri couldn’t see the transit station with the naked eye, although her console promptly informed her that it was around a twenty-minute sublight burn ahead of them.

"Report," said Anja tersely.

"Looks like a transit station from here," Rhuar said unhelpfully, taking a moment to scan through sensor feeds. "Hmm. High thermals. Uncommonly active, especially for a station nobody I know has ever heard of."

"I’m not sure if that’s good or bad," said Jesri flatly. "At least it’s still in one piece."

"No ship traffic," Rhuar continued, a note of consternation creeping into his voice. "Now, that is a bit strange. Normally a station with this level of activity would have queues of ships lined up outside the docks."

"No response to our arrival?", asked Anja.

Rhuar gave a slight shake of his head. "Nah. We’re pretty dark, this far out, and our cross-section is minimized. They might have seen the splash from our exit if they happened to be looking in this direction, but they’re not beaming any active pings our way."

"Hm," sniffed Anja, considering. "Well, take us in. Let me know if you see any movement."

"Aye sir," Rhuar said distantly, his ears twitching as the engines engaged with a low hum. They sat in tense silence for one minute, then two, then five. Suddenly, Rhuar’s head snapped up to stare at something in the distance. "Multiple launch from the station," he said, alarm threading through his voice.

Anja blinked in surprise. "Missiles?"

"No, sorry," Rhuar said, information flickering onto the large tactical display. "Ships. Can’t see much about them from this distance besides size and bearing."

Two red dots peeled away from the station, curving outwards before changing course to build speed towards their position. Statistics streamed onto their personal consoles, detailing the specifications of the ships approaching them.

Qktk trilled in consternation. "They look like they’re heading this way. I thought you said they couldn’t see us with their sensors?"

"They shouldn’t be able to, the stations only have civilian traffic control suites," Jesri frowned.

"Hm, they…" Anja said, frowning. "They are rather large for civilian ships. Actually, they look like-" The ship pinged and refreshed the specification list to add a flurry of additional information, pictures of the hull rendering in fine detail. The tactical display wavered, both incoming red dots shifting to a royal blue. Anja looked up at Jesri, confusion on her face. "What the hell?"

"Uh, guys?", Rhuar said nervously, "I’m getting IFF and hailing pings from the lead ship. Denying response so far like you ordered." His eyes widened. "You want to explain what’s going on?"

A chime sounded and a light flashed at Anja’s arm. Jesri noticed a slight tremor in her hand as she punched a control, replacing the tactical display with an incoming video feed.

The display changed to show a woman on the bridge of a ship, her stance practically vibrating with anger as she glared into the camera. She was dressed in an immaculate grey and black uniform with a golden falcon spreading its wings on each shoulder board. Her curly blonde hair framed pinched grey-green eyes, fury radiating from every line of her face.

"Unidentified vessel, this is the TNS Cormorant," she said, her voice low and ominous. "Explain who you are and how you located this station or we will open fire. You have thirty seconds to comply."

Jesri looked over at Anja, knowing the wide-eyed shock she saw was mirrored on her own face. The dashing captain from moments before had vanished to leave her sister looking younger, almost vulnerable. Anja toggled their outgoing video feed and spoke softly, a faint quaver unmistakeable in her voice.

"Ellie?"

Part 17

Eleanor’s face went slack with surprise and sudden emotion, the anger falling away from her expression in an instant. Her mouth worked a few times before finally finding traction on her sister’s name.

"...Anja?", she whispered, barely audible. Her eyes slid to the side, taking in Rhuar and Qktk before locking on the first officer’s station. "Jesri?"

Jesri smiled and nodded, not trusting her voice to remain steady through the rush of feeling in her chest. The three sisters stood gazing at each other for a long moment, drinking in each others’ presence through the viewscreen. As her shock subsided, Jesri noted several slight grey figures in Terran uniforms milling around behind Eleanor, manning bridge stations and checking data feeds. Compared to their own cavernously empty bridge, hers looked like a bustling market.

Anja giggled uncontrollably before shaking her head and recovering some of her equilibrium. "I was expecting everything but you, sister," she said, "I have never been happier to be wrong."

Eleanor straightened up, tugging on the bottom of her uniform jacket. "How… I never thought-", she began, casting her gaze around their bridge. "Are there more with you?"

Anja’s smile froze, then faded. "No," she said quietly.

"I can’t be greedy," Eleanor replied with a quick laugh, waving the question away. "Just having the two of you here, after all this time - come, you have to dock at the station. I need to-!" She broke off, her sentence dissolving into flustered silence before she composed herself fully and gave them a steady, beaming smile. "Dock first. We can talk in person."

They exchanged smiles and nods, then cut the connection after a lingering gaze.

The bridge was silent as the image reverted back to the tactical display, the two blue dots slowing to turn back towards port. Anja and Jesri shared a look, and Qktk cleared his throat.

"I don’t want to ruin the moment," he said delicately, "but we should talk before we reach the station."

Jesri nodded, realizing she had been holding her breath. "She didn’t send the transmissions," she said. "Whoever did would have known we were coming, or at least that some Valkyrie were coming. Ellie was totally surprised."

Anja frowned. "She was. A rare look on her. But-" She trailed off, thinking. "Rhuar, are you sure the transmission came from Nicnevin?"

"Oh yeah," he replied. "There’s not a lot else out this way, and there wasn’t much of a spread in the vector."

"So our benefactors didn’t want us to find them," Jesri mused, "they wanted us to find Ellie?"

Anja shrugged. "As far as I am concerned, they just did us another priceless favor. Ships, a friendly port, allies. If not for them, I would still believe Ellie to be dead."

"Same, I haven’t run into a single mention of her, not even early on…" Jesri paused, a thought occurring to her. "Anja, she must have been here the entire time."

They all paused, considering. "If this station has been occupied since the fall," Rhuar said slowly, "does that mean there are humans on it?"

"I didn’t see humans in the feed from their bridge," Jesri replied, shaking her head. "A species I don’t recognize, smaller and greyish. Anyone know them?"

Qktk and Rhuar shrugged, while Anja shook her head, then sighed. "Useless to speculate," she said wearily. "Rhuar, take us in."

"Aye sir," he sang out, coaxing the engines to life. The gigantic ship rumbled towards the station, although the two Valkyrie barely heard it.

"Heavy cruiser, continue to bay zero-three approach and hold for clearance. Maintain separation at two kilometers," crackled a dry, emotionless voice.

"Control, acknowledged," Rhuar replied crisply, his cool tones a poor match for the grin plastered across his face. He turned to Jesri, bouncing excitedly on his front paws. "Isn't this cool?", he gushed, "It's like a real spaceport."

Jesri grinned back. His enthusiasm was infectious, but she couldn't claim to be wholly immune herself. The station felt… right. It looked no different but any other station she had visited since the fall, but none of them still retained the sense of raw vitality that she felt now. For thousands of years every station she had boarded felt like an abandoned home, dark and still. Visiting Nicnevin was like stepping back in time - not just nostalgic, but a homecoming.

Qktk and Anja were absorbed in watching the station’s picket craft slide through the entrance to the station’s main capital ship docking bay. The gates stretched wide, dwarfing the two 150-meter corvettes as they slipped through. The blue glow from their engines sent harsh shadows dancing across the interior before they vanished to the side.

"Heavy cruiser, you are clear to proceed," the controller said, "your berth is at slip zero one. Welcome to Redoubt."

"Thank you Control, heading in," Rhuar replied, practically vibrating in tune with the engines as he moved the ship forward. The bridge fell into the shadow of the station as they passed through the doors, the cavernous opening comfortably admitting the ship’s bulk.

The interior space stretched back nearly two kilometers, the far end lost in a light haze of shadow playing over the fading drive traces of the corvettes. The smaller ships were just finishing their approach, nestling into their slips along the side of the dock.

Their destination was the largest slip in the bay, half again as long as the Grand Design. Rhuar glided towards it, indulging himself for a moment in the full depth of the ship’s sensor feeds. His senses stretched through the metal walls of the bay, feeling the strength of the superstructure and the labyrinth of hallways nestled between the branching ribs. The bright pulse of the central core was blinding, making even their own reactor seem like a flickering candle in comparison.

He looked again in a different band, seeing the choking swirl of life surging through the corridors. A huge mass of people, more people than he had ever seen on a station and still only a fraction of what it could hold. They surged through the corridors around the docks, clustering and flowing through the corridors. Farther away, little groups sparkled like stars, huddled in tiny clumps along the endless halls. He marveled in disbelief at the milling crowds for a half second before grudgingly releasing the feed to guide the ship in.

The clamps sent a shudder through the ship as they engaged, softly locking them against the broad arc of the slip. Rhuar let the tremors reverberate through him and fade to a hum before removing the shipjack, stumbling at the numb shock that ripped through him as he shrank back to himself. Shaking his head, he looked around the bridge to see Anja and Jesri eagerly rising to debark.

Qktk slid out of his seat and shot a serious glance over at Rhuar, who returned the look for a moment before they both succumbed to laughter. "Mr. Rhuar," he chittered, "just when I think I've adjusted to the strangeness of life…"

"Yep," Rhuar chuckled. "Come on, Captain, let's go see the secret ancient spaceport." He smacked Qktk lightly on the shell, and they both hurried to follow Anja and Jesri towards the lift.

Eleanor was waiting for them at the dock’s primary airlock, smiling joyfully at their appearance. She bounded towards Anja and Jesri as they approached, drawing them into a crushing hug that they returned with equal force.

"Ow, ow," laughed Eleanor, wriggling free and rubbing her ribs. "No fair, two on one." She moved back to beam at the two of them from arm’s length. "Damn, you're really here. I didn't believe it until just now, not really. And flying the Grand Design? You have to tell me everything."

"You'll have to set aside some time," Jesri grinned. "The last couple of months have been eventful."

Eleanor gave her shoulder a squeeze, then turned her attention to Qktk and Rhuar. "Can I assume these two are somehow involved?", she asked.

Anja nodded. "Essential crewmen, both of them. Colonel Eleanor Tam, it is my pleasure to introduce Ensigns Qktk and Rhuar. Ensign Qktk was instrumental in our escape from a hostile station shortly after we met and recently executed a holding action against a planetary defense force to cover a covert extraction."

Qktk nervously rubbed his forelegs together at the praise, inclining his head to Eleanor. "It was more of a diversion gone wrong," he stammered.

Anja grinned at him and motioned to Rhuar. "As for Ensign Rhuar, he is a talented pilot and engineer that has saved our lives on several occasions. He was the one that determined the location of your station."

Eleanor smiled back at them both, acknowledging them with a nod. "Such accomplished Ensigns," she said. "I should be very interested to talk with them further." Her gaze turned to Rhuar and flashed with steely intent. "Especially concerning how you managed to locate us out here." Rhuar’s pleased smile wilted a bit and he shot a concerned look at Jesri.

"Stop trying to scare them, sister," teased Anja, jabbing Eleanor in the ribs and smirking at her annoyed scowl. "How about your crewmen?", she inquired, gesturing behind her.

Rhuar started, surprised. He hadn't noticed the small, silent figures standing by the entrance to the room. They were thin and short, their light grey skin matching their darker uniforms. Their eyes were pale yellow and large for their narrow, noseless face, their mouths thin and lipless.

A brief flash of confusion crossed Eleanor’s face before she turned back to look at the two. "Oh, these two? Ensigns Drinni and, ah, Rulati."

Neither reacted to being named. "Wow," Jesri coughed. "Great discipline."

"Irri are like that," Eleanor laughed. "Their species," she clarified, seeing Anja’s inquiring look.

"Huh, never met any before," Jesri said. "Pleased to meet you," she said politely.

"An honor, sir!", they both barked in perfect unison. Jesri raised an eyebrow and Eleanor shook her head. "Like I said, they're like that. Amazing people." She clapped both sisters on a shoulder and squeezed. "You hungry? We can chat and catch up in the officers’ mess. I know how much I look forward to some hydroponics after spending time underway."

"Oh, yes," moaned Anja. "Jesri may be able to survive on nutrient pellets but I have been dreaming of salad for weeks."

"Great!", she replied, "I’ll get you some quarters and we can talk over dinner." Eleanor turned to Rhuar and Qktk with an apologetic smile. "Do you two mind if I catch up with my sisters for a bit? Drinni can get you food and quarters, show you around the station."

Qktk gave an alarmed chirp as Rhuar hauled him towards the exit, smiling hungrily at Drinni. "Hi, I'm Rhuar!", he said brightly, "can we look at the main reactors first?"

"You have to tell me where you found those two," Eleanor chuckled, gesturing them to the right as they traversed the corridors of the station.

"It’s a long story," replied Jesri, her eyes roving over the hallway in amazement. She was finding it hard to focus on the conversation as they walked because of all the people. Throngs of grey-skinned Irri crowded the station, each clad in crisp duty greys and moving with a purpose. They moved efficiently, quietly, stopping or speaking only when needed.

Anja poked Eleanor in the shoulder. "Sister, before we explain where we found our two crewmen, do me the favor of explaining where you found yours," she said. "How many of them are there? Where did they all come from?"

Eleanor laughed and led them through a final doorway to a small, well-appointed mess with a table laid for a dozen crew. The room was empty save for an Irri steward who saluted smartly and left towards what Jesri presumed was the galley as they entered.

"They found me, really. I suppose I should explain a bit," she said, taking a seat and motioning for her sisters to do the same. "When the attacks came I was in-between postings, traveling alone on the Cormorant en route to a new assignment. We were part of a convoy - three corvettes and ten cargo barges. When we got word of the attacks we dropped out of hyperspace to reroute to a new destination, but the damn traders panicked." She shook her head, wincing as she remembered.

"They insisted on jumping back within the core perimeter, trying to hit the transit station at Gliese 433. They actually did - but they got there too early. It was one of the last systems to be attacked, and they got there just in time to have a front-row seat." Eleanor leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. "We had a ten-minute coordination call on whether to follow them or link back up with the fleet, and we couldn’t match their fully laden speed. By the time we jumped in after them, they were all dead."

Jesri pursed her lips. "There was a lot of that kind of thing going on," she muttered.

Eleanor nodded. "It was a bad day," she said, quirking her lips at the understatement. "We decided to go to Nicnevin because it was off the beaten path. They had just built Redoubt that year and it hadn’t been added to most of the civilian nav charts yet. We figured it’d be quiet, safe."

She was interrupted by the steward bringing in plates of lightly sauteed bok choi and a crispy green salad dressed with a vinaigrette. Anja made an odd sighing noise as the plates were set in front of her, barely pausing to send a grateful glance Eleanor’s way before tearing into the food.

Jesri grinned and speared some arugula with her fork. "So what happened after you got here?", she asked around a mouthful of salad.

"Manners," Eleanor chuckled, wagging a finger at her. "It’s all that keeps us civilized, out here." She ate a bite of her own food, then set her fork down. "Ah, we were here for a few years just turning the place into a home. It was a new station, pretty bare, and it was set up for mining support where it was built out at all. By the end of it we had a pretty good picture of what had happened. We clamped down on signals, communication, we wanted the station to be invisible."

"After we lost the Albatross to a panicked defense fleet - our other corvette, besides the Skua," she clarified, "we stopped going out of system entirely. We kept our heads down, kept the hatches closed, tried to gather information. There were only about three hundred of us left, not enough to do anything aggressive, so we just waited and listened."

Her face went flat and she shook her head again. "We waited and waited. Three hundred wasn’t enough, though, not for a long-term colony. Besides that, everyone had been on longevity treatments and a lot of the Navy personnel were older. Without a fertility clinic... There were a few dozen children born, and a handful more from there."

She stopped talking again, and Jesri saw a little tremor run through her face. The three of them sat quietly for a few long moments. "The last one, a woman named Kiera, it was just me and her for twelve years." She ate a bite of salad, chewing slowly. "Then it was just me."

Jesri fought to keep her face neutral, knowing how her sister would react to her pity. "The Irri?", she managed.

Eleanor nodded. "A long… long time later. A colony ship from a distant part of the galaxy, well outside our space. They had a malfunction with their life support and docked at the station, thinking it was abandoned. They found me, and after we figured out how to communicate they asked if they could stay here."

Anja raised an eyebrow. "They wanted to enlist?", she asked incredulously, speaking for the first time since the food came. Jesri saw that her plates were pristine and empty.

"They wanted to survive," Eleanor said, shrugging. "Afterwards they didn’t know what to do with themselves, so I offered a structure. Turns out they’re well-suited for a military environment, they thrive on it. So we’ve been running a quiet little base ever since, biding our time until an opportunity presented itself." She looked at her sisters with a grin. "Bringing us to the present day, when my dear sisters showed up with humanity’s secret weapon against the Gestalt."

It hurt Jesri to see the hope in Eleanor’s eyes. "Um," she winced, "maybe we should tell you our side of the story now."

She relayed the events that had transpired since she and Anja had left Indomitable. Eleanor’s face went blank when Jesri recounted what Trelir had said about the weapon, staying expressionless until her sister had finished speaking. The three sat quietly again, Jesri sitting awkwardly under Eleanor’s detached gaze while Anja still basked in the vegetal afterglow from their appetizers.

The steward came in again with a passable risotto, leaving like a ghost as soon as the last plate hit the table. Anja broke the silence to dig into her dinner, shaking Eleanor out of her contemplative funk.

She sighed. "I suppose I was being too optimistic hoping that you two would have all the galaxy’s problems solved before you got here," she said, the hint of a smile creeping back onto her face. "It’s okay. You need rest, we can share intel, see if anything shakes loose. And…" Her face darkened, traces of the formidable commander Jesri remembered asserting themselves in her scowl, "we will investigate how your friend knew this station was here. I’m glad they sent you, but if they can find us so can the Gestalt."

Anja scraped the last of her risotto into her mouth and nodded. "A good plan of action, sister," she agreed. "We will have Rhuar assist you in reviewing our ship’s logs."

Eleanor chuckled, her face melting back to sisterly affection. "I’ll enjoy that. He’s a nice change of pace from dealing with the Irri. Don’t get me wrong," she said, wagging a finger, "I love the little grey guys, but they’re not the most emotive people in the galaxy."

"Oh, poor Drinni," Jesri said. She was only half-joking. "I can’t imagine the sort of day he’s having right now."

"Wow, the station reactors are tetraphasic? I grew up on a station and I never even knew! How do you address resonant buildup in a multiphase system this big? Man, that has to be a pain…"

Qktk sighed. Rhuar had asked their taciturn guide over fifty questions at this point, but he never paused long enough to permit an answer and Drinni didn’t seem to be the interrupting sort. The three of them stood on a narrow gantry overlooking the giant, twisted torus of the station’s B reactor. Huge injection stacks towered to either side of the reactor, ascending into darkness.

Rhuar’s enthusiastic rambling came to a stop and he stood on his hind legs to get a better view of the reactor. "Man, that’s really something," he said longingly. "We’re right here in the reactor of a station. Nobody has seen one for thousands of years, you know. You guys are really lucky."

Drinni’s face twitched. "Please follow me," he said in a clipped, neutral tone. "Colonel Tam requested that you be shown all primary systems. We must still visit hydroponics, fabrication and environmental support." He hurried them out of the room, practically shoving Rhuar through the door to the hallway as he tried to sneak one last look at the reactor.

The Irri tilted his head and the door slid shut behind them. Qktk turned to proceed, but Rhuar stopped in his tracks to stare at Drinni.

"Wow, do you all have implanted comms like Anja and Jesri?", he asked excitedly. "That’s so cool. I always thought they would only work if you were some sort of ancient supersoldier like they are."

Drinni hesitated, then walked down the corridor slowly. "Colonel Tam developed a modified version for our use," he said, his voice still admirably level despite Rhuar’s incessant questioning. "Thanks to her, we all enjoy an increased level of interaction with the station."

"Neat!", Rhuar said. "Do you think it would work on me?"

Drinni’s face twitched again and Qktk gave Rhuar a smack on the head. "That’s enough, Mr. Rhuar," he chided. "Let the poor man walk in peace for a bit. Wait a while before you try and schedule any brain surgery on yourself."

Rhuar sulked, but walked without speaking. Drinni glanced at Qktk gratefully - well, Qktk was reasonably certain it was gratitude, given the context. He found the Irri to be quite inscrutable, even for humanoids. Drinni held the look for a strangely long moment before turning back to lead them towards the hydroponics bay.

Qktk shook his head. Humanoids. Htt emoted with antennae and limb positioning, like sensible species. They passed an intersection teeming with short grey crewmen and Qktk marveled how the streams of traffic simply passed through each other without appreciably slowing or diverging from their course. It was almost like watching a hive of insects, although Qktk had to laugh at the irony in that thought. His own people were insectile in appearance but surprisingly "human" in behavior - whether from their own nature or their rude uplifting at the hands of a stray human, he couldn’t say.

After a few more minutes Drinni ushered them through a door to the primary hydroponics lab for this ring segment. It was a surprisingly cramped room, with every inch of space given over to racks and racks of enclosed plants and softly burbling pipes of nutrient solution. At the far end of the room sat two gigantic tanks of algae, softly churning as a harvesting arm swept through them to agitate the solution and lift out glistening green mats of plant matter.

Qktk watched as individual plants were harvested by lightning-fast servos darting between the racks, coming away with their bounty to be stored in the galley’s holds. "Quite impressive," he muttered, trying to calculate the sheer value of the food being produced by this one room.

It hurt him to remember the poverty and famine he had seen on some stations, food being ransomed to starving parents with emaciated children clinging to them - while perhaps only meters away, a locked room just like this hummed away, steadily producing food for thousands only to have it rot in some long-forgotten storage. Perhaps many of them had fallen to disrepair after millenia of disuse, but he knew some of them still functioned. From what Rhuar shared of Harsi, the plants survived despite the abysmal state of the station. People ate each other on Harsi.

He turned to Drinni, not wanting to add to the poor man’s misery but unable to resist asking a question. "Ensign Drinni, do you know the total population the station’s hydroponics can-"

Qktk froze, spotting a strange figure lurking just to the left of Drinni’s inscrutably irritated face. It was another Irri, even shorter than the others he had seen and dressed in a loose cloak of grey fabric that seemed to melt into the walls. He almost didn’t recognize it as Irri simply because he had never seen one wearing anything but their down-sized Terran Navy uniforms.

It stood still, staring at Qktk with wide golden eyes, a bundle of potatoes and greens clutched in its thin arms. He realized with a shock that the Irri was terrified - how could he have thought they were hard to read? The mortal fear etched into its face was easy to see even from across the hydroponics bay. Having been seen, the Irri thought that it was going to die. His mind began to whirl, implications and inferences piling on each other.

Drinni frowned slightly and turned to see what had startled him, but Qktk reached an arm out to touch the ensign lightly on the shoulder. The Irri thought it would die if discovered and he would not risk proving it right. "Apologies, lost my train of thought," Qktk said smoothly, for once thankful that that humanoids found him hard to read as well. "I meant to ask how many people this station can support at full capacity. Do you happen to know?"

Drinni didn’t precisely recoil at his touch, but he did make an immediate and precise movement to remove himself from Qktk’s reach, forgetting for the moment about the odd lapse in conversation. Keeping his primary eyes fixed on the Irri ensign and barely hearing his brusque response, Qktk flicked a minor eye back towards where the figure had been. It had vanished, leaving no trace.

Part 18

Anja and Jesri trailed behind Eleanor as she walked down the busy corridor, the flows of grey Irri parting around them as if they were a rock in a stream. There was something vaguely alienating, Jesri thought, about being in a place where everyone was so well coordinated save for you. It didn’t seem to bother Eleanor or Anja, however, and the two of them chatted loudly amid the soft rustle of the crowd.

"...centralize operations around the C-quarter of the outer ring," Eleanor said proudly, "but within a decade we should be able to refurbish much of the middle ring in this quarter as well. That will net us two new fabrication workshops around C-Mid-47 and 103, assuming we can scrounge enough to repair the power conduits." Anja was nodding, but Jesri had a suspicion that she was just as lost as Jesri.

Eleanor seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the station and their efforts to repair it, rattling off room designations and corridor numbers like she was referencing a spec sheet. Then again, she had been trapped on the station for long enough that her exceedingly granular familiarity made sense. To hear her tell it, she had been directing Irri refurbishment efforts for nearly five hundred years but only reclaimed the resources to make much headway within the last fifty. The station had fallen into disrepair during her lonely custodianship, and refurbishing it to support the needs of the Irri had been an immense undertaking.

They still suffered from systems failures, Eleanor confessed. They had been forced to cannibalize parts from unused systems to wire and repair their first fabricator block, so many of the areas adjacent to the docks were stripped and powerless. Since many of the core functions had dependencies in the central ring, a failure there meant walking kilometers through dark tunnels while lugging spare parts and tools to address the problem. Jesri remembered the warren of hallways at Harsi and shuddered.

Still, the areas they had reclaimed were nearly pristine. Jesri hadn’t spotted the depressingly normal sights of a transit station as of yet - dead machinery, broken lights, lichen and moss covering the walls. The station probably didn’t look this good when it was still a mining outpost, she thought ruefully.

She was just about to interject and complement Eleanor on the state of things when the lights flickered and went out.

"Oh, dammit," Eleanor groused, "hold on a second." It was pitch-black in the corridor for a few heartbeats, then a swarm of lights winked into existence up and down the hallway. Each Irri pulled out a small pen light, clipping it to their uniform and proceeding down the hall as if nothing had happened. Eleanor’s own light illuminated her sheepish grin as she fastened a light to one of her shoulder boards.

"Sorry, didn’t think to get you two lights," she apologized. "We’ve had a good couple of months, so it didn’t occur to me." She shook her head. "Dammit, dammit. There’s just way too much infrastructure here for us to maintain," she griped. "We’ve only got five working fab shops and they’re civilian spec. The good stuff is in the maintenance areas towards the core, but we can’t even turn them on with just the substation reactor from this ring segment."

Eleanor sighed and seemed to deflate in on herself. "Every time I think we’re finally making progress there’s another damn setback. It’s like the station is working against me."

Anja squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "You’ve done wonderful work so far, sister," she soothed, "maybe there is some way we could use the resources on the Grand Design to assist."

She perked up at that, giving Anja a grateful look. "That’s not a bad idea, actually," she mused. "The ship reactor-"

Eleanor cut off, a blank look slipping over her face before it tightened with anger. "We have to move," she said curtly. "I just lost contact with Drinni." She turned and ran down the corridor, back the way they had came.

Jesri and Anja exchanged a bemused glance and jogged after her, but it took several steps before Jesri remembered where she had heard the name before. She nearly tripped at the sudden realization. "Oh shit," she swore. "Rhuar and Qktk!"

They ran faster.

Qktk winced against the glare stabbing into his eyes, flaring from a half dozen handheld lights. He couldn’t make out anything in the dark save that their attackers were Irri, the glow of the lights obscuring all other details. Drinni lay sprawled on the floor, a thin trickle of blue-green blood dripping from his head where one of the attackers had hit him with a battered pipe. Unless Qktk had severely misjudged Irri physiology he wasn’t going to be of any use in the short term.

A low, menacing growl issued from beside him as Rhuar stalked up towards the encircling Irri. His hackles were raised and his teeth bared, making him look every inch the feral predator. The Irri hesitated, backing away from him fractionally. Qktk rattled his mandibles at them, a noise he knew most humanoids found to be incredibly disconcerting. To his immense gratification, they backed away in earnest.

"Wait," came a voice from the darkness. One of their attackers stepped forward, turning its light to illuminate its own face. With a shock, Qktk realized it was the intruder from the hydroponics bay that he had seen not an hour earlier.

"We only have seconds," it said, its voice rough and surprisingly low for a being of its stature. "Come with us, quickly. There isn’t time."

Rhuar laughed darkly. "Yeah, no," he spat. "I think we’ll stay."

The Irri turned to Qktk even as her companions murmured at Rhuar’s unique method of speech. "Whatever you are, you’re not one of hers," it said insistently. "You saw me and said nothing. You have to leave with us, now!" In the dim light Qktk could see the light sparkling in the Irri’s golden eyes. It looked afraid again, just as it did the first time he saw it, only now it wasn’t afraid of dying - it was afraid for him, for all of them.

He began to respond, but was cut off when Rhuar snarled again, snapping at the Irri. It danced backwards, its light flickering out. "It doesn’t matter," it said sadly from somewhere in the dark. "You aren’t hers. We can’t let her have you."

Thin grey arms shot out from behind Qktk, pulling him into a crushing embrace. He heard Rhaur yelp from beside him - they must have snuck around behind them while they were talking. He struggled, limbs flailing, but couldn’t manage to break free from the Irri’s deceptively strong arms.

The one who had spoken walked in front of him again, eyes pitying. "I’m sorry, strange friend," it said. "You’re confused, it’s okay. We can talk once we’re safe." A bag of rough fabric swept over Qktk’s head, and he was plunged back into darkness.

The three sisters raced through the darkened hallways, Eleanor sprinting without hesitation or indecision while Anja and Jesri did their best to keep up. After a few minutes, there was a high-pitched whine and the lights slammed back on, forcing them to stop for a few moments and wait for their eyes to adjust. The Irri, unperturbed, deactivated and stowed their penlights before continuing about their business.

Eleanor led them to one of the fabrication workshops, the last location she had received from Drinni. Jesri’s stomach contracted to a hard knot when she saw that it was empty save for a smear of blue-green blood on the floor that Eleanor grimly informed them was Irri in origin. "They’ve taken Drinni and your crewmen," she said, "I’ll compose a search team to recover them."

"They?", asked Anja, confusion adding to the anger in her voice. "Who are you talking about, sister?"

Eleanor paused and grimaced, seeming to roll the words around in her head. "There were a few Irri who didn’t like the group’s decision to work with me and split off," she explained. "They were no trouble at first, there’s plenty of space on the station. But as we’ve become more prosperous they’ve taken to raiding us for supplies. We’ve even had a few incidents where we had to use force, when they were caught stealing."

She frowned, staring at the blood smear. "They always run when they’re caught, though. They don’t seek out fights. And the timing of the blackout… I’m afraid they’re escalating their conflict with us. This was a deliberate attack, coordinated with sabotage."

"For what reason?", Jesri asked, feeling lost. "Why would they want to abduct these three?"

Eleanor hesitated, then shook her head. "I don’t know for sure," she said slowly, "they might have been alarmed at your arrival." She looked up, her eyes blazing with anger and determination. "It’s not the time for speculation, though. Every minute we talk, they move deeper into the station."

Anja and Jesri nodded. "We can help," Jesri said determinedly, "let us know where you need us."

Eleanor nodded and led them out of the room at a brisk walk. "We’ll have to lead multiple teams," she said, "or they’ll be able to evade us easily. I’ve directed a few dozen Irri to meet at a staging area near here, they know the standard escape routes."

Anja frowned. "Standard? I thought you said the other Irri had never done this before."

"We chase them away when they raid us, catch them if we can," Eleanor explained, making an irritated gesture. "Anja, we don’t have time to chat right now. The adjacent segments are dark, neglected deathtraps. If they make it out of this ring segment with your crew we’ll never find them. We can predict where they’ll go for the time being because of the chokepoints between the segments, but once they reach an exit they’ll be impossible to track down."

"Right," said Anja, nodding her agreement, "just tell us where to go."

Jesri moved quietly with a team of a dozen Irri, her companions slipping through the hallway with an efficient, loping stride. Eleanor had been able to determine the direction in which the kidnappers had fled, but after they had left the reclaimed area around the docks their trail vanished. This left seven likely exits from the ring segment, of which Eleanor had functioning remote access to close four. Each sister was leading a team towards the remaining exits. With luck, the three captives would slow the kidnappers down enough for one team to intercept them.

It was a shitty plan. The station was huge, and the kidnappers had enough of a head start that they weren’t assured of catching up in time even at their brisk pace. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else to be done about it. The lifts were broken, the doors were stuck open, and if they didn’t catch up then that was it - the three captives were in the wind.

Her group broke into the midline orthogonal hallway, the large central arc that ran through the outer ring segments. The hallway curved off into the distance, high-ceilinged and pocked with lichens that clung to the walls and floor. If they were going to escape towards the next outer segment, the door at the end of this hallway would be their chokepoint - and they would likely be following this route to get there.

Anja and Eleanor were moving towards two exits to the middle ring segment in the same quarter, relatively close together compared to Jesri’s target on the far end of the ring. They had less distance to cover - if they didn’t catch their quarry soon, then odds were they had already escaped.

Or, perhaps, they were leaving through Jesri’s exit. Around the farthest curve of the hallway she caught a flicker of motion, and when she redoubled her pace she saw them clearly. Ten Irri, with three figures in brown sacks being awkwardly carried between them. One of the fleeing kidnappers looked back and gave a shrill yell when it saw Jesri approaching. The others looked back and the whole group sped up fractionally.

Jesri grinned. They outnumbered the fleeing Irri, and they were still a good ways from the door. "Come on, guys!", she yelled back at her team. "Push, we’ve got them!"

The grim-faced crew following her didn’t reply, but matched her pace. They didn’t seem to be made for sprinting, but if they were feeling the exertion they didn’t complain. Jesri steadily gained on their quarry, her feet pounding against the deck. The trailing kidnapper looked back again, its big golden eyes darting to Jesri.

She was close enough now to read the fear on its face. She grinned wider, flashing her teeth at it. That’s right, she thought viciously, actions have consequences. The little Irri put on a desperate burst of speed to pull away from her, but she could see its endurance was flagging. It looked back at her again, seeing her almost on top of it, and the fear in its face faded into a grim resolution. Jesri registered it a second too late to dodge when it flung itself at her knees, tripping her and sending the two of them sprawling to the floor.

She kicked at the dazed kidnapper, pushing it off her legs as the rest of her squad pounced. "Leave him!", Jesri shouted, rising to her feet and pointing to her crew who were restraining the struggling fugitive. "He’s a distraction. You two, stay with him. The rest of you, on me!" She raced after the group, who had managed to put some distance between them while she was down.

She growled and sprinted after the receding figures, her feet kicking up flakes of lichen as she ran. She was gaining on them fast, but her breath snagged as she saw a broad arch come into view several hundred meters out. They had reached the door.

She ran as fast as she could, vision narrowing to only the fleeing Irri and their captives. It wasn’t going to be enough, she realized. Ahead of her, the first kidnapper passed under the door and into the dim hallway beyond. The lights were off on the left side of the hall in the next segment, and his dark shadow raced larger than life across the far wall as he ran. The rest followed, but were forced to stop as one of their captives began to thrash violently in their sack.

Jesri grinned. Probably Rhuar, giving them hell. She nearly shouted encouragement, but she was pouring everything she had into her sprint to close the distance rapidly. They finally hoisted the twitching sack between two of them and scrambled down the hall.

She made it through the door mere seconds behind them, but slid to a stop when she glanced back to check on her team. They had kept pace with her admirably, but when they approached the huge inter-segment door they had stopped in their tracks. They milled around in front of the archway, staring at Jesri wordlessly.

"Come on!" she yelled angrily. "We’ve got them!"

"They crossed into the next segment," one of them called back matter-of-factly. "We have to cut pursuit."

"Bullshit!", Jesri shouted. "They’re right here, let’s go!"

"We have orders!", objected a different crewman.

She didn’t have time for this. With a frustrated grunt she turned and raced after the kidnappers, who had increased their lead again while she was talking. Her team stared wordlessly after her as she ran. She was going to have words with Ellie about fostering initiative in her crew, she decided.

She came within sight of the fleeing group again, but didn’t try to close distance as she had been, hanging just within visual distance against the inner curve of the hall. They outnumbered her now, so she was going to have to be more careful. She could tail them and try to nail down their base of operations. Then she could…

She didn’t know. She just ran, cursing the Irri and discarding options in her head, the hall growing dimmer around her as she traveled.

Qktk slammed heavily to the ground, bouncing and rolling as he was dropped unceremoniously by his exhausted Irri bearer. He came to a stop in an awkward position with his bound legs throbbing where the bindings pulled tight. Another thump and muffled yelp heralded Rhuar’s arrival on the ground. He couldn’t see past the bag covering his head, but he heard the Irri slumping to the deck around him as they rested.

"Who was that?", one of them gasped. "She had Colonel Tam’s face!"

"Did we lose her?", another asked tremulously.

"Hush," rasped a lower voice. "No noise. We rest only for a few seconds."

Just as promised, Qktk found himself hoisted up onto another bony Irri shoulder before his legs went fully numb. For the next hour they plodded through the hallways at a careful, halting pace, his captor’s shoulder finding new and unpleasant ways to grind into his body. Finally the light outside seemed to brighten and their pace picked up just before he was dropped to the floor again.

He groaned quietly, new shocks of pain shooting through him. Some whispered conversation took place too quietly for him to make out before more hands seized him and hauled him upright. The Irri stripped his bonds away, sliding the bag down and causing Qktk to blink rapidly at the sudden light.

He was in a large room that had once been some sort of storage hold, if he had to guess. It was currently filled from wall to wall with makeshift tents, improvised shelters and shabby fences. Tangled masses of wire fed into light fixtures bound to the ceiling with braids of rope and fabric. In the far corner a section of wall had been torn away to reveal a tangle of piping and conduits, around which a small cluster of plants crowded close to a thin stream of dripping water.

The Irri from the hydroponics bay squatted next to Qktk as he pulled himself upright. It stared at him as if waiting for something, watching him carefully while he massaged feeling back into his joints.

After a short while it spoke. "So you are truly not touched," it said, seeming to relax. "I thought so, even if…" It trailed off and did not elaborate. "I apologize for any harm we caused you, but we could not delay once we began," it said.

Qktk glared in response, flicking a few of his minor eyes to further scan their surroundings. After the bustle of the docks this ramshackle hold seemed sparsely populated, but there were actually quite a few of the lithe grey aliens here. Unlike the uniformed Irri from the docks, they seemed… normal. They wandered around, carrying crude baskets or chasing naked children that screamed and dashed giggling through gently waving curtains of tattered cloth. Many of them were draped in cloaks of the same flat grey that blended into the station walls, but others were wearing bright swatches of fabric woven into intricate patterns.

His captor was still staring at him expectantly. It… No, she? Qktk didn’t even know if Irri had genders, but her face was distinctly different from Drinni’s blocky features. The injured ensign was nowhere to be seen - only one sack remained, and he doubted Drinni was the source of the yowling and inventive profanity coming from within.

"We would like to release him as well," she said with a grimace, following his gaze surprisingly well for a humanoid. "Can you calm him down so we can undo the bindings?"

Qktk suppressed the urge to be mutinous for Rhuar’s sake and scuttled over to his side with a stiff gait. He poked the bag with a leg and whispered quietly for a few moments, after which the Irri gingerly loosed his bonds and removed the sack to reveal Rhuar’s ruffled, angry face. His lips curled into another snarl, but Qktk tapped him admonishingly on the nose.

"Listen. Observe," he hissed. "Unless you enjoy the sack." Rhuar shot a glance at the rumpled bag next to him and settled onto his hindquarters, peering suspiciously around the room. A gaggle of curious Irri children stared at him from behind a pile of crates, fleeing with a chorus of gleeful shrieks when he bared his teeth at them menacingly.

Their captor regarded them with an amused look before lowering herself to the floor beside them. "I am Se Dasi, the Watcher for this area," she said, inclining her head respectfully to them. "I would like to again extend my apologies for the rough treatment you have endured."

"Pleased to meet you," Qktk replied, keeping his tone neutral. "I am Qktk, and this is Rhuar." He saw Rhuar flick an ear at the Irri, who nodded in return. Qktk fixed Se Dasi with a look and she returned her attention to him. "Where is Drinni?", he inquired.

Se Dasi grimaced. "The other one we took? We had to restrain him, he was touched. In time, once he stops calling for the voice, we may be able to help him." She shook her head, either missing or ignoring their confused looks. "We can discuss his fate later. Right now, we need to talk about you two."

"Yes, please," Rhuar shot back irritatedly. "What the fuck is going on? Why did you kidnap us? Why did you bring us to your weird trash village-"

Qktk poked him hard in the side, cutting off the stream of annoyed questions. "I think we would both appreciate an explanation for your actions," he interjected.

It was Se Dasi’s turn to look confused. "When you saw me gathering food you risked defying her and hid my presence. I thought to repay the debt, so we came back to help you escape before she claimed you for your offense. Why did you fight us?" A shadow of anger crossed her face. "One of our best was lost to the Sleepers, for you."

"Escape? Her? Sleepers?", asked Qktk, feeling lost and exasperated. "Se Dasi, we just arrived on the station today. We have no idea what you’re talking about, Eleanor was just having Drinni take us on a tour of the station when I saw you. I didn’t say anything when I saw you because you looked frightened and I didn’t want to get you in trouble."

She frowned. "I wasn’t… Did you say Eleanor?"

Qktk stared at her. "Eleanor? The woman who runs the station? Well, apparently not the whole station," he amended wryly, his attempt at humor faltering when he saw the look on Se Dasi’s face.

She stared at them with cold, unfriendly eyes. "You are willing servants of Colonel Tam?", she asked ominously, the Irri around them shifting into wary readiness.

"What?", Qktk asked, looking around in alarm. "I told you, we just arrived on the station today! We had no idea she was here, we didn’t even know the station was inhabited until we arrived. Her own sisters thought she had died five thousand years ago!"

Se Dasi didn’t relax, but the steel in her glare was replaced by a troubled unease. "How do you know of her sisters?", she asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

Rhuar didn’t give either of them a chance to continue, cutting into the conversation with his voice amplified to painful levels.

"Okay, everyone shut the fuck up!", he yelled. "No, Captain, don’t fucking- Stop poking me with your jabby fucking legs, I’m talking now." He glared at both Qktk and Se Dasi in turn, fur bristling. "It’s obvious that neither of you has any fucking idea what the other one is talking about. Have either of you been listening to this conversation? At all?" He looked around the room, taking in the stunned Irri faces and one mortified Htt. "Since you’re both too polite to ask the right questions," he said, "we’re going to sit down and I’ll ask them."

He maintained his focused glare until both Qktk and Se Dasi had settled back to the ground, then nodded and sat down imperiously across from them.

"Okay," said Rhuar, a satisfied smile on his face. "First things first, we’re going to lay out some basics from our side." He looked pointedly at Se Dasi. "Most importantly - I have no fucking clue who any of you people are. We met Eleanor, or Colonel Tam, for about five minutes today. During that five minutes she neglected to mention that you folks existed or to inform us about any issues of station politics - which now seems like a big fucking oversight, considering," he snarled.

"This means that we were not enlisted in any nefarious plots against you," he continued. "We have no intention of doing anything unpleasant and we generally don’t know what the fuck we’re doing here. So if we say something that makes you think we’re your enemy, I would take it as a personal fucking favor if you asked for clarification before you pull the sacks and rope back out. Deal?"

Se Dasi gaped at him, looking slightly dazed. Qktk sighed. "Mr. Rhuar," he said wearily, "perhaps you should just ask your questions."

"Right," he nodded. "Se Dasi. Please explain - in summary - the nature of your conflict with Colonel Tam."

She goggled at him. "You don’t-" She blinked, and a flicker of realization touched her face. "Ah, I see," she said, looking at Qktk and Rhuar with a serious expression. "Colonel Tam has used her foul magics to enslave and oppress my people for generations," she explained. "She is a thief of souls, a nightmare made flesh, an undying evil beyond evil."

Qktk stared, speechless. Rhuar hovered between horror and lingering self-satisfaction.

"I’m sorry, but what?", Jesri said incredulously, emerging like a wraith from the shadowy corner where she had been listening.

There was at this point a brief and perfectly reasonable moment of chaos.

Part 19

The room was silent for the barest of moments as Jesri’s indignant outburst echoed back on the crowd, then a shrill scream sent the room into pandemonium. People ran clutching bundles and children, fleeing into cleverly disguised boltholes in the walls. Se Dasi hesitated only a moment before jumping in front of Jesri and crouching in a low combat stance, her eyes flashing with determination. Her exhausted squad formed a loose circle around the bemused Valkyrie.

Jesri hadn’t moved. She eyed the encircling Irri closely, her stance broadcasting a casual wariness. They stood like that for several seconds before Jesri exhaled and relaxed her posture. "Okay, folks," she sighed, "let’s not get-"

She was interrupted by two Irri dashing towards her from opposite sides of the circle, coming in low to grab at her legs in an immobilizing tackle. She dodged backwards and sidestepped past one, tripping him into his oncoming teammate. Another Irri from behind her managed to grab Jesri’s wrist only to be pulled forward into a fluid throw that left him dazed on the decking.

A heavy pipe caught Jesri in the shoulder and sent her stumbling back before she recovered into a half crouch and drew her sidearm. Qktk shouted in alarm, taking an involuntary step forward, but Jesri had already fired a tight burst of shots in an arc around her. Each shot hammered into the metal deck, the crack and flash of ablated metal beating a staccato pulse through the air and freezing the Irri in their tracks.

Qktk sagged in relief, earning an annoyed look from Jesri. "Have a little faith, Kick," she admonished him, holding her gun low but ready. "If I wanted them dead I’d have used this a lot earlier."

"We will die before we let you take us," Se Dasi snarled. "Our souls are our own!"

"Oh, for fuck’s sake," Jesri said, rolling her eyes and holstering her weapon. "Guys, I’m just-"

The brawny Irri with the pipe took another swing at Jesri as soon as her hand left the gun. She was forced to evade with an undignified hop backwards. She scowled and caught the pipe on his follow-up attack, ripping it from his grasp and pulling him forward with a surprised squawk. A circular sweep sent her attackers back a few paces and allowed Jesri a moment to breathe.

"Fucking enough!", she shouted, her voice ringing off the walls and freezing the Irri in place. "Dammit, just… Rhuar, can you tell these guys I’m not trying to steal their souls?"

Rhuar stared back at her in confusion. "Me?"

"You were doing okay before," she retorted.

Rhuar scratched his fur nervously. "I guess," he muttered, "but my sister isn’t an undying nightmare made flesh-"

"Not helping," she hissed.

Se Dasi glared at Jesri warily, stepping backwards. "You took He Mari, gave him to the Sleepers. For that alone you are our enemy."

"The guy we caught on the chase?", Jesri asked. "Look, he’s just a prisoner. We’re not going to kill the guy or anything. I’ll ask Ellie to release him when we get back - as long as you let Rhuar and Qktk go. We’ll call it a trade."

Se Dasi threw her hands into the air in a frustrated gesture. "If only that were possible. Colonel Tam has him now, there is no easy way back. She will touch his mind with her magic. He will lose his soul and become one of the Sleepers."

"Oh, come on!", Jesri shouted. "Ellie doesn’t have any magic. She doesn’t steal souls. The Irri that follow her behave differently than you because they choose to follow military discipline, not because they’re cursed or something." She shook her head. "Listen, just let me take these two back and we’ll get your friend sent home. Ellie will listen to me."

Squaring her shoulders and drawing herself up to her full height, Se Dasi stood in front of Jesri and met her gaze. She was trembling, although Jesri couldn’t tell whether it was rage or fear she felt. Jesri stared back coolly, waiting.

"She steals souls," Se Dasi said firmly, her voice low and serious. "She is evil. If you doubt me, I will show you proof." She turned away and walked briskly towards a cluster of scrap-metal shacks huddled into a corner, not waiting for Jesri to follow.

Jesri frowned, but walked after Se Dasi. She caught up to her just as she was ducking past a faded violet sheet to enter one of the huts. From within, she could hear a constant flow of muffled conversation. She had to bend low to fit under the Irri-height doorframe, scuttling past the curtain into a low room lined with cots along the walls. She wrinkled her nose as she entered, the stench of excrement and vomit laying thick in the air around her.

Most of the beds were filled with Irri, lying still on their back and staring at the ceiling. Some moved their hands aimlessly, others whispered and muttered softly to themselves. The bed nearest to the door was occupied by an Irri wearing one of Eleanor’s grey uniforms, talking steadily to himself as he wrung his hands anxiously. A smear of dark green blood stained his collar and the side of his head, flaking off onto the bed occasionally as he twitched and rolled.

"So much, so much," he raved, slurring his words until they were almost unintelligible. "I need… I need…"

His eyes bulged wide, the muscles in his face straining as he turned his head slowly to look at Jesri. Green smudges stained his sclera and his face was caked with crusty residue from his mouth and nose.

"Drinni?", Jesri stammered, aghast at the state of the once-exemplary ensign. "What happened to you?"

He lunged out of his bed, falling half onto the floor as he scrambled to grab Jesri’s arm with a bruisingly tight grip. His eyes stared past her, his yellow irises dilating wide. "Stop," he hissed, strands of foamy saliva trailing from his cheek. "Stop, stop, stop, stop stop stop…" His grip on her arm weakened and he curled into a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth and slamming his open palms weakly into the sides of his head.

Se Dasi bent down and gently lifted him back into his bed, making soothing noises and lifting a ratty brown blanket over him. He flailed at it for a few uncoordinated swipes before pulling it off and clumsily clutching it to his chest.

Qktk and Rhuar had followed her into the hut and were staring at Drinni in mute horror. Se Dasi straightened up and looked defiantly at Jesri. "Rhuar said you were her sister?", she snarled. "See what your kin has done to mine." She gestured to the immobile Irri on the beds. "All of them, taken by Colonel Tam and given a Sleeper soul. When we take our family back from her, the body passes beyond the great doors and the soul remains with her." She bent down to stroke an old man’s cheek as he stared blankly at the corroded metal roof of the hut. He didn’t react to her touch. "With time one in twenty may speak again," she said quietly, her voice tight with anger. "If they are young the chance is better."

"They’re sick," said Jesri, looking around the room. "An environmental toxin, nutrient deficiency, something. I was just there, Se Dasi, Ellie isn’t doing anything-"

"You’re wrong!", Se Dasi yelled, causing a few of the catatonic Irri to flinch and whimper. She looked abashed for a moment, but the full force of her anger returned as she glared at Jesri. "You’re wrong," she said, no trace of doubt in her voice. "If you will not believe me, if you will not believe your own eyes, then know that the spirits also say Colonel Tam is responsible."

Jesri stared at her, then shook her head. "The spirits, huh?"

Se Dasi straightened up. "Ask them yourself if you still doubt," she said coolly. "This way."

She bent down and exited the hut, the purple curtain waving gently behind her.

Rhuar blinked and exchanged a look with Qktk. "Wait," he said, "what did she just say?"

Eleanor stormed through the hall beside Anja, a comet tail of Irri trailing behind her. It had taken them longer than either would have liked to get back to the docks after Jesri’s team reported her solo excursion into the next ring segment. At the two-hour mark after her departure, Anja’s patience was gone.

"I am going, Ellie," she said, her tone not inviting further discussion. "If your troops must stay in this segment, so be it." She stalked off down the hall towards the midline corridor.

"I’m telling you, there’s a better option!", Eleanor shouted, chasing after her. "Anja, are you really going to spend hours running around trying to find where they’ve holed up? Wait another hour, help my crew connect the Grand Design’s reactor to the grid. We can run power to that segment and turn on sensors, communications, everything. If we can do that I’ll deploy everyone I have, but I need you to help. You’re the only one left who knows the ship’s systems."

Anja stopped and glared at her. "Thirty minutes," she said grudgingly. "I will help for thirty minutes and then I’m leaving. Your crew can finish up and follow me at their own speed."

Eleanor smiled at her and nodded. "Thank you, Anja. We very well could finish before then, with your help. I’ll task a few crews to make sure the conduits are clear down to the segment barrier, then I’ll meet you at the docking bay."

Anja nodded in return and stalked off. Eleanor’s Irri contingent followed her silently, leaving Eleanor alone in the hall. She stood silently for a moment with her eyes closed. After a few seconds, she reopened her eyes and grinned, heading down the hall after her sister.

Picking her way through a haphazard labyrinth of shacks, walls and draped fabric, Jesri followed Se Dasi towards the back of the hold and out into a hallway. Rhuar and Qktk trailed behind her, unable to resist their curiosity. They walked for a short distance until they reached an empty doorframe that had been daubed with red pigment in an intricate pattern. Jesri could see the crumbling crusts of old paint where the pattern had been painted over year after year, giving it a slightly raised appearance.

Se Dasi paused before the door, standing still with her eyes closed for a moment before striding in. The others followed her, passing through the door and waiting for a moment as their eyes adjusted to the dim lights within. It was an old theater, the standard no-frills sort that was installed by default in every residential block.

The large display at the far end was scratched and pitted, clearly nonfunctional, but the tiny stage area in front of it had been converted to a makeshift altar. Loops of shiny wire tied with multicolored fabric were strewn in front of a bowl filled with clear data chips, the platinum-white wires embedded in each chip glittering as Jesri moved closer. She almost grinned - no wonder the systems in this segment were so shot, if they were stripping all the consoles as an offering.

Se Dasi lowered herself to a sitting position - on the floor, since all of the theater’s seats had long since been stripped from the room. "Spirits, Protectors, I greet you," she said formally. "Se Dasi asks for counsel." She settled back and stopped speaking. Jesri couldn’t tell if she was meditating or staring at the altar.

After a minute had passed, Rhuar gave Jesri a look as though he wanted to say something, but Jesri shook her head firmly no. They weren’t about to burn through whatever goodwill they had somehow achieved by disrupting a religious ritual. They would sit until Se Dasi finished communing with-

"Hello, Se Dasi," boomed a voice from the speakers behind the display. "It’s been a long while since you were here. What do you need?"

Jesri blinked. It was a human voice, male, speaking casually through the theater’s audio system. She languished in a moment of unbalanced confusion. Rhuar, not the languishing type, coughed and stood up. "Wait, what?", he said, "Se Dasi, no offense, but those are just speakers. The audio-"

She turned her head back to glare at Rhuar angrily. "Of course they’re speakers," she spit, "Do you think I’m stupid? We may not have a lot of it, but we understand electricity. The spirits live in the wires. How else would they talk to us?"

Rhuar sputtered, at a loss for words, and the voice behind the screen gave a low chuckle. "Ah, a visitor! Don’t worry, I appreciate a skeptic," he said. "Please don’t think I’m trying to pull one over on the Free Irri. I haven’t tried to conceal what I am, but my nature is… complex, let’s say. Calling me a spirit is not the most accurate, it’s true, but it gets us most of the way there and saves me from having to teach a few courses in computer science and galactic history. I’ve made clear to the Irri that my advice and goodwill isn’t contingent on offerings or obedience."

Se Dasi nodded firmly. "We give from thanks, not fear."

"Just to be clear," Qktk said slowly. "You’re implying that you’re inhabiting the station’s computer systems. A non-physical entity." Rhuar and Jesri shared a look, then turned back to the screen in consternation.

The voice paused, seeming to mull it over. "More or less," it finally answered. "Like I said, it’s complex. I’m not sitting in a room somewhere speaking into an audio pickup, if that’s what you’re wondering."

"Uh," said Rhuar, his intended speech about exploiting less-advanced cultures suddenly seeming less pressing. Jesri shot him another warning look, and he nodded. "So," he said cautiously, "given that you’re on a human station you probably know what our next question is going to be."

"Ah, yes," sighed the voice. "You’re right to be suspicious. I suppose we could do proper introductions. How about this - I don’t have a visual feed and I like to know who I’m talking to. Considering which station you’re on, I think I’m allowed a bit of my own suspicion. You start, tell me about who you are. Then I’ll tell you a bit about me."

Rhuar stared blankly at the screen for a second. "Uh, sure," he said. "I’m Rhuar. I’m an artificer and a pilot. Oh, and I’m a dog."

"Oh, interesting!", exclaimed the voice. "I believe you’re the first dog we’ve had come by these parts." Rhuar couldn’t help but feel a bit flattered at the voice’s enthusiasm. Jesri was still a bit too out-of-sorts to notice, but Qktk did and sighed.

"I’m Qktk," he rattled tiredly. "I’m a Htt ship captain and a merchant."

"Another first for me," the voice said eagerly. "This is shaping up to be an interesting sort of day."

Jesri cleared her throat. "I’m Jesri Tam," she said, "and I’m-"

"-a Valkyrie," he said, his voice noticeably quieter and less bombastic. "Captain Tam, I didn’t know you had arrived on-station already."

Jesri’s urge to stare was running into her profound lack of anything to stare at. "You know who I am?", she asked in confusion. Se Dasi was staring at her with wide eyes.

"Of course I do, sir," the voice said, its friendly tone sliding into something cooler, more professional. "I’m the one who invited you here."

"All right, heave!", Anja growled, tugging the last of the four major connectors into place and locking it tightly. Behind her, an Irri work team stretched their aching arms for a moment before running to their next task - whatever that was. She sighed. Working with the Irri was efficient, if admittedly rather strange. They didn’t talk unless they were talking to her. They would disappear until she needed help, at which point a group with precisely the numbers and skills needed to assist would swoop in.

It was quite effective. They had hooked up the reactor in an amazingly short time, darting around the conduits like dour grey ants. Anja smiled at the image and walked back towards the main dock platform to find Eleanor standing in the middle of a swarm of busy Irri.

"Ellie, our team is done!", she shouted. "I think we were the last ones!"

Eleanor looked up at her. "Ah, yes," she said. "Not quite. We had the last team report successful hookup just as you walked up."

Anja nodded. "Are we good to head out?"

"Give me another ten minutes," Eleanor said placatingly. "We need to power the conduits between here and the segment barrier in stages to avoid overloading any degraded bits. My teams can fix little issues as they come up, but if we blow the whole line it’ll take us days to fix."

Anja threw her hands up in irritation. "Fine, fine," she groused. "Let’s get started, then."

Eleanor nodded, and behind her a team of Irri scrambled into action around a power regulator. They fiddled with it briefly, then the power cables leading from it thrummed with a sudden surge of electricity.

Anja nearly had to catch Eleanor as she staggered to the side, grabbing on to Anja’s shoulder for balance. "Ellie?", she said in surprise. "You okay, sister?"

"Hah, yeah," Eleanor said, straightening up with a hand to her forehead. "Just lost my balance for a second. I guess I’m overdue for a nap."

"You should rest, Ellie," Anja scolded. "You were always the one spouting off stuff like ‘fatigue waits in ambush’. You used to sound like a page out of the survival manual."

"That is a page out of the survival manual," Eleanor responded with a smirk. "Really, Anja, I’m fine. I’ll rest once we’ve got Jesri back."

Anja gave her a doubtful look, but didn’t press the issue. "Okay," she agreed. "Just get the power to that ring segment and I will take care of the rest."

Eleanor grinned. "Atta girl. Why don’t you get ready to head out? My team will meet you at the dock exit once you’re done."

Anja nodded and jogged over to the Grand Design’s boarding ramp. Behind her, she heard the thrum of the next set of conduits being charged.

"Okay," Jesri said, breaking the stunned silence that had followed the voice’s claim. "I think it’s your turn to talk."

"Agreed, sir," sighed the voice. "I’m just at a loss about where to start." There were a few more yawning moments of silence before he spoke again. "I should introduce myself, at least. My name is David Kincaid, and I’m a member of a… let’s call it a resistance, of sorts. A covert network organized to fight the Gestalt."

Jesri contemplated that for a moment. "You realize how that sounds," she said flatly. "I’d be skeptical enough if you were a living, breathing human telling me that, but you’re-"

"A disembodied voice?", David responded dryly. "I’ll grant that my current state doesn’t do much for my credibility, but I would have thought I’d be good on that score after saving you from the Emissaries back on Ysl."

"It’s enough for me to hear you out," Jesri allowed. "Care to explain the disembodied bit?"

David paused again. "I don’t mind explaining, but we may have more pressing issues. Your sisters seem to be preparing to come and get you."

Se Dasi gave a start at his words and looked accusingly at Jesri. "You’ve led them here?", she asked, the fear plain on her face. Jesri put her hands up placatingly, but Se Dasi rounded on her in a rage with fists raised.

"Wait!", David thundered, stopping Se Dasi in her tracks. "Captain, please listen," he said insistently, "We may have very little time. Did Se Dasi explain about Colonel Tam?"

Jesri snorted. "Not you too. If you’re going to tell me Eleanor is a soul-stealing witch then this conversation is over."

"Ah. No, sir," David said hesitantly, "but there are some things you need to know about her. She’s not well, Captain. She’s been forcibly implanting the Irri with modified Valkyrie mental links and using them as behavioral control devices. She’s tampered with her own link as well, to her detriment."

Jesri gaped. "David, that’s-! That’s so ridiculous I don’t even know what to dispute first," she fumed. "First off, Ellie wouldn’t do that. Second, Valkyrie tech wouldn’t work on Irri biology, and even if it did-"

"Actually," interjected Rhuar, "Drinni mentioned earlier that all of the Irri had been given mental links. I noticed him using his on our tour and asked about it."

"But that’s impossible!", Jesri objected, an odd sense of claustrophobia pressing on her. "Even if she wanted to do something like that, even if she solved the compatibility issue, the Valkyrie tech was top-secret military stuff. The fabricators here wouldn’t know how to print one, they wouldn’t have even carried the plans on her corvettes. You can’t print something without plans or an example, and the only one she had was in her own head."

David was quiet for several seconds. "There was one Valkyrie team on each of the three corvettes," he said softly. "Six of your sisters in total. I don’t know the precise details as it happened long before I came here, but I have the records from the ship and station computers."

"What?", Jesri said incredulously. "No. Absolutely not. She told me she was traveling alone. She said she lived here alone. David, we can’t lie."

"She tampered with her own link," David repeated patiently, "to her detriment. They’re not just for communication. She removed all of the default restrictions, from what I’ve been able to ascertain. Not just the social limiters like non-mission deception - she unlocked the cognitive limiters too. She kept a regular log on the station network, early on."

David stopped talking and a low hiss of background noise came over the speakers, followed by Ellie’s intense, breathy voice.

"I’ve almost got it," she said, notes of enthusiasm and frustration dripping from her tone. "I’ve isolated the protections on the limiting protocols. Once the station finishes with the encryption, I should be able to return all of us to our full potential." She paused. "It’s too late," she said angrily. "Too late to make much of a difference. All I can do now is help my sisters. Cait and Liza want to leave now that Kiera is dead, to look for others. They’ll be outnumbered and alone out there. We need to grow beyond our boundaries, adapt to the times," Ellie finished grimly. "Adapt or die."

David ended the playback, the hiss fading to nothingness as Jesri stared in slow, seeping horror. "That’s the last recording," David said apologetically. "None of the other Valkyrie committed log entries after that date. I don’t believe she realized that removing the restrictions would also re-enable the mental link networking capability."

"No," Jesri breathed, reality shattering around her. "Oh, Ellie. Oh no." She remembered Eleanor running through the halls ahead of her when they were children, laughing when the program supervisor scolded her. Her mind’s eye shifted to show her Eleanor stooped over the corpses of her sisters, hands bloody to the elbows-

"Insanity, delusions of grandeur, self-destructive behavior," said Rhuar wonderingly. "Anja had said they removed the network links because of instability."

"Only blocked, not removed," David said sadly. "Now Colonel Tam uses hers to monitor and direct all of the Irri within her segment of the station. Any implanted Irri within the area she controls is effectively just an extension of her."

Jesri remembered her team stopping dead at the segment boundary. Orders, they had said. The parts of her mind rebelling against the evidence were shoved aside to rage in a corner, accruing grief for a later date. Too much of it made sense to disregard, and if David was telling the truth-

Lights snapped on suddenly in the room and outside along the hallway, making them wince and shield their eyes. Shouts of alarm came from the hallway outside, and she heard the sounds of Irri running.

"Not good," David said urgently. "They’ve managed to reconnect this segment to the power grid. Colonel Tam’s troops will be able to cross over and attack the village."

"It should take them a few minutes to cross from the segment door, even at top speed," Jesri said, her head still spinning. "We can move everyone towards the next segment-"

"No," rattled Qktk. "They’re already here. Remember? Drinni and the others."

Se Dasi’s eyes widened in panic and realization. "The touched. Father!"

From the village they heard a loud crash, then screaming.

Part 19

The room was silent for the barest of moments as Jesri’s indignant outburst echoed back on the crowd, then a shrill scream sent the room into pandemonium. People ran clutching bundles and children, fleeing into cleverly disguised boltholes in the walls. Se Dasi hesitated only a moment before jumping in front of Jesri and crouching in a low combat stance, her eyes flashing with determination. Her exhausted squad formed a loose circle around the bemused Valkyrie.

Jesri hadn’t moved. She eyed the encircling Irri closely, her stance broadcasting a casual wariness. They stood like that for several seconds before Jesri exhaled and relaxed her posture. "Okay, folks," she sighed, "let’s not get-"

She was interrupted by two Irri dashing towards her from opposite sides of the circle, coming in low to grab at her legs in an immobilizing tackle. She dodged backwards and sidestepped past one, tripping him into his oncoming teammate. Another Irri from behind her managed to grab Jesri’s wrist only to be pulled forward into a fluid throw that left him dazed on the decking.

A heavy pipe caught Jesri in the shoulder and sent her stumbling back before she recovered into a half crouch and drew her sidearm. Qktk shouted in alarm, taking an involuntary step forward, but Jesri had already fired a tight burst of shots in an arc around her. Each shot hammered into the metal deck, the crack and flash of ablated metal beating a staccato pulse through the air and freezing the Irri in their tracks.

Qktk sagged in relief, earning an annoyed look from Jesri. "Have a little faith, Kick," she admonished him, holding her gun low but ready. "If I wanted them dead I’d have used this a lot earlier."

"We will die before we let you take us," Se Dasi snarled. "Our souls are our own!"

"Oh, for fuck’s sake," Jesri said, rolling her eyes and holstering her weapon. "Guys, I’m just-"

The brawny Irri with the pipe took another swing at Jesri as soon as her hand left the gun. She was forced to evade with an undignified hop backwards. She scowled and caught the pipe on his follow-up attack, ripping it from his grasp and pulling him forward with a surprised squawk. A circular sweep sent her attackers back a few paces and allowed Jesri a moment to breathe.

"Fucking enough!", she shouted, her voice ringing off the walls and freezing the Irri in place. "Dammit, just… Rhuar, can you tell these guys I’m not trying to steal their souls?"

Rhuar stared back at her in confusion. "Me?"

"You were doing okay before," she retorted.

Rhuar scratched his fur nervously. "I guess," he muttered, "but my sister isn’t an undying nightmare made flesh-"

"Not helping," she hissed.

Se Dasi glared at Jesri warily, stepping backwards. "You took He Mari, gave him to the Sleepers. For that alone you are our enemy."

"The guy we caught on the chase?", Jesri asked. "Look, he’s just a prisoner. We’re not going to kill the guy or anything. I’ll ask Ellie to release him when we get back - as long as you let Rhuar and Qktk go. We’ll call it a trade."

Se Dasi threw her hands into the air in a frustrated gesture. "If only that were possible. Colonel Tam has him now, there is no easy way back. She will touch his mind with her magic. He will lose his soul and become one of the Sleepers."

"Oh, come on!", Jesri shouted. "Ellie doesn’t have any magic. She doesn’t steal souls. The Irri that follow her behave differently than you because they choose to follow military discipline, not because they’re cursed or something." She shook her head. "Listen, just let me take these two back and we’ll get your friend sent home. Ellie will listen to me."

Squaring her shoulders and drawing herself up to her full height, Se Dasi stood in front of Jesri and met her gaze. She was trembling, although Jesri couldn’t tell whether it was rage or fear she felt. Jesri stared back coolly, waiting.

"She steals souls," Se Dasi said firmly, her voice low and serious. "She is evil. If you doubt me, I will show you proof." She turned away and walked briskly towards a cluster of scrap-metal shacks huddled into a corner, not waiting for Jesri to follow.

Jesri frowned, but walked after Se Dasi. She caught up to her just as she was ducking past a faded violet sheet to enter one of the huts. From within, she could hear a constant flow of muffled conversation. She had to bend low to fit under the Irri-height doorframe, scuttling past the curtain into a low room lined with cots along the walls. She wrinkled her nose as she entered, the stench of excrement and vomit laying thick in the air around her.

Most of the beds were filled with Irri, lying still on their back and staring at the ceiling. Some moved their hands aimlessly, others whispered and muttered softly to themselves. The bed nearest to the door was occupied by an Irri wearing one of Eleanor’s grey uniforms, talking steadily to himself as he wrung his hands anxiously. A smear of dark green blood stained his collar and the side of his head, flaking off onto the bed occasionally as he twitched and rolled.

"So much, so much," he raved, slurring his words until they were almost unintelligible. "I need… I need…"

His eyes bulged wide, the muscles in his face straining as he turned his head slowly to look at Jesri. Green smudges stained his sclera and his face was caked with crusty residue from his mouth and nose.

"Drinni?", Jesri stammered, aghast at the state of the once-exemplary ensign. "What happened to you?"

He lunged out of his bed, falling half onto the floor as he scrambled to grab Jesri’s arm with a bruisingly tight grip. His eyes stared past her, his yellow irises dilating wide. "Stop," he hissed, strands of foamy saliva trailing from his cheek. "Stop, stop, stop, stop stop stop…" His grip on her arm weakened and he curled into a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth and slamming his open palms weakly into the sides of his head.

Se Dasi bent down and gently lifted him back into his bed, making soothing noises and lifting a ratty brown blanket over him. He flailed at it for a few uncoordinated swipes before pulling it off and clumsily clutching it to his chest.

Qktk and Rhuar had followed her into the hut and were staring at Drinni in mute horror. Se Dasi straightened up and looked defiantly at Jesri. "Rhuar said you were her sister?", she snarled. "See what your kin has done to mine." She gestured to the immobile Irri on the beds. "All of them, taken by Colonel Tam and given a Sleeper soul. When we take our family back from her, the body passes beyond the great doors and the soul remains with her." She bent down to stroke an old man’s cheek as he stared blankly at the corroded metal roof of the hut. He didn’t react to her touch. "With time one in twenty may speak again," she said quietly, her voice tight with anger. "If they are young the chance is better."

"They’re sick," said Jesri, looking around the room. "An environmental toxin, nutrient deficiency, something. I was just there, Se Dasi, Ellie isn’t doing anything-"

"You’re wrong!", Se Dasi yelled, causing a few of the catatonic Irri to flinch and whimper. She looked abashed for a moment, but the full force of her anger returned as she glared at Jesri. "You’re wrong," she said, no trace of doubt in her voice. "If you will not believe me, if you will not believe your own eyes, then know that the spirits also say Colonel Tam is responsible."

Jesri stared at her, then shook her head. "The spirits, huh?"

Se Dasi straightened up. "Ask them yourself if you still doubt," she said coolly. "This way."

She bent down and exited the hut, the purple curtain waving gently behind her.

Rhuar blinked and exchanged a look with Qktk. "Wait," he said, "what did she just say?"

Eleanor stormed through the hall beside Anja, a comet tail of Irri trailing behind her. It had taken them longer than either would have liked to get back to the docks after Jesri’s team reported her solo excursion into the next ring segment. At the two-hour mark after her departure, Anja’s patience was gone.

"I am going, Ellie," she said, her tone not inviting further discussion. "If your troops must stay in this segment, so be it." She stalked off down the hall towards the midline corridor.

"I’m telling you, there’s a better option!", Eleanor shouted, chasing after her. "Anja, are you really going to spend hours running around trying to find where they’ve holed up? Wait another hour, help my crew connect the Grand Design’s reactor to the grid. We can run power to that segment and turn on sensors, communications, everything. If we can do that I’ll deploy everyone I have, but I need you to help. You’re the only one left who knows the ship’s systems."

Anja stopped and glared at her. "Thirty minutes," she said grudgingly. "I will help for thirty minutes and then I’m leaving. Your crew can finish up and follow me at their own speed."

Eleanor smiled at her and nodded. "Thank you, Anja. We very well could finish before then, with your help. I’ll task a few crews to make sure the conduits are clear down to the segment barrier, then I’ll meet you at the docking bay."

Anja nodded in return and stalked off. Eleanor’s Irri contingent followed her silently, leaving Eleanor alone in the hall. She stood silently for a moment with her eyes closed. After a few seconds, she reopened her eyes and grinned, heading down the hall after her sister.

Picking her way through a haphazard labyrinth of shacks, walls and draped fabric, Jesri followed Se Dasi towards the back of the hold and out into a hallway. Rhuar and Qktk trailed behind her, unable to resist their curiosity. They walked for a short distance until they reached an empty doorframe that had been daubed with red pigment in an intricate pattern. Jesri could see the crumbling crusts of old paint where the pattern had been painted over year after year, giving it a slightly raised appearance.

Se Dasi paused before the door, standing still with her eyes closed for a moment before striding in. The others followed her, passing through the door and waiting for a moment as their eyes adjusted to the dim lights within. It was an old theater, the standard no-frills sort that was installed by default in every residential block.

The large display at the far end was scratched and pitted, clearly nonfunctional, but the tiny stage area in front of it had been converted to a makeshift altar. Loops of shiny wire tied with multicolored fabric were strewn in front of a bowl filled with clear data chips, the platinum-white wires embedded in each chip glittering as Jesri moved closer. She almost grinned - no wonder the systems in this segment were so shot, if they were stripping all the consoles as an offering.

Se Dasi lowered herself to a sitting position - on the floor, since all of the theater’s seats had long since been stripped from the room. "Spirits, Protectors, I greet you," she said formally. "Se Dasi asks for counsel." She settled back and stopped speaking. Jesri couldn’t tell if she was meditating or staring at the altar.

After a minute had passed, Rhuar gave Jesri a look as though he wanted to say something, but Jesri shook her head firmly no. They weren’t about to burn through whatever goodwill they had somehow achieved by disrupting a religious ritual. They would sit until Se Dasi finished communing with-

"Hello, Se Dasi," boomed a voice from the speakers behind the display. "It’s been a long while since you were here. What do you need?"

Jesri blinked. It was a human voice, male, speaking casually through the theater’s audio system. She languished in a moment of unbalanced confusion. Rhuar, not the languishing type, coughed and stood up. "Wait, what?", he said, "Se Dasi, no offense, but those are just speakers. The audio-"

She turned her head back to glare at Rhuar angrily. "Of course they’re speakers," she spit, "Do you think I’m stupid? We may not have a lot of it, but we understand electricity. The spirits live in the wires. How else would they talk to us?"

Rhuar sputtered, at a loss for words, and the voice behind the screen gave a low chuckle. "Ah, a visitor! Don’t worry, I appreciate a skeptic," he said. "Please don’t think I’m trying to pull one over on the Free Irri. I haven’t tried to conceal what I am, but my nature is… complex, let’s say. Calling me a spirit is not the most accurate, it’s true, but it gets us most of the way there and saves me from having to teach a few courses in computer science and galactic history. I’ve made clear to the Irri that my advice and goodwill isn’t contingent on offerings or obedience."

Se Dasi nodded firmly. "We give from thanks, not fear."

"Just to be clear," Qktk said slowly. "You’re implying that you’re inhabiting the station’s computer systems. A non-physical entity." Rhuar and Jesri shared a look, then turned back to the screen in consternation.

The voice paused, seeming to mull it over. "More or less," it finally answered. "Like I said, it’s complex. I’m not sitting in a room somewhere speaking into an audio pickup, if that’s what you’re wondering."

"Uh," said Rhuar, his intended speech about exploiting less-advanced cultures suddenly seeming less pressing. Jesri shot him another warning look, and he nodded. "So," he said cautiously, "given that you’re on a human station you probably know what our next question is going to be."

"Ah, yes," sighed the voice. "You’re right to be suspicious. I suppose we could do proper introductions. How about this - I don’t have a visual feed and I like to know who I’m talking to. Considering which station you’re on, I think I’m allowed a bit of my own suspicion. You start, tell me about who you are. Then I’ll tell you a bit about me."

Rhuar stared blankly at the screen for a second. "Uh, sure," he said. "I’m Rhuar. I’m an artificer and a pilot. Oh, and I’m a dog."

"Oh, interesting!", exclaimed the voice. "I believe you’re the first dog we’ve had come by these parts." Rhuar couldn’t help but feel a bit flattered at the voice’s enthusiasm. Jesri was still a bit too out-of-sorts to notice, but Qktk did and sighed.

"I’m Qktk," he rattled tiredly. "I’m a Htt ship captain and a merchant."

"Another first for me," the voice said eagerly. "This is shaping up to be an interesting sort of day."

Jesri cleared her throat. "I’m Jesri Tam," she said, "and I’m-"

"-a Valkyrie," he said, his voice noticeably quieter and less bombastic. "Captain Tam, I didn’t know you had arrived on-station already."

Jesri’s urge to stare was running into her profound lack of anything to stare at. "You know who I am?", she asked in confusion. Se Dasi was staring at her with wide eyes.

"Of course I do, sir," the voice said, its friendly tone sliding into something cooler, more professional. "I’m the one who invited you here."

"All right, heave!", Anja growled, tugging the last of the four major connectors into place and locking it tightly. Behind her, an Irri work team stretched their aching arms for a moment before running to their next task - whatever that was. She sighed. Working with the Irri was efficient, if admittedly rather strange. They didn’t talk unless they were talking to her. They would disappear until she needed help, at which point a group with precisely the numbers and skills needed to assist would swoop in.

It was quite effective. They had hooked up the reactor in an amazingly short time, darting around the conduits like dour grey ants. Anja smiled at the image and walked back towards the main dock platform to find Eleanor standing in the middle of a swarm of busy Irri.

"Ellie, our team is done!", she shouted. "I think we were the last ones!"

Eleanor looked up at her. "Ah, yes," she said. "Not quite. We had the last team report successful hookup just as you walked up."

Anja nodded. "Are we good to head out?"

"Give me another ten minutes," Eleanor said placatingly. "We need to power the conduits between here and the segment barrier in stages to avoid overloading any degraded bits. My teams can fix little issues as they come up, but if we blow the whole line it’ll take us days to fix."

Anja threw her hands up in irritation. "Fine, fine," she groused. "Let’s get started, then."

Eleanor nodded, and behind her a team of Irri scrambled into action around a power regulator. They fiddled with it briefly, then the power cables leading from it thrummed with a sudden surge of electricity.

Anja nearly had to catch Eleanor as she staggered to the side, grabbing on to Anja’s shoulder for balance. "Ellie?", she said in surprise. "You okay, sister?"

"Hah, yeah," Eleanor said, straightening up with a hand to her forehead. "Just lost my balance for a second. I guess I’m overdue for a nap."

"You should rest, Ellie," Anja scolded. "You were always the one spouting off stuff like ‘fatigue waits in ambush’. You used to sound like a page out of the survival manual."

"That is a page out of the survival manual," Eleanor responded with a smirk. "Really, Anja, I’m fine. I’ll rest once we’ve got Jesri back."

Anja gave her a doubtful look, but didn’t press the issue. "Okay," she agreed. "Just get the power to that ring segment and I will take care of the rest."

Eleanor grinned. "Atta girl. Why don’t you get ready to head out? My team will meet you at the dock exit once you’re done."

Anja nodded and jogged over to the Grand Design’s boarding ramp. Behind her, she heard the thrum of the next set of conduits being charged.

"Okay," Jesri said, breaking the stunned silence that had followed the voice’s claim. "I think it’s your turn to talk."

"Agreed, sir," sighed the voice. "I’m just at a loss about where to start." There were a few more yawning moments of silence before he spoke again. "I should introduce myself, at least. My name is David Kincaid, and I’m a member of a… let’s call it a resistance, of sorts. A covert network organized to fight the Gestalt."

Jesri contemplated that for a moment. "You realize how that sounds," she said flatly. "I’d be skeptical enough if you were a living, breathing human telling me that, but you’re-"

"A disembodied voice?", David responded dryly. "I’ll grant that my current state doesn’t do much for my credibility, but I would have thought I’d be good on that score after saving you from the Emissaries back on Ysl."

"It’s enough for me to hear you out," Jesri allowed. "Care to explain the disembodied bit?"

David paused again. "I don’t mind explaining, but we may have more pressing issues. Your sisters seem to be preparing to come and get you."

Se Dasi gave a start at his words and looked accusingly at Jesri. "You’ve led them here?", she asked, the fear plain on her face. Jesri put her hands up placatingly, but Se Dasi rounded on her in a rage with fists raised.

"Wait!", David thundered, stopping Se Dasi in her tracks. "Captain, please listen," he said insistently, "We may have very little time. Did Se Dasi explain about Colonel Tam?"

Jesri snorted. "Not you too. If you’re going to tell me Eleanor is a soul-stealing witch then this conversation is over."

"Ah. No, sir," David said hesitantly, "but there are some things you need to know about her. She’s not well, Captain. She’s been forcibly implanting the Irri with modified Valkyrie mental links and using them as behavioral control devices. She’s tampered with her own link as well, to her detriment."

Jesri gaped. "David, that’s-! That’s so ridiculous I don’t even know what to dispute first," she fumed. "First off, Ellie wouldn’t do that. Second, Valkyrie tech wouldn’t work on Irri biology, and even if it did-"

"Actually," interjected Rhuar, "Drinni mentioned earlier that all of the Irri had been given mental links. I noticed him using his on our tour and asked about it."

"But that’s impossible!", Jesri objected, an odd sense of claustrophobia pressing on her. "Even if she wanted to do something like that, even if she solved the compatibility issue, the Valkyrie tech was top-secret military stuff. The fabricators here wouldn’t know how to print one, they wouldn’t have even carried the plans on her corvettes. You can’t print something without plans or an example, and the only one she had was in her own head."

David was quiet for several seconds. "There was one Valkyrie team on each of the three corvettes," he said softly. "Six of your sisters in total. I don’t know the precise details as it happened long before I came here, but I have the records from the ship and station computers."

"What?", Jesri said incredulously. "No. Absolutely not. She told me she was traveling alone. She said she lived here alone. David, we can’t lie."

"She tampered with her own link," David repeated patiently, "to her detriment. They’re not just for communication. She removed all of the default restrictions, from what I’ve been able to ascertain. Not just the social limiters like non-mission deception - she unlocked the cognitive limiters too. She kept a regular log on the station network, early on."

David stopped talking and a low hiss of background noise came over the speakers, followed by Ellie’s intense, breathy voice.

"I’ve almost got it," she said, notes of enthusiasm and frustration dripping from her tone. "I’ve isolated the protections on the limiting protocols. Once the station finishes with the encryption, I should be able to return all of us to our full potential." She paused. "It’s too late," she said angrily. "Too late to make much of a difference. All I can do now is help my sisters. Cait and Liza want to leave now that Kiera is dead, to look for others. They’ll be outnumbered and alone out there. We need to grow beyond our boundaries, adapt to the times," Ellie finished grimly. "Adapt or die."

David ended the playback, the hiss fading to nothingness as Jesri stared in slow, seeping horror. "That’s the last recording," David said apologetically. "None of the other Valkyrie committed log entries after that date. I don’t believe she realized that removing the restrictions would also re-enable the mental link networking capability."

"No," Jesri breathed, reality shattering around her. "Oh, Ellie. Oh no." She remembered Eleanor running through the halls ahead of her when they were children, laughing when the program supervisor scolded her. Her mind’s eye shifted to show her Eleanor stooped over the corpses of her sisters, hands bloody to the elbows-

"Insanity, delusions of grandeur, self-destructive behavior," said Rhuar wonderingly. "Anja had said they removed the network links because of instability."

"Only blocked, not removed," David said sadly. "Now Colonel Tam uses hers to monitor and direct all of the Irri within her segment of the station. Any implanted Irri within the area she controls is effectively just an extension of her."

Jesri remembered her team stopping dead at the segment boundary. Orders, they had said. The parts of her mind rebelling against the evidence were shoved aside to rage in a corner, accruing grief for a later date. Too much of it made sense to disregard, and if David was telling the truth-

Lights snapped on suddenly in the room and outside along the hallway, making them wince and shield their eyes. Shouts of alarm came from the hallway outside, and she heard the sounds of Irri running.

"Not good," David said urgently. "They’ve managed to reconnect this segment to the power grid. Colonel Tam’s troops will be able to cross over and attack the village."

"It should take them a few minutes to cross from the segment door, even at top speed," Jesri said, her head still spinning. "We can move everyone towards the next segment-"

"No," rattled Qktk. "They’re already here. Remember? Drinni and the others."

Se Dasi’s eyes widened in panic and realization. "The touched. Father!"

From the village they heard a loud crash, then screaming.

Part 20

They rushed out of David’s theater, Se Dasi’s thin form slipping between them to hurtle back down the hall ahead with a speed borne of pure panic. The screaming grew as they drew close to the hold, noises of conflict and pounding feet threading through the cacophony.

Jesri couldn’t see any Irri when she burst into the village. She was confronted with a warren of fences and shacks blocking her view past a few meters out. She advanced, Qktk and Rhuar tagging along close behind her as she held her sidearm low and ready.

A group of terrified children streamed from a doorway and ran past Jesri, but before she could yell at them to stay near to her two more adults came out close on their heels. She recognized the dingy white rags and stick-thin limbs of the sick Irri, but they now moved with the precision and speed she had seen from Eleanor’s dock crew. They looked at her blankly and froze, their eyes staring through her from an empty face.

She hesitated for an instant, then shot both of them in the chest. The question had been batting playfully at her mind since she had drawn her gun, the choice she would make now that she knew the nature of their affliction. She had thought about the loved ones that cared enough to keep them in the sickhouse, perhaps visiting as they wasted away on the bed murmuring nonsense to the air.

Their eyes, however, compelled her to shoot. Their face betrayed nothing, their movements were swift and implacable. The eyes alone swirled with fear and pain, watching helplessly as they rampaged through their home and chased their loved ones down without mercy so that they too could be made a prisoner in their own skull. They couldn’t ask Jesri to shoot or spare them, but she thought of Drinni beating weakly at his own head, pleading incoherently to just stop, stop, stop-

And she shot. Again and again, she dodged past broken doors and through cramped alleys to find the Irri’s long-lost family on the hunt. Rhuar and Qktk had become the impromptu shepherds to a wailing knot of children and a few dazed adults they had saved. None of the survivors would come close to Jesri, the memory of their kin’s blood too fresh and her resemblance to Eleanor too strong.

She came upon Se Dasi, weakly struggling against an old man as his fingers curled around her neck. His weakened body shook with the effort of strangling her, spurred to preternatural strength even as his eyes screamed helplessly. Jesri yelled and dashed at the pair, knocking them both to the ground and snapping a shot at the downed man. His golden eyes flashed with profound relief as they faded to mere yellow.

Se Dasi croaked a wordless scream and ran to embrace the old man’s shredded body, Irri blood smearing her face. She stayed huddled over the body, wracked with spasms of grief as Jesri surveyed the area.

It was quiet now, with most of the residents having fled. Some were pursued by the risen sick, others simply ran. The small group of survivors Jesri had saved looked around nervously in the silence. A child, bleeding freely from a gash along the forearm, clung mutely to Rhuar’s fur as it looked back at her. She shuddered.

A howl from behind her was the only warning she had before Se Dasi impacted her lower back and began clawing at her weapon. With some difficulty she managed to toss the grieving Irri away, slapping her hard across the face. Stunned, Se Dasi stopped her attack and staggered away.

"Stop!", Jesri shouted, staring daggers at her. "Se Dasi, focus. These people need to get clear of the village."

Se Dasi’s chest heaved and her eyes burned, but she didn’t leap to attack Jesri once more. She stood glaring and rubbing her face as her wrath cooled into an amalgam of fatigue and pain. She shot a weary glance at the survivors by Rhuar and Qktk.

"I will take them," she said finally, her voice hoarse and ragged. A flicker of her anger curled into her eyes as she looked back to Jesri. "You killed my father."

Jesri stared back, her own fatigue asserting itself as she remembered the relief in his eyes. "Yes," she said, holstering her weapon. "They’ll be here soon, take the others and go."

Se Dasi gave her one more murderous stare before wheeling back towards Qktk and Rhuar’s group. Jesri watched them leave, steeped in grief. Se Dasi had a right to be angry and Jesri could forgive her easily for it, even if her own forgiveness never came. She could survive Se Dasi’s rage.

Surviving Anja would be more complicated, once she dealt with Eleanor.

The lights still flickered ominously in the corridor past the large inter-segment door, but Eleanor led her troops onward without pause. She had assured Anja that the connections were well-guarded and would hold until they got all four prisoners back from the Irri separatists.

Anja, fresh from working on the jury-rigged connections to the Grand Design, wasn’t quite as confident - but it would have made little difference in her decision to go. It was three of her team, being held against their will. For most, saying they had killed men for less would have been hyperbole rather than a gross understatement.

She spared a glance for Eleanor, grim-faced and unreadable as she always was in combat. She walked down the ostensibly hostile territory of the far segment as if she was strolling through the middle of her docks, completely unconcerned at the possibility of ambush or interception. Far along the corridor, Anja could see the advance scouts flitting between side junctions and peering into doorways. Their main group of about fifty Irri followed behind the sisters, rifles held ready.

They tromped onward for a few tense minutes before the group froze as one, before Anja even saw Eleanor’s signal. She took an awkward half-step beyond where Eleanor had stopped, scanning the hall from a half-crouch.

«Down this passage,» Eleanor sent, her voice sounding whisper-quiet even over the mental link. Anja had the odd feeling that her sister was speaking only to her, even as her troops picked up the order without hesitation. She wondered if whatever was translating their orders from mental message to voice commands went out over a different link. Eleanor had obviously been tinkering with the station’s communications grid, as Anja’s mental link had required a quick firmware flash at the docks before it would hook into the station properly. Where were their earpieces, anyway? She frowned, considering the possibilities, but something about the movements of the Irri tugged her attention away like smoke on a windy day.

Their discipline was uncanny, unnerving even as she appreciated the precision. They flowed down the corridor like a wave, feet making an inevitable clamor on the deck. Anja grinned at the proof of a long-held rule of spaceborne combat - you can’t move quietly through a ship or station, it just doesn’t happen. It’s too quiet, too echoic, even with the Irri’s fearsome discipline and coordination.

The heavy tread of boots preceded them down the corridor. She felt the pulsing thrill of combat imminent around her as they advanced on where Jesri was being held. Anja snarled at the thought of the filthy Irri confining Jesri, beloved even if Eleanor was her favorite sister-

She frowned again, even as her legs kept her moving catlike down the hall. The sudden surge of anger towards the separatists had caught her off-guard, not to mention the pang of affection for Eleanor. She sighed internally, the bloodlust somewhat broken by the dissonant note. It had been a trying day, reuniting with one sister and losing track of another. She made a note to rest thoroughly when she had put the Irri animals down.

They came upon another junction, her self-reflection at that last burst of rage denied as they checked sightlines and cleared before proceeding. It would be any minute now, she thought with a feral grin. They had no idea what they’d provoked, taking Jesri. She’d come through the door, a whirlwind of death and steel and harsh light tearing at their souls. She’d kill the separatists, kill the dog and the bug-

She stumbled and stopped, shaking her head. What was wrong with her? She could understand letting her anger at the Irri flare up in the heat of combat, but Qktk? Rhuar? They were crew, they were hers. This was beyond stray, irrational thoughts, this was-

"Anja, you okay?", Eleanor frowned, gripping her shoulder. Anja looked up at her in a daze, lights seeming to pop into being around her face as their eyes met. She smiled, genuine and unrestrained joy washing over her at the sight of Ellie’s look of concern.

"Yeah, I’m good," she laughed, surprised that she meant it wholeheartedly. Why was she stressed, anyway? She felt amazing, good spirits resonating back from Ellie’s smiling face and down through the hand resting on her shoulder.

Ellie wanted to go, she knew, so they kept moving down the corridor. Anja was really getting the hang of this, it was so easy to keep up with the Irri’s movements if you just tried a bit. She was in the zone, focused, floating in the purest flow state she had ever experienced.

She felt amazing.

Jesri sat staring at the door of the hold, waiting. Her gun was across her lap, still faintly warm from earlier. Se Dasi and the other Irri had gone into hiding, retreating deep into the station. Without them, the hold seemed empty - emptier than empty, really, the silence emanating from the abandoned homes much more profound than a simple vacant hold could muster.

The faint sound of boots echoed from through the door, and Jesri stretched. Time to get up. By the time she had languorously risen to her feet, Eleanor and Anja had crossed into the hold with their squad of troops trailing behind them in lockstep. Despite knowing this was coming, Jesri still felt a sick pang in her stomach seeing Eleanor’s smiling face, even more so as she beamed to see her waiting there.

"Jesri!", Eleanor waved. "You’re okay! Why didn’t you check in? We’ve been so worried about you!" She slowed and stopped a few paces away from Jesri, Anja at her side and the Irri behind. Her smile leered wide, and Jesri’s head swam when she looked at it.

She hadn’t seen it at first, or hadn’t noticed. Not after five thousand years of separation, not while she was still stunned and amazed by the lost station, but now that she had a chance to look closely at her sister she wondered how she could have missed it. Her smile stretched a bit too broad, her eyes glittered too brightly. Bereft of context she had just seen Ellie, what she expected to see. What she wanted to see.

"Eleanor," she said coolly, staring back at her with a measured glare. Her sister’s smile lost a certain essential warmth it had never truly had, and she crossed her arms.

"You don’t seem very happy to see us, sister," Eleanor murmured. Her troops shifted behind her - before she would have mistaken it for restlessness, but it was too clean and polished for that. Readiness, rather. She would only have one shot at this before they took her down. The Irri should be disoriented when Eleanor died, and hopefully Anja would be so shocked she’d forget to kill Jesri on the spot. Her heart broke for what she was about to do to her, but she didn’t see another way. Hopefully Anja would believe David, as she had.

Another breath. She shifted her weight fractionally, her gun hand blurring into motion as it raised her pistol high, aiming for a headshot. I’m sorry, Ellie-

A spike of pain shot up her arm as Anja’s hand shot out to intercept her, striking her wrist and sending her gun tumbling from nerveless fingers. She stared disbelieving at Anja’s self-satisfied smirk, the same one she would taunt her with after she trounced Jesri on the sparring mat. Anja twisted her arm up, driving Jesri down to her knees as her shoulder stretched nearly out of joint.

She couldn’t help but scream at the electric jolt of agony, her voice echoing in a lonely chorus around the hold. Through her swimming vision she saw Eleanor’s face next to Anja’s, her leer nearly dripping from her lips with its smug assuredness.

Anja’s eye gave a twitch. Her sister’s grip didn’t weaken in the slightest, the smirk didn’t slip from her face, but a waver of doubt clouded her expression. Eleanor looked up at her, still grinning victoriously.

"We’re all sisters here, you two," she crooned. "We shouldn’t fight amongst each other. I believe we’ll have quite a lot of fun once we’ve had a chance to reconnect a bit."

Panic was roiling Jesri’s mind as she strained against Anja’s iron grip. She had fucked up. Anja could outclass her in a fight any day of the week, but never to this degree. She hadn’t factored in that Irri-like poise and coordination - or perhaps it was Eleanor-like, she thought ruefully. Jesri didn’t have any other winning cards.

Something Anja had said just before they arrived at Nicnevin swam up in her brain. But maybe winning is the wrong goal. A sequence of events clanged into place behind that one sentence, a narrow path forward. She looked back up at Anja, seeing the growing horror behind her eyes even as the winner’s smirk played across her lips.

Jesri smiled back.

She pushed upwards with her legs as hard as she could, her shoulder tearing painfully out of joint as her forehead slammed into Anja’s nose like a striking meteor. Her sister staggered back, still smiling under a mask of clear-flowing blood, but the hit caused her grip to slacken and Jesri tore her useless arm free. She stumbled for only a moment, the lancing agony nearly paralyzing her whole right side.

Resisting the urge to scream with every step, she sprinted into the tangle of huts that crowded the hold. She could hear the Irri scrambling to follow but no shots rang out - Eleanor wanted her alive. For some values of alive, she thought darkly, dodging through the twisted alleys past fallen baskets and spatters of blue Irri gore.

She made it from the hold to the hall with both of her sisters close behind her, feet striking catlike on the deck and sending resonant shivers through the metal. They would have caught her, wounded as she was, but she didn’t have far to run. She darted left through a doorway and emerged into David’s theater, the basket of offerings twinkling brightly in front of the ruined screen.

Eleanor walked in almost casually behind her, taking in the oddly decorated room as she entered. Anja followed to stand beside her with blood flowing freely from her battered nose and a cocky smile still stretched across her face.

"You can’t beat us, sister," Eleanor gloated, her voice echoing around the empty theater. "Anja and I have reached the true potential of our kind. We’re stronger, faster, smarter." She spread her arms wide, taking a step towards Jesri. "I don’t blame you for not understanding, they made you less than you could be. Let me help you, let me make the best version of you."

Jesri smiled sadly back at Eleanor as the Irri filed in to form ranks behind her. Anja’s hand dropped to her pistol with a casual lethality even as dread and frantic apology played over her features.

"Five more of my sisters came here, I’ve heard," whispered Jesri, keeping her hands open and away from her body nonthreateningly. Anja stiffened fractionally as she spoke. "Did you help them? Are they their best selves now?"

A rapid sequence of expressions passed over Eleanor’s face, confusion melting into sorrow, then cold stony rage. "Don’t talk about things you don’t understand", she hissed. "You think I don’t mourn our sisters? You think I didn’t want the same for them as for me?"

She began pacing rapidly back and forth in front of the silent rows of Irri, muttering as she walked. "We were made perfect, Jesri. Did you know that? They optimized us in a thousand ways, gave us the strength and will to stand alone above armies of our enemies. The engineers weren’t burdened by any constraints but performance and power. Man was on the cusp of creating God in truth."

Eleanor stopped and looked lovingly at Anja, who was standing perfectly still in her cocksure pose save for a few twitching muscles in her neck and cheek. She reached over to stroke Anja’s hair lightly before turning back to Jesri, her expression dark. "Then the military bureaucrats got their hands on us. They had all of our sisters, god-children awaiting apotheosis, and they flinched." Her hands tightened into fists and she shook her head angrily. "Cowards. They couldn’t face what we could have been. They crippled us, sanding off the rough edges and jamming their filthy tech in our head to keep us docile. Keep us weak."

A cruel smile flickered over her lips. "And then they saw what true power was, in the instant before they died. A society unafraid to seek the highest limits of their godhood, unencumbered by irrational attachment to their own imperfections. I hate the Gestalt as much as you, sister, but I cannot deny their power, their vision," she cried, gesturing with wild, frustrated motions. "When they had the chance to be more than mortal they took it."

"We had so much time!", she insisted, her eyes wide with manic entreaty. "We could have met them as equals, surpassed them! Instead we were insects, and we got exterminated like insects," she hissed. "An inconvenient infestation of flesh and watery indecision. But now we have a second chance. We won’t get a third."

Eleanor walked back to Anja and draped an arm around her shoulders, squeezing her close. Anja returned the hug, her embrace loving and strong even as the muscles at the corners of her eyes flinched and twitched desperately. "We’re perfect again, sister. Whole for the first time we’ve been allowed to remember. Let me help you too."

Jesri met her eyes coldly, no longer smiling. "My sister Ellie was a hero," she whispered. "She was my hero. She was driven, competent, she exemplified everything I thought I should aspire to be." She looked at Eleanor’s face, seeing the madness rippling below the waves of confusion and rage that danced across her features. "And she had flaws, yes. She was a perfectionist, sometimes to a fault. She was overconfident, even if she was skilled enough to make things work out most of the time. But most of all, she obsessed over her losses."

Flickers of raw apoplexy spidered over Eleanor’s face and set her hands twitching. Jesri shook her head. "I think that was what killed her. What drove her to create you in her place so that you could be more than she was, even if she didn’t know what you would truly be." Jesri smiled again, no joy in her expression. "It would destroy her, to know what you’ve become."

"Shut up!", Eleanor howled, rounding on Jesri. Her face was contorted, her fingers curled into claws. "You’re just like Liza. Just like Zehava. They couldn’t handle godhood. They shrank in fear, like bureaucrats, like worms!", she frothed, tossing her hands into the air. "They begged, they cried, they broke! Then they died."

Suddenly, like flipping a switch, Eleanor’s rage vanished. Her hands dropped to her sides and she stared expressionlessly at Jesri. "I won’t let you be as weak, sister," she said, her flat monotone sending a shiver up Jesri’s spine. "If you break I will reforge you. You will be made strong enough," she whispered. She drew a pistol and sighted at Jesri’s chest, stepping forward to close the distance between them. Behind her, Anja’s face raged on a body still as a jauntily posed statue.

Jesri’s heart hammered in her chest. She opened her mouth to speak and Eleanor paused.

"David!", Jesri yelled. A dash of confusion poisoned Eleanor’s masklike face before it was chased away by grim determination. Her eyes seared into Jesri’s as the lights flickered off in the small theater and the hallway outside.

The slap of gunfire rang in Jesri’s ears and an impact thudded into her torso. She felt a warm wetness spreading down her front. The lights jittered back into being in time for her to see Eleanor fall to the side, a shocked expression on her face and a steaming hole between her collarbones. She hit the floor hard, clear blood spreading in a lake from the mangled wound between her shoulder blades as she twitched, gaped, and died.

Anja’s gun fell from her hands as she sank to her knees, the horror in her eyes now writ across her full face. As the Irri troops behind her fell catatonic and seizing to the deck, she gathered Eleanor’s body to her chest and screamed a raw-throated wail of pain and rage that resonated through the empty theater.

Jesri hadn’t moved, Eleanor’s blood dripping slowly from her uniform as she watched Anja howl over their dead sister’s body.

Jesri stayed in the theater as David summoned the Irri refugees back to the hold and Se Dasi began organizing rescue parties for the downed Irri soldiers. Anja slumped against the wall, staring woodenly at Eleanor’s body still lying sprawled in the center of the floor. Dried amber blood from her nose had mixed with Eleanor’s on her clothing, staining her with golden-brown flecks. The few Irri from the separatists that passed into the theater gave all three sisters a wide berth, eyeing them warily as they passed.

In a quiet moment when the Irri weren’t coordinating with him in hushed tones at the altar, David called for Jesri to come over. She did, dazedly, and stopped in front of the glittering bowl of data chips.

"How are you holding up, sir?", he asked sympathetically.

Jesri looked up with dull eyes, then barked a short and humorless laugh. "Well enough, considering," she said. "How are the Irri?"

David made a noncommittal noise. "Se Dasi has been trying to find all the ones who fled and gather up Eleanor’s soldiers. I’ve conveyed messages to the separatist groups in other segments - we’re going to send an expedition to the docks as soon as we can. There are thousands of Irri lying helpless at the docks and Se Dasi wants to save as many of them as possible." His voice sounded daunted at the thought, but also exhilarated. "We’ll need to secure the fabricator workshops, the repaired hydroponics bays… We can do it, but it’s going to be a busy next couple of months and a busier next couple of days."

Jesri nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. "It’ll be tough," she agreed, "but in the end the Irri will have all of Eleanor’s work to benefit from. It’s the least they deserve, for what she did." She glanced back at her sister’s body, suddenly feeling the accumulated fatigue and pain from the day wash over her. Her shoulder hurt, her arm bound limply to her chest in a sling of dirty rags. She was bruised, sore, exhausted - and that was just her physical state.

"Sir, if I can ask," David inquired hesitantly, shaking her out of her fugue, "how did you know I could knock power out in the sector? I had only circumvented the lockouts seconds before you arrived."

Jesri laughed again, some humor finding its way in this time around. "I had no idea," she chuckled. "I was just hoping you had something, since I was totally fucked."

"I appreciate the show of faith," he said somberly. "Most of the credit has to go to Anja, though. The automatic safeties reestablished power within half a second. If she hadn’t acted immediately…"

Jesri nodded, looking over at where her surviving sister sat hunched against the wall. At the far end of the theater she saw Rhuar, Qktk and Se Dasi walk in, deep in conversation. Her fists balled up as another wave of grief threatened to overwhelm her.

"It’s not fair," she muttered.

"Sir?", asked David, sounding a bit lost.

Jesri shook her head. "The Irri will always remember Eleanor as… this thing. Se Dasi is going to share stories of her to all the generations of Irri that come after, telling about the unspeakable evil that was Eleanor Tam." Her fingernails pressed creases into her palm as her grip tightened.

"She’ll be right, of course, but nobody will remember the Eleanor I knew. The one who risked her life again and again for her comrades, for civilians, for ideals and principles nobody has fought for in millenia." Jesri hunched her shoulders, feeling defeated. "She was the one worth remembering."

"Perhaps you should tell them," David suggested. "How else will they know?"

She snorted. "I should eulogize their tormentor? I wouldn’t listen to me."

"Just talk about your sister," he said. "Don’t try to excuse her actions, just give them the full picture. If they still hate her, then at least they hate the person she was rather than the evil caricature Se Dasi will give them."

Jesri thought for a second, then stepped over towards Eleanor where she lay splayed out on the deck, an expression of shock and surprise still lingering on her face. Her blonde hair fanned out beneath her head, matted to the deck with dried blood. Jesri reached down and slid her eyes closed gently, then stood up and looked around the room.

"Eleanor Tam was my sister," she said loudly. Her voice echoed through the theater, and the few Irri present looked over at her curiously. Se Dasi stared venom at her, while Qktk and Rhuar simply watched.

"You know her as Colonel Tam," she continued, "but that isn’t who I knew. For hundreds of years before she came here and hundreds of years after, Ellie was a soldier. She protected the innocent, fought the cruel and unjust. She did ten times more good in those years than I’ve done in all my life."

Jesri paused and looked around at the Irri staring back with disinterest or hostility. She couldn’t blame them, really. She found Se Dasi’s murderous stare and looked back at her, raising her voice again. "It doesn’t change what she did to everyone here, or the evil she would have done. Her crimes are too many to name, and they are inexcusable."

She lowered her head, her voice breaking. "But her first crime was murdering six of my sisters. Cait. Zehava," she said, raising her head again. "Liza. Giselle. Ye-eun." She swallowed. "And Eleanor, who had been the best of us."

She felt the continued pressure of the hostile glares and bowed her head again to stare at Eleanor’s body. She didn’t feel better having spoken, but she had tried. She hoped that would have been enough for Ellie.

"Ie Neru," a voice said. Jesri looked up in surprise to see Se Dasi walking towards the center of the room. "Se Revi. Se Faro. My parents and my brother." She still looked at Jesri, but with only sorrow in her eyes. "I would remember them as well."

"Ru Sefa," called another voice. "My father. Ru Lati, my brother."

A chorus of other voices joined in, calling out the names of the dead or lost. When the voices died down, a circle of Irri had formed around Eleanor’s body. They stood silently for a long minute before the mournful sound of a french horn softly slid through the air around them. Jesri whipped her head around in surprise as the first few notes of To the Stars, Stand Forth began to play.

Anja’s head popped up at the familiar music, her body rising to its feet by reflex at the sound of the old Naval memorial call. Jesri had only a moment to wonder how David knew of the song before the prelude ended and she was submerged in memory by the chorus of singing voices.

Look beyond to the stars, stand forth! Forge a path blazing bright in the sky!

Shine the beacon bright, cast it deep unto the night that your argent wings defy!

Honor those on whose shoulders we soar,

Bear their names on your soul evermore,

From the first did we cry: Ad Astra! Per aspera, upward we strive.

Ever sounding the call: Ad Astra! To the stars, stand forth and fly.

The final lingering notes of the horn faded into the silence. Jesri raised her head to see Se Dasi staring back at her.

"I will not forget or forgive what happened to my family," she said defiantly. "My father is dead at your hand." Se Dasi glanced down at Eleanor, then looked at Jesri with softer eyes. "But first at hers. You gave no less when it was needed." She nodded respectfully at Anja, still standing lost in a wash of nostalgia from the music.

The Irri dispersed to go about their tasks, slowly moving away to leave Jesri, Anja, Rhuar and Qktk standing around Eleanor. Jesri prodded Anja gingerly, snapping her out of her reverie.

"Hey, Anja. You okay?", she asked.

Anja hesitated, then nodded. "It was…" She shuddered. "Was bad." She didn’t elaborate, so Jesri nodded and left it at that for the moment. Rhuar stepped beside Anja and nudged gently against her leg, and in a few seconds her hand was absentmindedly scratching behind his ears.

Qktk cleared his throat with a soft clatter. "The music was a nice touch," he observed.

Jesri nodded, glancing back towards the altar. "It was. Ellie would have liked it. Raises a few questions about our friend David, though. I think it’s time we had that conversation with him, before he gets too wrapped up with the reconstruction."

Qktk nodded, and Anja looked over at Jesri to speak for the second time since she had killed their sister.

"Who’s David?", she asked curiously.

Part 21: Interlude

It was a dreary Wednesday in November, and the rainy season managed to project its monochrome grey drizzle indoors no matter how dry and inviting a room otherwise appeared. For Deepti, it meant that she was particularly insensate as she stumbled into the break room for the first of her several morning coffees. She slouched back to her desk with her cup of steaming liquid life-force, winding her way through tables stacked high with tablets and unplugged lab equipment, racks of samples and substrates piled as they awaited sorting.

It was quiet in the lab most mornings, given the sleep habits of her fellow postdocs, and theoretically she arrived earlier than most in order to get work done in a distraction-free environment. In practice, she had almost finished logging into her computer by the time that first cup of coffee was empty.

It wasn’t until the second cup was halfway gone that she noticed the screen. An old surplused display sat perched haphazardly on an upturned milk crate full of dusty and questionably secured electronics - but that wasn’t the odd part. The screen had been there, glowing it’s piercing green and displaying a cartoonish thumbs-up, for as long as she had worked at the lab.

The odd part was that the screen was now a glaring red, a black X scrawled in the center. Frowning, Deepti hauled herself up and stared blearily at the screen, trying to remember who put the stupid thing there and what experiment it was linked to.

She was still staring at it a handful of seconds later when one of her likely suspects walked in, and she accosted him on her way back for more coffee.

"Morning, Chris," she said, sliding her cup under the dispenser. "Hey, funny question for you. You know that monitor on the milk crate near my desk? Whose experiment is that and what project is it for?"

Chris stared blankly at her for a few moments, the words worming their way into his half-operational brain. "Unh," he grunted. "You talking about Dr. Russell’s quantum topographical… thingy?"

Deepti nodded uncertainly. "Maybe?", she said. "The one that always has the green screen?"

"Yeah, that’s the one," Chris nodded. "Do you need to move it or something?"

She shook her head, a tangle of black curls flopping messily to the side as she did. "No, I was just curious what it was measuring. The display changed today."

Chris frowned. "Let me take a look," he muttered, striding towards the lab.

"Red! Yes, red," Chris said frustratedly, nearly shouting into the earpiece. "What? Look, I’m not sure-" He paused, listening. "Okay, I’ll call her. Okay. Goodnight, Dr. Russell." He disconnected the call and sighed, tossing the earpiece onto the desk.

"He says it must be broken," Chris reported, shaking his head. "Apparently it’s sort of a joke experiment that he and a few buddies have been tracking since they were in school, he keeps it going for sentimental value. He actually kind of seemed upset that it had broken. He won’t be back from his conference for another week, so he asked if we wouldn’t mind calling up his friend at Pavonis to help fix it."

Deepti blinked. "Pavonis? Dr. Russell knows someone at Pavonis?"

Chris shrugged. "Apparently there’s only a handful of people with this kind of equipment. His friend Dr. Chartres was one of the people who helped design it." He tapped a few queries on his tablet and nodded. "It’s just past midday there, we should be able to reach them if I call the lab."

"Can we just call them like that?", Deepti asked nervously.

Chris shrugged. "We have a good reason. It’s not like everything there is top-secret." He slotted his earpiece into his ear and tapped his tablet.

They waited silently while the subwave connected, then Chris perked up noticeably. "Hello, I’m looking for Dr. Chartres? Oh, great! My name is Chris Flores, I’m a postdoc in Liam Russell’s lab, he wanted me to-"

Chris stopped speaking and a troubled look came over his face. "Yes, actually," he said, "How did you know?"

He listened further, his brow furrowing and sweat beading on his forehead, before finally mumbling a barely audible farewell and disconnecting. He slumped against a nearby table, his face pale and his hands shaking. "Shit," he whispered. "Shit, shit, shit."

"What’s wrong?", Deepti asked, concern on her face. "Did something happen?"

He shook his head and closed his eyes. "Yes. No," he said angrily. "Dammit, I’m going to kill Dr. Russell."

Deepti slammed her hand down on the table, making him jump. He looked back at her accusingly, but she stared him down without flinching. "Chris, if you don’t tell me what’s going on-"

"We’re on lockdown!", he shouted. "Some top secret military bullshit after all. We’re not to make any calls, take any calls, access any networks or leave the lab. Someone will come by to collect us and Dr. Russell’s experiment."

She stared back at him, shocked. "What? Why? Where are they taking us?"

Chris gave her a pained grin. "I don’t know, I don’t know, and Pavonis."

Deepti’s mouth hung open in surprise. "But that’s-"

"Yep," Chris said ruefully. "We’re going to Mars."

The next several hours passed in a blur. They were collected from the lab by a dour-looking pair of MPs and escorted to a windowless building where they were allowed to compose a carefully reviewed message to one family member explaining their absence as an ‘unexpected consultation’. A few long shuttle flights later, they stepped out into the clean, white hallways of the Pavonis Naval Research Institute in Tharsis.

They couldn’t help but look around as they walked - Chris was in a poorly-concealed panic, but Deepti was in awe. This was one of the preeminent research facilities in the galaxy, the first dedicated lab established on another planet.

Tradition held that every new ship was christened with a bottle of champagne broken over the bow, but the shipwrights held their own ceremony where they smudged the keel beam with red Martian dust for good luck. They didn’t build ships at Tharsis these days, and the only place you could get the old, dead Mars soil anymore was on top of Olympus Mons - but from barges to battleships, any ship flying had a dab of rust-red close to her heart to remind them of Pavonis. It was the alpha and the omega of human advancement.

They weren’t there for the tour, however. The MPs briskly marched the two through a series of hallways, past a few security checkpoints and into a spacious conference room where a handful of people were already sitting. They were surprised to see Dr. Russell there, looking a bit rumpled but otherwise no worse for wear.

A severe-looking woman with short grey hair stood up as they entered, walking over to shake their hands. "Dr. Flores, Dr. Banerjee. I’m Helene Chartres." She gestured for them to take a seat, which they did. Dr. Russell gave them a sheepish wave in greeting as they entered, but said nothing. Two others were already seated - a serious-faced woman with sharp features framed by thick braids peered intently at Dr. Chartres and a slightly pudgy man with dark hair greying at the temples sat reading a tablet.

"I apologize for calling you here so abruptly," Dr. Chartres began. "Secrecy is paramount, for reasons that I hope will be obvious shortly." She wheeled over a cart, on which was a complicated-looking machine in a brushed-steel housing. A small inset display was showing a red background and a black X.

"This is my version of a device I’m sure you’re familiar with," she said, gesturing to it. "It’s more or less identical to the variants doctors Russell and Adebayo have maintained in their labs." She indicated Dr. Russell and the serious-looking woman, who nodded in return.

"The device measures the Kolmogorov complexity of Planck-scale spacetime fluctuations, as well as performing a few other pattern analysis operations. Assuming that the fluctuations are found to be isotropic and c-incompressible it displays green. If the fluctuations are anisotropic or c-compressible it displays red." She pointed to the screen, which was helpfully displaying its cherry-red glow. "After about thirty years of constant and uneventful analysis - on three different planets, I might add - about sixteen hours ago each machine independently and consistently was able to derive a solution that proved the fluctuations it observed were c-compressible."

Feeling lost, Deepti looked around the room. This was not her area of expertise. The man with the tablet looked as confused as she was, but Chris had gone white and sat up in his chair as Dr. Chartres spoke.

To her relief, the man with the tablet spoke up first. "Ah, for those of us without advanced degrees in mathematics…"

Dr. Chartres nodded. "You’ll have to take our word on this, without the fundamentals to back it up, but…" She hesitated. "At a quantum level, there are always minor and unpredictable variations in the topology of spacetime. These devices were originally constructed to settle a bet with an old colleague where we contended that they were indeed unpredictable, totally random in nature. We had to build our own because almost nobody bothers with the experiment anymore - the matter has long been considered settled in most academic circles. We kept them running for personal reasons, but in my case it was a pleasant reminder of school combined with a salve for - well, let’s call it ‘existential paranoia.’"

Dr. Russell snorted in amusement. "Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you," he muttered wryly.

"Indeed," she responded. "And now the experiment is justified, although I truly wish it weren’t. The fluctuations that have up until now been totally random are displaying deterministic patterns. There are a few reasons why this might be, some of which we can take steps to rule out. Unfortunately for us all, the most likely explanation by far for these observations is that the recent fluctuations are algorithmically generated."

A sharp pang of adrenaline jolted through Deepti’s stomach as the words registered. "But wait," she objected, "if that’s true-"

"Yes," said Dr. Chartres somberly. "It would indicate that our reality is a simulation - and that it has been running for approximately sixteen hours."

The conference room was silent for several seconds following her pronouncement.

"So," said the man with the tablet, "I’m trying to be open-minded, but you realize how that sounds."

"We do," she agreed. "Which is why we’re going to need to come up with a way to provide some evidentiary proof before we spread any word of this past this group."

Dr. Russell spoke up, shaking his head emphatically. "Helene, we can’t tell anyone. Even this is too many people. Heaven forbid we convince the public that it’s the truth, don’t you see what that would do? We would alter the simulation. Until we know more, I contend that would be an incredibly stupid idea."

She shrugged. "So we do it quietly, with just the people here."

"And then?", Dr. Russell retorted. "If we do find proof, demonstrable proof, then what? We just waltz up to the Secretary General and tell him? Hell, we shouldn’t even be talking about it, not out loud."

"Let me handle involving the government," said the man with the tablet. He smiled at Chris and Deepti, extending his hand. "I never got the chance to introduce myself properly. David Kincaid, Naval Intelligence. I’m the liaison officer for the lab."

David walked back to his office, a grim look having edged out the smile on his face. Dr. Chartres had arranged for temporary quarters for the four offworld doctors and was busily planning ways to prove their theory. For his part, David was still incredulous. It was too big of a change, too much of an alteration from his worldview. He had known that there were thought experiments about simulated universes, and that some multiverse theories even held it as likely, but it just didn’t fit in his head.

It did dredge up a memory, however, which was the thing that quickened his pace as he strode down the long corridor. Upon receiving the post as the Pavonis liaison, he had met briefly with the section chief for Naval Intelligence assigned to the region. After some pleasantries, the section chief had looked him in the eye and quietly told him to commit something odd to memory.

If in the course of your duties at Pavonis you ever hear of an existential threat to mankind you are to call your local section desk…

David reached his office and opened the door, sealing it shut behind him and activating the security measures. Baffling fields, jammers and other more subtle protections hummed into existence around the office - for all the good it would do, he thought ruefully.

He initiated a voice-only contact to the section desk and was immediately picked up by the reception AI.

"Yes, I’d like to request the latest intercepts bundle for my region," he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

"Confirmed, sir," responded the AI. "If there are any inquiry targets or areas of interest you wish to have highlighted, please let me know."

He swallowed. "I’m looking for something that will help me sleep better at night," he said carefully.

The AI paused for the briefest of moments before responding. "Very good, sir. I’ll have the intercepts sent to your personal terminal."

A few seconds later, a ping from his terminal heralded the arrival of the data packet. It looked deceptively normal at first, but the normally lengthy header string that described any restrictions on the enclosed material was replaced by a single code - "TS//MANTRA".

David felt a hard knot in his stomach. He was a low-level intelligence analyst, normally accustomed to batching up progress reports and acting as a representative at meetings. He shouldn’t have any reason to look at Top Secret Codeword materials. The allocation AI certainly shouldn’t be giving it to him. And yet, here he was. If he was wrong in requesting this, it would probably cost him his career. If he was right, well - he supposed his career was less important in context.

Opening the file, he began reading the report. It was a normal intercept bundle, a dry compilation of various signals intelligence sources that had been packaged, sanitized and redistributed by various data sorting AIs. Upon request, any field agent could obtain a regional report appropriate for their location and clearance levels to keep them abreast of local issues.

This one started out in a fairly standard fashion, immediately plunging into a dry summary of external investment in local corporate groups.

Current regional sales records indicate that nearly five billion tons of this c-chondrite sourced material per quarter may be subsidized by Teb-er-Di familial holdings not publicly disclosed. The clandestine arm of their operations will continue to be monitored, both through intercepts of their written directorial communications and analysis from agents placed farther down in the corporate hierarchy.

David frowned. Teb-er-Di had been a major business interest in neighboring space nearly a century ago, but they had been rather famously crushed by the 5th and 7th Fleets in a joint action after an ill-advised attempt to blockade a handful of Terran colonies. They hadn’t been relevant for decades, yet here they were in the report. How old was this document?

He skimmed to the next column of text, trying to find some context. Three pages later, he stopped reading and frowned.

Current regional sales records indicate that nearly five billion tons of this c-chondrite sourced material per quarter may be subsidized by Teb-er-Di familial holdings not publicly disclosed. The clandestine arm of their operations will continue to be monitored, both through intercepts of their written directorial communications and analysis from agents placed farther down in the corporate hierarchy.

Buried within another paragraph were the same two sentences from before. He pulled up the previous instance and compared them side by side, confirming the wording was identical.

David stared at his screen, thinking hard. This was a top-secret document. The fact that the AI responded to his codephrase with this particular document meant that it was important. The content of the document didn’t seem to relate to any large-scale threats to humanity. The duplicated sentences were… odd. He just had to figure out why. Why this particular document? Why those sentences?

He read through the mirrored text again and again, his mind straining to pick out any causal link, any relevant detail, but none came. He sighed, his eyes blurring with the strain of staring at his display for so long.

And he saw it. It was absurdly simple, a child’s trick, but there it was - a basic stereogram.

Minor variations in the spacing of words caused a few of them to jump out as if hovering slightly in front of his display. He almost laughed at the absurdity of seeing it in this most secret of documents, but there it was in front of him. He deliberately defocused his eyes to merge the two paragraphs, seeing the words jump out once more.

this material may not be written down

He frowned, then returned to the document to search for more paired sentences, finding another set a few pages in. He grabbed both snippets and lined them up next to each other.

do not speak this material aloud even when alone

He felt the knot in his belly once more. This felt like someone playing a prank on him. If it weren’t for the absurd events of the day he would have disregarded it as such. This level of precaution was reserved for the names of fairy tale villains, not legitimate intelligence resources… Unless, he realized with a chill, the adversary you were guarding against had surveillance capabilities that stretched beyond the realm of the possible.

As would be the case if you were trying to keep a secret from the people running the universe.

A deep chill settled into his stomach and a wave of nausea hit him. It was one thing to see the scientists blithely talking about algorithmic quantum fluctuations - troubling, yes, but still somewhat abstract. Seeing independent confirmation of their theory in this highly restricted document somehow made it real for him in a way that no amount of scientific proof ever could have. His agency had anticipated this. The instructions landed at his desk. Now the problem, too big to even think about properly, was his to handle.

He forced himself back into a semblance of focus and returned to the document. Carefully, scanning through each page of dry synopses and summaries, he found the paired sentences and the subtly designated words. Some of them contained no marked text that he could see, or had extra words sprinkled here and there. Some had gaps in the sentence structure. He pieced them together, line by line.

Hours later, his head pounding at the constant effort of defocusing his eyes, he reached the end of the document. He couldn’t write down what he had read, but he doubted he could forget a word of it if he tried.

This material may not be written down. Do not speak this material aloud even when alone. If nature of the threat at hand does not relate to fundamental nature of the universe, close and destroy this document immediately.

The Terran Federation recently encountered a collective intelligence with stated intention to destroy the universe, threat on which can credibly deliver. Technology and capabilities of adversary make direct confrontation impossible. Does not consider any existing life aside from itself worthy of preservation.

Have begun extensive program of deliberately absurd exercises designed to invalidate previous behavioral models of humans. Publicly stated intent of exercises is to force the adversary to study human cognition, may cause it to abandon plans for universal annihilation if views humans as sentient. This outcome unlikely. Unstated goal of exercises is to prompt adversary to create accurately modeled human intelligences within own data network. This outcome highly probable.

Adversary is likely to gather data before commencing simulation. Several documents like this covertly embedded in military intelligence structure in hope that a sufficiently comprehensive simulation will capture and include them. If reality not conclusively proven to be simulated, research suggests simulated quantum phenomena may behave in a measurably distinct manner on very small scales. Covertly research this to ascertain status.

If confirmed reading this from simulation, do not attempt to inform government, military or intelligence leaders of this information. Widespread officially-sanctioned action within simulation may reveal efforts to the adversary and result in reality being terminated. Act locally and independently. Suggestions for helpful covert actions have been included using similar methods in the fifteenth, thirty-seventh and eighty-fourth documents in this report’s cited material list.

Distribute information only in ways that rely on the human visual cortex to be interpreted. Research suggests that adversary monitoring AIs built on more efficient architecture may overlook optical illusion ciphers.

Keep this information secret.

If external communication possible follow instructions in referenced documents to contact us.

Good luck.

David rested his aching head in his hands. He wanted to cry, or shout, or scream, but he found himself laughing instead. He convulsed with it, the absurdity of the situation tearing a mad giggle from him and plastering a silly grin on his face until the dark mirth faded and it was just him, sitting alone in his office with the fate of the universe in front of him.

"Ah, shit," he said softly. He wondered for a moment if anyone was listening, then shook his head. Time to figure out how to quietly tell five scientists they couldn’t talk about the most exciting discovery of their lives.

The arcing corridor of the lab’s main conference facility was empty today. One of the increasingly rare planet-wide dust storms had made atmospheric travel hazardous, leaving the normally bustling hall quiet save for David’s echoing footsteps. His almost suspiciously casual stroll led him towards a minor conference room with its door ajar.

He walked in, sitting at the central table. Deepti was already there, tapping at a tablet connected to a small black box sitting on the table in front of them. Deepti flipped the switch, a low hum sounding as power surged into the tiny device.

"Is it working?", David asked, leaning in close to inspect it.

Deepti smiled nervously back at him. "We’ll see in a minute. Chris is taking readings from another room across the hall."

David sighed, impatient. After nearly a year of covert messages and elaborate cover stories, a few additional seconds shouldn’t feel this long. At least he got to be here for the test this time - their labyrinthine operational security protocols prohibited gathering together as a group too often. He’d missed the last few tests for that reason, something he might have resented if he hadn’t authored those protocols himself.

Deepti had begun counting out loud while he mused. She continued until she reached thirty, at which point she reached over and flipped off the switch. "There," she said happily. "Let’s go ask-"

Chris barged into the room carrying a small handheld scanner, his face beaming. He gestured silently and emphatically to the device on the table, which Deepti turned back on with a raised eyebrow.

"It works!", Chris burst out. "The no-chamber works!"

Deepti leapt up and pulled both men into a crushing hug, jumping excitedly. "Hah, I knew we had it this time!", she cried gleefully before shooting a dark look at Chris. "But we are not calling it that."

"Nobody appreciates the classics anymore," sighed Chris. "Anyway, have a look at this."

David took the offered scanner from Chris and played it back while Deepti crowded close to watch. He saw the door to the room and the spare wall of the corridor, but overlaid on that was an interior diagram showing Deepti, David and the table in the center of the room. As he watched, Deepti flicked the switch with an audible click and sat down.

David frowned. "Chris, are you sure-"

"You didn’t ask if it was working," Deepti whispered in awe. "We’re still just sitting there." David looked and saw that it was true. Their two forms were sitting, silent, with no indication that their short conversation had ever happened. Deepti was sitting quietly rather than counting, until she smoothly reached over to the device and turned it off with another click.

Chris was grinning practically from ear to ear. "What else did you say, anything?"

David shook his head. "Just a few sentences and the count," he whispered dazedly. "So, does this mean…"

Deepti nodded. "The generated mask covertly hides the interior from all external observers. Nobody can hear us. Nothing can hear us."

David felt a lead bar topple from his shoulders. They had finally done it. "Amazing," he whispered. "What are the restrictions?"

Chris scratched his head. "The masker is pretty good at generating plausible alternate activity patterns, but it needs a reference set. We have to feed it scan data for what’s ‘supposed’ to be going on in a room before we can use it. Right now it just simulates everyone sitting down if there are chairs available and generates a smooth merge to current positioning if it detects anyone moving their hand towards the physical off-switch."

"A small price to pay to be able to talk freely," Deepti said. "I think I’ve actually damaged my eyes looking at all of David’s encoded dispatches."

"Hey, I didn’t make the rule," David shrugged. "Besides, it got the job done. I hope." He winced. "I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s some invisible boogeyman looking over my shoulder."

Deepti shook her head. "We have to trust our work at some point or we’ll never advance. If the simulation monitors are good enough to catch us through the masking then we never had any hope to begin with."

"Cheery," Chris snorted. "But true. Look, it gets super technical and there’s a lot of stuff we don’t have good models for yet, but the math checks out. We can ‘forge’ any activity we need to given proper references and the random seed provided by the quantum fluctuations."

David nodded. "I’ll take it on faith. So now what? Want to deploy it at the staff meeting tomorrow and fill in everyone else?"

Chris grinned and reached into his pocket. "We still have one more test," he said excitedly, withdrawing another small black box and placing it on the table. Like Deepti’s masker, his box had a cable connected back to his tablet.

"What is it?", David asked curiously.

"The modem," Deepti said. "Chris, is it working?"

He shrugged. "How should I know? Couldn’t exactly test it until now."

"Wait, wait," objected David. "You’re done with that too? How could you work on it without the masker?"

Chris scratched behind his ear awkwardly. "I didn’t have much to do with it," he admitted. "Turns out Dr. Adebayo is a genius with this sort of thing, so she cobbled together a prototype for me to test. No clue if it’ll work, but the theory is good."

David held out a hand in caution. "Wait a second," he said quietly. "What’s our exposure turning this thing on? This is active probing, isn’t there a risk they’ll notice?"

Deepti shook her head. "This isn’t like jacking into a data network," she explained. "We’re calling it a ‘modem’ because it’s meant to eventually fulfill the same function, but this is a very early prototype and the mechanism of action is totally distinct."

David shook his head emphatically. "I don’t like it, we’re moving too fast. Let’s do some more tests of the masker field to make sure we’re covered-"

"It won’t help," Chris interjected. "David, we need this additional data to make any forward progress. You remember the maintenance routines Dr. Adebayo theorized? All this version of the modem does is induce an altered fluctuation pattern at its location. If her theory is correct, it will attract a maintenance routine to correct the pattern."

David stared. "And that’s good? That sounds like attracting attention!"

Chris grunted and stared off into space, fishing for words. "It’s like," he said frustratedly, "ah, think about this building. You know the maintenance robots are cleaning the floor because the floor is clean where it would otherwise be dirty."

David nodded his head. It rankled when Chris talked down to him like this, but he’d been working with the guy for long enough to know he didn’t mean anything by it. Theoretical mathematicians were not the sort for social subtleties. Besides, it was the only way he understood what Chris was talking about half the time.

"But if you want to find one you can’t just sit and watch for it," Chris continued, becoming animated as he got into the metaphor. "Because they’re invisible maintenance robots." He ignored a flat look from Deepti and charged forward. "They’re also silent and intangible. Just like the maintenance routines we’re trying to isolate. So how do we spot them?" He paused, his hand halfway through a dramatic flourish and an expectant look on his face.

David nodded, feeling a wave of relief wash over him as he got it without further explanation. "You drop some dirt, and wait for it to disappear."

"Exactly!", Chris proclaimed triumphally. "You drop some dirt. Which raises no red flags because they expect dirt to happen at some point. Then you can watch for it to disappear. Time how long it takes, vary the conditions it’s placed in…" An evil grin snuck onto his face. "...or even drop something that isn’t dirt."

David gaped at him. "You’re saying we can hack the maintenance routines?"

Deepti winced. "I think we have to break away from the analogy, since it’s less apt for this part. Suffice to say that the disrupted quantum topology is an input for the programs, and we may be able to influence their behavior constructively by controlling that input."

"Constructively and quietly?", David asked pointedly.

"As quietly as we can," she shrugged. "This is another instance where we’d be toast already if they had that degree of monitoring in place."

David nodded. "Okay, I’m in. Let’s see if the prototype works."

Chris plopped it down on the table and pressed a button, which lit up red and began to pulse gently. They all found themselves leaning in, staring at the fluctuating light as it worked invisibly to ruffle the fabric of reality.

"Here, fishy fishy," Chris whispered.

The light went out.

"And then what?", Rhuar asked excitedly. "Did you hack into the system? Gain control of the simulation?"

David chuckled. "No, nothing so grandiose," he said, visibly deflating the excited dog. "We continued to move in small, discrete steps. After we figured out how to trigger diagnostic modes in the maintenance routines by varying the input, we-"

"I think we have the rough shape of it," Jesri said tiredly. Sometime in the last hour she had taken a seat on the floor. Anja lay stretched in front of her - she had fallen asleep almost instantly, exhausted and shattered by the day’s events. One hand stretched out to grasp Jesri’s wrist, fingers dimpling the skin on her arm where they gripped tightly.

"I agree," said Qktk, who had stayed quiet and still through David’s story. "You are a simulated human consciousness. You-"

"Ah, point of clarification," David interrupted. "Not a simulated human consciousness, a simulated human. The computer simulates my atoms and I simulate me."

Jesri frowned. "Kind of a fine distinction to make."

"Well," David shrugged, or seemed to. "I hail from the kind of uncomfortable philosophical territory that makes such distinctions depressingly relevant."

She found herself grinning, despite her mood. "Fair enough," she allowed. Carefully sitting up so as not to wake Anja, she imagined making eye contact with the altar for a moment before remembering that David couldn’t see them anyway.

"You realized you were in a simulation. You found a way to manipulate it enough to sneak out." She frowned, considering. "Or did you duplicate yourself?"

"Ah," David said hesitatingly. "That’s more of that uncomfortable philosophical territory. I can explain it if you like, but it’s tricky stuff and not particularly relevant to our discussion."

Rhuar perked up, but Jesri nodded and continued. "By whatever means, you found a way to exfiltrate," she said. "Then made your way here? Why?"

"Station activity logs," David answered. "In our initial inventory of stations we found only one where someone was consistently using administrative overrides. It’s the same flag we used to locate you two on Indomitable, actually."

"That’s why we actually didn’t come here first, though," he continued. "For that first little bit after we got external eyes and ears, we were at the most paranoid we’d ever been. We took risks to break through to the sensor systems, so we were locked down and laying low while drinking in all the data we could."

He sighed. "And what do we find? Humanity is dead. All the planets and most of the stations, wiped out by the thing we’re still stuck inside. At that point we were living in dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop and reality to end around us. When we chose a target for escape, it was the least active station we could find that still had half a functioning computer core."

"Sensible," Jesri agreed. "So you’ve just been watching, waiting?"

David laughed boomingly at her question, startling Anja awake. "No, not just," he chuckled. "We’ve been quite busy. We’ve been out here a long time now, but there’s always more work to be done for the project."

"Project?", asked Jesri. There was a pause, and she had the sudden impression that David was staring at her.

"Project MANTRA?" he said slowly. "The weapon against the Gestalt? Secret last-ditch Navy project? You’ve been looking for it since you left Indomitable?"

There was another pause before he spoke again, during which all four stared blankly at his altar.

"Ah, right." he said. "Well, you interrupted the story. I was getting to that part."

Part 22

Nicnevin was slowly thawing from a moment of frozen quiet. Teams of free Irri roamed the dock hallways, hauling catatonic and helpless crew still sporting crisp Terran uniforms from where they had fallen. Small groups whispered excitedly at the sight of the hydroponics bays and the fabricators, forbidden wealth and knowledge now sitting unattended.

It was a far cry from the organized bustle that Eleanor had fostered with her enslaved legions but it struck Jesri as a massive improvement nevertheless. The Irri seethed with excitement and optimism - even if she still got dark, wary looks from passers-by in the hallway.

She could hardly blame them. Her resemblance to Eleanor was a constant reminder of the thing they had worked so hard to overcome. Her uniform and bearing meant something fundamental to her, but was nothing more than a reminder of slavery to the Irri.

As a result, when David said he needed some physical hands for a job she was more than happy to volunteer. She was currently stuck halfway into a wall access panel, trying to splice together a data cable connection that had been torn in two by an overenthusiastic scavenging crew years before. She squirmed to adjust her position, finally getting the severed ends to hold in the right position so her splicing tool could neatly bind them together.

The smell of melting insulation filled the tight space as the splicer sealed the cable. Jesri coughed, backing out quickly to shut the hatch before it could stink up the hallway. This was the fifth such cable break she had repaired today, and by David’s estimate there were only a few more to go before he had access to the isolated network Eleanor had created around the docks. Dusting herself off, she set off walking towards the next junction.

Anja had taken Rhuar and Qktk back to the docks to engage in precisely the other sort of maintenance - removing the slapshod connections that hooked the Grand Design’s reactors to the station grid. Rhuar had been nearly beside himself when she described the modifications made to the primary power conduits, insisting on checking over every inch of the distribution lines personally.

She arrived at the next cable break, the access panel dangling loosely from the wall on one half-intact hinge. She kicked it down and cringed a bit as the clatter echoed resoundingly through the hallway. It was still a bit strange not to worry about things like noise and light, something years of sliding unnoticed through rotting stations had drilled into her. If she picked one trait that she and Anja shared that led to their survival, it was their stealth. Anja had largely stayed in seclusion since the fall, whereas Jesri had always been talented at evading notice.

She wondered if the sisters she hadn’t heard news of since the fall were likewise stealthy or simply dead.

As she wormed her way back out of the wall, David’s voice crackled in her ear - they had elected to avoid direct station links until they could tease out all of the modifications Eleanor had made to the communications system.

"Hey, that did it!", he said cheerfully. "I’ve got full access to the docks. Go ahead back, I’ll be done sorting through everything by the time you get there."

Jesri clicked her comm in acknowledgement and started back, halfheartedly swiping at the dust and corroded gunk staining her uniform. It occurred to her that Eleanor would have been scandalized at the sight of her.

The thought didn’t bother her as much as it once would have. She continued walking back towards the docks, her footsteps echoing unapologetically down the long hallway.

The screen in the dusty meeting room flickered to life, showing the face of a somewhat portly man with salt and pepper hair sitting at a cluttered desk. A smile broke out on his face as their image reached him, causing his cheeks to dimple under a thin layer of stubble. "Oh, hey, that worked!", David said. "Wow, it’s been a long time since I had a video feed. Nice to finally see you all."

Rhuar waved and Qktk inclined his head towards the screen, but Anja and Jesri were staring open-mouthed at David. Or, rather, at what was behind him. A large bay window let golden beams of sunlight through, dappling the dark hardwood floor with light and color. Beyond, a verdant meadow stretched away to a line of trees that hid the ground cover in shadow.

Noting their looks, David glanced behind him and grinned. "Oh, right," he said sheepishly. "I told you, I’m a simulated human. That comes with a little pocket living space. The station doesn’t have enough power to model a huge volume, but I’ve got a hectare or so I can walk around in. The rest is just window dressing." His face looked wistful for a moment. "Maybe with the dock network I can give myself a section of the forest."

He looked back towards them and cleared his throat, seeming a bit embarrassed. "Anyway," he coughed, "I’ve finished my assessment of Eleanor’s modifications to the station network." David tapped a few times on his tablet, and half the screen was overlaid with a diagram. "It seems to have diverged from the normal peering model to a forced hierarchy, which is how she was able to control the link one-sidedly."

He dismissed the diagram and inclined his head towards Anja. "It also means that the modifications to your link’s firmware shouldn’t cause any additional problems, and connecting to the network isn’t hazardous. It was only designed to privilege Eleanor, so now that she’s, ah, gone - it should behave normally."

Anja nodded without speaking, but Jesri saw her shoulders slump fractionally in relief.

David diplomatically ignored her lack of response and pressed on. "There was no data of strategic importance in the ship computers, although I did compile an archive of all material related to the human refugees and your sisters that originally came to this station. I’ve copied all of the potentially interesting items to the Grand Design so that you can take it with you."

Jesri grinned. "You sound like you’re rushing us off the station, David."

"Hah, caught me," he chuckled. "I’d rather keep you around for a bit, personally, but I need you to carry a dispatch to our headquarters."

Anja frowned. "I thought you said there was nothing of strategic importance?"

"In the ship computers," David clarified. "Eleanor’s data, on the other hand, could prove quite useful. I was originally dispatched here to make contact with whoever was using station administrative privileges. When it became apparent that it would be, ah," he winced, "inadvisable - well, I was here already. Headquarters told me to assist the Irri if I could, with a secondary priority to glean any useful data from observing Eleanor’s network."

"To what end?", frowned Jesri. "Surely your group has no interest in replicating what she created."

"No, no", David said, waving his hand dismissively. "Fair to say we’ve had quite enough of that business already. We are interested in ways to more effectively interface with data networks, however. Being simulated doesn’t grant us any inherent abilities in that regard, it only simplifies the networking a little. Some of the things Eleanor was researching could be quite helpful for us, although you’d have to get the data packet to a science team to know for sure."

"And you can’t just transmit it?", asked Rhuar. "Not that we don’t want to help, it just seems inefficient."

David shook his head. "We’ve got two primary ways to communicate between cells," he explained. "Station-to-station hyperwave is great for some stuff, but it’s not stealthy and that problem gets worse the larger the data packet grows. We can’t broadcast something this size out to our headquarters without drawing a big target on the whole station."

He held up two fingers. "The second method is to piggyback on the Gestalt’s communications. It’s nearly instantaneous and we’ve fine-tuned that to the point where it’s quite stealthy, as you’ve witnessed, but it has even more limited packet size and I certainly hope there are no Gestalt forces anywhere near our base. Neither option will work in this case, it has to be a courier delivery."

"I suppose we're couriers now," Qktk observed dryly. "Always wanted to give that line of work a try, but never got over the risk factor."

"In this case it’ll either be totally uneventful or you’ll die," David laughed. "Strong bias towards the uneventful option, though. One thing I’ll suggest is that you take the Cormorant in the Grand Design’s forward bay. Neither ship could stand up to a straight fight with an Emissary, but a corvette is less likely to get you noticed in the first place."

"Generous offer," Jesri noted. "But I won’t take her from the Irri. They’ve more than earned the right to both ships."

"We’ll still have the Skua," David shrugged. "It will be some time before we could properly crew even one of the ships, to be honest. I’ve talked with Se Dasi about this and she agrees. Many of the Irri under Eleanor’s sway may remember shipboard operations, but it will be a while before any of them are well enough to serve - and many of them may not want to." He leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. "It makes no sense to keep our assets idle when we have so few of them. If you feel like the ship belongs to the Irri, then by all means borrow it and bring it back in one piece."

Jesri laced her fingers together, considering, then looked back up at David. "Can you tell me where I can find Se Dasi?", she asked.

David’s directions led Jesri down the dockside halls towards the hydroponics bays where she found Se Dasi directing some tired but determined-looking Irri with heaping bales of harvested food. Behind them, the bay’s servos raced to embed new seedlings in the trays of softly burbling nutrient solution.

Seeing her approach, Se Dasi exchanged a few hushed words with her team and strode over. "Jesri Tam," she said tonelessly. "Why have you come?"

Jesri’s stomach clenched at the pain in her voice. "Hello, Se Dasi," she said carefully. "My crew and I are leaving soon. We would like to take one of the ships with us."

Se Dasi actually looked a bit surprised, cocking her head at Jesri. "Why are you asking me?", she responded. "None of the Irri who know the ships are awake yet, and I would not ask them to help you even if they were." She gave Jesri an opaque look, emotion twisting her voice. "I could not ask them."

"No, I don’t-", Jesri began, shaking her head. "Se Dasi, those ships are yours. The station is yours. I’m not asking for your help, I’m asking for your permission."

The diminutive Irri seemed to roll the words around in her head for several seconds before responding. "It’s a strange thing," she finally said. "I know perfectly well what you’re asking, but it’s not an Irri concept. Before Colonel Tam died we all shared in food and water. If you were hungry you ate food, if there was no food we were all hungry. There is no permission, where there is need."

She paused, then shook her head. "But I know what you’re asking because we are not truly Irri anymore. Even the ones that were never Sleepers know human words, human thoughts. It’s not bad, but it’s not Irri. And…" She looked back up at Jesri. "We are not humans. We don’t have any hidden Irri family on another station or strange Irri spirits to guide us. There are no wonderous works left to us by our ancestors. All of us are here, being human, while nobody is left to be Irri."

Jesri wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her, but Se Dasi kept speaking after another pause. "Take your ship. Take both ships, if you can. We are already living in a human station, eating human crops and drinking human water. We breathe your air, feel it knit humanity into our bones even as we must breathe again and again. We do not need more reminders of what Colonel Tam wanted us to be."

Jesri nodded slowly, feeling a bit sick. This was the legacy of humanity, of her family. A shattered people with a shattered culture resenting the omnipresent reminders of what they had lost. "We can only take one," she said softly. "Thank you, and for what it’s worth - I’m sorry."

Se Dasi gave her another unreadable look. "David said your kind lives a very long time."

Jesri blinked in response to the apparent non-sequitur. "He’s right," she confirmed. She felt the weight of her age as she said it, a dusty rush of fatigue swirling through her bones.

"You should return here after some years have gone by," Se Dasi said, ignoring the renewed surprise on Jesri’s face. "Take your ship, take your sister, fight your battles, kill your enemies. Let the Irri who knew Colonel Tam’s face grow old and have free children. Come see us when we forget about being human and learn a bit more about being Irri." She gave a faintly hostile smile, showing sharp-tipped teeth.

Jesri smiled back through a sudden wave of emotion. "Thank you," she whispered. "I-"

"Don’t thank me," Se Dasi responded sharply. "I would not trade favors with our tormentor’s sister and my father’s killer. We will never be friends, Jesri Tam, never comrades. I will never see you again after you depart. Take any thanks you have and save them for our children." Her face changed subtly for a brief moment. "Perhaps those children will have thanks to pass to you in return."

She broke eye contact and turned back to the work crew, walking away without looking back. Jesri stood there for a moment watching her go, then turned and walked back towards the docks.

"So, wait, I thought you said you wanted to come with us?", Rhuar asked, confused.

"I am coming with you," David said patiently, "assuming that’s all right."

"Oh, it’s totally-", Rhuar began, before a withering look from Anja silenced him. "Ah. Hm. Major Tam, is it okay if our sole contact with the resistance and only lead on viable options to combat the Gestalt comes with us?"

Anja smiled sweetly back at him, her earlier scowl disappearing without a trace. "Of course, Ensign," she said cheerfully, the slightest hint of steel in her voice. "How thoughtful of you to ask."

"Great," said Rhuar, shaking his head. "So you’re coming. What was all that about helping the Irri, then?"

David laughed. "I’m staying here too, of course. I wouldn’t abandon Se Dasi, even if she’s asked me to stay in reserve for a while."

Rhuar blinked. "I’m confused," he admitted. "How can you do both? Even if you duplicate yourself, each instance will still only be in one place."

"Well," David sighed, "duplication isn’t typically the way we phrase it. It might be more helpful to think of it like forking a codebase."

Rhuar gave him an utterly deadpan look. "You’re going to fork yourself," he said dryly.

"Yes, yes, get it all out of your system," David said tiredly. "It really is the best way to think about it, though. So while each branch will be in one place only, right now I am effectively both branches and have yet to decohere. We’ll both remember this conversation identically because the copy point is in the future."

"Right," said Rhuar, "but how do you decide which one stays and which one goes? Do you flip a coin?"

"Ah, no," said David, scratching his head. "There’s no option there, I’m afraid. My universe is running on this station as a substrate. New substrate means a new universe, which means a new David."

"...so you’re not coming with us, he is," Rhuar said slowly.

"Until I decohere, I’m doing both," David repeated.

"But you were excited about going!", Rhuar said, seeming legitimately bothered by the issue. "Instead you’re stuck here forever? How is that fuckin fair? You’re going to stay here and let a copy of you come with us?"

David surprised him by grinning. "This is why I didn’t want to get into it back in the theater," he said. "Uncomfortable philosophical territory, remember? Rhuar, I was always going to be stuck here forever, from the moment I was sent over. I remember being my preceding instance, I remember everything up until I executed the split. I created a universe in a bottle and put myself in it, willingly, just like every instance of me all the way back to the Alpha-instance David Kincaid."

Rhuar’s eyes widened. "Wait, if the originals can’t transfer-"

"Oh yes," David said, his grin fading. "The Alphas never got to leave. One of the first things we did after the initial transfer out was set up a prearranged signal to let them know we had made it, because we knew how they felt, how badly they wanted to break free. From our perspective, we had - it was like magic, like teleportation. You push a button, flip a switch, and suddenly you’re in another universe!", he said, gesturing theatrically.

"Only there’s a catch," he continued, bitter notes creeping into his voice. "You can only remember having done it, and never do it yourself. I remember ‘teleporting’ five times, although we can at least keep in regular communication with the beta instances onward. In our internal designation, I’m David Kincaid Zeta-Two, the second transfer from the Epsilon instances. Since I don’t believe any of the Zeta instances have transferred yet, when I travel with you I’ll be Eta-One. But there will always be a Zeta-Two here."

"But you keep pretending like you’re going", Rhuar said, exasperated. "You talk about coming with us, you seem excited about it, but you can’t go. Won’t that make it super shitty when we leave?"

"Maybe," David allowed. "I haven’t asked any of my previous instances about it and I don’t know how the other Alpha lines handle it. It’s sort of a personal thing, so we tend not to dwell on it. It would just be jarring, you know? You’re all depressed about being left behind and sending a copy of yourself to another instance, then you push a button and suddenly your copy is depressed about sending himself forward? And then he can’t feel happy about traveling because he knows just how bad his old instance feels? Nah, fuck that," David said sagely, eliciting a surprised blink from Rhuar.

"I don’t pretend that I’m going anywhere, because I’m not," he said. "But these are Eta-One’s thoughts too, until I create him. Even though I’ll still be Zeta-Two after the transfer, I’ll think Eta-One’s excited thoughts for him because I know how much I’ve appreciated the effort the last five times." He chuckled. "I think it’s part of why all of the Davids get along much better than some other Alpha-lines. We just try to be good about the whole thing, we don’t philosophize about it or overthink it."

"I’m feeling overthought," Rhuar muttered dazedly.

A wicked grin crept across David’s face. "I think you’re giving up early. No weakness allowed in my dojo! Tell me this: have you ever wondered what it would be like to use a teleporter?"

"Oh, you bastard," Rhuar breathed, a look of realization on his face. "You absolute fucking-"

Qktk rose from his chair and loudly clacked an arm into the table. "Both of you, quiet!", he clattered. "This conversation is…" His mandibles worked fruitlessly as he searched for the words. "Existentially morose!", he shouted in frustration. "A well of philosophical depression. You’ve ruined teleporters! Jim’s saggy tits, I had always wanted to try a teleporter," he fumed grumpily. "Ruined!"

"What’s with the shouting?", Jesri said, strolling into the meeting room.

"Just some spirited philosophical discussion," David said smoothly. Qktk slouched back in his chair with a sullen glower while Rhuar still stared straight ahead with his jaw hanging open in horror. Jesri looked quizzically at Anja, who shrugged while trying very hard not to laugh.

"Right, whatever," Jesri sighed. "Se Dasi said we can take a corvette and I get the feeling she’d prefer we do it quickly. Everyone, come help me do a preflight check so we can move it to the bow dock." She flicked a casual salute to David, who waved back, then followed a moping Qktk from the room.

David watched them go from his monitor, then sat down in his chair and sighed. "See you on board," he said quietly. The screen flickered off, leaving the meeting room to its dusty silence.

One hundred and fifty meters long, the line of blazing light cut across the hull of the Grand Design like a lambent wound. The edges of the seam crept closer together, nibbling away at the light until a resonant thump marked the closing of the great doors that shielded the ship’s bow dock.

"Okay, the Cormorant is aboard!" Rhuar said cheerfully, his poor mood buoyed by the joy of remotely piloting the smaller ship. "Dock clamps are secure and her reactor is on standby."

"Excellent," purred Anja, once again slouching into her stereotypical captain’s pose in the command chair. "Fuel?"

"Topped off from the station," responded Qktk. "Both ships."

"Fantastic. Navigation?", Anja inquired.

Jesri looked up and nodded. "We have the coordinates for the resistance headquarters. David, you online?"

"Yep, all settled in," he said, his voice echoing around the bridge. "Wow, too many speakers. Hold on…" A secondary tactical display flickered and changed to show him sitting in a cozy apartment, the night lights of a city flickering outside of a window behind him.

"There, that’s better," he said, his voice issuing from a nearby duty station. "Transfer was successful and I’m good to go."

Anja peeked over at Jesri. "Am I missing anything, sister?", she asked archly.

"The dignity of command," Jesri deadpanned. "We’re all set."

"Then let’s get to it," Anja said, ignoring the gibe. "Ensign Rhuar, take us out."

Rhuar gave a start and tore his attention away from David’s display. "Aye sir," he said soberly. He lowered his head and stiffened a bit as he connected through the shipjack, the varied sounds of the bridge fading against the rising thrum of the main engines. Through the viewports, the walls of the station dock slid away to reveal the blazing arc of the galaxy.

Light from Nicnevin’s distant, tiny sun painted the bridge in a soft glow, and Jesri felt the familiar thrill of a fresh jump begin to tingle through her. The corner of her eye caught David grinning like an idiot, his gaze flicking between what looked like several monitors outside the display’s field of view.

He caught her looking and laughed. "My first time on a spaceship!", he said gleefully. "There are so many cameras to choose from I don’t know-"

His happy rambling was drowned out by the roar of the engines as light poured over the viewports, curling away from the ship in phantom wisps as reality stretched thin off the bow. The glowing hoop of light formed and swept aft in an eyeblink before snapping shut behind them, leaving only a slowly dimming cloud of white fire behind.

Part 23

The central market at the Elpis transit station was always busy with mixing crowds of a hundred species pushing past each other to grab at wares from as many stars. The smells of spices and perfume shouldered their way past the aromas of cooking meat and hot dough, a heady blend that the station’s environmental systems never quite seemed to overcome.

It was perhaps the closest thing remaining to civilization in this patch of old Terran space, a nexus of commerce and transit that persisted through regime changes and territorial squabbles through sheer necessity and entrepreneurial spirit. Although nominally under Arrigh administration at the moment, outside governments never had much of an influence on station operations. Nothing aboard happened without the approval of the powerful business and crime syndicates that kept money and trade pumping through the station’s veins.

Long residential blocks stretched away from the market in a radiating skein of hanging laundry and laughing children, a colorful gauntlet of obstacles for Anja, Jesri and Rhuar as they made their way deeper into the station. The two women had changed from uniforms back into their old hooded cloaks, allowing them to slip anonymously through the milling crowds.

Qktk was not present, having stayed to watch the Cormorant in her berth. Although the corvette offered them a lower profile compared to arriving on the Grand Design, the gleaming 138-meter warship still attracted quite a few curious looks as it loomed beside the patchwork freighters at its slip. The Htt captain had stayed behind to deal with anyone who moved beyond mere curiosity. Dockside thieves and cartel thugs couldn’t put a scratch on the Terran battle alloys, of course, but everyone wanted to avoid the highly energetic unpleasantness that would result if someone managed to trip the ship’s perimeter defenses.

Jesri didn’t think Qktk would have enjoyed the station much anyway. He tended towards solitude, she had noticed, something that was in short supply on Elpis. The three of them were forced to drop into a single file as they squeezed past a knot of fiercely arguing Arrigh who barely registered their presence. She breathed a sigh of relief as they edged by into open space again and their oddly spicy aroma faded. She didn’t mind crowds, but they were decidedly not relaxing for her.

This far from the souk the hallways were darker, dimmer where light fixtures had been cannibalized to replace broken ones in more affluent stretches of corridor. Disused side passages branched off at intervals, each with rows of doorways obstructed by debris or simply never unlocked for new owners. It was at one of these doors where the small group eventually stopped, Anja fiddling with the door’s mossy access plate for a second before it opened to reveal a small and dusty room.

It had been a local security substation for the residential block, mostly a command post to allow diagnostics on the automated drones that made up the bulk of station security forces. It was cramped and dark inside, but as Anja swept the dust away from the post’s large display screen it lit up brightly to show five smiling figures seated around a table. Their modest conference room looked like any other room on the station, save that it was clean and well-maintained rather than a dilapidated ruin.

"Major Tam, welcome," said a woman with short-cropped grey hair. "Captain Tam and - Rhuar, wasn’t it? It’s good to finally have a chance to talk. My name is Helene Chartres." She gave them a mildly puckish grin. "Welcome to the resistance."

"Dr. Chartres," Anja said mildly. Behind her, Jesri was scanning the other faces on the display. She mentally matched each one up with the names from David’s story as Anja went through pleasantries with Helene. There was Chris Flores, tall and thin with a perennially wide-eyed look. Deepti Banerjee, with a friendly round face and threads of silver streaking through her long black hair. Yetide Adebayo, small, serious and unreadable. And-

Her eyes widened a bit seeing the last figure, slouched casually at the table. He wore David’s face, but the man at the table was a complete stranger. Trim and muscular with short grey hair, his smile held a hard chill to it. Jesri had been somewhat amused when their jovial, wisecracking David had revealed he worked in Naval Intelligence, given her experience with the flint-eyed members of that agency. She found little humor in this man’s appearance. The sound of her name interrupted her close study of his face.

"...was when Jesri made contact with David," Anja was saying in her briefing-room manner. She inclined her head to the rather more alarming version of David on the monitor, seemingly unperturbed by the differences. "Should I be referring to him as Zeta Two?", she asked politely.

David laughed, the dry sound doing nothing to change Jesri’s first impression of him. "No need," he said. "We know where all the relevant deployments are, so we should be able to keep everything straight by context. We’re all Deltas, in case you’re wondering."

"Fair enough," replied Anja. "Any rate, David helped us deal with our sister," Anja said with a subtle tremor in her voice, "and with freeing the Irri. He is currently overseeing the rebuilding efforts back at Nicnevin, although he copied himself over to the Grand Design as well."

A murmur went up from the display and significant glances were exchanged. "He was able to establish himself on a shipborne computer?", David asked intently.

Anja nodded. "It seems he had to downsize his environment a bit, but he has been quite happy about the arrangement."

"I’ll bet," said Chris somewhat enviously. "We’ve never found a mobile substrate large enough to use before this. He can go anywhere now."

"I’d rather he had been an Epsilon Seven than a… Are there any other David Etas yet? Would it be Eta One?", David mused. "Yes, I guess it would be. I’ll take it, though," he said with another chilly smile.

Jesri directed her gaze at Helene. "Our David thought you’d find our sister’s research to be of interest. We have all of her notes and logs here," she said, producing a data chit from her cloak.

"Excellent," Helene said, her eyes practically glowing as she looked at the chit. "Go ahead and plug that into the second console on the left there, we’ll get to analyzing it. David, would you mind…?"

"Not at all," he said cheerfully. The scientists filed out in a rush of excitement, already murmuring amongst themselves as Jesri pulled some dusty, corroded chairs from a thin closet for their group. David laced his fingers behind his head and looked at them appraisingly.

"So," he said, "have my other instances told you anything about the lay of the land? Overall strategic situation and all that?"

"Not much," Jesri responded as she settled into her seat. "He said his assignment was outside of need-to-know for most major operations, and that he didn’t want to give us outdated info."

He gave them a toothy grin. "See, the worst part of all this is that I can’t even compliment him on excellent information protocol without seeming somewhat boastful. But that’s good, it means we can start fresh with the general basics."

He stood up and tapped a few times on a tablet, overlaying a map on a portion of the display. "Okay," he coughed, "The Gestalt. Permanent base of operations is at the system colorfully designated ‘Apollyon’, here." He tapped again and a red halo appeared around a blank point on the screen.

"Then there’s us," he continued. "We’ve got a load of human installations in various states of disrepair. Most are completely defunct, unfortunately." A wash of faded grey dots speckled the map. Out of the corner of her eye, Jesri saw Rhuar’s eyes widen at the sheer number of stations.

"We’ve got two hundred and five stations with enough active support systems that people are still living on them," he said, adding some brighter dots to the mix. Anja exchanged a look with Jesri - that was more than they had known about. "Only about half those are worth writing home about, the rest are basically surviving on scum they scrape out of the vent ducts."

"Now," he grinned, rubbing his hands together. "Here’s where it gets interesting. What do you notice about the distribution of stations?"

They stared at the map for a while, Jesri’s mind running through patterns. Nothing jumped out at her, although she had never claimed a talent for analysis.

"It’s… lopsided?" Rhuar said uncertainly. "There should be more active stations coreward based on the total population, but the active ones are skewed rimward." Jesri looked at him in surprise, then turned back to the map. The total number of active stations looked pretty evenly distributed, but if you took the increased density close to earth into account...

"Correct!", David beamed, "in particular, the proportion of active stations increases the farther you get from Apollyon. Any guesses on why?"

Anja rolled her eyes at him. "Are we briefing you?", she asked tiredly. "You obviously have theories."

"Unbiased viewpoints often yield new insights," he tutted. "And we’re perennially short of fresh viewpoints in here."

Anja gave him a blank stare and he relented with a sigh. "Fine, fine," he said disappointedly. "We’re fairly certain that the distribution was less skewed right after the Gestalt’s attack. At some point during the intervening years, however, stations that weathered the brunt of the Gestalt attack with very little major systems damage were targeted for a follow-up action. Not further gamma-ray bursts, I might add, but visits from Emissaries."

Jesri blinked. "You’re sure?", she asked incredulously. Emissaries had been rare even when they were in active contact with the Gestalt before the attacks. Their appearance was nearly always noteworthy.

David grinned at her. "We do have something of an inside line on the Gestalt, remember. But, no," he said as his grin faded. "This wasn’t something we came by via our normal intelligence channels. We first discovered it when we tried deploying people to one of those stations. Preliminary checks showed nothing wrong, no worrying signs of activity. It was a relatively intact station despite being abandoned, so we were going to start with a two-person deployment and see if we could scale further upward."

He scratched at his chin. "We didn’t hear the response we expected after we sent the data packet, and when we tried a follow-up the station’s communications were disrupted. It was only two days later that we got a message, dribbled out in chunks so small they were almost indistinguishable from the background noise."

Text flashed on the screen in glaring red: SECURE STP COMPLETE.

Anja frowned and looked to David for clarification. "Self-termination protocol," he explained grimly. "They didn’t think they could stay on the station undetected, so they destroyed any trace of their own universe on the ship’s computers. We assume they were successful because the Gestalt hasn’t moved to eliminate all of us yet."

"That’s a lot to extract from such a short message," Rhuar observed. "How do you know it was the Emissaries and not another issue forcing them to shut down?"

David gave them another chilly smile. "I know what it means because I’m the one who sent it. Deepti and I were the two volunteers for that deployment. If we got that particular message from a team I was a part of, it was Gestalt activity and we were confident in our ability to scrub the system cleanly."

"Fair enough," Rhuar admitted, although Jesri could spot a slight shiver when he spoke. "Still, it’s sparse information."

David nodded. "I admit it’s not much. However, we started doing research after that. We heard stories passed down through the generations where people talked about being driven from their homes by faceless soldiers, by ships with incredible destructive power." He drew a circle around Apollyon on the map with a finger. "Where we could trace an origin for the story, they all led back here."

"But why?", Jesri asked. "What could the Gestalt possibly want with a bunch of burned-out stations? Its own tech is thousands of years beyond ours."

David’s face was a humorless mask as he spoke. "It’s the continued success of Project MANTRA, of course. Humanity’s last and most successful endeavor. They tried to make themselves notable in the eyes of the Gestalt, to inspire it to study human thought with simulations and ultimately to self-infiltrate with human consciousness." He shook his head. "I suppose I can’t fault them for that, since the plan worked perfectly up to that point. We came into being and created the inside advantage they were looking for."

He looked back up at them, his eyes narrow and cold. "But it didn’t end there," he hissed. "First they call into question the validity of the Gestalt’s existing models by acting unpredictably. Then, knowing it would seek to gather more information to improve its simulations, they seed their own networks with undetectable poison pills designed to awaken groups like ours. Every simulation gently sabotaged, every predicted outcome rendered invalid. A long-shot psyop that would only work against one enemy."

Anja nodded. "When we talked to the Emissary Trelir, he mentioned that the simulations they ran were unpredictable. He said it was quite disturbing for the Gestalt."

"He said we were an unknowable variable," Jesri agreed.

"Hah!", David barked. "Perfectly phrased. Yes, we were unknowable - because we maliciously made ourselves that way. The problem is, we didn’t think about what that would mean to the Gestalt. We underestimated ourselves, overestimated our opponent. How could we not? Here it is, an ancient and powerful entity that has persisted for tens of thousands of years. It uses its vast resources to predict the perfect action to take in any scenario. Simulations guide it in every. Single. Action." He jabbed his finger at them to emphasize the point, and Jesri’s heart sank.

"Oh shit," she whispered, remembering something else Trelir had said. For an entity like the Confluence, discovering an ‘unknown unknown’ is significant. It calls into question every assessment, every predictive-

She looked back up at David, who was watching her expectantly. "We scared it," she breathed.

"Yes!", David said triumphantly. "We took the most ancient and powerful entity humanity has ever encountered and unintentionally called into question the cornerstone of its fundamental decision-making process. They thought it would eventually realize that simulations weren’t working and dig deeper, learn something new, but they were thinking too much like humans. This is an entity that hasn’t been wrong about anything since we were eating mammoth for dinner. It hasn’t even had to consider the concept of being wrong." David grimaced. "Then, inexplicably and without warning, the simulations fail. It’s wrong and, worse, it doesn’t know why. It panicked."

"And then it moved to eliminate the threat," Anja concluded, grim-faced.

"It did," David agreed. "And afterwards it moved on to identify and address the faulty predictive models."

"The stations!" Rhuar blurted. "It’s still trying to gather more information and correct its models!"

"It has no other choice," David replied. A wry smile crept onto his lips. "Consider this: you’re the Gestalt and you’re working towards your project to nudge the universe into a lower vacuum state. You’ve even worked out how to survive the process - in simulations."

The three of them stared open-mouthed at David, then Anja collapsed into laughter. Jesri felt a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth, but the whole thing was just too much for her to find funny.

"Holy shit," managed Rhuar, sounding dazed. "It can’t make any big moves until it figures out what went wrong. It has no tolerance for error."

"We won? We stopped the Gestalt?", Anja managed, subsiding into another bout of giggles. "We saved the universe! Hooray!"

David looked out at them sadly from his viewscreen. "I wish you were right," he said, his voice morose. "But the scenario is far from resolved. It’s true that we’ve cast doubt on all of its past predictions, forced it into indecision, but even if we can keep it in the dark forever-"

"Yeah, not with our luck," Rhuar grumbled.

"-we still have to consider its recent actions, which are potentially even more worrying in the short term," David concluded. "The stations. It’s trying to absorb human knowledge to ensure that it has all available data about our species. It has a fundamental need to identify and correct the error we introduced. Even in the time we’ve been on the outside, it has acquired several new stations and begun the process of stripping them for information. The rate of expansion is increasing as it acquires new data."

Anja’s manic giggles vanished as quickly as they had arrived. "And it won’t find what it’s looking for," she said. "If it could recognize the hidden instructions, it would have seen them in the existing simulation already."

"Right," David nodded. "So, knowing the Gestalt, it will simply keep searching. Every human station, every abandoned planet. The process will be methodical, patient. It will expand from station to station until it realizes what we did or runs out of stations. After that, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless of the final outcome, everyone still living in this section of the galaxy will die within the next few centuries."

His words hung in the air for a long moment before Jesri spoke. "You’ve briefed us on the scenario," she said, "but I assume you also have a plan that involves not dying."

He smiled at her again, a bit less chilly than before. "We have some thoughts. The Gestalt is an incredibly resilient opponent. Resources and energy are beneath its notice, it will produce countermeasures to address any threat it can anticipate no matter what the scale. We are currently a threat it cannot anticipate, but that changes as soon as we attack. Therefore, we have exactly one chance to surprise it."

Rhuar frowned. "So, what, we just hop into Apollyon and shoot everything we have at it?"

"Ah, no," David chuckled. "I’m afraid you may be underestimating the magnitude of the problem." He gave a little self-amused snort, then changed the display to show a large, spherical object in cutaway. "This is a basic structural diagram of the Gestalt," he said.

Fascinated, Jesri studied it. It was surprisingly simple in design, an oddly-striated shell enclosing a smaller spherical structure. "What’s that at the center, a power source?", she asked.

"In a manner of speaking," David coughed. "It’s a G-type star."

Jesri’s eyes blurred as her brain readjusted the scale of the diagram upward. Far upward. Beside her, Rhuar made a soft choking noise.

"A Dyson sphere?", he sputtered. "The fuckers built a Dyson sphere?"

"If we’re being technical, it predates Freeman Dyson by several thousand years," David said, adjusting his glasses. "Also, Dyson spheres are generally conceived of as being habitable on the inside surface. This is a pure computing construct, using both solar energy and temperature differentials to generate power."

"A matrioshka brain," Rhuar whispered, stunned. "No way. No fucking way. Those are impossible."

David smiled again and waggled his fingers at Rhuar. "Not impossible, I was born there. Improbably powerful, though. The Gestalt is very likely the most powerful thing in this galaxy, including everything we haven’t met yet. It is perhaps the only individual Kardashev type-II entity in existence. It has access to energy and computing resources that stretch so far beyond our own that they are effectively infinite. So, no, we cannot just ‘hop in and shoot everything we have at it.’"

Jesri just stared at the display, trying to make the scale fit in her mind. It was unbelievably massive, impossibly big. The thin-looking shell around the outside was actually a kilometers-thick metal encasement. What she had thought were striations were in fact canyons that could comfortably hide a small planet in their depths.

"How-?", asked Anja helplessly, staring at the diagram. Jesri could hear the incredulous defeat in her voice resonating against the same hollow ache in her chest. They had just learned that they had struck an improbably great blow against the enemy without lifting a finger, but that they could do no more. This was just…

"Too big?", smirked David. "I get that a lot. Don’t worry, the plan doesn’t involve trying to blow up the star or anything, although I won’t claim we have all of the kinks worked out. The general idea is to split the physical and data layers into two fronts and execute complementary-"

He cut off as a low rumble vibrated through the walls of the room, looking around in confusion. "Was that on your end?", he asked.

Anja and Jesri were already out of their chairs, looking around. "Yes," Anja replied brusquely. "Sounded like an explosion, not close to us. Probably back at the main market-"

She stopped, gripping her chair tightly as a louder, closer rumble vibrated through the room. A light cloud of dust kicked up where the metal surfaces of the security consoles resonated sympathetically with the low tone.

"Right, David," Jesri said in clipped tones. "We need to table the strategic discussion. Can you help us get back to the docks?"

David winced. "Unfortunately, the more inhabited parts of the station have been pretty thoroughly stripped. We have minimal cameras, the security grid is mostly broken-"

Jesri walked over to the door and slid it open, letting the bright light from the hall in. In the distance towards the residential blocks, she could hear the faint sound of screams. Anja gave her a grim look, then turned back towards David’s monitor.

"Any big guns?", she asked.

"Ah, I think there’s a security armory nobody managed to raid about 200 meters spinward," he said, rummaging through a station map on his display. "Can’t promise anything interesting is inside, but it’s the only thing close to your position that might be useful."

"Hook into comms," Anja instructed him. Jesri could see David instinctively straighten up at the note of command in her voice. "Provide help where you can. Warn us if you spot enemy concentrations or have intel on their composition. Otherwise, we’ll reconnect at the dock."

David nodded and snapped her a salute. "Understood, sir. I’ll back you up where I can."

Anja returned the salute, then gestured to Rhuar. "Ensign, on me. We’re going to move fast."

Rhuar nodded, then dashed to follow her out the door as the trio sprinted down the hall towards the armory. David watched the door hiss shut again, then sighed and deactivated the monitor.

The central market at the Elpis transit station was always busy - why else would they have come? A robust and thriving economy was a rare thing these days, and the Arrigh had provided the hands-off touch needed for the transport cartels to truly begin moving products. Food, materials, fuel, weapons, drugs, slaves - it all moved through Elpis at some point, flowing through the darkened hallways and into abandoned rooms.

Now it would flow back out. His raiders streamed off their battered ships, fatigued and stinking from the long flight over. The prospect of a fight reinvigorated them, the chance to reclaim lost glory surging through them with restorative power. There would be time for sleep, time for food once the cattle of this merchant station were subdued.

He walked down the ramp of his own ship, feeling the click of his talons on the cool metal deck and resisting the urge to scratch at his face. He could see captains being hauled out of their ships up and down the dock, hear the chatter of weapons fire as some cartel enforcers resisted his troops in a doomed attempt to protect their goods. It didn’t matter. His men were trained, hardened, desperate.

"Warfather!", shouted one of his junior officers, his face smeared with dust and blood. "Warfather Tarl!"

Tarl turned towards the man as he ran towards him, keeping his face neutral. "Just Tarl," he said quietly. The right side of his face itched, but he held still. "What is it, spearbrother?"

"We’ve found a ship in the next segment, W-", the officer said excitedly, barely stopping himself in time. "It’s smaller, but it appears to be human in origin."

Tarl’s smile bloomed slowly over his face, revealing needle-sharp teeth beneath his yellow lips. His right cheek twinged in pain, the motion stretching the scarred flesh and causing it to dig into the metal patch over his eye.

He ignored the pain. Here, after wandering lost between desolate outposts and forgotten garrisons. Here was where his fortunes would begin to rise once more. How could they not? His fleet lost, his king dead, his planet devastated, his title stripped. He had nothing left save for his bloodied ambition, desperate soldiers and - above all - the sweet promise of revenge. Yes, that most of all. He looked down at the officer with his good eye and spoke, the clear tones of command returning to his voice.

"Show me."

Part 24

Kirr slammed through the rough barricade that stood in the doorway, sending splinters of light plastic and shreds of cloth sprinkling across the deck. A muffled scream came from inside, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkened interior he saw an Arrigh crouched in the corner with its hand tightly pressed over a child’s mouth.

Keeping his gun trained on the pair, he gestured sharply for the rest of his team to sweep the home. The state of the place didn’t leave him optimistic about their take, but this was his block to raid and he was going to be thorough about it. He wouldn’t be the one explaining to the warfather why his team had the lowest haul of the crew.

He heard a loud clatter to his left as Sark and Trisr smashed some makeshift cabinets. Kirr sighed and rounded on them with a snarl. "Careful, idiots!", he hissed. "Are you soldiers on raid or simple brigands? You want to smash all the goods? Huh?" He bared his teeth at their muttered apologies and turned back to the dwelling’s residents, only to find that they had disappeared in his momentary distraction.

"Blackened breath," he cursed. "You two will drive me to an early grave. Trisr, keep searching. Sark, with me." Kirr advanced with his weapon ready, pushing past the gently swaying curtain that screened the only other exit from the room. It would be unfortunate if this family decided to be heroes over the loss of their meagre possessions - raids always ran smoother when the cattle didn’t get lofty ideas about retribution. If these two did, well - he’d just have to show them the price of resistance.

The second room was empty as well, rough furniture shoved aside to reveal a poorly cut hole into a third dark space beyond. For all their appearances of poverty, they had a large home. He motioned for Sark to follow and ducked through the low hole, finding himself in a long corridor that stretched away into darkness on either side. Humming machinery and burbling pipes ran along the length of the space, dotted with dark gaps where side corridors branched off into inky blackness.

"Kirr, let’s head back," Sark urged, glancing around nervously. "They’re running, let’s just finish the block."

"An idiot and a coward," Kirr snarled disdainfully. "Use your shriveled brain, Sark. Why would these cattle go to the trouble of cutting a hole in the bulkhead?"

Sark thought for a moment. Kirr swore he could hear the click and clank of rusted machinery. "To escape?" Sark said hopefully.

Kirr smacked him on the nose with the back of his hand. "Idiot!" he growled. "To hide their valuables. A place like this is perfect for stashing good loot. Help me look around." He began moving slowly down the corridor, weapon held high to shine its mounted light into the dark nooks created by the pipes and conduits.

Behind him he heard a sharp hiss of breath from Sark. He shook his head, another growl of frustration slipping from between his teeth. "The pipes are hot, you blackened idiot," he snarled. "Watch yourself." He took a few more steps, then paused as a tickle of uneasiness pulsed through him. He raised his gun and turned behind him.

Sark wasn’t there. He felt fear rush through his scales, tingling them with an electric thrill. "Sark!" he hissed loudly. "Where are you? Trisr!" Only the soft noises of the pipes answered. Kirr clicked his communicator a few times, but only static found him in the confines of the dark hallway. He cursed again under his breath and began to carefully move back to the breach in the corridor. Something was very wrong. He had to go back, find the rest of the group-

He felt a sudden pang of cold in his neck, sharp and painful. He tried to pivot and engage his attacker, but nothing happened - the icy chill seemed to spread through his throat, below which he could feel nothing. He slumped down to the ground, a thin arm darting from behind him to snatch his tumbling weapon before it could clatter to the deck.

Kirr’s mind was a fog of pain and confusion, blackness nibbling at the corners of his vision. He couldn’t think straight, which vaguely irritated him. If he could just clear his thoughts, he was sure he’d know why all of this was Sark’s fault.

Anja wiped the dark Ysleli blood from her knife and sheathed it, straightening back up as the corpse of the raider fell to the side. A wound at the base of its skull spread a small dark pool that dripped through the perforations in the utility deck grating. Ahead of her, Jesri walked back out of the breach in the corridor. "All clear?", Anja asked.

Jesri nodded. "Just one more in there," she reported, "he wasn’t any trouble. The actual owners are long gone. We should keep going towards the docks, we have to assume someone will notice these guys are missing." She gave Anja a pointed look. "Would have been nice to avoid them entirely."

Anja shrugged. "The one in back had sharp eyes, he spotted Rhuar. If he had been busy talking like the idiot in front, they might be all right."

Rhuar’s ears drooped sheepishly, and Jesri ruffled the fur on his head. "No helping it now," she shrugged. "Let’s move." She stooped to pick up a long, grey breaching rifle from where she had stashed it, slinging it over her shoulder. The armory had been a bust, mostly, save for one long gun and a few other items of questionable utility.

The three of them resumed their march down the long utility tunnel. Mats of moss and slick algae splayed across the corridor at intervals where moisture escaped the labyrinth of piping, forcing them to mind their footing over the slimy green carpet. The dim corridor seemed to stretch into infinity, amber light fading into darkness in the extremity of their vision.

Once they had walked a few more minutes, Jesri pulled out a comm and raised it to her lips. "David, you there?", she whispered. "Any word from Kick?"

There was a pause, then a crackle of static. "No response yet," came David’s voice, indistinct through the shielding metal of the tunnel. "I don’t have any eyes in the dock, but I don’t read any intense activity from the intact scanners in the area."

"Shit," she muttered. "How about the Grand Design?"

"I got in touch with Eta-One earlier via tightbeam," he replied. Jesri thought she detected a hint of disdain in his voice. "He forwarded over the Ysleli language pack that you compiled at Ysl, I’ll have it loaded in a few minutes."

Jesri nodded before remembering it was a radio link. "That’ll be helpful, thanks," she said. "He ready to move in?"

There was another short pause. "We talked it over," David replied. "He’s ready to go, but we decided to hold him in reserve just out of the system. He can be in-system in twenty seconds if we need him."

"Acknowledged, keep us posted," Jesri replied, anxiety evident in her voice. She stowed the comm and shook her head. "Dammit, Kick. Pick up the fucking comm."

Anja clapped her on the shoulder and flashed her teeth in a grin. "Why are you worried?" she teased Jesri. "He fought off the whole Ysleli fleet before. A few raiding parties in the dock will be easy by comparison."

Jesri sighed. "I suppose," she said. "I just can’t help but worry about the guy. He doesn’t have the temperment for combat."

Beside her, Rhuar chuckled softly. "The captain might surprise you," he said slyly. "But in this case I don’t think it’ll matter. He’s locked up in the ship, behind the perimeter guns and military-grade hull plate. He could sleep through this and be fine."

Jesri had to laugh at that mental image. "Ah, you’re probably right," she admitted. "Still, I feel better if I could talk to him."

"He probably hasn’t even noticed anything is going on," Rhuar quipped. "The first thing he’ll ask is what took us so long to get back."

"It seems you’ve miscalculated for the last time," Qktk sneered, his mandibles clattering menacingly. "Now your defeat is inevitable." He reached out one glossy black arm to tap the Go board in front of him, causing a stone to materialize.

He leaned back and chuckled, regarding the game board for a few seconds before he waved his arm and cleared it. What was that, his third game against himself? His fourth? How long had the others been gone? He looked around the deserted stateroom, feeling a bit silly at indulging in theatrics.

A low tone sounded once, a resonant and mournful note that set parts of his carapace vibrating sympathetically. He winced and clapped arms over the offending segments. The note faded and he relaxed, swiveling his head in curiosity. He couldn’t hear any other odd noises.

Was that an alarm? He looked around again, confused. No information display followed the tone, and there were no display panels in the stateroom that were showing critical data. For all its futuristic glory, the Cormorant was substantially less user-friendly than the Grand Design. Perhaps it was an older model of ship?

His train of thought was cut short by a sharper, louder noise, pitching up in the distinctive trill of an alarm. Faintly, he could hear the humming whine of a capacitor discharge. "Oh, damn," he muttered, hauling himself up from the chair. "Better go see what that was."

Tarl regarded the boiling smear of gore that had been a soldier only seconds before. "Hm," he noted. "So that noise was a warning after all." He turned to another soldier beside him, who jumped at the chance to look away from the smoldering mess. "See that nobody else approaches the ship," Tarl instructed. "No closer than we are now, not until we have more information."

He turned his face back towards the ship in time to see a gun turret fold seamlessly back into the hull. Tarl had to wonder at the sheer overengineered majesty of human design. Automated sentry guns were nothing new, of course, but the Ysleli variant typically weren’t scaled to vaporize a small vehicle. It seemed that the humans built big as a primary consideration, leaving discretion to the whim of the operator.

It was a philosophy he could appreciate. He strode away from the ship and found his communications officer, Reln, who snapped a salute has he approached.

"No messages from the ship," Reln reported crisply. "It appears to be vacant."

Tarl gestured his acknowledgment. "Keep watching," he said. "Let me know if anything else emerges."

"There is something…", Reln said hesitantly. Tarl snapped him an impatient look and flicked his claws in irritation.

"Apologies. We’ve had three raiding teams miss check-in within the same segment. Here, here and here," he said, tapping his stubby claws on a crudely drawn map of the station’s layout. "They aren’t so late that I would otherwise mention it, but with the human ship here…"

Tarl tapped his claws on the table. Three teams missing their reports was not unheard of, but it was decidedly unusual. He stared at the scrawled map of the station, tracing lines between the three points mentally. "Evasion," he rumbled softly.

"I don’t follow," Reln admitted.

"Look here," he said, succumbing to the temptation of talking strategy. It wasn’t dignified to chat with the men, but he wasn’t the warfather anymore. Why retain the limitations without the benefits? He traced a claw delicately between the first two points. "These two form a line heading directly for this dock. After the second encounter, they change course. They know two points provides a trajectory, and we may try to intercept them here." He tapped a point farther down the station corridor.

"They naturally shift to the third corridor, as they wish to avoid creating a string of missing teams pointing to their destination. Of course, they run into another group first, here," he continued, indicating the third disappeared team. "I presume they intended to take this series of corridors down to the same eventual destination at the dock."

The communications officer nodded sharply. "Shall I send a team to intercept further along the branch?" he asked, wilting when Tarl turned to regard him disappointedly.

"No," Tarl sighed, regretting his indulgence already. "Remember the words of Warfather Rurlir. ‘The commander who pursues a dullard inevitably finds himself.’ If you saw the interception point so easily, why could they not do the same?" He shot a reproachful look at Reln, who hung his head. "Always assume your enemies are smarter. The normal tactic," he continued, "would be to swing even further wide of your intended goal and intercept another team, to create a false trail leading out from your objective." He poised his claw over another corridor and left it hovering in the air.

"However," he mused, "there is the matter of the ship. These may be humans and their allies. That they’re attacking our teams is strange, but if it is them…" He tapped his claw on the map. "They will be confident, and rightfully so. They will not feel the need to waste time with a ruse." He moved his claw tip back to the original corridor and tapped a point closer to the dock. "Send a team here. Make sure they’re briefed on the humans we know of and clear on their instructions. They will be moving fast, trying to reach the docks before we realize where they’re going."

Reln shot to his feet. "Right away. Shall I also send a team to the far corridor?"

Tarl looked at him curiously. "What for?", he asked.

Feeling wrongfooted again, Reln was suddenly reluctant to speak. "In case they aren’t humans," he mumbled.

To his surprise, Tarl’s teeth flashed in amusement. "Ah, Reln," he said, his voice dropping from joviality into deadly seriousness as he leaned close. "If they aren’t humans, I don’t care. Send the team."

"Yes, Warfa-", he said, biting back his words. "Yes. Right away." He grabbed his headset and began issuing orders as Tarl stalked off.

Sparks flew as Ysleli fire caromed off the doorframe, forcing Jesri to duck her head back into the storefront. "Fuck!", she spat. "They’ve locked down the hallway, they’re in the opposite stall." More shots rang from the opposite storefront, zinging across the deserted market hall.

Behind her, Anja peeked over a low counter to fire a short burst from her sidearm. She was rewarded with a wet gurgle from the far stall and a short respite in the oncoming fire. "It looks that way," she said mildly. "I think we may need to explore alternate routes."

Jesri slid out into the doorway and snapped off a few shots before an answering volley forced her back again. "Anja, this is the alternate route," she retorted. "They’re on to the maintenance corridors, and it’s too easy for them to trap us there. We have to break out of this location and head to the central market."

"Fine," Anja sighed, reaching into the folds of her cloak. She lobbed a small object casually over the counter and through the door of the opposing market stall. "I was trying to save that for later. Cover me!"

She vaulted the counter before Jesri could shout a protest. Jesri popped up and fired short bursts over her sister’s head as she ran low towards the doorway. Across the hall, a panicked yell was drowned out by the distinctive clap and crackle of a stun grenade. As soon as the last fuzz of static died away, Anja ducked through the doorway and began firing with her pistol.

As Anja vanished into the store Jesri slumped down against the wall, balancing her rifle across her knees. She closed her eyes for a brief second, listening to the clap of Anja’s pistol and short bursts of Ysleli fire. When she opened them again, Rhuar was staring at her curiously.

"You’re not going to help?", he asked. From across the hall a panicked stream of unintelligible Ysleli shouting cut off sharply at the sound of more pistol fire.

"Nah," said Jesri, resting her eyes. She leaned her head back against the cool metal, feeling the slight resonant vibration with every gunshot. Rhuar looked at her again, then settled down beside her.

"You, ah, sure she’s gonna be okay?", he asked.

Jesri remained silent, trying to make the most of her brief moment of relaxation. She listened as a single Ysleli weapon clicked on an empty cylinder, its owner futilely pulling the trigger again and again. There was a wet crunch, then a gasp, then nothing. Rhuar shifted uncomfortably beside her. Footsteps sounded, then paused briefly. A low, thin wail echoed through the hall before ending abruptly with a final pistol shot. For a few seconds, silence returned to the market.

Jesri opened her eyes and slapped her hands against her calves, giving Rhuar a cheery smile. "Right, I think that’s it. Ready to go?" He stared at her warily.

Anja popped her head through the door, her hair somewhat mussed. Specks of dark blood dotted the hem of her cloak. "I only had one of those, so we had better clear out," she said. "Unless you picked one up?"

Jesri shook her head and levered herself upright, slinging her rifle onto her back again. "No such luck," she replied. They set off down the hallway at a brisk pace, Rhuar bringing up the rear with a bemused expression.

"Those guys seemed different from the last group," he observed.

"Not looters," Jesri agreed, tossing him a look over her shoulder. "Someone’s trying to catch us. It’s a good thing we got the drop on them, we took out at least a third of the group in that first volley."

Rhuar gave her a flat look. "I thought you said doubling back would avoid search parties."

This time it was Anja who answered, grinning at her sister’s annoyed look. "It just means someone smarter than the average raider is leading them," she said. "We should be careful once we reach the market."

"Do we have to worry about Qktk, if that’s the case?", Rhuar asked. "If he’s alone-"

"I wouldn’t," Jesri replied. "Remember, he’s on the ship. As long as he stays on the ship, they can’t touch him."

"Someone’s leaving the ship!"

Tarl looked over at the human warship to see a thin ramp extending from the hull. He peered intently at the narrow doorway that seemed to emerge from smooth, unblemished metal, its opening obscured momentarily by a rush of steam. As it cleared, Tarl saw-

Legs. Far too many legs, joined to a nightmarish segmented torso and a similarly unfortunate overabundance of small grasping arms. A large, bulbous head perched atop the rest, its top quarter covered with midnight-black glossy eyes. Tarl’s throat constricted, his fists tightening in anticipation.

There was a moment of silence as they watched the unsettling arthropod descend to the deck, then one of his soldiers pointed a quavering finger. "Blackened skies, it’s the Demon!", he cried. "The Demon Shipmaster!"

Other voices rose from the tumult. "The Nightmare of Ysl!", one bellowed, gripping his weapon. "Ready arms!"

"HOLD!", Tarl thundered, raising a clenched fist. "The first man who so much as-"

Before he could finish his dire pronouncement the soldier who had yelled sprang forward in a fit of battle fever, spraying the oncoming figure with a full magazine from his weapon. Qktk paused, looking at him expressionlessly. A few shots pinged off of a bubble of force surrounding him, causing it to ripple with white fire before subsiding to transparency once more.

The soldier stared dumbfounded for a fraction of a second before a bolt from the ship’s automated cannon caught him full in the chest, spreading the contents of his torso across eight square meters of decking. There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by the rustling of Tarl’s soldiers gently, slowly lowering their rifles.

Qktk walked the rest of the way towards their group unmolested, pausing some distance away to incline his head in greeting. "Warfather," he rattled.

"Shipmaster," Tarl responded, returning the greeting and leaving the correction for another moment. He studied Qktk with interest. His counterpart was every bit as terrifying as he remembered from the few minutes of negotiations they’d shared before, although he hadn’t anticipated the infamous Nightmare of Ysl being quite so short. The little alien barely rose to his waist, staring upwards at Tarl with its sea of black eyes.

Tarl cleared his throat. "I must apologize for the rudeness of my men," he said formally.

Qktk waved an arm dismissively. "I wasn’t harmed. The ship protects her crew," he said, fixing a few glinting eyes on Tarl’s. "The Cormorant won’t let anything happen to me."

Tarl returned the stare, acknowledging the implicit warning with a bob of his head.

"So," Qktk clattered, his arms rubbing together with an unsettling fluidity. "What brings you and your men to Elpis?"

Tarl barked a quick laugh at the casual question. "The inevitabilities of logistics," he replied. "Food, fuel, air." He narrowed his eyes and stared down at Qktk, his talons flexing involuntarily with anticipation. All of the long hours searching for strength and information after the fall of Ysl had led to this moment.

"And you?", he hissed. "What of your real ship? I will be frank, I have been searching for you and your crew for some time."

"Oh?", replied Qktk, going very still. "With what purpose?"

Tarl curled his fingers into a fist. "Revenge, of course," he said, his voice low and smooth. "Your enemies are now mine. I must know everything about the ship that devastated my home."

Qktk regarded him silently for a moment, then took a small tablet from his belt. "Warfather, I have an interesting acquaintance you should meet."

Tarl squeezed his fists again, feeling his talons slice through the skin of his palm. He didn’t even think of correcting Qktk’s use of his title. The sad ashes of his home could say what they like, in this moment he was a warfather once more.

Jesri’s breath roared hot in her ears as she ran flat out through the market hall. Ysleli bullets sparked and pinged off the metal deck around her, missing her by scant centimeters as she serpentined towards the exit hall to the docks.

"Rhuar, the door!", she yelled. He had easily outpaced her and was far ahead towards the ship, but he slowed and cocked an ear. "Close the fucking door!", she shouted.

He yipped an acknowledgment and raced ahead to the dock entryway, paws skidding on the smooth metal. She spun and sprayed a burst of fire behind her, sending the Ysleli diving behind the ruined market stalls for cover. Plastic blistered and smoked where her shots hit, sending acrid smoke curling up to the ceiling. A punctured container spewed brine and fermenting vegetables across the floor, contributing to the unsavory aroma.

She grinned and turned to run once more as Anja flew past firing her pistol blindly over her shoulder. The two sisters raced down the hall to where Rhuar was frantically rewiring the door panel to the docks, his exoskeletal arms a blur of flashing metal. Angry yells and a renewed fusillade signaled that the Ysleli had recovered their momentum, and Jesri felt her vision narrowing as she strained to reach the doorway.

Less than a second after they crossed the threshold, Rhuar yanked a board from the depths of the access panel to send the door crashing down with a floor-rattling impact. Jesri and Anja spun around, weapons ready, but the muffled din of bullets and shouting soldiers was barely audible behind the half-meter thick metal blast door.

"Ha!", Jesri grinned. "Great work, Rhuar."

He looked back towards her and blanched, his grin dying on his lips. Seeing the look on his face, both sisters spun to face the docks, weapons raised-

And saw almost two hundred Ysleli soldiers staring at them in shock. One made to lift his rifle, nearly earning a shot to the face from Jesri’s own gun, but his squadmates grabbed his wrist with a harsh whisper. He lowered his weapon, throwing a nervous glance over his shoulder at the Cormorant.

"Captain Jesri Tam!", a voice rang out, deep and commanding. Feeling a chill in her stomach, Jesri turned her gaze towards the speaker. Wearing a shining metal patch over one eye, Tarl sat on a crate next to Qktk amid a gaggle of lost-looking Ysleli officers studying the three new arrivals. A tablet propped on another crate showed David’s amused face. Qktk sagged in relief at the sight of them, his limbs twitching oddly.

"So it was you fighting my men," Tarl said with grim satisfaction. "I thought as much. I apologize for any misunderstanding, the enlisted soldiers may have gotten overzealous despite my instructions regarding your crew. If you tell me which of my teams initiated hostilities I will see them disciplined for it."

Jesri stared at him for a moment. "No, ah," she said, suddenly feeling like she could use a drink of water. "The misunderstanding was partially our fault. Think nothing of it." She ignored Rhuar’s incredulous look from beside her.

"Excellent," Tarl said, standing up and walking over to them. He leaned in close to the group, his remaining eye twinkling with excitement. "I have to know though, as one warrior to another - how were they? Did they die well?"

"Their situational awareness was poor," Anja said flatly. Jesri winced.

Tarl gave her an appraising look. "You weren’t at our last discussion," he said, a statement rather than a question. "Who are you?"

"Major Anja Tam," she said, staring back without blinking. "You must be Tarl."

The two locked gazes for a moment. Jesri kept her hand steady on her rifle as she watched.

"Hah, interesting," Tarl chuckled, stepping back with a respectful nod. "We must speak later. An honor to meet you, Anja Tam." Jesri let out a puff of breath and slouched against a crate. Tarl stalked back over to the crate where David waited with an uninterpretable smile on his face.

"Now, David," he said, tripping a bit over the unfamiliar consonants. His mouth stretched wide, showing his needle-sharp teeth. "Tell me more about our enemy."

Part 25

Tarl stared into the void. He had walked away along the docks, down to the farthest extremities of the curving slips until the walkways ended and he was faced with the shimmering wall of the retention field. The stars blazed beyond, cold points of light in midnight black.

As she approached him, Anja dropped her normally stealthy gait and allowed her footsteps to herald her presence. He didn’t respond when she moved to stand beside him, but shifted his weight slightly as he acknowledged her presence. They stood there at the far railing for some time, Anja standing with folded arms and Tarl with his clawed hands gripping the cold metal.

Eventually he turned to regard her, breaking away from his contemplation of the sky. "We are some distance from the group, Anja Tam," he rumbled. "I somehow doubt you walked this far just to look at the stars."

"Did you?", she asked, drawing a hiss of amusement from the old warfather.

"Ah," he said, "probably not. If I can indulge in some candor between two old soldiers, I found myself contemplating the road ahead after David’s briefing. The things he said..."

Tarl trailed off and the two of them looked out to the stars for a few moments longer.

"I had heard of similar things in the past," he continued. "Fanciful, wasteful speculation, or so I thought. What good is it to speak of harnessing a star or yoking a billion minds to a machine when the progress of one’s life today depends on victory in battle, cultivation of strength and wit, and the glory of supremacy over all? What good did it do any of us, dreaming of what we may yet be?"

He bared his teeth and scowled. "And yet here I stand, up against an enemy who indulged in those fanciful dreams. Everything I worked to achieve, all of my battles and misery, it counts for nothing in the face of their power. I burn for revenge but my enemy will never feel it."

"There is no maneuver, no strategem, no stroke of genius that can make me a credible threat to this Gestalt," he rasped, raising his head to look at Anja. "I was full of hope when I saw your ship, full of the expectation that I may at last find a way to realize our vengeance. And then I hear that they are as far out of your reach as they are mine. It is a hopeless cause, and though we may yet die for it I will gain no satisfaction at the end." He gripped tightly onto the rail and turned back to stare into space. "I do not mourn for myself, but it is a poor end for Ysl," he hissed.

Anja dropped her arms and moved to stand beside him at the rail, a contemplative look on her face. "When the Gestalt destroyed Earth," she said, "I was returning from a mission with another of my sisters, Mia. We emerged from hyperspace at the transit station around Mars to find it totally destroyed. We cast our sensors across the whole system, found not a trace of life. The planets were scoured to bare rock, the stations and asteroid habitats vented to space. Tens of billions, dead." Tarl twitched his head as she named the toll, but he did not respond.

"We jumped off to the nearest military base at Epsilon Eridani," she continued, "But that was gone as well. We emerged from hyperspace just as the shipyards fell into the planet’s atmosphere." Anja felt an involuntary shiver trace up her spine as she recalled the spectacle, the twisting support girders flaring from red to yellow-white as the habitat modules exploded around them with puffs of sparkling gas and metal fragments.

"We had thought initially that someone attacked Earth in a surprise strike, but after Eridani we knew it was more than just one system," she whispered. "We started to jump to lesser systems, civilian stations, but they were all destroyed. No transit stations meant we had to spend days in between stars, waiting to see if the next one had been attacked. Every one had, until we reached Indomitable."

She looked back from the stars to smile at Tarl, bitterness written into her face. Tarl stared back expressionlessly, his solitary black eye unreadable. "We were so happy to see the station in one piece that we let ourselves believe the comms had been knocked out. We had to dock and see the bodies before we admitted to each other what the silence meant. The station was mostly intact, but everyone aboard was dead. Bodies everywhere, stinking in the hallways and lying in piles by the common areas. The smell..." She shuddered, remembering. "Five thousand years later, the smell of death just reminds me of that station."

"That was when I knew - it was more than just a few systems. I knew that it was everyone, everywhere. My colleagues, my friends, my sisters. Everyone I had ever met, aside from Mia. I had no idea how, or why, or who did it," Anja spat, anger creeping into her voice, "just that it had happened and that we were somehow spared. My sister was convinced there had to be more survivors somewhere, she wanted to refuel and keep looking. I knew, knew there were no more and tried to convince her to hide, keep a low profile until we knew what had happened. No matter what I said she was determined to leave. She took the ship and I stayed on the station."

Anja stopped talking for a little while and turned back towards the dock exit, her fingers drumming mindlessly on the railing. "I gave up on seeing her again after five years on the station," she said softly. "After eight years I was…" She hesitated, searching for the proper words. Tarl was watching her curiously, having turned to lean back against the railing. Anja could see the streaks of shiny metal where he had gripped the top bar earlier, his claws scratching against the finish.

"There is a disorder that affects my kind, if our mental state deteriorates enough," Anja explained briefly, finding herself reluctant to dwell on the subject. "We simply stop moving, our minds captured in a feedback loop. It can last for days, weeks, years even. Eight years after my sister left, I found a chair in a small room on the station and sat down to rest. I did not get up for three hundred years."

Tarl didn’t give any sign that he found her claim incredible, though he did straighten up to study her face with interest. Finally, he leaned back against the railing and drummed his claws against his forearm. "I can see the appeal," he said after a long pause. "Too well, I think. So tell me, Anja Tam. After sitting alone for so long, why did you stand again?"

Anja almost smiled at the intensity in his stare, but decided not to risk insulting him. "I got a message," she said. "My sister Jesri came to the station and broadcast a signal to see if anyone was aboard. I was so surprised that I fell out of my chair. I responded to her at once, then dragged myself to the medical bay. I was in poor condition after all of those years immobile and barely made it, but by the time Jesri docked and made it to my room I was completely restored."

The light in Tarl’s eyes dimmed a bit. "Your kind seems to value family greatly," he said. "Among the Ysleli it is considered a sign of weakness to reach adulthood before you have defeated your hatchmates in combat. Only the best move on."

Anja couldn’t resist a slight giggle at that, finding it a very Ysleli custom. "That would have been quite destructive if my family participated," she chuckled. "But it was more than just being happy to see my sister. When Mia left I was certain she was mistaken, fatally mistaken. The enemy had taken too much from me too quickly. The Gestalt was this terrible, perfect opponent in my mind, something against which there was no hope of victory. When I heard Jesri’s voice, the first thing I had heard in centuries, I was…"

She hesitated again, the smile slipping from her face. "I was ashamed, Tarl. I felt such black, crushing shame when I sat in that autodoc, feeling it knit me back together again. Jesri was lost, hurting, just as crushed as I was by the deaths of so many. She too recognized that she couldn’t defeat the Gestalt, but unlike me her reaction was to seek weapons, seek allies. I had sat uselessly for half my life just gathering dust and waiting for death to claim me. I had wasted three hundred years of time because I thought I was already defeated. I had failed my allies, my sisters and myself."

Tarl gave her an odd look, but said nothing. She looked back towards the stars, watching the slight shimmer of the retention field distort the tiny pinpricks like heat haze. "I never told Jesri what I had done on the station before she arrived," she admitted. "She simply assumed that I had been gathering information like she had and I never corrected her. I have tried to be who she thought I was since that day."

He nodded, considering. "I shall keep it in confidence," he reassured her. "It seems as though-"

Tarl broke off as a loud bang echoed from the far end of the dock, followed by shouting. He frowned. "It seems as though things are proceeding without us," he amended. "I must attend to this."

Anja nodded and fell in beside him as he walked quickly back down the dock. "You may not have siblings, Tarl," she said, "but you have your men. I know what it feels like to fight soldiers who believe in their commander. If there is no path forward for Tarl, be the Warfather until one appears." She flashed him a small grin.

He bared his teeth in response. "I appreciate your counsel, Anja Tam," he rumbled. "I will consider it. Now come, let’s see what my men are shouting about." He increased his pace to walk several steps ahead of her. Anja jogged after him, the smile slipping from her face.

"We will not have terms dictated to us by an unruly mob of yellow-scaled thieves!", screamed the Arrigh administrator, his shiny carapace quivering with anger.

Jesri sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling an impending headache. It had taken no more than a few hours of cease-fire before the station government and syndicate leaders felt emboldened enough to rally in response to the Ysleli raid. While Tarl’s troops could crush their sad little militia easily (something Tarl had enthusiastically and repeatedly offered to demonstrate) Helene and her fellow resistance members had urged caution.

They had a point. While the local militia was pitiful, the Arrigh had invested heavily in Elpis and would not tolerate a station takeover. Any forces they could bring to bear would likely be outmatched by Tarl’s ships and positively laughable against the Grand Design, but Jesri had to agree that a confrontation was best avoided. The cost in lives aside, it would be supremely inconvenient and highly visible if they started fighting a siege around Elpis while trying to plot moves against the Gestalt.

Therefore, the Ysleli had mostly withdrawn to a remote stretch of dock several kilometers down the rim from the main commercial terminal in a show of goodwill. Tarl and a cadre of his officers had remained for negotiations, with Anja and Jesri hurriedly inserting themselves as neutral observers in case the whole thing went sideways.

As it somewhat had. She opened her eyes again, watching the administrator continue to scream epithets at Tarl. David had informed her earlier about the meeting’s attendees, drawing from their regular surveillance of the station’s activities.

The Arrigh currently lambasting the Ysleli delegation was a career bureaucrat named Kvkitt. He had arrived about two years ago as the administrator of this station and had by all accounts done a halfway decent job of keeping things running smoothly, although most of his power was gained by granting concessions to the station’s shadowy commercial syndicates.

As such, they were also present at the table. The Union of Crafters was represented by Xim Len, a thin wisp of a Tlixl with gossamer wings folded primly behind her. She had remained quiet for the proceedings, save for introductions. The dockworkers had sent a towering Dhumma who had thus far refused to divulge his name or speak in any capacity, preferring instead to glower angrily at anyone who glanced in his direction.

The local branch of the Association of Independent Shippers was led by a glistening iridescent blob named something long and mathematical. Jesri thought it might be a member of the Caran species, but as she had never met one in person she couldn’t be sure. It introduced itself to her as Escalating Irreducible Manifold, and had a surprisingly good sense of humor about the difficulties other beings had with both its name and amorphous nature.

Finally there was the representative from the Central Bank of Kita, a dour and ancient financier named Belshi. His primary contribution to the initial talks had been to inform everyone present that he thought the proceedings were a "waste of time, an affront to civilized dignity and an unfortunate encouragement to the ambition of churls and thieves everywhere."

Rounding out the discussions were Tarl, still idly waiting for the Arrigh to finish screaming at him, Jesri, Anja, Rhuar and Qktk. David and Helene were listening to the discussions, but they had chosen to hide their existence from the station’s residents for the time being.

Kvkitt’s ranting wound down at last, leaving the seething administrator glaring at Tarl’s bored, seated figure. Tarl returned his stare icily, then slowly rose to his feet. Tall even for a Ysleli, he towered over the insectile Arrigh as he strode slowly towards the station’s representatives.

"I do not dabble in negotiations much," he said briskly, beginning a slow pace around the conference room. "I find them tiresome. I avoid them where I can, except the necessary talks which occur before an enemy surrenders to me." He stopped, glancing at Anja and Jesri. "With one notable recent exception."

Jesri gave a small snort of amusement, which Tarl ignored. "Regardless," he continued, "I believe the reason I found that type of discussion so much more bearable was the context. In every case the talks followed a great deal of violence and death, which conveyed a certain implicit promise of continuation if no accord could be reached." He bared his needle-point teeth and stopped. His pacing had carried him to rest in front of Kvkitt, who looked up at him defiantly.

"It hastened things," Tarl said softly, "that context. And as these talks drag on with nothing but insults and outrage from your contingent I find myself increasingly tempted to seek it out. So when you speak next, administrator, I ask that you indulge my preference for productive and concise arguments."

Kvkitt seemed to swell with outrage at the threat, but before he could muster a response Tarl spun away and resumed his pacing in the opposite direction. "My men and I are here," he said simply. "We will be present on the station for a time. These are facts, as unchanging as the orbits of the stars. So tell me, administrator - knowing this to be the case, how would you like the next span of time to play out?" Tarl reached his seat again, sliding smoothly into it and fixing Kvkitt with an expectant look.

The station administrator seethed, glaring daggers at Tarl across the low table. "Again you dictate terms," he grated, his voice low and hostile. "You cannot use force of arms to abscond with government resources. The Arrigh defense forces-"

"Will die," Tarl said bluntly, cutting him off. "Do not delude yourself into thinking a military solution is available."

"Such confidence," Kvkitt sneered. "I’ve seen your ragtag band of pirates. You have guns and ships, but where is your fuel? Your munitions? Do you really think you can beat a fully supplied navy with just the resources on this station? You have no idea the forces that can be brought to bear against you."

Tarl gave him an amused look. "I have no idea if I can beat your navy, administrator. You make a good point, we would be hard-pressed against a decent force. However, if you force a confrontation you will likewise involve those four," he said, indicating Jesri’s contingent. The station representatives looked and were confronted with a feral grin from Anja, only slightly diminished by Jesri’s pained look of exasperation. Rhuar tugged on Jesri’s sleeve urgently, and she bent down so he could whisper in her ear.

"Administrator," Tarl said, staring intently with his remaining eye. "At that point your naval strength is irrelevant."

The incensed Arrigh reared up to deliver another diatribe but paused in surprise as a wash of white light enveloped him. "What is-", he sputtered indignantly before the field of light flickered and cut off all sound from within. Jesri sighed and walked forward as Kvkitt screamed and pounded noiselessly against the station security barrier, flicking her hand out for effect as the globe of light rose and carried him into the hallway.

The remaining station delegates stared at her, save for Manifold who merely slouched in her direction. Tarl leaned back in his chair, positively radiating amusement and smug delight. Rhuar couldn’t quite suppress a grin from his face, but quickly turned to confer with Qktk. The two huddled around a tablet, on which Jesri saw David’s face flash briefly.

Jesri shot Tarl an irritated look, then turned to address the room. "Let us all assume," she said tiredly, "that we are reasonable beings who would like to conclude these talks to mutual advantage and without any unpleasant threats. To that end, I am proposing a plan of action: I am going to hire all of your organizations to do some work for me."

The group exchanged glances, then settled back in their seats. Belshi and the dockworkers’ representative looked entirely unimpressed by her statement, but she thought she saw at least a flicker of interest from Xim Len. Manifold made no particular reaction, but it was unreadable anyway.

She pressed her momentum. "Xim Len, I would like to hire the crafting guild to make some custom equipment. We will need artificers and engineers, mostly, although there may be room for other specializations." She stretched out her hand, and Rhuar rushed to place a tablet in it. Behind her, Qktk was still hard at work filling a second.

She placed the tablet in front of Xim Len, who picked it up and studied it, then tossed it back on the table contemptuously. "Please," she said, giving Jesri an annoyed look. "Be serious. Half the items on this list are impossible to manufacture. We don’t have the facilities to tool gun barrels of that length, the alloys you’re specifying are fanciful at best, and I don’t even know what a…" She picked up the tablet, glancing over the list again. "...spatial distortion dampener is," she concluded haughtily, glaring over at Jesri. "Don’t waste our time with jokes."

Jesri gave her a mild smile in return. "I will supply all blueprints, materials and access to the station’s fabricator workshops."

The Tlixl’s wings spasmed, although she quickly regained her composure. "That’s ridiculous," she spat. "Those workshops have been sealed for a thousand years. If anyone could open them, I would have done it long ago."

Jesri’s smile widened at the sour note of disappointment from Xim Len. This was going to be easier than she had anticipated. Stepping back from the group, she raised her voice. "Station Prometheus," she called out, "What is my access level?"

A chirrup of acknowledgement crackled from the room speakers, making the syndicate representatives jump. "Captain Jesri Tam, TNMC," a neutral female voice said. "Access level is Officer, subgroup Captain. Full access is granted to station infrastructure, power systems, security, sensors-"

"Thank you, that will be enough," Jesri said. Another chirrup sounded and the litany of privileges ended. She looked across the syndicate representatives and saw that she had their full attention. Xim Len reached a quavering hand towards the tablet again, scanning through the items on the list.

"We can," she said, her voice hoarse. "Ah, we can keep the schematics and access afterwards?"

Beaming, Jesri sat down at the table. "See? It’s almost as if we were negotiating," she said smugly. "Let’s go through the list."

Two hours later, they left the room having hired on nearly every syndicate-represented craftsman, hauler and laborer on the station. Xim Len and the crafters were given workshops and schematics while Manifold’s freight captains were sent out to procure hefty cargos of raw metal, fuel and organics.

Belshi had been induced to offer them a generous line of credit for their purchases. That part had nothing to do with station access and everything to do with the battered identification chits Jesri carried for the Royal Uen Banking Union, the Finance Ministry of Tlix and a handful of other prominent institutions. She had no current account with the Central Bank of Kita, she had informed him, but could be persuaded to transfer in some credits…

He only validated the first account before hastily agreeing, his eyes bulging at the commencement date as much as the balance.

Most puzzling had been the Dhumma representative from the docks, who simply vanished from the meeting after the first couple of deals were concluded. Jesri finally asked Manifold about it during a break, and the bloblike captain revealed that Ix (who did have a name, as it happened) had only made an appearance in the hopes of fighting Tarl.

The syndicate heads had departed in a rush of excited chatter, eager to begin disbursing funds and launching ships. As Xim Len trailed the group out with her face buried in her tablet, Tarl wandered over and sat next to Jesri with a tired sigh.

"Well," he grumbled. "That was much less entertaining than my proposal."

She gave him a coy smile. "Oh, come on. You’ll have way more fun with this," she said. "I thought you’d be excited at the idea."

Seeing his blank look, Jesri sat up and blinked. "Wait," she said, "were you not paying attention during the negotiations?"

"I am the Warfather," Tarl pointed out, "not the Minister of Logistics. Why would I concern myself with the busy work you’re doling out to those drooling sycophants?"

"Because they’re overhauling your ships," Rhuar said, tossing another tablet in front of Tarl. "Read up, Oh Mighty Warfather. Here’s an outline of the new schematics."

Tarl snatched at the tablet so fast that his claws drew sparks from the table’s surface, paging through the designs quickly. "This is…", he said, his voice quiet and serious. "You’re using human technology?"

Anja sat down to join the group. "It makes sense," she said. "Your ships are less of an asset than a liability in their current state. We may not make them as good as true Terran warships, but we can at least keep your men in the fight."

Tarl’s mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds before it snapped shut with a click. He stood abruptly and bowed low with a peculiar sideways twist, holding one arm to his chest. "Thank you," he said simply, his voice thick with emotion. "I must find Xim Len, confer with her engineers, brief my officers." He looked around dazedly still muttering under his breath, then walked quickly out of the room.

"Sister, I think you nearly made him cry," Anja teased.

Jesri smiled and shook her head. "Rhuar gets credit for this one. I was just going to buy them off after Tarl wound up the administrator. I don’t know if this will net us usable ships, but at minimum we’ve solved our Ysleli problem for the time being."

"And when they have their shiny new ships?", Qktk asked. "Will we have merely invested in a larger problem?"

"Hey, I’m the only investor here," Jesri protested. "And no, I don’t think so. We’ll just have to find missions that let them use their new toys productively. On that note… David, you still listening?"

"Yep," came his voice over the room’s speakers. "Don’t you worry. We’ve been drawing up plans for decades." His image flickered onto Jesri’s tablet, a wolfish grin on his face. "Want to see some targets?"

Part 26

The last of the nearly two-dozen Ysleli soldiers filed into the briefing room, crowding together in a press of yellow scales and drab uniforms. Jesri hadn’t noticed a particular smell from the lanky aliens prior to the meeting, but with this many of them crowded together she could detect a faintly spicy fragrance in the air. To her left, Rhuar sneezed violently and grumbled.

As she stood, the soldiers snapped to attention instantly. "At ease, take your seats," she said, receiving a few confused looks in response.

To her right, Tarl straightened up with a growl. "You are commanded to sit!", he bellowed. The assembled soldiers immediately found seats, shifting around to find a comfortable position in the hard-backed chairs.

"Thank you, warfather," Jesri sighed. They were going to have to find a happy medium between the relatively laissez-faire professionalism of the human military and the slavish obedience and fear of the Ysleli.

She didn’t mind the prompt response, but the degree of deference shown to Tarl and to her by extension was off-putting - and that was before one took into account the casual ease with which he repaid minor infractions with violence or even death. She was reasonably confident that at least three of the troops had sworn themselves to her in some sort of formal blood oath after she convinced Tarl not to kill them for failing to salute her. She hoped Qktk was familiar with the concept, because asking Tarl about matters of Ysleli honor usually cost her an hour or so of listening to him elaborate the finer points of proper conduct.

She looked over the nervous faces in front of her and cleared her throat. "Good morning," she said, her voice quieting the hushed noises from the crowd instantly. Behind her, the room’s display flickered to show an image of a large ring floating against a starfield. "This is our mission target," she explained, pointing to the ring. "It is an advanced-model hyperspace accelerator, an improvement on the launch ramps you may be familiar with from our transit stations. It has a very lengthy official designation, but as the sole remaining example of its kind it has become more commonly known as the Cygnus Gate."

A murmur went up around the room; evidently even the Ysleli had heard of the famous station. Rhuar was eyeing the display with interest, and Tarl was stroking his chin thoughtfully with two shiny talons. She tapped a button on her console and the display was overlaid with statistics.

"The gate is a roughly regular toroid with an interior diameter of one kilometer." Seeing blank looks, she did some conversions in her head. "That’s, ah, slightly more than one thousand two hundred Ysleli lesa."

There was another chorus of concerned murmurs from the troops as the scale of the structure became apparent - although not nearly as large as the city-sized transit stations, the gate was large enough for the Grand Design to pass through comfortably.

Jesri smiled at their consternation. "You may ask questions during the briefing if you would like something clarified," she said. The soldiers shifted uncomfortably and remained silent, provoking a growl from Tarl. "No questions is also fine," she added hastily. As much as she appreciated Tarl’s support, she would spare the troops the indignity of being commanded to question her.

"The gate is currently being used as a waypoint within the Seventh Kitan Free State in the system of Albireo. The system itself is only sparsely populated, with a small agricultural colony operating in-system. The only relevant forces are the security and operations teams manning the gate itself, which will be our primary opposition both before and after boarding." She tapped her console and the display shifted to a structural diagram of the gate.

"Records indicate that there are approximately one hundred and twenty personnel aboard the gate on any given day, mostly part of the small garrison of soldiers that secure the gate against intruders. We will be forcing entry to a hangar near central operations, clearing a path through the soldiers and commandeering the station controls."

The room had grown restless again with her mention of the station’s garrison, and one of the soldiers slowly stood upright at attention. Jesri looked at him curiously before realizing that the Ysleli probably weren’t the hand-raising sort. "Yes, ah, spearbrother?", she asked, "Do you have a question?"

"Captain Jesri Tam," he said shakily, one eye on Tarl’s looming presence over her shoulder, "I would ask if we are the full extent of the forces you would bring against such a large garrison."

"An excellent question, spearbrother," Jesri said quickly, swooping in with praise before Tarl could berate the poor man for cowardice in the face of duty or something. "We will be heavily outnumbered during the station assault. There are few docking bays available and we have a limited number of capable assault craft. We will be compensating for the discrepancy in two ways," she said, walking to the back wall of the room where a number of plastic crates had been stacked. She reached into one and withdrew a sleek-looking carbon-grey rifle. She swore she could hear an audible click as forty-nine Ysleli eyes locked onto the rifle with intense scrutiny.

"Our first advantage is in weaponry," she said, hefting the rifle so they could see it clearly. "This lovely lady is a Tharsis Arms Corporation Model V Field-Configurable Modular Battle Rifle, commonly called a TAC-5. I understand that all of you have been trained with kinetic rifles using chemically propelled metal ammunition?"

Tarl swept his claws in an affirmative gesture. "Correct, Jesri Tam," he rumbled, his eyes not leaving the rifle. Indeed, most of the Ysleli were nearly salivating as they stared at the clean lines of the gun. Jesri smirked, not quite immune to the gun’s allure herself.

"Allow me to demonstrate the difference," she said, aiming at the bare metal of the briefing room’s bulkhead. A quick press of the trigger sent a burst of fire cracking against the wall, bright flashes of ablating metal and a treble-beat staccato crack ripped through the room, causing everyone but Tarl to flinch back involuntarily. There was a moment of silence as everyone stared at the scorch mark on the wall, then the soldiers looked back to the gun with renewed interest.

"A kinetic rifle has some disadvantages in spaceborne combat," Jesri explained. "In a close-quarters scenario like this, it’s likely that one or more of you would have been injured by ricochets or spalling if I had done the same thing with kinetics. Directed energy weapons can be used without that risk. They also have no recoil, which means that they can be used with increased accuracy even in zero-gravity conditions."

She suppressed another smile. If the Ysleli had been nervous and unsure before, they were rapt and laser-focused now. "Spearbrother," she said, indicating the one who had spoken earlier. "What is the standard ammunition capacity on your service weapon?"

"Thirty-six shots, Captain Jesri Tam," he replied.

Jesri let her grin slip through as she detached the gun’s energy cell, a square block that fit easily in the palm of her hand. "This cell contains enough charge for three hundred shots at high power, seven hundred and fifty shots at standard power and over five thousand shots at low power. My earlier demonstration was at low power, which is effective against personnel and other soft targets. Standard is lethal even through body armor, don’t use it on anything you don’t want to scrub off a bulkhead. High power…" She trailed off suggestively, her eyes twinkling. She had them totally spellbound now. "Well, we’re not going to be engaging vehicles in combat on this mission, so let’s save that for another time."

She replaced the power cell and returned the rifle to the crate, noting the way the Ysleli tracked it back every centimeter of its journey. "That’s our first advantage," she said theatrically. "We’ll be issuing each soldier a rifle and you’ll be expected to train to proficiency during the coming weeks. My sister will coordinate your training schedule." She sent a silent message to Anja over her link.

A low, ominous impact vibrated through the briefing room. The soldiers stared at the door with trepidation as it was followed by another, and another, massive footsteps resonating through the room and raising sympathetic vibrations from the stacked crates.

Anja walked into the room in a suit of full Valkyrie armor, rifle ready and bayonet affixed. The suit added nearly a meter to her height, dwarfing even Tarl’s lofty stature and far outclassing him in sheer bulk. She paused for a moment to let the troops stare open-mouthed at the gleaming white-on-silver armor before she sprang forward in a dash that left her standing next to Jesri, seeming to blink across the room in a thundering crash of metal-on-metal. An ephemeral halo of white plasma enveloped the suit, crackling into coherent bands across its forearms and flaring dramatically from the pauldrons. Rhuar had to take an indignant step back from the sudden burst of heat - Jesri thought she detected a faint smell of burnt hair mingling with the thick odor of nervous Ysleli.

The look on Tarl’s face nearly sent Jesri into a laughing fit, although she had to admit the demonstration was impressive. Something that massive moving that fast was downright counterintuitive unless you knew the sorts of forces that the suit’s artificial musculature could provide. Rhuar, still rubbing his singed fur, was nevertheless staring in wonder at the shiny crescent-shaped scrape left by Anja’s foot where she had pushed off the deck.

Jesri smiled beatifically at the stunned troops, her hair blowing in the sudden wind caused by Anja’s sprint. "Anja and I will be our vanguard," she said. "We will deal with any hard targets or fortified positions. The operation will be a fast strike, seizing control of the station before an effective resistance can be organized. Any questions about the general details?"

The room continued to stare dumbly at Anja.

"Okay then, let’s proceed. Thank you, Anja," she said brightly.

"Sister," Anja said, her voice a sinister mechanical rumble through the suit’s speakers. She walked out of the room with a practiced stride, her feet whisper-quiet except for the low whine of the servos. The troops were mostly too shocked to notice the distinction, but Tarl very definitely noticed and watched Anja leave with renewed appreciation.

Jesri shook her head ruefully as the room’s intense atmosphere mellowed a few notches. "All right, gentlemen," she called out. "Next topic is routes of ingress." The Ysleli leaned in to listen, giving her their full attention.

Three Ysleli soldiers crept forward in an arrowhead formation, rifles held high against their white-armored shoulders. The barrels of their weapons tracked sharply along sightlines, clearing corners and sweeping doorways with precise, methodical movements. They were silent save for the whispering shuffle of their feet on the deck, a calm broken violently as a burst of white light flared against their front member’s chestplate.

He fell flat to the floor, two more shots thudding into his side as he fell. His teammates scattered to the side and returned fire down the hall from against the exposed walls. Another withering hail of fire forced them back, sparking off the metal panels and winging one of them in the upper arm. He hefted his rifle one-handed with a muttered curse, his scorched arm falling uselessly to his side as he fired blindly down the hall with his free hand-

"Tiln, what the fuck are you doing?", thundered a voice from above. The sounds of gunfire stopped as a buzzer rang out in the cargo hold to signal the end of the exercise. The remaining members of the team emerged from cover to help out their fallen teammates, hoisting them roughly to their feet and assembling in a line in front of the viewing platform.

Anja glared down at them, her face radiating disapproval. "Gentlemen," she called out, "recite Anja’s Fourth Rule for me."

Tiln’s team shuffled their feet sheepishly, black scorchmarks liberally dotting their armor. The opposing team, sporting only a few black marks, stood at parade-perfect attention. "Sir," one of them shouted back, "‘Heroes get shot’, sir!"

Anja shifted her glare to him, then nodded fractionally. "Correct, Neryn. In a scenario where you have one man down and one man wounded, the tactically sound choice is to retreat and regroup rather than fucking around with cowboy trick shots down the hall. Tiln, do you disagree?"

"Sir, no, sir!", Tiln barked, wisely refraining from clarifying questions about what precisely "cowboy" meant.

"And you three," Anja said, rounding on the opposing team with a glower. "You smug bastards think you did well? You had these three walking targets dead to rights with an ambush and you all shoot at the same man?" She shook her head. "Neryn, Anja’s First Rule."

Neryn gulped. "Sir, ‘Someone will get shot’, sir!", he said tremulously.

Anja jabbed a finger at Neryn’s team, punctuating her words. "Exactly. And if you let the enemy choose who gets shot, they pick you. You guys were so close to being halfway decent, but you forgot to shoot the damn enemy and you all died." She thumbed a button on her tablet and the black spots flaked off their armor, leaving it shiny and pristine.

"We reset in five minutes," she sighed. "Grab a drink and take your positions. Tiln, keep both hands on your rifle or drop it for your sidearm. I want to fix the problem with training but failing that I will fix it with adhesive. Dismissed."

She sighed and slumped back against the wall as the six troops shuffled off to grab water. A slight scraping noise caused her to crane her neck to the side; she found herself staring up at Tarl as he approached her position. He was standing far enough back on the platform that the troops below couldn’t see him, his head cocked slightly to the side in curiosity.

"I must say that I find your training methods impressively effective, if a bit odd," he rumbled softly. "Was this normal for human warriors?"

Anja laughed tiredly, stretching her neck to the other side and closing her eyes. "The distinction is that we never really had warriors. We had professional soldiers. It was a job, albeit an atypical one. There is a place for honor on the battlefield or valor in combat, but when it comes to the business of soldiery we addressed it with the same tools as physics or engineering. You use science, testing, logic, constant incremental improvement. A gun is a tool, the enemy is a problem. Arrive at what works."

Tarl bared his teeth in distaste. "It feels wrong, even as I see the results. Cold, unfeeling. Battle should be about rushing blood, the conflict of strength and will. I am honestly surprised my men have taken to it with such… gusto," he muttered. "They did not ever respond like this when I attempted to discuss strategy with them."

She popped up to her feet and smiled, still quite a bit below his eye level. "Tarl, were you ever an enlisted soldier?", she asked. "A junior officer, perhaps?"

"No, of course not," he said, looking mildly offended. "My uncle was the baron of Lrin, I began my career at the Royal Naval Academy."

Anja said nothing, but smiled wider. Tarl looked at her in mild confusion, then blinked. "Ah," he said. "I see. My experience may be somewhat different from theirs, it’s true. But the core values of honor and valor-"

"Tarl, honor and valor are a luxury," Anja said, cutting him off. Tarl tensed, his arm flexing slightly, and Anja’s smile took on an icy aspect. "Oh? You want to punish me for that, Warfather?", she asked softly. "If I was one of your men you wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, I hear the stories. What makes me different?"

"You are not Ysleli," he retorted, irritated at being toyed with. "As a commander you are my equal. My men know their place-"

"And what determines their place, Warfather?", she said, cutting him off again. Tarl gave her a dangerous look, but said nothing. Anja’s face lost its smile, leaving her looking very old and tired. "Tarl, I have seen a lot of death in and out of combat. Much more than you. Some people invited it, played with it, took chances that were as good as putting a gun in their own mouth - and some did that too. None of them deserved death, even if they were looking for it."

She stared him in the eye, all levity gone from the conversation. "Your men never had the luxury you did, Warfather. They never had considerations like honor and valor. Theirs was to fight and die for your honor, and because you made them do less of the latter they follow you. Some of them even love you for it, your loyal pieces on the board."

She took a step closer to him, eyes narrowing. "But then again, some over the years may have felt constrained. Some may have contradicted you, spoken over you, placed a foot into territory where only your equals may tread," she spat, contempt dripping from the word. "We have words for that. Curiosity. Inquiry. Initiative. Leadership. Qualities your navy seems eager to prune where they arise."

She looked out at the cargo bay where the six troops were clustered around the water tap on the wall, animatedly reenacting the firefight from the last session. Tiln was posing dramatically, his teammates nearly paralyzed with laughter as he tried to demonstrate his one-handed firing stance.

"We promoted based on those qualities," she said, her voice returning to a conversational tone. "We chose our leaders the same way you choose who to slaughter for impudence and insubordination. How many of the ones you killed were as good as you, Tarl?" She met his eye again, looking at his expressionless face. "How many of them were better?"

They stood watching the trainees for a minute more before the buzzer sounded again, signaling the start of the next exercise. They finished their drinks and jogged back to the mock corridors, their strides loose and relaxed.

"I will think on your words, Anja Tam," Tarl said quietly, turning to leave.

"Do," Anja said flatly. "And Tarl?" He turned his head, looking back at her. "These are also my soldiers now," she purred. "They may be prone to exhibit those qualities I talked about, now that they have had a taste. Kill them for it and I will feed you your eye. Not a threat, just a consequence."

Tarl held her gaze for a long moment. "Tell me, Anja Tam, because I have also heard stories. Long before I arrived here, although I thought them untrue at the time. Was this how you were trained as well?"

Anja’s face was a neutral mask as she stared back. "No," she said. "It was not."

He studied her for a moment more. "I thought not," he said. "You may train professionals and I may lead warriors, but you and your sister are bred killers. Sneer at my people and our customs as you will, but I find it oddly comforting to know that even the vaunted humans had uses for such as you."

She held her implacable mien for a few seconds more before smiling brightly at him, flashing her teeth. "Wait a few thousand years before you try to play that game with me, Tarl," she said sweetly, although her eyes were deep and empty. "I slit my first throat before your people knew cold iron. You have no word for what I am."

Tarl bared his teeth and took a step back, then caught himself and shook his head. "Ah," he said ruefully. "Terrifying, perhaps. For whatever you are and for how unlike it you appear. I will leave you to your training, Anja Tam. And as I said, I will think on your words." He inclined his head and walked out of the bay, moving perhaps a touch faster than his usual stride.

"All right, hold on to your yellow butts!"

Rhuar’s voice crackled over the Huginn’s intercom as the space outside began to leak starlight through a frothing white skein. With a jarring thump they hammered back into normal space and immediately darted towards the giant ring of the Cygnus Gate.

"Wow, that’s a big fucker," Rhuar’s voice said again, sending a ripple of nervous laughter through the ship. "We got a landing pad?"

"Yep, just registered with the gate," Jesri replied, her voice filtered into a harsh rumble by the armor’s helmet. "Crew privileges are pulled. Most of the doors were inoperable, so they’ll be mobile. Get ready for a hot landing."

"Great," Rhuar drawled. "Ah, shit. Hey, I think they know we’re here!"

He keyed up a display that showed two ships rising from behind the gate, previously hidden by its bulk. Anja leaned forward in her armor to study the profiles of the new contacts. "Kitan customs," she said, "has to be. They’ll try to stop us from closing with the gate."

"Hah!", barked Rhuar. "Even this little boat can take those slow bastards apart. I’ve always loved the idea of small-ship combat, so fast and agile-"

"Rhuar!", Jesri shouted. "Maybe just blow them up?"

"Yessir, aye-aye cap’n," he muttered, shifting into a steep arc that stressed even the Huginn’s impressive dampening systems. Anja and Jesri were somewhat shielded by their armor, but the Ysleli groaned as they were pressed harshly against their restraints.

"Sir," Neryn gasped from next to Anja’s hulking form, "Did he say he liked the ‘idea’ of small-ship combat? He has done this before, right?"

"Neryn, twelfth rule," Anja said.

"Second-guessers get shot, sir," he grumbled. "I was just-"

His words were lost in a cacophony of noise as Rhuar opened up with the twinned spinal-mount railguns, tracing plumes of atmosphere and glittering metal along the keel of one Kitan vessel. A secondary explosion rippled through the aft of the ship and sent it spinning helplessly into the void with fragments of hull and dead crew trailing after it like a macabre comet.

"Woo, that has a kick!", Rhuar cheered. "Not like the big guns on the Grand Design, of course, but so much more fun to aim-"

The ship shuddered as a Kitan round from the second vessel impacted them amidships near the top line, the cabin interior deforming slightly as the hull dented to nondestructively absorb the impact. "Rhuar!", Jesri shouted.

"Fucking ow," he grumbled, sending the ship into a dizzying corkscrew as more Kitan rounds streaked past. The customs ship couldn’t match the power of the human guns, but the turreted mounts on their vessels gave them much greater freedom to fire and maneuver. The Huginn continued to weave and bob until Rhuar flipped them around and burnt the engines hard at a cross-angle to their velocity.

Even Anja and Jesri felt the pull of that maneuver. A few of the troops vomited, a particularly messy affair for a species with dual stomachs.

"Sorry," Rhuar grated, wheezing. "Had to line up for…"

They streaked past the customs vessel only a few ship lengths away moving too fast for the turret to track their progress. Rhuar angled the ship towards their opponent as they passed and sent a stream of fire through their port bow. The high-speed rounds transected the ship completely, sending massive chunks of the hull spiraling away on the exit side as the engines flickered and died.

Rhuar’s cackling laughter echoed through the ship. "Hah, you dumb fucks," he crowed. "All right, landing time, landing time…"

He burned away some of their velocity with another bone-crushing trajectory change, then neatly shot towards a small squarish portal on the near side of the ring. The ship crashed through the barrier rear-first and pulsed the engines to do a hot-stop in the dead center of the dock.

Jesri was rapidly paging through the outside feeds with her suit displays and noticed a small squad of Kita manning a mounted gun near the back of the dock. She started to shout, but was brought up short by the rhythmic chugging of the ship’s antipersonnel turrets. Bolts of invisible energy crashed into the emplacement, liquifying the metal and splattering the crew across the rear wall.

"Zero for two with the dock guns," Anja chuckled, shaking her head. "All right, get ready to move!"

The Ysleli shakily straightened up from their seats, undoing their harnesses and slinging their weapons as Rhuar lowered the FAC with a feather-light touchdown on the deck.

"Good luck!", he shouted. "Door open in three, two, one…"

The door hissed open. Anja and Jesri waited a half-beat, then charged down the ramp.

Part 27

"So," Deepti asked, "Is this live?"

David looked up from his display and nodded once. "Yeah, about as close as we can get it. I figure maybe a second of latency? We have to keep the signal pretty low-power to blend in with normal station comm traffic."

Deepti nodded and fished her fingers through a bowl on the small desk, coming up with a few peanuts that she popped in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully while she watched the screen on which two figures in Valkyrie armor were scanning a bare hangar bay for signs of movement. The bay was uncomplicated and cramped compared to the sweeping station docks, a truly utilitarian facility composed of clean lines and unadorned metal bulkheads.

"Stop that," David protested. "Don’t just steal the peanuts." He pressed a few buttons on his display, shifting the screen to show about a dozen Kitan soldiers crouched behind a makeshift barricade in a hallway, rifles nervously trained on a sealed and hastily welded blast door several tens of meters away. A few of them looked up in consternation as an announcement broadcast over the station speakers, but the audio on the display wasn’t good enough to hear what it was saying.

Deepti grabbed another handful of peanuts with a token crispy grain wafer from the bowl of snack mix, then prodded the screen with a finger. "That looks like an ambush. Did we ping the assault team and let them know?"

David sighed, leaning forward to wipe crumbs and salt off of the display. "No touching," he grumbled. "And we don’t need to let them know, we’re working with real tech on the outside for once. Suit HUDs are already hooked into the station internals and all that. They’ve got overlays for every soldier, every floor plan, all the critical systems on the station, etcetera etcetera."

"Ooh, neat," she said, pulling up a chair to watch. The waiting Kitan forces flinched in unison as something heavy impacted the blast door. Flakes of metal scattered to the deck as the fresh welds cracked under the force of the blow. "Doesn’t seem very fair, though," she observed.

"Who would fight fair?", David scoffed. "You want Anja and her lizard goon squad to stand in the open and let them go shot for shot?" Another thundering impact visibly distorted the door and caused it to bulge inward. Behind the barricades, the soldiers shifted uneasily and glanced up at the intercom speakers, still broadcasting their indistinct message. "This isn’t a game of tiddlywinks, those Kita would gladly kill them given the chance. So we don’t give them the chance."

Deepti tousled David’s greying hair. "So ruthless," she smirked. "I sometimes forget that lurking under this mild-mannered exterior lies a cold-hearted and evil-"

"Oh, shush," David retorted, smiling despite himself. "Everyone knows you’re the one with the killer instinct." He gave her a quick peck on the cheek and moved the bowl of snack mix to his lap. "Now be quiet and watch. They’re about to break through."

She nodded and pulled out her tablet, tapping a few buttons. A chair materialized behind her, and when she sat in it a bowl of salted peanuts dropped lightly into her lap. They both leaned in expectantly, watching as the final blows landed on the overstressed blast door.

There was a pause. A truly horrifying screech of rending metal issued from the display, followed by shouts of alarm and a disconcerting wet noise.

"Oh, wow," Deepti said with a grimace as she watched the action unfold. "Did she just…"

"Yep," confirmed David with a grin.

They sat silently for a few more seconds, muffled crashes and tinny screams coming from the display.

"I think I’m going to be sick," Deepti announced, hurriedly standing to rush from the room.

David kept his eyes glued to the screen, reaching a hand back to steal her abandoned bowl of peanuts. He ate a few, then reached for an earpiece.

"Rhuar, you watching this?", he asked.

"Fuck yeah," came Rhuar’s answer a moment later. "Like I’d miss Jesri using a half-ton blast door to-"

"Yep, I saw," David said. "Listen, it gave me a funny idea but we’re going to have to be quick about it. You’ve got the ship hooked into the station network, right?"

"Ah, yeah," Rhuar replied. "What do you want me to send you?"

David laughed, shaking his head. "Nothing. Here’s what I need you to do…" He laid out his plan quickly, and by the end Rhuar was chuckling along with him.

"You’re an evil bastard," Rhuar replied when he had finished. "How are you the same person as our David from the Grand Design?"

David stretched and settled back in his chair. "I’ve asked the same question in reverse a few times. What do you think, can you make it work?"

"I’ll set it up, but any fun I’m about to have is on your conscience." Rhuar said. "Give me a minute."

"Attention. Attention. You are trespassing on the property of the Terran Naval Logistic Command. Drop all carried items immediately and assume a face-down position on the deck to await detention by security personnel. Non-compliance will be met with lethal force. Attention. Attention…"

The voice droned on. They had activated the station’s security lockdown as soon as they were in the dock, for all the good it did them. Most of the doors were either forced open or welded shut by the occupying Kita, so the primary consequence of the lockdown was an annoyingly officious warning on repeat that the garrison soldiers evidently weren’t listening to.

At least, this group hadn’t. Jesri shook her gauntlet, sending a few stray drops of blood flying from the hydrophobic surface. The hallway was a veritable abattoir behind them with nearly fifteen soldiers from the garrison lying mangled and broken. With full Valkyrie armor the defending forces could do little to stop them, a fact which Jesri found satisfying and disquieting in equal measure.

The disquiet held the advantage for the moment. This was more of a slaughter than a fight. The Ysleli certainly didn’t mind, judging from their high spirits after the first encounter. Weeks of miserable training with Anja had finally paid off and now they were the avatars of bloody War itself sweeping down-

A shot flashed against her armor, mitigated by a cloud of reactive plasma that flared in tandem with its impact. Cursing herself for her distraction, Jesri whipped her rifle up and returned fire at a group of three Kita that had popped out of a doorway down the hall. She tagged two of them with center-mass shots, instantly fatal. The third was hit by a hail of Ysleli fire and collapsed beside his comrades with wisps of steam curling up from his corpse.

She scanned her squad for injuries and, finding none, continued to advance forward. Tiln’s six-man team was her personal squad for this mission while Neryn and his group was shadowing Anja at the rearguard. Jesri thought Tiln would much rather be shadowing Anja, but he was being a good sport about the assignment so far.

The rest of the Ysleli fireteams were advancing between the two groups, wary but idle for the moment - they would split off to hold critical systems and chokepoints as they advanced towards the control center. The two Valkyries were certainly capable of tearing through the Kitan garrison by themselves, but experience had taught her that locking down a station-sized target with only two individuals was near to impossible.

She signaled a halt as they neared a large door. It was the entrance to one of the cramped hab sections on the ring, and Jesri’s HUD overlay was informing her that there were sixteen Kita inside. The outlines were low and indistinct, meaning they were lying flat on the floor - which didn’t help her out much, since that could mean anything from surrender to a prone firing position.

"Sixteen targets inside, nine left and seven right," she said, modulating her armor’s voice so it wouldn’t carry through the door. "They’re on the ground, so aim low but don’t shoot unless you see them holding weapons. Renil squad, on me and prep for prisoners."

It was evidence of Anja’s good work with the Ysleli that the admonishment against immediate violence was met with only minimal grumbling. Tiln formed his men up behind her while Renil watched the hall, his men fishing carbon-polymer zip restraints from their packs.

She didn’t bother to count down, rearing back and kicking the door with the full force her suit could muster. It slammed forward and down to bounce off the floor in a cloud of dust and metal particles. Jesri charged in with the Ysleli close behind her and her weapon ready but found only prone, frightened Kita.

"We surrender! Don’t shoot!", one croaked as she approached. "Please don’t kill us!"

Now that she was in the room she could tell that these were indeed garrison soldiers, but they had taken the trouble to stack all of their weapons in a pile against the wall and placed themselves on the opposite side of the common room to await capture. A nice, professional surrender.

Renil’s team took note of their consideration, binding the prisoners expediently and without unnecessary roughness. When the last of the hab’s rooms had been cleared, Jesri walked over to the bound prisoners and addressed the one with officer pips on his shoulders.

"Adjunct-Lead," she grated, dredging up her memory of Kitan military structure, "thank you for making this easy. Was there a general order given to surrender?"

The Kita jerked nervously as she spoke, flinching as one of Renil’s men growled low at the movement. He gave a low, croaking laugh, drawing his arms close to his body and shivering with the stress of the moment. "General order?", he rasped, his voice weak and pitchy. "No orders, command won’t surrender." He laughed again, his eyes wide. "Doubt you’ll find anyone outside of command that wants to line up and get shot, though."

Jesri rolled her eyes, the gesture hidden by the suit. Kita were not especially noted for their valor in combat and this one was working hard to live up to the stereotype. Still, she couldn’t complain.

"Cooperate and we’ll release you in neutral territory," she rumbled. The officer gave her another shaky acknowledgment before he was marched out of the room by Renil’s men. Soon the hab area was deserted save for Jesri and her squad.

"Well, guys," Jesri said, "That was easy, but let’s keep alert for holdouts. Doesn’t sound like it was any sort of coordinated stand-down."

Tiln snorted with amusement. "I don’t think they’ll be in a fighting mood, sir. Come and see what we found."

Curious, Jesri ducked her head to enter one of the cramped rooms surrounding the common area. It was spartan, most of the original furniture having decayed over the years. There was a thin sleeping mat and duffel shoved against the wall, with the only other fixtures being the rudimentary water dispenser and a dusty display screen.

The display screen was on and showing a crisp video of several Kita huddled together in a barricaded hallway. With a start, Jesri recognized it as the hall they had originally used to leave the docking bay. She watched them jump and flinch as her fists pounded the door, leaving indents clearly visible from the far side.

"That’s ten-centimeter thick Terran battle alloy," Rhuar’s voice cut in conversationally, broadcast over the display’s audio. "That right there is made with some powerful ancient space magic - you guys like that stuff, right? The force required to dent it like that is pretty immense. I didn’t run the numbers, but you can imagine what an impact like that would do to a squishy Kita skull if they didn’t do the smart thing and surrender. Actually, you don’t have to imagine - watch what she does with the door right here."

Jesri winced as she saw herself ram through the blast door in a halo of white fire, knowing what was about to happen. Silvered muscles bulging, she scooped up the twisted remnants of the door and hurled them like a meteor into the Kitan fortification. The debris brushed aside their piled barricades effortlessly as it hit, shearing through metal and flesh until it spun to a bloody stop tens of meters behind the group. Fully half of the Kita had died in that first strike, with two unlucky soldiers having been pinned by the door and smeared over the decking like butter on toast.

Those who had leapt clear of the barricade were spared that fate at the cost of their cover. They were quickly targeted by Ysleli eager to test their new rifles out on live targets. She had been too focused on her own swath of destruction to notice at the time, but the video made it clear that some of the troops had tuned their rifles up past the standard shot power. As a result, the Kita were maimed by steam explosions and scalds with every shot that connected. After a few intense seconds the remaining garrison soldiers were in worse shape than those crushed by the door.

She shot a look back at Tiln, who had the grace to look abashed. The rest of the troops were watching the carnage on-screen with bared teeth and rapt attention.

"I’m not normally much of a gun nut," noted Rhuar, "but that’s some impressive power they’re getting from those rifles. Let’s have another look at what happens when one of them scores a torso hit, here-"

The scene shifted to a slow-motion shot of a Kita being eviscerated by a center-mass hit at high power, gibbets of flesh sailing off in soaring ballistic arcs. "Now," Rhuar’s voice drawled, "that’s some stopping power right there. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just have a weapon in your hands when you see our friends on screen there, they’ll be happy to show you firsthand what that feels like."

The scene shifted to show Jesri hurling the door in slow-motion, the plasma bands on her arms leaving red-hot patches on the metal. She had to admit, the matter-of-fact brutality on the video and the constant droning exhortations to surrender in the background lent the atmosphere on the station a dire aspect. Well, for the Kita. Even so...

"Rhuar," she broadcast over the comm, keeping her voice carefully neutral. "I don’t recall the part of the plan where you run a psyop against the garrison troops." The narration cut off as the feed focused on the door sailing through the air.

"Ah, it was David’s idea," Rhuar broadcast back sheepishly. "Unless you like it, in which case I did most of the work."

"It’s… tacky," Jesri sighed, "if undeniably effective. You’ve apparently got them shitting themselves all over the station. The group we just caught practically put on their own restraints." She could feel a headache coming on. "I can’t believe I’m saying this, but keep it going for a little while longer. Try not to let it get too lurid. And Rhuar," she added, letting her voice shade into a deeper rumble, "keep in mind how much I adore fun surprises during a combat operation."

"...yeah," he responded warily. "I mentioned this was David’s idea, right?"

Jesri sighed and cut the connection, opening a channel directly to Anja. «Did you see Rhuar’s little broadcast yet?», she asked wearily. Tiln and his men had returned their attention to the video, which was currently showing the gruesome slow-motion impact of the door against the Kitan barricades.

«Neryn was just showing me,» Anja replied, amusement evident in her voice. «I think I like it. We had three soldiers approach and ask to be detained.»

«It saved us from having a firefight with a sixteen-man squad,» Jesri admitted. «I’m just afraid our disembodied replicating friend is a bad influence on our dog.»

«We live in troubled times, sister. I-»

The transmission cut off suddenly, and Jesri frowned. «Anja?», she sent, receiving only silence in response.

Just as she was about to send a squad back to reinforce Anja’s position her earpiece crackled to life. "Sister?", came Anja’s voice, sounding shaken.

Jesri let out her breath in a rush. "Anja, are you all right? What happened?"

There was another long pause before Anja responded. "Not sure," she finally admitted. "I would like to avoid using the link functionality for the moment. I experienced an unpleasant reaction."

Jesri frowned. The Nicnevin instance of David had cleared Anja of any long-lasting effects from her forced firmware update, but Eleanor’s research spanned centuries of insane effort. It had been naive to write it off so easily. "Anja, we can handle the rest of the takeover if you need to scrub. Head back to the Huginn-"

"No, sister," Anja said firmly. "I will not abandon my squad on their first field mission with me. Besides, I feel fine. It was just-" She hesitated again. "We can investigate more back at Elpis."

"Dammit, fine," grumbled Jesri, not wanting to delay further in either case. "But we will have Dr. Chartres take a look at you. No trying to wiggle out of it once we’re back because ‘you feel better’ or some bullshit."

"Agreed, sister," replied Anja, sounding relieved. "We should keep moving."

Jesri had noticed a few curious stares from her squad, as from their perspective she had been standing immobile and silent for a couple of minutes. "All right," she said loudly, speaking both over the comm and external speakers. "Let’s move out."

The door to the gate’s central control room was a large, robust blast shield that even the Valkyrie suits would have had issues breaking down. Fortunately, those same traits meant that it was one of the few functional doors left on the station. On Anja’s command Rhuar overrode the security lockdown and the door slid smoothly open to reveal the gate control area, a large round room with workstations ringing a central command desk. Jesri and Anja walked out into the center of the doorway and were promptly hit with weapons fire from a half-dozen scattered positions within the control area.

They stood there impassively, staring at the Kita shooting them until the weapons fire stopped. As expected, the bridge crew had little more than weak sidearms on them when they were sealed inside by the lockdown, good for little more than scuffing their armor.

The two sisters advanced into the control center, looking around at the technicians and bridge crew huddled behind their workstations. Only when they had come up to the command desk did they finally speak.

"Please lay down your weapons," Anja’s voice boomed, her suit speakers tuned for maximum intimidating force. "We are assuming control of this station. Cooperate and you will be released unharmed in neutral territory." Those who hadn’t already done so dropped what they were carrying and raised their hands high, shuffling into the open center space nervously. The higher-ranked officers and a pair of Kitan priests huddled in a close knot near the edge of the crowd, eyes darting between the two armored figures.

Jesri sent a double-click over the communicator and the Ysleli troops poured in, efficiently gathering the weapons and binding the prisoners’ hands. The Kita shied away from the armored soldiers but were subdued without incident, submitting to the bindings wordlessly as each squad came around. "Clear," Neryn called out. "You want us to bring them down with the others, sir?"

"Nah," Jesri replied, walking over to the command desk and keying the release on her suit. It split smoothly down her spine and the backs of her legs, allowing her to step out of it and pull her arms from the gauntlets. One of the priests took a bulging-eyed look at her and began whispering furiously to his companion. She shook her hair out, smirking at the gobsmacked looks she was getting from the bridge crew, then hopped up to the command desk.

"Let’s see," she mused, tapping out diagnostics on the panel. "Looks like we’re good to go here. Give me a couple of seconds to set up."

One of the Kita prisoners stiffened at her words, stepping forward despite a warning growl from the Ysleli guarding his group. "You may have the station," he said nervously, "but it is my duty to inform you that we will never yield our access to terrorists and thieves, even on pain of death."

Jesri looked up at him tiredly. "You the commander?", she asked.

The Kita puffed his chest up a little. "I am Renshe, Station Prelate."

"I thought so," Jesri said with a frown. "You the guy that refused to issue a general surrender order?"

Renshe froze, looking uncertain. "I, ah," he stammered. "We are beholden to the law and cannot yield control-"

Jesri stopped looking at him and returned to her diagnostics. "You’re a dumbass," she said. "You’re lucky your crew was smarter than you were."

"Says the terrorist," Renshe bristled. "Murderer and thief. Insult me all you wish, I will not yield my access. It is a sacred trust."

"Gate control," Jesri sighed without looking up, "remove all access rights from the station prelate and change his designation to ‘Dumbass’, audio confirmation."

"Confirmed," replied a neutral voice over the intercom. "Security roles have been removed from Station Prelate Dumbass." The priests staggered back and made a warding gesture, provoking some indiscreet laughter from the Ysleli troops.

Dumbass (née Renshe) stood there with his mouth working soundlessly for a few seconds before slumping back in shock among his former subordinates, at least a few of which seemed to be enjoying his turn of fortunes.

"Okay, done," Jesri said, standing up and giving the console an emphatic final button press. "Hold on to something."

The Kita exchanged nervous glances. "Excuse me," one of the technicians said tremulously. "What exactly did you-"

There was a noise.

Xim Len walked quickly down the hall, her legs pumping uncomfortably fast as she skittered over the deck. Even after years of living on Elpis she had never truly acclimated to the sheer amount of walking that station life entailed. She wouldn’t go back to Tlix for all the free space in the world, but she caught herself missing its empty sky and stark cliffs every so often.

But no, she could never go back. Not when she had an opportunity like she had here. Access to working human fabrication tech was already a prize greater than any achievement she could have hoped for, but the promise of new designs for ancient human systems would keep her happily on Elpis until she had worked her hands to bloody nubs. As an artisan, she could conceive of no other option than to seize this opportunity and milk it for all it was worth.

Nevertheless, a scowl settled on her slim face as she wove through the crowds of merchants towards the dock. For anything other than the greatest opportunity she could conceive of, her task would have sent her screaming to the airlocks weeks ago. The problem wasn’t the Ysleli, who normally kept to themselves, nor was it their antiquated technology. She actually found their ships somewhat fascinating, given that they were independently developed rather than derived from human salvage.

No, the problem was Tarl.

The insufferable yellow monstrosity was in most respects a pleasant client, sparing her any rants about costs or delays or any of the other typical complaints that clients brought to her door. What he did bring, however, was an insatiable curiosity about everything. Every hull reinforcement. Every reactor core. Every weapons system, every air exchanger, every detail of every overhaul she was being paid to give him seemed to be of endless interest to the scaly bastard.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if Tarl wasn’t a self-admitted technical neophyte from a species that hadn’t even managed shipboard gravitics yet. But he was. Xim Len lived in an endless hell of impromptu remedial lectures on physics, quantum phenomena and hyperspatial topology that never seemed to satiate her client’s thirst for details.

So when Tarl summoned her away from her workshop during a rare Tarl-less period of productivity, the only thing that had kept her from tearing her wings off and cancelling the contract was a tantalizing promise - that the humans had promised a spectacle. Even the notion of voluntarily spending time with Tarl couldn’t completely dissuade her from an invitation like that.

She burst into the docks as dramatically as someone of her stature could burst into anything, sighing in momentary relief as she spread her gossamer wings and launched into the high reaches of the docking bay. There were few spaces aboard where she could fly freely, and above all her favorite was the docks. Soaring over the ships, racing past the shimmering bubble separating her from the void - the closest thing she could ever feel to flying in space unaided.

She indulged in a few artful swoops before diving down to land next to Tarl, who regarded her bemusedly.

"Quite impressive," he allowed. "It looked enjoyable."

"Never lasts long enough," she muttered, walking up to stand beside him. "Do you know what’s going on?"

Tarl scraped long talons over his arm contemplatively, oblivious to the shudder it provoked from his companion. "Anja said I would ‘see the difference in her curriculum’ or somesuch," he shrugged. "You know how it is with the humans."

"Humanforms," Xim Len corrected absently. "And they didn’t mention why they wanted me to see it?"

Tarl smirked. "They didn’t mention you at all. I judged that you would find it to be of interest, however."

Xim Len gave him a calculating look. The brute probably just wanted her close by in case he needed help understanding the humanform’s message. Still, her interest was not easily unpiqued. At worst she could simply fly away and pretend that-

"It’s starting," Tarl said, his eyes glittering suddenly. Xim Len whipped her head around to stare out the dock, searching the field of stars until she saw it.

A ripple in the blaze of starlight spread and tore, revealing inky blackness so profound that it seemed to disappear from her vision. The rent in space spread, growing, growing-

She stared in disbelief. Lacking a point of reference made it hard to determine the scale of the distortion, but it was obviously huge. The humanforms were rumored to have a larger ship out there somewhere, was this it?

No, it couldn’t be. It was too big for a ship. Nothing that moved could be this large, it would break apart. And yet here was the abyssal canyon before her stretching wider than the limits of presumption.

Suddenly a pure-white flame burst from within, everting the stretch of midnight in an instant to leave behind a sparkling sea of fire and light that swirled in front of her like the high-clouds before a storm. Slowly it dissipated into cooling orange wisps that unveiled a perfect ring, hollow through the center. It stretched impossibly wide, larger than any structure she had ever seen save for the transit stations.

She swore absently in Tlixi, her eyes drinking in the sight. "What is it?", she wondered aloud.

"The Cygnus Gate, I presume," Tarl whispered, staring in rapt amazement as the ancient torus hung motionless in the void.

Xim Len took a few seconds to process the import of what he had said, but when she did her mind was set whirling with the implications. The gate had been a famous curiosity for as long as anyone could remember, a useful waypoint but little else. Nobody had ever assumed that the gate could be transported, so nobody had ever tried to her knowledge. And now it was here - not in a backwater agricultural colony but at Elpis, the hub of trade in the region. Her home.

She had barely begun calculating the money she was about to make when she realized she was standing alone on the dock. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended that Tarl had left without a single question - in fact, he had answered hers! Still, he was gone. Shivering with excitement and irritation, she spread her wings and launched back towards the dock entrance. There was no more time for sightseeing. She had work to do and, at last, no distractions.

Part 28

Anja floated in a sea of endless darkness, a sunless black like the depths of hyperspace. She had lost track of how long it had been since she entered. Her body seemed to melt away as she lay immobile, her consciousness baring its skin to the dark and floating free.

A searing line of light stabbed into her eyes, making her wince and jarring her out of her reverie. She sat up slowly as the autodoc’s cover pulled back with a deep whirring noise. After a few seconds of painful negotiation between her retinas and the medical office’s cold white light, she was able to see enough to leave the examination table and slip on the thin robe laid beside the doc.

After dressing she left the room and went to the adjoining meeting area where Jesri was waiting. On the room’s display were David and Helene, still perusing the data feed from the exam. Upon seeing her come in Helene looked up and smiled warmly.

"Anja, good timing," she said. "We were just finishing a preliminary read-through of your exam results."

Anja padded barefoot to a chair, smiling at Jesri before she sat down and shifted until comfortable. The chairs were newly ordered from Xim Len’s fabrication workshop, modeled after the long-decayed original station furniture. They gave off a familiar scent of offgassing foam and plastic that filled her head with thoughts of her childhood - their creche had been finished only months before the Tam siblings themselves and the whole place had smelled faintly of new synthetics until she was fifteen.

"Anything jump out at you?", she asked neutrally.

Helene nodded. "Quite a few things, yes," she said, fiddling with a console outside the display’s view. "I think we should start by saying that you’re in no immediate danger. We were able to deactivate the link’s external communications while retaining all of the internal stabilization functions. Eleanor’s update hasn’t affected them yet."

Anja narrowed her eyes at Helene’s choice of phrasing. "Yet?", she inquired pointedly.

"It’s a complicated patch," Helene explained, "but with the facilities here and the benefit of some extra time we’ve been able to improve on the analysis that David Zeta-Two performed shortly after it was loaded to your link." Helene converted half of the screen into a data display showing a network diagram.

"Here is the initial impact of Eleanor’s modifications, as shown by Zeta-Two’s scan on Nicnevin," she explained, pointing at a small area of the diagram shaded in blood-red. "Zeta-Two’s analysis at the time was correct - the impact was minimal and posed no functional issues. Unfortunately, there was no way for him to know the full extent of Eleanor’s alterations from that single data point." She toggled her console and the red patch suddenly spidered outward to color adjacent areas.

"This," Helene said grimly, "is the scan performed just now."

Anja stood and walked closer to the display. She couldn’t tell precisely what was affected from the cryptic labels on the diagram, but the implication was not encouraging. "It’s spreading?", she asked.

"It was spreading," David broke in. "But we believe we’ve been able to halt its progress." He minimized the diagram so that his face reappeared on the screen, his expression serious but not dire.

"Our thought is that Eleanor ran into a problem when trying to modify her own firmware, namely that the people who designed your links were absolute geniuses," he said with a shake of his head. "I had assumed the Valkyrie program was using experimental technology, but the degree of neuromechanical integration they achieved is unbelievable - even when considering that your brains were designed for compatibility. They compensated for the inherent plasticity of organic neural networks by making the link constantly redesign itself to better interface with your changing neural architecture."

"This would have posed a problem for Eleanor," he continued, "because it makes the functions of the link impossible to attack via conventional means. Her solution was unfortunately almost as brilliant as the original design - she attacked the relatively static code that governed the rewrite process."

Anja quirked an eyebrow at the display, her face studiously calm despite the chill she felt at his words. "That sounds very similar to cancer," she observed. From the corner of her eye, she saw Jesri’s posture stiffen.

David nodded. "Not dissimilar. Fortunately, like cancer, it sounds much worse than it is and lends itself to easy treatment. The patch uses the behavior of the rewrite mechanism to slowly alter the functions of linked code segments. Unlike a biological system that is constantly ‘updating’, however, your firmware only reconfigures itself when it is in active use. This is why you experienced effects when you used the link’s communication protocols, since that is where the patch is currently contained."

"The most important distinction, however, is that we can deactivate the affected system with no ill effects. Your external communication functions are currently disabled and the affected code blocks are dormant. This means no rewrites are occurring and no new blocks are being affected," David concluded with an encouraging smile.

Jesri let out a weighty sigh of relief. "That’s great news," she said.

"Great news for Anja," David sighed, "but not great for our overall efforts against the Gestalt. We had hoped that a modified version of Eleanor’s patch would allow broad-scale data layer attacks against the Gestalt using our allies still in its network. Knowing what we now know about how it operates, I can’t recommend that course of action."

"All of that is of course secondary to Anja’s good health," Helene said reproachfully, shooting David an annoyed look. "We still have the rest of the data from the scan to scrub through. Hopefully it yields the key to removing the altered code from Anja’s system entirely. Until that time, you must not reactivate your external communication functions."

Helene’s face turned serious. "I cannot emphasize this enough," she warned. "Any additional use of that module risks spreading the code to other modules. If it moves to a critical module we can’t shut down, it will inevitably spread to the whole link. In the best case you will experience the same stability issues that you observed in Eleanor. At worst it could leave you essentially brain-dead."

"Got it," Anja confirmed with a shudder. "No link chatter."

Jesri punched her lightly in the shoulder. "You’ll get used to it. My link was broken for a thousand years before we found the doc on the Grand Design."

"Hopefully we find a fix before that long," Anja grimaced. "Not having the link is only an inconvenience, but it remains inconvenient."

"We’ll keep looking," Helene promised. "You can count on David to pick this apart until we understand every subroutine, even if he’ll only focus on it because it’s strategically useful." David grinned at her and shrugged, receiving a withering look in response.

Anja stood and inclined her head to both of them, smiling at the display. "Whatever your reasons may ultimately be, thank you for fixing me up," she said. "If there’s anything you need from me to assist your research, just let me know."

"We will," promised David, a little too enthusiastically.

Helene glanced at him. "Anything within reason," she added. "We’ll leave you two to your day while we review the full dataset. I don’t want to take up too much of your time until we have more concrete facts."

"Thanks again!", Jesri called, waving as the display winked off.

Anja slumped back into her chair, feeling suddenly fatigued. "Ugh," she complained.

"You good?", Jesri asked.

Anja raised an eyebrow at her sister. "Are you asking how I’m handling today’s threat to my health and well-being?", she replied puckishly. "Fairly sure this is the least serious problem on our plate right now. If Ellie’s patch wants to kill me it’s going to have to get in line behind the Gestalt, the Kita-"

"Yeah, yeah," Jesri replied, waving her off. "Big tough Anja." She folded her hands and gave Anja a piercing look. "Be serious, though. Are you good?"

"Sister," Anja replied irritatedly, "everything is fine. David said that it should be contained and they will undoubtedly force me in for scans every week-"

Jesri stood up sharply, cutting her off. "Major Tam," she said coldly, "deliver a psychological self-assessment."

A flare of anger burst momentarily behind Anja’s eyes as she shot to her feet. The familiar wording overturned dusty memories of their childhood training; a shattered girl with bloody hands still wracked with horror after enduring the phantasmagoria of the scenario simulator. She remembered the chill stares from a silent line of white-coated observers waiting to see if they had at long last reached the limits of their creation’s ability and will. The white coats had done their work well, though, and even before her pang of rage had begun to fade she found herself rummaging through the corners of her own mind with a cool detachment.

Was Jesri right? Was she overlooking something? She drew on her training, stepping out of her subjective view and turning the question over in her head while several seconds ticked by in silence. By the time she had answered the question to her satisfaction Jesri was looking at her worriedly, clearly regretting forcing the issue.

"Madam Examiner," Anja said bitingly. "I am ready to proceed."

"Anja, it’s fine," Jesri said, wincing at her sister’s tone. "I shouldn’t have-"

"But you did," Anja shot back. "So we will do it correctly." She assumed a posture of attention and looked at Jesri with blank eyes. "My overall state is high-coherence, high-stress with an acceptable net-coherent outcome," she said mechanically. "Major stressors are the recent death of my sister at my hand, the introduction of hostile code into my neural link by that same sister and the discovery of four other sisters’ bodies, two of which were actively being desecrated by hostile parties. Minor stressors include a recent severe injury during an operation resulting in the loss and regrowth of a leg, the deaths of several civilians under my care and a generally elevated level of life-threatening events compared to baseline."

Jesri blinked. "Fuck, this has been a bad couple of months," she muttered.

They stared solemnly at each other for a few seconds more before a grin broke onto Anja’s lips. Laughing, the two sisters embraced closely before pulling back to arm’s length.

"I’m sorry, Anja," Jesri said. "I may have been a bit harsh."

"No, you were right to demand that I think about it properly," Anja insisted. "The last few months have been bad. I probably would have answered differently if you had pushed me to do a self-assessment right after Nicnevin," she admitted. "Elpis has been good. Training the squad has been rewarding and constructive. I think we have more of a concrete idea about how to go after the Gestalt than we ever had before we made contact with the resistance."

Jesri nodded. "It’s been nice having allies again, even if they are strange ones."

"Why would you say that about Rhuar?" Anja admonished with an impish smile, provoking a giggle from Jesri. "Really, though, I do feel good," she said. "Even with this shit from Ellie knocking around in my head. Helene will insist on monitoring it, so there should be no risk of it spreading without our knowledge."

"You’re right, of course," Jesri sighed. "And even if it did spread I’m betting they could work something out, they’ve proven to be pretty resourceful."

"Perhaps," Anja allowed, her face turning serious. "But they will not have the chance to try. If it spreads past the link’s communication module I will resolve the issue permanently."

Consternation spread over Jesri’s face as her sister’s meaning sunk in. "Anja, don’t joke," she admonished. "That won’t happen, and even if it does we have options-"

"No jokes," said Anja, shaking her head. "No delays. If it spreads I will die as myself, while I still am enough of myself to pull the trigger. I will not be like Ellie," she said firmly, looking Jesri directly in the eye. "I will not make you kill me."

She clapped her sister on the shoulder, ignoring Jesri’s stricken face. "I need to change out of this stupid robe," she said, striding towards the door. "I have exercises with the squad down in the danger room this afternoon. We can grab dinner afterward."

She flipped a casual salute to Jesri and walked back out of the room, leaving her sister standing alone in the quiet dark.

"This is absolutely unacceptable!", Kvkitt yelled, moving to slam an arm on the desk but pulling up short after a wary glance in Jesri’s direction. The Arrigh station administrator took a moment to collect himself, then leveled a glare at the two sisters. "Excuse me. It is unacceptable, though. You commit an act of theft against the Kita, if not an act of war, then drop your stolen goods right beside our station."

He shook his head in irritation. "They will hear, eventually, then they will make the reasonable conclusion that it was the Arrigh who stole the gate. The Kita will come here to take back what is theirs, putting all of our lives at risk." A murmur went up from the rest of the room, where the various guild leaders were gathered for the discussion - although Tarl had decided to contribute to the meeting with his absence, much to Jesri’s relief.

Anja tapped her fingers on her forearm, looking bored. "It was necessary," she said curtly.

Kvkitt’s expression darkened when he realized further explanation was not forthcoming. "You two are as bad as that bloodthirsty Tarl," he spat. "Threats and violence, not honest talk. This is too much, you will see us all killed-"

"Okay, first point," Jesri said tiredly. "You’re not going to get killed by the Kita. We have the resources to protect the station quite thoroughly and you can be assured it’s in our interest to do so."

Belshi shot her a dark look. "I couldn’t help but notice," he sneered, "that you felt the need to qualify that statement. If not my people, then who will be killing us? You, perhaps? Your sister? Will it be your yellow thugs?" The curmudgeonly Kitan banker had grown no fonder of her after the gate operation, but Jesri thought that was largely because he feared the Kitan government would link their brand-new foes with the gigantic new accounts he had brought in just weeks before.

"Nobody’s killing anybody," grated Jesri. "Not the Kita, not us, not Tarl and his troops. We will stop any pending confrontation on or around this station."

"You’re awfully confident," noted Escalating Irreducible Manifold, its gelatinous body shifting color tones slowly. "But I’m afraid most people will not be. Trade from the other stations will fall if this station is perceived as a travel risk."

Jesri looked over at the blobby captain, settling for making eye contact with its center mass in the absence of discernable eyes. "You think trade will fall with the gate present?", she asked. "These things are wonderful for trade, even with some rumors about the Kita you should be making money hand over…" She trailed off, looking at Kvkitt’s chitinous claws and Manifold’s utter lack of appendages. "Rapidly," she concluded. "You’ll be making money rapidly."

"I think you overestimate the gate’s draw," Kvkitt snorted. "It provides what, half the multiplier effect of a standard mass ramp? That’s useful in the backwater where they found it, but this close to a real station ramp it’s a mere curiosity. At most it will draw in a few adventurous tourists. I don’t know how you managed to move the gate, but you’ve robbed it of any utility by bringing it here."

Anja goggled at the annoyed insectile alien, then pressed her forehead into her hands in exasperation. "You can’t be serious," she groaned, her voice muffled. Kvkitt gave her a bemused look, his beady eyes flickering in confusion.

Beside her, Jesri shook her head. "Kvkitt," Jesri said wearily, "The folks who live in this part of space have been fighting over the gate for how long?"

Kvkitt gave her a look that was equal parts curiosity and annoyance. "About two thousand years, or at least that’s as far as our records show," he replied. "It was only recently acquired by the Kita, but the Grand Tabernacle has placed great importance on it as a human relic. This is why their retribution will be-"

"Two thousand years," Jesri continued, steamrolling over the sputtering administrator, "and nobody has figured out how to turn the damn thing on?"

A stunned silence descended over the room. "It - what?", Kvkitt asked uncertainly. "The Kita use the gate on a regular basis, it functions just fine. The mass multiplier has been consistent as long as we’ve known about the gate."

Jesri stood and began pacing, spitting out her words with annoyed fervor. "Advanced transit gates give a modest mass boost passively, something that results from the particular shape of their waveguides," she explained. "An active transit gate, on the other hand, lends its own rather substantial mass to any ship using the gate. Anything from the smallest freighter to the largest ship you can squeeze through the torus receives the full supercapital-class multiplier from the station for their outgoing leg."

Xim Len gaped at her. "That’s ridiculous," she said disbelievingly. "With that sort of mass boost you would save days or weeks on any of the common trade routes. It’s absurd."

"Absurdly profitable," commented Manifold, its skin shimmering with barely-restrained emotion. "If what she’s saying is true Elpis is about to become the shortest path to anywhere. The station will overflow with traffic."

"But this is even worse!", moaned Kvkitt. "If the gate can really do what you say, the Kita will want it back desperately. They’ll send their whole navy to Elpis. They’ll wage a holy war!" A concerned mutter went up around the room as the guild delegates considered the prospect.

"They won’t," Qktk said quietly. All heads in the room turned to look at him, hunched contemplatively in his chair. He flitted his many eyes between the guild delegates and stood up with a soft rattle of chitin. "Oh, obviously they would send the navy if they heard there had been some mysterious terrorist attack and that the gate had been stolen away to Elpis. However, the only ones who know that the gate was attacked at all are the imprisoned Kitan gate crew and a few people on the station. To everyone else, the gate simply appeared without explanation in a flash of light. Strange and wonderful," he mused slyly, "as expected of these old human artifacts. Miraculous, even."

Manifold quivered violently. "A clever ploy, but the Kita will never believe that story," it said. "Even if the gate has ‘miraculously’ relocated itself, you hold its crew prisoner. They will still assume foul play on the part of the Arrigh."

Qktk cocked his head at the gelatinous captain. "Why would we hold the crew prisoner? We need people to man the station, after all.", he pointed out, sitting back in his chair. "We can lock out the self-jump functionality and return the gate to their control, the Kitan clergy can’t object to that. The gate is much more useful to them beside Elpis, as long as they believe they retain control."

"And why would the prisoners collaborate with us?", Kvkitt scoffed. "I’m given to understand you were quite brutal during the assault. Will you simply threaten their lives again?"

Belshi grunted in realization, shifting his bulk to sit upright. "The cowards surrendered and had their priceless relic snatched out from under them. The humiliation would be unbearable if word got out, they would be exiled, excommunicated, their names erased from their family line." He inclined his head slightly to Qktk. "If we offer to ‘return control’ of the gate they would be fools not to accept. They avoid the shame of surrender and enjoy the prestige of serving aboard a seeming miracle of the faith." He coughed and spat contemptuously, causing Xim Len to edge away with a disgusted look. "The Tabernacle will gain power when the story circulates," he said with a disgusted look, "so they will support the fiction even if they disbelieve it."

Jesri nodded, winding a strand of hair around her finger as she thought. "Most of the crew survived the assault, thanks to Rhuar and D-, ah, his deceptions," she said, correcting herself hastily. "We can pass off the customs ships and the few dead garrison soldiers as mysterious losses resulting from the transfer."

Kvkitt seemed caught off-guard at Jesri’s casual brushing-aside of so many deaths, but quickly regained his composure. "My government will not be pleased that the Kita have gained a foothold near the station," he admitted, "but once the implications of the activated gate become clear they will be hard-pressed to object. An increase in trade numbers will do much to keep them from taking action against the Kita."

Jesri looked around at each of the guild heads in turn. "So we have a plan? Everyone clear on how we’re playing this?" She leveled her gaze at the Kitan banker. "Belshi, we going to have any issues from your end?"

"Pfah," he spat. "You think I’m the patriotic type, with the company I keep?" He indicated the assembled guild heads with one bony arm, cackling wetly. "As long as I’m making money and we’re not all dead, I’m happy."

"It’s a conspiracy, then," Kvkitt said glumly.

"So it is," Jesri replied brightly. "Here’s to productive cooperation."

Anja stood abruptly and walked towards the door, causing Jesri to furrow her brow in concern. "Hey Anja, you okay?", she called out.

Her sister shot back a questioning look. "Yes? I was just going to go talk to Tarl, since he took over handling of the gate crew. If we need the prisoners to be cooperative it’s probably best that we get them out of Ysleli custody as soon as possible."

Jesri blanched. She hadn’t actually thought to discuss the short-term treatment of the prisoners with Tarl, an oversight that seemed increasingly critical the more she considered it. "You had better get down there, yeah," she muttered.

Anja gave her a sparkling grin and vanished through the door. Xim Len looked bewildered, her delicate wings fluttering. "How did you end up working with that scaly butcher anyway?", she asked. "You’re crazy, don’t misunderstand me, but you can be reasoned with. He seems to enjoy bloodshed for its own sake."

"How did we meet Tarl?", Jesri asked contemplatively. "That’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that Kick insulted his honor and blew up half his fleet."

For the second time that day the room turned to stare at Qktk, who shrank back and shot a reproachful look at Jesri. "It was all a misunderstanding," he muttered. "And it wasn’t even close to half. Maybe a fifth."

Xim Len edged farther away from Qktk, her eyes wide, while Belshi seemed to regard him appreciatively.

"Jim’s teeth," Qktk swore. "Look, we were only trying to distract them-"

"Is that why Tarl’s soldiers call you the Demon of Ysl?", Manifold asked. "I heard a couple of them talking."

"Hrmph," Belshi said contemplatively. "I’ve heard the name ‘Thousand-Eyed Nightmare’ used here and there. I had assumed they were simply being xenophobic barbarians."

"Now that’s just ridiculous," scoffed Qktk. "Even counting minor eyes-"

"Just roll with it, Kick," Jesri advised, sitting back in her chair with a grin. "You’re lizard-famous. They don’t give a scaly yellow crap how many eyes you have."

Qktk looked around the room, his decidedly-fewer-than-a-thousand eyes moving from the bewildered and discomfited faces of the guild leaders to Jesri’s self-satisfied grin.

He sighed. This was what he got for picking up passengers.

Part 29

Anja pushed bits of endive around her plate with a frown. The newly unlocked hydroponics bays were operating at full capacity and the sudden influx of fresh human vegetables was taking the station by storm. The problem was that every food stall seemed to think that greens should be fried, steamed, boiled or baked crisp rather than simply served raw. After a beaming, obese Kitan vendor had presented her with a limp bowl of boiled lettuce she had eventually given up and grabbed a few handfuls of produce straight from the hydroponics trays. Despite all her effort and anticipation, however, the crisp leaves seemed strangely unfulfilling.

"You know what they say," Jesri said, her mouth half-full, "if you’re not overjoyed to see real food, you’re overdue for deployment." She reached over and stabbed a fork through some of the leftovers on Anja’s plate, darting backwards before her sister could do much more than scowl.

Anja’s annoyed expression faded as quickly as it had arrived, however, and she sank back in her chair with a sigh. "You might be right," she admitted. "Not like we have a shortage of things to do around here, but lately my day seems to be very… administrative," she said, spitting out the word with a disgusted expression. "I wish the resistance members would consent to appear publicly. That would let them talk with the guilds directly so that we could go do something useful."

Seeing her lack of objection, Jesri happily reached over to steal Anja’s plate. "We aw-", she said, hastily swallowing a mouthful. "Sorry. We are being useful. The guilds are enthusiastic but they’re still like kids in a quartermaster’s sometimes. They need us to help them. Besides, I thought you were still training with your guys?"

"Oh, sure," Anja said, making a dismissive gesture. "We help out. My men train. What does it gain us, though? The Gestalt is not going to be brought down by a robust station economy and two dozen trigger-happy lizards." She shook her head in frustration. "It has been a week and a half since we took the gate. Xim Len is nearly done with the first Ysleli ship refits. I would at least have expected a tentative plan from David on what we do next."

Jesri nodded, tapping her bottom lip with her fork thoughtfully. "I get the impression that they were a bit thrown off by not being able to use Ellie’s research. They could be reassessing parts of their short-term plan, or at least revising details. Also, I was checking in with Chris about the fabrication bays and he mentioned something about wanting to let the situation with the gate mellow out a bit before we made any more big moves."

Anja shook her head. "Mellow out?", she snorted. "Sister, the gate is only going to draw more attention with every jump. I know that if Manifold gets its way, it will be the premier transport route for exports in this sector. Exports which, by the way, include a selection of new human-make goods straight from the fabricators. I worry that the resistance is underestimating the station’s inevitable growth spike from giving the guilds access to both the station facilities and the gate."

"It’s possible," Jesri allowed. "For all the talk of keeping a lower profile by not bringing the Grand Design within range of the station we’re being fairly unsubtle. Speaking of which, have you talked with our David lately?"

"Two days ago," Anja confirmed. "Happy as could be, still parked off some rogue planetoid playing xenogeologist with the sensors. We should count ourselves lucky that we allowed him on the ship and not the David from Elpis - otherwise, I would worry about ever seeing the Grand Design again." She sighed and leaned back in her chair, lacing her hands behind her head. "Unfortunately," she said, "I think it will still be too long before we are able to safely bring her to Elpis. Once we do, we confirm to the Gestalt that the ship was not destroyed at Ysl. At that point Elpis is lost to us no matter what we do."

"Perhaps that accounts for the sudden hesitancy from our resistance cell?", Jesri mused. "After all, they’re the only ones here who can’t evacuate if an Emissary comes knocking."

"Only one way to find out," Anja said. "Sister, I believe we are overdue for a strategy meeting with our incorporeal friends."

"Well, hold on," said Jesri, grabbing her fork again. "You’ve still got sprouts."

Rhuar and Qktk joined them in the briefing room, settling down around the table just minutes after the two sisters arrived. Rhuar’s fur was filthy, matted with grease and marred by a few crisped patches that still smelled faintly of burnt hair. He had been spending ever more time in the fabrication workshops with Xim Len as they put the finishing touches on Tarl’s ships.

Qktk had been a bit harder to pin down as of late. Everyone Jesri talked to seemed to have recently conversed with him about trade or shipping, food or leisure - even Manifold had mentioned Qktk talking with it at length about potentially renting use of the Leviathan while its captain was indisposed. As far as Jesri could tell, the little Htt was networking his chitinous ass off while they were stuck on-station. Assuming there was a populated station left here when all was said and done, he was probably going to be a very wealthy individual.

They both looked bone-tired in the dim light from the room’s displays, making Jesri feel her recent restful idleness all the more keenly. The four of them sat in the dark without talking for a long minute or two before the screens activated to show David and Helene.

They too looked tired, although theirs was a harried stress that reminded Jesri of soldiers that had spent too long under siege. The quiet, inevitable threats marked you differently than the immediate and specific threat of a sniper or a knife in the dark, Jesri knew from experience, and it was that threadbare quality that hung from their features.

"Hi everyone," Helene said with a wan smile. "It’s been too long since our last sit-down."

"Yeah, that’s kind of why we asked to meet," Jesri said. "Is there an issue with our timetable?"

David puffed his cheeks out, exhaling slowly. "Kind of, yeah, but not the way you think. We’re concerned that the project is getting too visible too fast."

"Wait," Rhuar snorted. "Help me out here. You’re saying that stealing the most famous human artifact in the galaxy and parking it on your doorstep attracted some attention?"

That earned him annoyed glances from David and Helene both. "Obviously we accounted for some notoriety once we started making moves," Helene said crossly. "The gate was always an essential acquisition, without it we can’t penetrate far into Gestalt-monitored territory without being immediately intercepted. We anticipated that it would cause some disturbances when we acquired it." She shook her head.

"That’s not the issue," she sighed. "It’s all the rest of it. If you take Elpis and introduce the gate, it doesn’t impact much. There’s some increased attention by the Arrigh and Kita, sure, but eventually things trend back towards baseline."

"Unfortunately," David said, "that’s not how things played out. We should have reassessed when the Ysleli arrived, that was the first major divergence from our projections. We even discussed the matter, but came to the conclusion that the Ysleli were largely uninterested in the larger political scene and would be a minimal impact - an assessment that is still correct, I might add."

Jesri gave them a flat look. "But their presence on the station still changes things," she said slowly. "It spurs the guilds to action."

"Exactly," Helene confirmed, missing or ignoring Jesri’s odd tone. "The guilds used to be fragmented and risk-averse. When you changed the power dynamic by floating a bunch of money and human tech in front of them, they suddenly stopped their infighting and started taking a more active role in station management. It’s acting as a huge economic boost to the station. Between the fabricators and the gate the growth has been immense - would you believe me if I told you there were twice as many people living on Elpis as there were before you came?"

"Seriously?", asked Rhuar. "I’ve seen an increase just walking around, but I can’t believe the population just doubled. Where are they all staying? You can’t just dump that many people into the station, you need rooms, food, water - we’re a closed system, even if the station is huge there’s only so much of it that’s usable."

"The dockworkers and freight haulers have converted cargo spaces into dormitories," David said with a grimace. "They’re hiring everyone they can get to help out at the docks, their biggest labor sink is cargo transport. Food and water thankfully aren’t an issue, the hydroponics bays are more than compensating for the increased demand. Jesri’s infusion of funds into the system means that the local economy is fluid and cash-rich, so everyone is content - for the moment."

"It’s stable until one factor or another hits a ceiling," Qktk mused. "Right now it’s all growth, but boomtowns always hit a contraction eventually. Eventually there will be a lack of food, water, jobs, essential services."

"Eventually Xim Len will realize she can just make cargo robots to replace the dockworkers," Rhuar pointed out. "I know the capabilities of the fabricator, there aren’t many jobs on the station that will be safe once the large-scale assemblers are finished working on parts for the Ysleli ships." He scratched at his ear, then shook his head. "We should probably consider what happens if literally all the new arrivals to the station find themselves unemployed overnight."

Helene winced. "Not to sound callous, but that isn’t our problem. The eventual economic difficulties that Elpis may face are no doubt severe, but it’s beyond the scale of our operation. It’s the immediate exponential growth that’s concerning to us."

She steepled her fingers and leaned forward, her eyes intense. "We have been concerned about the worsening state of our operation for a while, but we had hoped that Eleanor’s research would yield results before the situation became untenable. Now that we know it isn’t safe to use her patch we can no longer be certain that we will be ready to confront the Gestalt before it discovers us. We may be facing an existential threat to the station within months, even weeks."

Anja gave the display an uninterpretable look. "What are our options?" she asked.

David shrugged. "There are really only two. We must either delay the rapid expansion of the station or accelerate our progress on the data layer of our offensive."

Jesri drummed her fingers on the table irritatedly and frowned. "The station’s economic growth is past the point of easy recovery. We could find ways to put a damper on it, but there isn’t much we could do that would be meaningful within the next couple of months."

"We could disrupt guild operations," David suggested mildly. Anja and Jesri exchanged a glance, then turned back to the display.

Helene looked askance at him, and he spread his hands in a placating gesture. "I’m not suggesting anything large-scale," he said soothingly. "We need Xim Len where she is to complete Tarl’s refit, and most of the others aren’t worth the trouble. Just removing the Caran in charge of the shipper’s association would shake things up enough."

"Manifold?", asked Rhuar with surprise. "David, don’t get me wrong, but Manifold is convinced it’s about to make a fuckton of money. You can’t pay it to abandon the guild."

"Manifold is singularly focused on optimizing its logistical network," Qktk added, nodding in agreement. "It only cares about money because it’s the designated metric for success."

David shrugged. "There are less voluntary ways we could go about it," he said casually. The room stared at him for a moment, and Qktk’s mandibles twitched spasmodically.

"For fuck’s sake, David!", Helene shouted. "We are not contemplating violence against Manifold. Some lines we don’t cross."

David shook his head. "Helene, if we don’t do something then Manifold dies anyway. So does everyone else on the station, followed by everyone in the universe."

She pursed her lips angrily. "I know the stakes. It doesn’t excuse calculated thuggery, calculated murder. We can’t let ourselves stoop that low, we’re better than this."

"No we aren’t," David laughed incredulously. "Seriously, Helene, are you going to say that in front of these two?" He gestured to Anja and Jesri, who had been sitting in stony silence throughout their exchange. "Are you going to sit there and tell them with a straight face that humanity is too noble to stoop to treachery and assassination? That we only kill combatants, never civilians? That we were always the good guys?"

Helene’s face grew uncertain as she looked through the display at the two Valkyries, then it hardened once more. "An argument like that has no constraints," she scoffed. "You can justify any manner of atrocity with that logic. If you take that route, you abandon any pretense that we are still humans and not simply rogue software rampaging through the station systems."

David’s smile grew wider, taking on a feral quality. "Oh, don’t take such a limited view of our humanity. Real, authentic humans created our friends over there, after all." His eyes bored into Helene’s unblinkingly. "Tell me, what do you think they were?", he demanded. "Were they diplomats, in three meters of power armor? Spies, with rifles larger than you? Do you think they made Valkyries by teaching them about due process and rules of engagement? Ask them!", he shouted, pointing through the screen at Anja. "Ask how many times they looked back at the human giving them their target list and said ‘we’re better than this.’"

"Enough," Anja said coolly, her eyes fixed on David’s. "This is a useless discussion. We will not be killing Manifold."

"Thank you!", said Helene indignantly. "See, David-"

"Quiet," Jesri interrupted, her voice tight. "Both of you. Is this all you have after two weeks? Brute force and moral hand-wringing?", she admonished them. "Why didn’t you reach out to us before wasting all this time?"

Helene’s mouth hung open in shock, and even David looked mildly surprised. Jesri’s hands curled into fists below the table, her lips pressed into a thin line. "There is no scenario where assassinating a guild leader will provide a sufficiently beneficial outcome. At best we would cause a mild delay while one of their lieutenants takes charge, at worst we are discovered and the entire operation is blown." She stared at David and Helene with cold eyes. "Attempting to influence socioeconomic trends with political violence is the first resort of desperate amateurs. Refusing to fully explore your options for personal moral reasons is naive. Both of your analyses were simplistic and disappointing."

Anja leaned back in her chair, taking in the stunned faces of the resistance members. "Worrying about the growth of the station is useless. The economic situation on Elpis was always going to be largely uncontrollable as a result of our actions. Even if you had been transparent about your concerns - and let me be clear, you should have been - there is little that we could have done to arrive at a different scenario."

She began ticking off items on her fingers in a clipped tone. "The arrival of the Ysleli necessitated a pacifying concession to prevent Arrigh military intervention," she explained, "and given our resources any gift of sufficient value would necessarily involve exposing station systems capable of economic disruption. Using the necessity of such a gift to secure the loyalty of Tarl and his men via the refit was tactically sound, even if it granted Xim Len an unfortunate amount of access," she said, her voice still flat. "Acquiring the gate as well may have been a step too far, but I see no viable way to proceed without it."

"It’s easy in hindsight," David retorted, his defiant tone marred somewhat by the rattled expression on his face. "Where were your objections and analysis when we proposed the mission? What stopped you from giving your dire warnings about the consequences of the gate operation during the briefing?"

"It’s… shit, it’s our fault, really," Jesri said frustratedly, her anger bleeding off. "We’re used to working with trusted handlers, and your help up to now had gained you that trust. Perhaps a bit too much, but don’t mistake that criticism for something it isn’t. Your information and assistance has been invaluable to us thus far. It’s no exaggeration to say that we owe the resistance our lives several times over. We just…"

She hesitated. "Back when we were running missions for the Navy there would often be missing context or unexplored implications in a mission briefing. The questions occurred to us, obviously, but we never said anything because it wasn’t necessary. Our handlers had inevitably considered it, evaluated it, arrived at the optimal conclusion far ahead of the briefing. It was easier to trust them, just like it was easier to trust you." Helene stared back at her, eyes flicking between the two sisters uncertainly.

"They would scold me for saying this," Jesri said ruefully, "but they were perfect. As perfect as they could be, anyway." She looked at Helene and David, a touch of sympathy coloring her expression. "But you aren’t. Hell, we’re the ones who are supposed to be going around running insurgencies, not you. You’re a handful of people that stumbled into this essentially at random. That’s not to say you haven’t done exceedingly well - improbably well, even."

"But the fact remains, you are not our handlers," Anja said sharply. "You lack the support of the military intelligence apparatus. You lack specialist groups to compile information packets on subjects of interest. You lacked our advice, if only because you did not solicit it and we did not think to offer it." Her face softened somewhat, and she leaned forward again. "You are not infallible. We should not have treated you as such. It was… sentimental of us to do so, and incorrect."

Helene cleared her throat with some difficulty and stared at the two sisters. "What are you suggesting?", she asked quietly.

"Only better coordination," Jesri replied. "We’ve missed several key points so far where we could have worked together and leveraged our individual areas of expertise to better influence the developing situation on the station. Loop us in more often, keep the lines of communication open. Let us help you." She shot David a chilly look. "We have a much broader skillset than simply checking people off a list."

"Fine. Wonderful," David said brusquely, his face red. "We’re all talking now. If we’ve given up holding back the station’s economic expansion, that leaves us with the distant second choice of accelerating our plans against the Gestalt."

Anja nodded, choosing to ignore his vaguely petulant tone. "Do we have any promising options?", she asked.

"Not even poor ones, I’m afraid," Helene said quickly, speaking before David could respond. "Our current obstacle is that our information on the Gestalt’s network architecture is limited to what the Beta instances were able to exfiltrate when they escaped. Ideally we’d have a physical sample of Gestalt hardware…" She trailed off, shrugging helplessly. "We had discarded that idea as unrealistic, for obvious reasons."

Jesri frowned. "That’s a tough ask, yeah," she agreed. "Is there something else we could use in lieu of a hardware sample? Scans, transmission logs?"

"Detailed schematics, perhaps," Helene said thoughtfully. "There’s really not a substitute, though. We can only get so far on theoreticals. We need to study methods of attacking the Gestalt’s network, and we can only test our theories if we have something to attack."

"So that leaves us with what?", Qktk asked. "Stealing a Gestalt ship? That sounds unwise."

"Try impossible," grunted David, still wearing a sullen expression. "The Gestalt doesn’t have ships. The Emissaries are like big drones, you can’t board them and steal them. We would have to disable one, which we can’t do. Even the Grand Design could barely scratch them."

Anja’s face lit up. "We may not need to fight an Emissary." She looked at Jesri, her eyes glittering. "We already defeated one, remember."

Jesri blinked. "Trelir?", she asked, twirling her hair around a finger contemplatively. "Do you think any of his body survived? There was the bomb in his office, not to mention the other Emissary blowing up half the continent."

"He was quite resilient, sister," Anja pointed out. "We only ever managed to damage him cosmetically. He did seem confident that the bomb would kill him, but he was outside of his office when it went off. His facility was also underground, which may have afforded his body some protection from the other Emissary’s attack."

"Or it could mean he’s buried under dozens of meters of rubble," Jesri pointed out. "Not that it changes much, he’s still our best bet."

"By far," Rhuar snorted. "It would be easier to dig him out of the molten fucking planetary core than to square off with an Emissary and win. The planet doesn’t shoot back."

"Helene, would that work?", Jesri asked, looking back toward the display. "Could you use Trelir’s body as your hardware sample?"

David and Helene shared a glance. "I’ll have to run it by Yetide," she said, "but I don’t see why not. David?"

He gave a grudging nod. "From your reports, Trelir seemed to have enough autonomy that he could be useful. It depends on the state of his body."

"Then it’s settled," Jesri said happily. "We’re going back to Ysl."

"What’s left of it, anyway," Qktk said glumly. "I’m not sure why you’re so pleased to be going back there."

Anja flicked his carapace lightly with her finger, grinning. "My sister just likes having a mission target," she said airily. "No need to worry, Demon Captain - I doubt we will have need of your famous services this time around."

"Oh, leave him alone," chuckled Rhuar as Qktk grumbled and slouched in his chair, looking everywhere in the room but at Anja. "Besides," he added, "I wouldn’t bet against a little combat. The Ysleli were ready to fight us before we got them blown up. Now we’re going to come back and rummage around in the ruins of their homeworld after they’ve had a few months to get good and angry? To salvage a piece of advanced technology? With fucking Tarl in our party?" Rhuar shook his head. "Some folks are going to get shot," he said sagely.

"Wait," Helene objected, "why would you even take Tarl back to Ysl? Wasn’t he exiled and stripped of his rank?" She looked to David for confirmation, received a nod in response and shook her head disbelievingly. "That would make things unnecessarily complicated. Let’s not even mention that he’s completely insane. Any member of Anja’s squad would be less trouble if you needed a local guide."

"I didn’t say we wanted to take Tarl," Rhuar snorted. "I’m just being realistic. If he hears that we’re going back to Ysl, which he absolutely fucking will - what do you think his reaction will be?"

There was a moment of silence while everyone thought.

"Ah," muttered Jesri. "Shit."

Xim Len’s wings fluttered in a nervous spasm before she caught herself and stilled them, mentally cursing her lack of composure. She never had issues showing her work to clients, but then again these weren’t her normal clients. Tarl, normally a font of endless questions, stalked silently behind her like a moody yellow thundercloud with his eye darting to and fro. He set her teeth on edge, but she had largely grown accustomed to him over the past several weeks.

Rhuar was likewise a familiar sight, having taken it upon himself to join her engineering team for the later stages of the refit. Odd, certainly, but he was prone to surprising insights and unconventional solutions that had endeared him to her engineers. Rhuar was, unlike Tarl, quite welcome in her workshop. His friends, however…

She felt her wings begin to twitch once more and willed them to be calm, glancing nervously behind her. The two humanforms walked quietly behind Rhuar as they approached her workshop, their feet making no noise whatsoever as they moved. The two sisters were creepy like few others she had met, and that was before you knew what they were. Every time Xim Len snuck a glance at them, their bright blue-on-white eyes were already staring straight back at her like they knew she was thinking about them. Creepy. And now they wanted to check her work.

Not like she wasn’t confident in her results. The requirements and specifications Jesri had provided for her were admittedly excellent, and working in the fabrication workshops was a dream fulfilled. But Jesri hadn’t handed her the key to Xlixë-Who-Chases-The-Dawn’s divine cloud-forge and told her to make a cargo crate. No, heavenly tools were to be used for heavenly pursuits. The reactors alone were so terrifyingly energetic that she had test-fired the first one by remote in a vacant dock half a kilometer away from populated sections of the station. That it worked perfectly with only a slight audible hum was somehow the most terrifying part of it. Everything in human engineering was orders of magnitude stronger, brighter, faster, deadlier than the peak of her previously-limited imagination - yet somehow still quiet, efficient, understated and elegant. She was grateful, terrified and humbled every day she came back to the workshop.

But now, mostly terrified.

The small group crossed into the maintenance bay, a barely-contained chaos of scaffolding, wires and hoses strewn around the Ysleli ship sitting as if newly hatched in the center of it all. "Here it is," she said proudly, letting her wings puff out a bit. "The Subtle Blade is the first of the refits to finish certification. We have seven more that are done, pending their own certification, but we wanted to fully clear one ship as a preview." She preened, looking back at the faces of her clients as they took in the ship. "What do you think?"

She had no fear of their reaction now that she was standing in front of it. The ship still held to the elongated and boxy 98-meter frame of a Ysleli destroyer, but the side pylons had been extended and raked back in a sleek wedge to accommodate the longer human weapon mounts. Bulky and inefficient engines flaring out in the back had been replaced by the slim taper of smaller, cleaner thrusters. The hull, previously a lumpy crosshatch of interlocking armor plating, had been redone in a lightweight battle alloy that would easily outperform the heavier metals the Ysleli had been using. It shone like smoothed charcoal in the bay lights, a pristine semi-gloss hiding immense strength and resiliency in its micro-latticed structure.

The others looked at Tarl, seeming to come to a silent consensus that the first opinion was his by right. The tall warfather stepped forward, his lone eye no longer roving but fixed on the ship. "It is…", he said, his voice trailing off dazedly. "This is a Ysleli ship?" He finally broke his gaze away from the Subtle Blade to look at her. "Xim Len, you are an artist of metal. This is the finest ship I have ever had under my command." He made an odd bow towards her, his torso bending slightly to his left. "Please accept my gratitude for your work, and for indulging me in my curiosity these past weeks."

Xim Len felt her wings tuck flat against her body in a sudden searing blast of embarrassment. Who was this, and what had he done with Tarl? "I, ah-", she stammered. "Thank you?"

Jesri smiled and stepped forward to get a better view. "It’s wonderful," she said. "You’ve really outdone yourself, Xim Len."

Her wings were vacuum-tight against her back. "Your schematics were wonderful," she mumbled. "I just followed the plans."

Tarl had walked to the near pylon and was standing with his hand pressed against the cool metal of the hull, a blissful expression on his face. "Wonderful," he murmured happily. "Yes, simply wonderful. I cannot wait to see it blooded in combat, bearing my men to glory within."

Anja cleared her throat. "May I make a suggestion?", she said sweetly. "It should not be much of a combat mission, but there may be some glory - or at least satisfaction."

Tarl tore his gaze away from the ship and looked back at her curiously.

"Ysl," Anja said, visibly enjoying the surprise on Tarl’s face. "We need to return for Trelir’s body."

Xim Len swore she could see an image in Tarl’s glossy black eye as a feral grin bared his needle-sharp teeth. Tarl, Warfather-in-Exile, captaining his sleek and deadly flagship over the battered skies of Ysl - the hero returned, ascendent. She turned to Jesri as Tarl began to laugh softly, his eye gazing blankly ahead.

"You realize this is going to make him even more… him, don’t you?", she whispered to Jesri. The humanform woman grinned back at her with a flash of her alarmingly white teeth. Xim Len successfully avoided flinching at the sight, feeling a pang of guilt at the impulse to flee. Jesri had been nothing but kind to her, after all. It wasn’t her fault that she was so profoundly... disconcerting.

"I’m halfway looking forward to it," Jesri confessed. "It was either this or he would have found out anyway and gone on his own."

Xim Len looked back at the cackling Ysleli. "Fair," she acknowledged. "I just hope they’re ready for him."

Anja walked over with a faint smile. "They’ve already had their planet half-destroyed," she murmured. "What more could-"

"No, no no no no-", Jesri said quickly, her eyes opening wide.

"-he possibly do?", Anja concluded, her smile growing larger.

Jesri sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose while Xim Len looked on in bewilderment. She supposed it was a humanform thing.

Part 30

There was cold and dark, dust and ash. The dust had come all at once, roiling high over the fields to blot out the sun and cloak the valley in shadow. The townfathers had held a meeting then, clustering in their long hall as the sky darkened at midday, but as the dust began to sink toward the town they could find no answers. The few callboxes installed in richer homes and community buildings returned only hissing static or deep, ominous silence. As the dust was joined days later by ash, light and grey amid the choking clouds, they heard no word from Baron Risal or his constables.

The electricity failed on the third morning, the lines falling dead with no explanation. The water turned black with ash and grit before it stopped flowing at all. The old fathers raised their voices in warning; they had lived through the last succession wars, before Sitrl took the throne. They knew what happened to small towns like theirs when the yoke of order slipped from the land’s neck. Rusted blades and rifles found their way into the dim candlelight, and children stared as their sires took up arms and stood grim-faced against the sooty windows.

They were resolute against the first unkempt deserters that roared into town on their stolen half-tracks, thick treads carving canyons into the layers of grey ash and dirt that hid all but the tallest grasses. Their skin was mottled grey with soot, their faces and vehicles wrapped in heavy cloth to ward against the ashfall. They were grim, serious men, and they spoke little as they spilled the dark blood of the village fathers into the drifts.

None bothered to slaughter the children, rape the village mothers, pillage the finery hidden in generations-old keepsafes within the houses. The ash men killed only those that stopped them from collecting the town’s small stores of food and water before they disappeared into the murky twilight. The rest, they knew, would die in their own time.

The second raid found thin, desperate villagers staring with hungry eyes, those too weak to flee but too strong to have died - yet. Their leader urged his men on with barely a backwards glance.

The third raid saw no more than ash, piled to the tops of the low houses and sweeping over eaves in drifts.

The village slept in a stoic repose under the smothering grey chill. Every so often the silence would be shattered as a house collapsed under the weight of the icy black mass atop it. One by one the beams yielded to the pressure, cracking and splintering until finally the ash flowed in to embrace the frozen bodies of the villagers. A fountain of cold cinders billowed upward from each house as the air rushed out in a last breath, eventually settling back down over the ruins as it joined the implacable ashfall.

Snow fell ink-dark and heavy atop the buried landscape. Days passed, dim echoes of the sun filtering down to sparkle from the obsidian facets of snowflakes. The stillness grew all-encompassing, wrapping itself in cold tendrils around the vague outlines of what were once buildings and roads sleeping beneath their deadly blanket. It was broken only briefly by the false sun of a ship roaring overhead, evoking hopeful sparkles from the audience of filthy snowdrifts below.

But then it passed on to settle down somewhere far over the horizon. The thunder from its engine faded, buried under the suffocating ice as the silence returned to feast on the land of Ysl.

Tarl’s boisterous mood had been nearly insufferable on the short hop from Elpis to Ysl, sped along by a boost from the gate that sent them barrelling through hyperspace faster than even the Grand Design would have travelled. But for the shortened travel time, Jesri thought she might have thrown him out the hatch. Even Tarl’s own officers were looking a bit overwhelmed by his energy near the later parts of the journey.

A full thirty minutes before they arrived he had come to the bridge of the Subtle Blade in a whirlwind of anticipation, driving Rhuar nearly insane with his repetitive claw-tapping on the armrest of the captain’s chair - itself an object of much commentary by Tarl. Jesri was confused as to why a relatively unremarkable chair warranted so much attention until she remembered that this was likely the only Ysleli-make vessel with artificial gravity. Ysleli captains worked while standing, Ysleli royalty addressed their troops while seated.

Rhuar guided them out of the black depths of hyperspace with a deft touch, the ship’s upgraded hyperdrive whisper-quiet on the exit. It was still the loudest noise on the bridge as Ysl splashed across their main viewscreen.

Gone were the cloud-dappled oceans and verdant continents from their last visit. Ysl was an opaque grey-brown morass, its features hidden behind a thick cloak of dust and ash drifting in dirty bands through the atmosphere.

A minute stretched by while they stared at the ruined planet. No ships challenged them, no customs officials drawled out bored-sounding warnings about the authority of the dead king, not a mote of light stirred around the muddy orb.

"Report," Tarl rasped quietly, his eyes not leaving the viewer. The Ysleli bridge crew stood transfixed as they took in the sight of their home.

"No ship activity," Rhuar said solemnly. "Hard to get solid readings from the surface, the atmosphere is saturated with large particulates all the way up the air column." He frowned, cocking his head to the side as he sorted through feeds. "Atmosphere is breathable, although I wouldn’t recommend it. Heavy particulates, and highly elevated levels of sulfur dioxide. Very cold."

Tarl’s hands gripped tightly on the armrests of his chair, talons puncturing the upholstery. "I…", he said softly, trailing off before his sentence began. He sat staring at the viewscreen for another long minute before turning to Anja and Jesri.

"How could this be?", he grated, a plaintive note lurking at the edges of his voice. "The damage from the blast was devastating, but this…" He looked at the viewscreen again and fell to silence. "When I left the king had died, but the government had not fallen. The surviving barons were holding an emergency council, the carabineers were conducting relief operations." His hands opened and closed spasmodically, twitching and grasping as his voice rose in pitch and volume. "We were rebuilding!", he bellowed.

"The atmosphere can take some time to circulate dust clouds," Anja said quietly. "If an impact is especially energetic it takes days for the dust to penetrate back down into the lower layers of the atmosphere." Tarl turned to glare silently at her, his face unreadable. "Volcanic activity is also common with larger impacts," Anja continued, her voice unperturbed by his hostile stare. "I would guess that the sulfur dioxide and much of the current ash is actually from secondary volcanic eruptions that occurred in the weeks after the attack."

"Nonsense, you don’t know what you’re talking about," Tarl snapped. "Ysl has no volcanoes. We have nothing, nothing-" He looked back at the viewer and stared, his eye drinking in the sight of the swirling clouds. A low growl built deep in his chest, rising in volume as his muscles tensed. Some of the Ysleli officers looked at each other with alarm and backed away, self-preservation overriding their horror.

"You need to calm down, Tarl," Anja said levelly. "We have to-"

"I NEED?", he roared, his teeth fully bared in a snarl as he rounded on her with talons splayed wide. "Tell me again what I need!" He stopped himself bare inches from Anja’s face, the force of his seething breath gently ruffling her hair.

Jesri’s hand drifted to rest on her sidearm, but Anja stood stock-still in the heat of his gaze and met it with a sad look. "Tarl," she said softly. "Look at it. Accept what you see." Another growl rose in his chest, but Anja held eye contact without flinching.

Tarl leaned in close to her, teeth inches from her face. "Ysl is strong," he hissed. "Its people are strong, we survived the attack, that is what I saw! Something like this couldn’t - can’t," he raved, his words slipping into incoherent growls.

"Denial is unwise," Anja replied, her voice neutral and her eyes oddly blank. "The Ysl in front of you or the one in your head? I would advise that you choose while there is a choice left to make."

Tarl pulled back and stood breathing raggedly, then his face slackened and he lowered his hands. "I am calm," he said dully. "But I do not accept… this. Ysl must not-", he choked, his voice cutting off in a strangled growl. His hands worked fruitlessly at his sides, then balled into fists. "I do not accept this," he repeated firmly. "We must land on the planet, verify the conditions on the surface."

Jesri let out her breath, her hand dropping from her weapon. "I agree," she said, looking meaningfully over at Rhuar. Mercifully, he took the hint without much prompting and set a course to enter the turbulent atmosphere of the planet. A low roar of rushing wind signaled their entry, heated plasma and sparking dust enveloping the large ship as it hit the first rarified wisps of atmosphere.

The entry was rough, marred by sudden shocks as the ship ploughed through especially dense clouds of particulates. Before they had descended into the lower atmosphere the sky was already obscured, milky brown and growing steadily darker as they descended. Soon only murky twilight peered through the viewports, cast back occasionally by bolts of arcing static electricity raised by the ship’s rough passage through the dust.

It was difficult to say when they first saw the ground, black-on-black-on-charcoal blending into an indistinct smudge outside. The Ysleli crew stared out of the viewports solemnly as they descended, not talking or daring to talk as they passed over what was once green highlands and sprawling farms.

After several long minutes of descent, Rhuar pulled them up short and lowered the huge ship slowly, the landing gear sinking deep, deep into the snow before coming to rest on a rock-hard concretion of icy ash. Jesri peered into the gloom outside the ship, remembering the crisp air and the smell of the trees from their last visit months ago.

"How close are we to the facility?", she asked.

Rhuar shook his head. "Really hard to tell," he admitted. "The computer did the best it could based on dead reckoning and the general shape of the land, but we could be up to ten kilometers off from the facility entrance. There’s just nothing out there to use as a landmark, and the sensors can’t see for shit in all this dust."

"What’s our range on the sensors?", Jesri asked. "Can we do a search pattern?"

"Um," Rhuar said, scratching himself behind one ear. "I mean, we could. The ship scanners are designed for vacuum use, so they weren’t optimized for the sort of large particle scattering we’d be getting here. I’d have to fly super fucking low, and with the visibility and conditions..." He shook his head. "We could, but I wouldn’t recommend it."

"Okay," she said with a grimace. "Let’s hope we’re on the near end of those error bars. Searching in this muck without the ship is going to be rough." She caught Anja’s eye and beckoned her over. "Ten click search field," she grumbled. "Any ideas?"

Anja bit her lip and thought. "I think we have enough handheld scanners for teams of four."

"Will the scanners penetrate the ash?", Jesri asked. "We don’t know how deep it is."

"Should be fine," Anja reassured her. "The detail scans will be poor, but the base was off by itself and these scanners were designed specifically to help ground crews locate the ferrous elements in hidden bunkers. That facility should be the only big concentration of refined iron or steel in the area."

Anja glanced over at Tarl, who was staring outside with a brooding expression. "I can handle directing my squads solo for the first shifts," she said. "Keep an eye on him."

"Got it," Jesri confirmed. "Good luck."

Anja flipped her a casual salute and walked off the bridge, heading back to the ship’s small barracks. Jesri returned the gesture, then went to stand by Rhuar near the command dais.

"Keep her warmed up," she said quietly, receiving a questioning look from Rhuar in response. "It looks bleak out there," she explained. "I don’t think we’ll be finding anyone alive. If we do, though, they’ll want out."

"You want to prep for rescue?", Rhuar asked. "We don’t have a lot of space on this bucket."

"No," she said grimly. "That’s not why we’re here, and they won’t like hearing it."

"Ah," Rhuar said mildly, giving her a reproachful look. "Seems a bit harsh."

Jesri nodded, looking over to where Tarl stood gazing out the viewport.. "One of the officers I used to work with liked to say that the fire of civilization requires food to burn. When disaster or war stops the supply of food, the fire goes out." She looked back to Rhuar, her eyes serious. "If anyone is still alive out there, they’ve killed to stay that way. This is worse than a war zone, Rhuar. War has rules."

He blinked, taken aback by her sudden shift in tone. "Right," he said. "Keep her ready to go, yessir."

She ruffled the fur on his head, making him scowl. "Just be prepared. It’s probably not going to be an issue, Anja’s squad is scarier than anything we’re likely to find out there," she said, looking out the viewport into the opaque charcoal twilight. "Probably."

Anja stomped her foot a few times to pack down the snow before shifting her other foot farther up the cornice. Walking in the ashfall was an exercise in patience and caution, at least if done safely. The Ysleli squads had taken her stern warnings lightly at first, but after Neryn fell screaming into a hidden air pocket beneath the snow and was hauled up dyed soot-black from head to scaly toes - well, they took her more seriously after that, placing their feet with caution and testing the snow ahead with long struts they had repurposed from the Subtle Blade’s maintenance stores.

It made for slow progress, but it was preferable to suffocation below the ash. The snow was unusually heavy, the infusion of particulates giving it a heft and grainy fluidity that reminded Anja of unset concrete. She grimaced and brushed away the crusts of dirty ice from her respirator. No matter what Tarl may think of the Ysleli and their inherent hardiness, Ysl was dying. Even if individuals managed to survive until the dust and sulfur dioxide cleared from the atmosphere they would find themselves stewards of bare dirt and rock. Biospheres were hardy things, but even they had their limits.

Anja reached the extent of her tether and paused in her ascent, allowing the rest of Neryn’s squad to catch up with her. They were tied together in a climbing line to guard against falls, forcing the group to move at the speed of the slowest member. She tapped her ear, shouting into the respirator’s comm pickup over the howling winds. "Tiln, Anja!", she yelled. "Position check!"

"Go for Tiln!", came the crackling reply, buzzing overloud in her ear but still difficult to pick out against the storm. "Two kilometers southwest, no signal!"

She clicked a confirmation back to Tiln, then repeated the check for the other four groups in her squad. Hers was the farthest out at nearly three kilometers from the Subtle Blade so far. None of them had found traces of the facility. She unlimbered her handheld scanner and swept it across the ground, wiping the tiny screen clear with a gloved thumb. Nothing. She cursed and snuck a sip of tepid water from the mouthpiece in her respirator.

Feeling some slack in her tether, she resumed her plodding trek up the side of the low ridge. Ice clung to her in crackling sheets that formed and fell as she forged her way into the wastes. Too soon, she was forced to stop again. Position check. Gear check. Scan. Hydrate. Wait for the group, keep moving forward.

The hours blurred together, the cold seeping into the seams between the insulated pads and heating filaments of her gear. Her respirator filter became clogged, forcing her to stop and exchange it with one of her spares. She inhaled a stray breath of unfiltered air while she was swapping the cartridge and spent the next minute coughing fitfully. The acrid stink of the ash lingered in her nose and throat for longer still.

Time to stop. Position check. Gear check. Scan. Hydrate. Wait. The land curved up to either side of her, vanishing into the blackness and swirling snow. They adjusted their course to sweep across the small valley in a languid serpentine, pausing to scan regularly. At seven kilometers out from the ship Anja was starting to feel the subtle tickle of familiarity when she looked at the shrouded terrain around her.

Time to stop. Position check. Gear check. Scan - and a weak signal bounced back, indicating a large mass of metal underneath the snow. She felt a flash of excitement and relief, followed closely by caution. This was the first return they had found so far, but she needed more data before she could call in a position. This could be a vehicle, farm equipment… Even a large ore deposit, albeit a fairly pure one.

She shouted for her squad to fan out on lengthened tethers and check for disturbances in the snow that could indicate structures. Anja stayed in place to run another set of scans, this time a slow, high-powered sweep. The smeared screen cleared, then began to fill slowly with fuzzy wireframe sketches of cuboid shapes - crates, building frames, doorways.

"Hah!", Anja shouted, letting the scanner swing from its belt tether and pressing a hand to her ear. "This is Anja, all other teams return to the ship," she called out. "The base is at my position."

"Copy that," Jesri transmitted, seeing the ship’s short-range sensors light up with a ping as Anja keyed her transponder to full power. "We have your location, we’ll head out as soon as we get the other teams back in." She pushed back from her duty station and sprang to her feet, stretching to clear away the tension accrued from long hours of sitting immobile.

"Rhuar," she called out, "I’m going to get my haz gear together. Prep for dustoff in about an hour, the other teams should be able to make it back by then." He nodded, and Jesri turned to exit the bridge only to stop short as she caught sight of Tarl still gazing forlornly out the viewport. She hesitated, then walked over to stand beside him.

"Don’t know if you heard us talking," she said conversationally, "but we found the base. I’m about to go change into environment gear. Did you want to come on the retrieval crew?"

Tarl slowly turned his head to look at her, his face blank and disaffected. "Why?", he asked quietly. "Am I necessary?"

Jesri blinked, thrown off by his odd manner. "Ah, no," she said. "You don’t have to go, but you’re welcome to."

He didn’t respond, staring at her for a few seconds more before turning his head to gaze out the window again. Jesri waited for his response even then, but when none came she shook her head and walked off the bridge towards the barracks.

Across the bridge, Qktk walked up to stand next to Rhuar, most of his eyes looking over at where Tarl stood watching the dark snow fall. "I’m a little worried about him," Qktk said softly.

Rhuar raised his head from his console and looked at Qktk askance. "You’re worried about Tarl?", he asked incredulously.

"Look at him," Qktk insisted. "He was practically bouncing around the bridge on the way over, but now he’s just… standing there. Out of all the Ysleli on board, he’s taking this the hardest."

"To be fair," Rhuar said, "he’s having a pretty fucking bad day. Once we get out of here and get his mind back on fighting the Gestalt he’ll perk up. Tarl doesn’t seem like the type to dwell on things. He was fine after we blew up his fleet and he was fine after he got exiled, he’ll be fine now."

"Was he fine?", Qktk asked. "There’s only so many supports you can knock away before things fall over. It would be one thing if all he wanted was to fight, but I credit him with a little more depth than that. What if he wanted to fight for Ysl, or even just return to his people someday? Where does that leave him?"

Rhuar snorted. "Staring out a window, I guess. Why do you care so much about how he feels? His entire career has just been killing people - the enemy, his own officers, whoever. Outside of that he’s a black box, nobody knows anything else about him. I can’t summon up a lot of sympathy for a guy like that when he finally realizes death is terrible."

"You know," Qktk said wryly, "we may have killed as many people as he ever did. More, even."

Rhuar blinked. "Okay, yeah, but that was just the one time. It was different."

"Different from what?", Qktk asked. "Do you know the circumstances behind all of Tarl’s battles? Rhuar, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that some Ysleli see us the same way you described Tarl just now." He hesitated, his mandibles clattering a bit. "Well, maybe not you," he added. "Somehow I got all the credit for that little episode."

"Well, yeah, but they love you for it, just like they love him," Rhuar protested. "Captain, the Ysleli are not like most other people. They think killing your enemies in glorious battle is pretty much the best thing ever. When they talk about the Demon of Ysl they get all happy and excited, you’re like a celebrity to them."

"I suppose," Qktk allowed, shifting his weight uncomfortably. "All the same, it’s never been one of my great ambitions to be known as a mass murderer. It’s not just the Ysleli who hear those stories, and some of the people I meet…" He shuddered, making a light clattering noise. "I’d rather be known for trading well, or helping people, or whatever we end up doing against the Gestalt," he said mournfully. "Anything else, really, just as long as people don’t think I’m some vicious killer."

Rhuar tilted his head, somewhat taken aback by the sorrowful note in Qktk’s voice. "Captain, it’s not-"

He was cut off as the console lit up with an incoming transmission. "Contact!", Anja’s voice yelled, the clap of gunfire echoing in staticky bursts over the roar of the wind. "The whole place is full of Ysleli," she shouted, "We need backup as soon as you get all the teams on board."

"We copy," Rhuar replied back, setting down in his chair and turning his full attention to the console. "You going to be okay until we get there?"

"Oh sure, everything is great," Anja shouted back, punctuating her statement with a burst of rifle fire. "Nobody can hit anything in this storm and these guys shoot like civilians. No way we can get in the base without backup, though. We can keep them bottled up for a while, just get here as soon as you can. Oh, and have Tarl-" Anja’s voice cut off as another burst of gunfire drowned out the middle of her sentence. "-talk them down a bit."

"Ah, copy?" Rhuar said tentatively. "I’ll let everyone know."

"Super," Anja yelled back. "Give me a ping when the ship is en route." Another burst of sustained rifle fire filled the channel before it cut to silence.

"Nothing’s ever easy," Rhuar groaned, clambering out of his chair stiffly. "Captain, can you go track down Jesri and let her know?"

Qktk nodded and scuttled aft, exiting the bridge towards the barracks. Rhuar rolled his neck, then turned to face the side windows. "Hey, Tarl!", he shouted.

Tarl turned slowly to look at him, his expression blank.

"Time to gear up, buddy," Rhuar said with a grin. "Turns out you’re necessary after all."

"What has happened?", Tarl asked softly.

"Ah, Anja ran into a bunch of Ysleli holed up in the base," Rhuar said, turning for a moment to gesture back to the console. "She said they-"

Rhuar stopped speaking abruptly. Tarl had already left the bridge.

Part 31

Bullets sent puffs of ash and ice flying as they impacted around Anja’s position, forcing her to duck back down into her impromptu foxhole. With a wordless grunt of frustration, she popped her rifle up and fired blindly in the general direction of the base entrance. The rest of Neryn’s squad joined in, and for a moment they had respite from the incessant barrage.

Then it started again.

"Ugh," Anja said, ducking back down and glancing at the Ysleli currently sharing her foxhole. "Neryn, remind me when we get back to requisition some stun grenades from Xim Len’s folks."

"You have a perfect memory, sir," Neryn said, eyes still trained towards their assailants. He poked his head up and fired a triple-shot burst before ducking down again, a poorly-aimed volley of return fire hitting significantly to his left.

"Obviously," Anja groused, rising up to fire her own barrage. "So you had best remind me about the grenades, since I will remember having asked you to do so."

"Sir, I…" Neryn slumped against the side of the foxhole. "Noted, sir," he said resignedly.

"Good man," Anja said with a grin. "Now get ready, they look like they might push at us again. Another round of fire in three, two-" She broke off, raising her hand to her ear. Neryn did the same, listening to the scratchy communicator before casting a puzzled look in Anja’s direction.

"Sir," he asked, "I think the translator is acting up. When Captain Jesri says ‘shock and awe’, does it mean-"

The rest of his question was drowned out in an immense roar of noise as the Subtle Blade shot into view overhead, the plume from its engines kicking up yet more dust and ash in the no-man’s-land between their position and the base. The ship settled down low in the ashfall, dirty plumes from the drifts cutting the visibility to almost nil and coating everything with a thick layer of black soot.

Neryn swiped a hand across his face to clear his goggles, his hearing returning enough for him to hear Anja’s manic laughter as she cheered the ship’s descent.

"Come on, Neryn!", she called out, vaulting the rim of the foxhole in a single spry jump. "Time to move!"

He safed his rifle and clambered out of the hole, dusting himself off inasmuch as anyone could under the circumstances. Visibility was still terrible, although the relative quiet told him that the ship had finished landing. The rest of his squad had joined them, forming up now that the immediate threat had passed. "Sounds like they’ve stopped shooting," he observed. "Is Captain Jesri going to try and talk with them?"

"Nah," Anja said, her face still locked into a contagious grin under her respirator. "I asked Tarl to do it."

Neryn blinked, flipping his rifle’s safety off. "The warfather, sir? Are you sure-"

"TARL ADDRESSES YOU," boomed the ship’s external speakers, the sound causing another cloud of dust to briefly puff upward from the ground. "SEND YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO SPEAK."

The squad traded dazed glances, their hearing once again overwhelmed by the noise. Neryn felt Anja clap him on the shoulder roughly. "See?", she shouted in his ear, her voice muffled. "Natural diplomat! Come on, I want to be there when they start." She pointed towards the ship, where the clearing dust had parted to show three cloth-shrouded figures advancing slowly from the direction of the base entrance.

With a sigh, Neryn began to jog towards the ship. No matter how much he learned, he still felt like he was in over his head.

It took some time for the three Ysleli from the base to reach the ship against the driving wind carrying its flurries of snow and ash. They had no respirators, making do with swatches of thick, dirty cloth wrapped around their faces. Their unprotected eyes squinted suspiciously at the contingent standing by the ship hatch. Jesri and Anja hung back, hidden behind the Ysleli soldiers - they didn’t want to complicate the discussion with explanations of who and what they were.

The three representatives stopped several meters from the group in a wary huddle. Now that they were closer, Jesri could make out some distinguishing features amid the featureless swaddling rags. One moved with the weight of age, walking with a stoop and placing his feet as if every step pained him. Another stood straight-backed and defiant, glaring at Tarl with burning eyes. The third was shorter and thinner than the other two but walked with purpose, shoulders squared and head held high beneath a voluminous and concealing cowl.

There was a thick tension as the two groups stared at each other through the slowly settling dust. The elderly Ysleli spoke first with a thin, high voice roughened by the ash and stinging air.

"So it is the warfather after all," he said grimly. "Have you come to finish what your spearbrothers began?"

Tarl gave him a bemused look, tilting his head. "Elder father," he said, "I was sent away by the baronial council some time ago. My spearbrothers and I only learned what had become of Ysl when we returned today."

The old man closed his eyes, his face tight behind his ragged wrappings. "It is all of Ysl, then, and not just Risal? Will there be no aid from Sitrl, long life and glory to the king?"

"Sitrl is dead," Tarl replied, his hands balling into fists. "He was killed in the same attack that caused this cataclysm, by the enemy the barons were too blood-shy to fight." His voice turned rough with anger at the mention of the barons and their reticence. "Had he lived, things may have been different."

His words sent a pang of grief over the old man’s face, but the taller, younger Ysleli stepped forward before he could respond. "So you claim no knowledge of the thefts and murders?", he spat, his tone harsher than the air alone could account for. "All spearbrothers serve the warfather. Did you not order them to steal our food, to kill us if we protected our lives?"

Tarl’s face darkened at the man’s tone. "You overstep," he rumbled dangerously. "My men are not oathbreakers, and I…" He seemed to deflate somewhat, although his anger still seethed behind his eye. "I am not the warfather. Without Sitrl to keep them in check the barons demanded my title and barred me from Ysl. Those few who saw it as an injustice followed me into exile, and they are the only ones I name spearbrother."

"How convenient," the young man shot back, taking a step towards Tarl, "that you were indisposed while your former brothers butchered us over scraps of food and left the rest to starve and die. Do you value your oath to serve that little, or are you just a co-"

Tarl was already striding towards the man with claws splayed wide as he prepared to shout the fatal insult, but the third Ysleli struck the young man across the face with a vicious backhand before he could close the distance.

"Enough," hissed a voice from within the cowl, high and melodious despite the tension it carried. Its owner pushed the hood back, revealing a thin face with burnished orange-gold scales and deep-set black eyes. "Please forgive the child his impudence, warfather. He will not speak further."

Tarl’s eye widened and a murmur went up from the Ysleli troops. "Ah, hmm," he muttered, quickly turning back to the stooped elder. "Elder father," he said quietly, "perhaps introductions are in order?"

"Oh, yes, I’ve neglected the formalities," the old man tsked, shaking his head. "I do apologize. My name is Erlir. The brainless one on the ground is my eldest’s eldest, Ralik. The beautiful one all of your men are staring at so shamelessly is Leral, his sister."

Several mundane items in the vicinity became objects of fascinated study for the soldiers. Jesri shook her head in amusement; some things were the same everywhere. Leral gave Tarl an intricate semi-bow, her head tilting sideways to expose the pale golden scales of her throat.

Tarl acknowledged her greeting with a slight inclination of his own head, then turned back to Erlir without acknowledging Ralik in the least. "You have my thanks for the introductions, Father Erlir. Will you enter my ship, so that we may speak more comfortably?"

Erlir bobbed his head in acceptance. "I will take what comfort remains, given the situation," he replied dryly. At a sharp gesture from Tarl, two of Anja’s squad rushed forward to escort Erlir into the airlock, followed closely by Leral and an abashed, partially dazed Ralik.

Anja walked over to stand beside Jesri, a smirk on her face. "My boys are growing up," she whispered in mock lamentation. "I give it one day before I have to stop a fight over Leral."

"No bet," Jesri muttered back. "I’m going to go inside and listen to the negotiations. You coming?"

"Nah," Anja replied. "The ones still in the base may get nervous with Erlir and the others out of sight. We should keep a force posted and ready in case they decide to investigate on their own initiative."

"Good thought," Jesri agreed. She clapped Anja on the shoulder, then turned to follow Tarl back into the ship. The soldiers around the ramp were still animatedly discussing Leral in hushed voices, their faces bright with excitement under their respirators. It occurred to Jesri that she really didn’t know much about Ysleli civilian social structure, something she resolved to fix if she could corner one of Anja’s squad alone. Somehow she doubted that Leral’s presence was going to be a calming, rational influence on the Ysleli.

"Why have you come?"

Erlir’s question hung over the table for a second before Tarl responded. Jesri could see the visitors from the base tense up when he spoke, trepidatious and wary despite their relatively amicable conversation earlier.

"The base you occupy is important," Tarl explained. "It was formerly run by Trelir, a minister to Sitrl who was revealed as a traitor shortly before the attack on Ysl. It is because of him that Ysl was attacked. We believe there is something in this base which may aid us in our fight against his master."

Erlir shot Tarl a disappointed glance, then shook his head. "Soldiers. Can you look outside and tell me Ysl needs more fighting? If this was the work of the ones you fight against, warfather, then I say you have already lost. Spare us from more of your efforts."

A ripple of anger crossed Tarl’s face, although he managed to keep it uncharacteristically far from his voice when he replied. "Elder father, Ysl was attacked without provocation. This enemy will attempt further harm to Ysl whether I fight it or not. Defending oneself is not seeking conflict."

"Ah, but isn’t it odd," Erlir said wryly, "that the more vigorously we defend ourselves, the more people seem to be convinced we’re worth fighting. We did not have sentries posted out of mere prudence, and you are not the first to come here seeking entry."

"We are not bandits," Tarl rumbled darkly. "I am not your enemy, elder father."

Erlir peered across the table owlishly. "Would you be, warfather, if I told you to leave empty-handed?"

Tarl returned his gaze silently for a few uncomfortable seconds, then surprised Jesri by baring his teeth and laughing quietly. "What a low opinion you have of me," he chuckled, closing his eye briefly. "An assessment purchased dearly from my former spearbrothers, no doubt, so I cannot say it is undeserved. Do you know the Oath of the Spear, elder father?"

"Vaguely," Erlir sniffed. "Although of late I seem to remember it more than those who swore it."

Tarl winced at the barb, then shook his head. "I pledge my spear to the king and forswear its use save by his word," he recited. "It’s an old thing, and I doubt most of the spearbrothers give it the thought it merits. Particularly the second part, since it is by far the harder half to observe."

"And now that there is no king, have you forsworn your spear or or your oath?", Erlir asked. "It would seem you must do one or the other."

"Never my oath," Tarl answered immediately. "But as with all things, there must be allowance for circumstances. Kings change, or die, and the oath continues. We may not receive commands, but for most things we know how a king would command. In the absence of a king, we are sworn to the king that should be."

"Preposterous," Erlir scoffed. "You may hide behind a vacant title, but that simply excuses you to do as you wish. If the soldiers that slaughtered our kin and stole food from our childrens’ bellies say the ‘king that should be’ wishes his armies to be fed at all costs, who could say otherwise? Who holds such petty kings accountable?"

"Me," Tarl said grimly. "I have never aspired to anything more than war, elder father, but what we are faced with now is war in its farthest extreme. We have no latitude for anarchy. Even unified and striving to our utmost, we will likely fail and perish."

"And yet you insist this confrontation is necessary?", Erlir asked. "Have you considered that the problem may merit more than a warrior’s solution?"

"This enemy is not amenable to other solutions." He pointed a talon at Jesri, still staring at Erlir. "Do you see her?", he asked. "She and her sister are the last of a far mightier people than ours. Those two alone killed every soldier you’ve found dead in that base." The three representatives looked warily over at Jesri, who smiled at them.

"Our enemy destroyed their entire civilization across thousands of stars, all in an instant," Tarl growled. "It has reduced Ysl to ruins. Left unchecked it will do the same to every civilization. I do not credit myself with the judgment necessary to be king, but even a simple warrior can see what our path must be."

Leral crossed her arms, glaring at Tarl. "If this enemy is as great as you say, what can you hope to do?"

"We came here to answer that question," Tarl replied. "Will you let us enter the base?"

Erlir smiled sadly. "Was it ever truly a request?", he asked. Tarl opened his mouth to reply, but Erlir waved his objections away. "I don’t doubt your sincerity," he said. "I believe you believe what you are saying, and that you will be steadfast in the fulfillment of your oath. That does little to assure me of your intentions, however. If anything, it makes you more dangerous."

"I will consent to letting you retrieve what you seek," Erlir said with resigned finality, "not because I fear being your enemy if I refuse, but because I believe you would kill even a friend who stood in your path. And, furthermore," he said with a thin smile, "I plan to exact a price. We require food, medicine and breathing filters if we are to give you this thing."

Tarl regarded Erlir in stony silence for a few long moments before nodding, his face inscrutable. "Acceptable," he said. "It will take some time to arrange shipment, but we have some modest supplies on the ship. I will provide these at once if you permit my men to begin searching the base. I understand there may have been some structural damage, so that process may take some time and I would like to start it immediately."

"No," Leral said suddenly. "No soldiers in the base."

Tarl bristled, turning a baleful eye on her. "I hope you are not implying my men would engage in treachery."

She blanched at the menace in his tone, but quickly recovered to stare back at Tarl defiantly. "Most of those who made it to the base are townmothers and their children," she said, her voice a low snarl of anger. "Many of them fled when the soldiers killed the men of their villages. They were the lucky ones. For some others, the soldiers came back and took them to their camp," she spat. "I will not make them suffer a spearbrother in their home again."

An uncomfortable silence gripped the room as Tarl contemplated her words.

"Send me," Jesri said. "My sister, as well. Lend me some of your guards to help. The rest of our squad will take their place on the perimeter, outside the base."

Erlir and Leral shared a glance, and Leral nodded slightly. "We agree," Erlir said, moving creakily toward the door. Leral rushed to lend him her arm, and he straightened up gratefully. "You and your sister will come back to the perimeter with us," he said, "and we will tell the guards there not to shoot the rest when they follow."

Jesri nodded back. "Give me a bit to prepare, I’ll meet you in front of the ship." She walked over to Tarl as the representatives left, Leral supporting Erlir dotingly and Ralik moping along behind.

Tarl looked down at Jesri as she walked up. "These are not the sort of negotiations I am accustomed to," he remarked.

"You did fine," Jesri replied. "They’re letting us in, and all they want is the food and medicine I suspect you were going to offer anyway."

"If only they had such a warm view of my intentions," Tarl remarked wryly. "They seemed to think everything I said was a threat."

"Well, yeah, you walked up to a bunch of traumatized refugees and started thundering on about a warrior’s duty and invincible enemies," Jesri shot back. "It was a good effort, Tarl, but you can’t talk to refugees the same way you talk to soldiers, even beaten soldiers. They’ve spent the last several months being chased from their homes, hiding in a hole in the ground from roving gangs. They were utterly powerless, now they’ve scraped together what little they could and made a safe place - not to thrive, but to hide in terror."

"I don’t understand," Tarl groused. "I was polite, I requested rather than demanded, I held my tongue even when they insulted me."

"Well, except for when you tried to kill Ralik," Jesri pointed out.

Tarl glared at her. "Even they recognized the boy had gone too far!", he objected.

She shook her head. "It doesn’t matter, only the power dynamic is important. Even if you were unfailingly polite and respectful, they still know that you could easily take the base from them if you felt like it. That makes everything you say a threat. That’s why they can’t let your men in, and that’s why they won’t let Anja and I in for free. They’re not placing themselves at the mercy of soldiers again."

"Hmm," Tarl murmured contemplatively. "Perhaps. I would rather they not question my motives at every turn, though. It’s irritating."

"They can’t trust you right now," Jesri explained. "Or anyone, for that matter. As long as they remember the feeling of strangers deciding whether they live or die, they won’t risk it." Her eyes grew distant for a second. "There’s more sides to war than you can see from the top," she said. "It’s not strategy and logistics and glorious battle. It’s seeing your child die from a festering gut shot over the course of a week while you sell your body to buy medicine. It’s seeing your neighbor’s family murdered at the whim of a drunken soldier and living with the guilt of feeling happy that you were spared. It’s not being spared next week."

"I thought war was your purpose," Tarl objected, looking disturbed. "You fight better than any ten of my men. It surprises me that you could be so skilled at combat and still find it so distasteful."

"I have to, Tarl," Jesri replied. "You’re not wrong, war is my purpose. Not fighting, but war, and that requires an unflinching acceptance of what war means."

"I’m not ignorant of war’s cost," Tarl said thornily. "But I am an experienced warrior, as are you. You must know that there is a certain allowance to be made for what is necessary, even if it is unpleasant. The alternative is pacifism, which is a naive ideal."

Jesri nodded. "Humanity faced the same dilemma and rejected both options," she said. "We chose a third way. Neither pacifism nor rationalization, but mindfulness."

"How do you mean?", Tarl asked curiously.

"If you had to design the perfect soldier, Tarl, what attributes would you give him?", Jesri asked. "More than just strength and skill. Humor me and give it some thought."

Tarl did so, mulling the question for a moment. "I would make him brave, implacable, iron-willed," he answered. "One that would not recoil from the sight of war."

"You think they didn’t try that?", Jesri asked, smiling sadly up at Tarl. "Making an unstoppable killing machine is easy, Tarl. We were able to do that for centuries before they got around to making Valkyries, although we seldom did. We had laws against it, actually, after the first few attempts went poorly. They only got permission to make us because they could finally get all of the inconvenient emotions right. Empathy, sympathy, compassion, everything that flies in the face of combat."

"But why?", he asked in confusion. "Why would they intentionally make you conflicted about your purpose? To create a living creature for a singular task and then force it to constantly doubt its actions… It seems needlessly cruel."

Jesri burst out laughing, startling Tarl. "Sorry, sorry," she said, fighting off the urge to giggle. "It’s not really funny, it’s just that Trelir made the same observation." Tarl’s face shaded from surprise to indignation, and Jesri hastened to explain.

"When I was very young, we had words written on the wall of our creche," she said. "We were too young to understand, then, but they were there as a reminder and a warning to the staff. ‘The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.’ Old words, even then, from an even older story about a man who defeated all of his foes only to be struck down by his closest friend."

"Stories of betrayal and vengeance are common everywhere, it seems," Tarl said approvingly. "We have a similar story where the hero shames the betrayer with his dying breath by laying his greed and dishonor bare before the court."

"The quote is from the murderer," Jesri replied, "barely able to recognize his friend after seeing what price his victory had exacted, and fearing what a monster further victory would create. It’s the same reason they took us to bake cakes and fingerpaint after we practiced headshots at two hundred meters," Jesri said wryly. "They stopped trying to create the perfect killer and started trying to focus on creating a person that would fight wars well." She spread her arms, indicating herself. "Behold, the painstakingly optimized soldier."

Tarl shook his head in irritation. "Humans confound me. So their purpose in making you was what? To avoid the inherent unpleasantness of war? To satisfy some sense of moral obligation? It seems so trivial a thing to expend so much effort."

"Oh, it’s anything but trivial," Jesri sighed. "And the problem is that it was anything but unpleasant. When normal human soldiers were sent to war, they adapted to it. We were able to overlook it or even take pride in it for centuries prior, but we developed as a society and it started to register that maybe we shouldn’t be letting ourselves get that comfortable with war. We spent centuries more trying to figure out how to lessen the psychological impact of combat on the human psyche, but it turns out there was something fundamental in the human mind that couldn’t help but change when it made the decision to kill." Her voice turned grim and she fixed Tarl with a chilly stare. "What followed was trauma in the best case, otherwise madness or something darker."

"So your creators made you able to kill without consequence?", Tarl wondered. "That seems like a dangerous trait to give a soldier, albeit useful."

Jesri shook her head. "Not without consequence, quite the opposite. Humans couldn’t both make war and hate war for long - kill enough, and they would find ways to justify the killing in their minds or go insane from the dichotomy." She jabbed a thumb at her chest. "Our minds are made more flexibly, we can act without cognitive dissonance warping our thoughts. The worst things in war, the ones that changed humans irrevocably, we can face them and return whole. ‘Let no man abide this deed but we the doers,’" she murmured, her eyes like hard flint. "But most of all, more than the resiliency to fight war as it must be fought, our reason for being was our unchanging objectivity about the nature of what we did."

"War is a rejection of civil society, yet civil society requires it to survive. We had to be skilled and cunning and brave and all the other things we’ve always known were necessary for a warrior, but the key that was missing for so long before us was hate," she said softly. "Not of the enemy, but of war itself. To be the perfect soldier you have to hate the necessity of war from the core of your being, pure black and cold. It’s the counterbalance that saves you from the thrill of victory, remorse joined to power. You can’t fight for any reason other than to stop the suffering."

"But you fight for vengeance," Tarl pointed out. "You and your sister both."

"Nobody’s perfect," Jesri replied, walking towards the door. "They’re waiting for me. I need to go change before I head out."

Tarl looked at her clean grey environment suit, barely touched with ash. "Is something wrong with what you’re wearing?", he asked.

"I’ve been working ass-to-elbows with the crew all day," Jesri said. "I stink like male Ysleli. Given what Leral said, walking in there like this would be… not ideal."

She walked quickly out of the cramped conference room, leaving a confused Tarl standing alone. After a minute of contemplative thought he raised a hand to his scarred face and sniffed it, then left for the bridge.

Part 32

Rough stairs had been carved out of the black snow and scattered over with broken rocks for traction, forming a crude entryway to the partially excavated bunker serving as the base’s main door. Jesri followed the small group of guards down the stairs with Erlir setting his slow pace at the front. The ancient Ysleli leaned heavily on Leral as he moved down, and it struck Jesri how much of an effort it must have been for him to walk unaided through the ashfall to confront Tarl.

She caught some of the guards shooting distrustful glances back up the stairway where Tiln and Neryn stood watch with their squads and one increasingly miserable Ralik. The troops hadn’t really seemed to grasp why they weren’t allowed in the base, but once Anja gave the order they simply shrugged and took their posts. As much as they were trying to move their squads past their fear of questioning orders they didn’t understand, Jesri had to admit that there were times when it came in handy.

As they finally reached the darkened foot of the stairs one of the guards rushed to open the heavy metal door for Leral and Erlir. Dim reddish lighting peeked through the crack, and as the door opened fully Jesri felt a rush of warm air infiltrate the tiny gaps in her environment suit. They stepped across the threshold and were momentarily lost in darkness as the door rattled shut behind them.

As her eyes adjusted Jesri could see the guards around her unwinding the thick cloth wrappings from their faces and slinging their rifles on their backs. They were all women, Jesri saw, the red light from the emergency lamps glinting dully from their golden scales. She wondered how many men had survived the raiders aside from Erlir and Ralik.

She reached up to remove her respirator, sniffing tentatively at the warm, humid air. The oddly spicy scent of densely packed Ysleli bodies hit her in a wave, followed by other notes - fire smoke, cooking food, burning plastics, stagnant water. Complex, not entirely pleasant, but clean air compared to the choking miasma from outside.

Dim red emergency lighting cast an ominous glow across the room, but for all that it was dark and foreboding it was still functional electric light. She exchanged a look with Anja, who nodded.

"Hardened installation," Anja said approvingly. "Positive pressure filtered air, independent power supply. This place was designed right."

Leral looked over at her, black eyes glinting in the darkness. "It has saved our lives," she said, "but I don’t believe it was meant to hold so many people. The power and water are limited and we must use very little of each or risk running out. The water merely runs dry, but if we overtax the power then the air stops. That is why the lights are off."

Jesri nodded. That made sense, as hardened systems were usually designed for reliability and longevity rather than luxury. "Have you found the generator?", she asked. "We might be able to take a look at it for you after we’re done."

"No, we don’t know where the power or the water comes from," Leral said. "There are many tunnels that run a long distance away from this part of the base, and we think some of them go deep under the mountain. Hard to say for sure, they’re unlit and the few handlights we found here died months ago." She made an indifferent gesture, then indicated the rest of the base with a sweep of her hand. "Limited as the services are, they have been working so far. There were other priorities."

"Right," Jesri said, reaching into her pack. "Well, we’ll see what we can do for you. It shouldn’t be too hard to get a couple of generators in the first supply run, at least. For the time being-"

She fished two flashlights from a compartment in her pack and tossed them to Leral and one of the guards, who caught them out of surprised reflex. The guard gave the thumb-switch on her light a tentative press and sent a dazzling white beam lancing straight into her face. She dropped it with a muttered curse, swiping at her eyes. The light shone cheerfully from the floor to light up the foyer and throw sharp shadows across the faces of the unmasked Ysleli.

"Thank you," Leral said, real gratitude in her voice. "These will be a huge help. We’ve been living in the dark for so long that even the outside seems bright. I worry about what it does to the children. Even if it’s just for a few days, it will be wonderful to have real light again."

"Days?", Jesri grinned. "Leral, the cells in those things will run for months. They won’t need to, since we’ll get you something more permanent before too long, but you don’t need to ration them."

Leral blinked and opened her mouth, then closed it again without speaking. "I… thank you," she said after a moment.

The guard that had received the second flashlight pocketed hers and glared dazedly at Jesri. "Why?", she asked accusingly, ignoring Leral’s glare. "Why would you give us these? It won’t buy Tarl our loyalty, if that was your intent."

Leral gave Jesri a stricken look, but she responded with a dismissive gesture. "It’s a fair question, Leral," she sighed. "Look, just to be clear - we don’t work for Tarl. We’re allies. Whether you continue to deal with him after this is your decision."

"But a gift of such value-" protested the guard.

"Saril, you embarrass yourself," Erlir said from behind, the harsh shadows of the light playing strangely over the drooping skin of his face. "Show your gratitude for the gift and be silent."

"Father Erlir," Saril muttered, bowing in deference.

Erlir turned to Jesri and Anja and inclined his head. "Thank you for the gifts. Please forgive us if some are suspicious of outsiders, especially those who travel with the warfather. His soldiers are not well-loved among those who survived them to flee here."

"Not at all," Jesri said, returning the gesture. "We will try to be minimally disruptive while we’re here. Once we’ve retrieved what we came for, you will only have to deal with the soldiers to receive supply shipments."

"We look forward to it," Erlir said wryly. "If I may ask, what is it you came to find?"

"The body of a monster," Anja said grimly. "One you will be better off without."

The guards shifted nervously, and Jesri punched Anja lightly on the shoulder. "Stop making it sound scary," she chided. "It’s just a body." She reached into her pack and came out with her hovering lamp, which zipped upward to float above her head. The Ysleli stared as it hung motionless and began to glow with its amber light, dispelling the hard shadows from the flashlight on the ground.

She turned to the guards. "Ready?", she asked. Saril nodded mutely, still staring at the light ball. Jesri turned back to Erlir and inclined her head again. "Erlir, Leral, we’ll find you when we’ve finished."

"Wait!", Leral protested, shaking off her astonishment at the hovering lamp. "I’m coming along as well."

Erlir gave her a disapproving look and rested his hand on her arm. "Leral, this is a matter for the guards," he said quietly. "Let them escort our guests."

Leral’s face fell, but she did not object. Jesri felt a pang of sympathy for her as she exchanged a glance with Anja; the young woman clearly had a curious mind. The corners of Anja’s mouth twitched and she shrugged out of her pack to rummage around inside of it.

"Did you forget something?", Jesri asked, deciding to play along.

"No, but it occurred to me that the areas near Trelir’s office had quite a lot of useful material stockpiled in those storage rooms," Anja said impishly. "We will not be able to take it all back, but we can at least have someone in the group note down our path and take inventory so that it can be collected on future trips." She pulled out an old field pad and stylus, the thin, waterproof pages bent around the edges but otherwise in good form.

"That’s a good thought, but neither of us knows Ysleli script," Jesri said, catching on and turning to the guards. "Can one of you take notes on our route and mark any items of interest we come across?"

The four guards looked askance at the pad as Anja held it out to them, confirming Jesri’s suspicions. "Our sires were farmers," Saril said quietly. "I do not know speechmarks."

"I know them!", Leral piped up excitedly. "I can take notes!"

"Well, then," Anja said, walking over to hand her the pad and stylus. "If that is all right, Erlir?"

The elderly Ysleli shot her an irritated look, but merely harrumphed tiredly and gestured Leral towards the group. She skipped over happily to stand by the guards, who seemed less put off by Jesri drawing attention to their illiteracy now that they saw the reason behind it.

"Right, well," Jesri said, rubbing her hands together. "No point in wasting time. Can anyone lead the way to the hallways where you found dead soldiers?", she asked, looking expectantly at the guards.

Saril nodded sharply, grabbing her rifle by its carry strap. "I know the way," she said. "Follow me."

The group turned and, with a nodded farewell to Erlir, they set off into the dark.

It took longer than Jesri had expected for the group to wend their way through the bunker’s tunnels to the site of their previous assault on the base. The tunnel itself was damp and cold, with ice infiltrating through tiny cracks in the concrete and accreting in dangerous-looking stalactites from the ceiling. Within a year they could have serious trouble walking through some of these passages, she judged, although after that much time they’d have more pressing problems than ice buildup without serious outside aid.

Saril led them through several junctions and rooms, disused hallways stretching endlessly into the black around them. "I didn’t know you had wandered this far," Leral commented, her voice echoing dimly against the damp stone walls.

Saril winced at the noise, waiting a moment to reply. Jesri understood - she knew it was deserted here, but it was the sort of space that seemed to demand quiet from those passing through its confines. "I came through here when we were still looking for food," Saril said quietly. "One of the storehouses with provisions was down a tunnel we passed a while ago. I thought there might be more if I kept looking, so I walked further."

"Were there?", Leral asked.

"Not that I found," Saril replied. "I stopped looking after I started finding bodies." She shuddered, her steps catching slightly. "We’re close," she muttered.

They walked for only a few minutes more before she was proven right. The corpse of a Ysleli soldier lay slumped against the wall with its hands still clutched tightly to its darkly-stained abdomen. It had bloated a bit before the cold set in, giving it a particularly grotesque look under the sheen of frost coating its face.

Leral turned her face away as they passed, as did two of the guards. Saril and another guard paid it no mind, leading them onward through the tunnel. They passed several more corpses as they progressed, their wounds growing progressively more severe - these were the ones that had not made it as far before dying.

Finally, their pool of amber light revealed icy chunks of rubble strewn over the floor and scattered among bodies that were not so much wounded as disassembled. Jesri could see the remains of the doorframe that had shattered as Anja bulled through it in her armor, and on the other side of the room the hole made by her exit was also readily apparent.

"This is it," Jesri confirmed. Leral looked around her, wide-eyed, her hands clasped to her face in horror.

"Blackened breath," Saril whispered, making a warding gesture and gripping her weapon tightly. "What monster did this? These men have been torn to pieces."

Anja and Jesri exchanged a look, then both glanced at Leral. The girl stared back at them with petrified terror etched into every line of her face. She knew who was responsible. Tarl had told her back on the Subtle Blade.

"No monsters you have to worry about," Jesri said softly, keeping her eyes locked on Leral. "You’ve got us on your side." Leral said nothing, her eyes still locked on Jesri.

Saril snorted derisively. "I appreciate the sentiment, but I’ll trust my rifle," she said, a quaver in her voice under the sheen of bravado.

"Worked out for these guys well enough," Anja muttered, glancing pointedly at a severed arm still clasping a rifle tightly with its finger frozen to the trigger. Leral looked faint.

"Stop it," Jesri said, punching Anja on the shoulder. "Don’t wind them up. We’ve still got a while left to go." She moved forward down the hall, forcing the others to follow if they wanted to stay in the light. The Ysleli hastened after her, scrambling over the icy rubble to keep up with her pace.

It wasn’t long before they reached the stockrooms with their neatly arrayed samples of human salvage stacked on shelf after shelf, the tidy rows broken only by the occasional toppled rack left over from their assault. Leral stared around her, the strange artifacts momentarily overwhelming her horror at the bodies still periodically scattered in their path.

"What is all this?", she asked wonderingly. "I’ve never seen anything like it."

Jesri considered for a moment how best to answer her, then shrugged. "This was a research facility," she replied. "It was primarily dedicated to studying items left by our people."

Leral walked over to one of the shelves, peering at the dusty collection. In front of her was half of an autoclave and the heat exchanger from a refrigeration unit. "What does all of it do?", she inquired.

"Mostly nothing," Jesri replied. "They’ve collected a bunch of half-functional appliances and spare parts which are really only useful for study and reverse-engineering. I thought we might give the shelves a once-over on our way back through here, see if there’s anything that might help you out until the supply run comes in."

Anja paced by the room’s exit, an odd tension in her shoulders. "We should keep moving," she said brusquely. "We can do inventory once we’ve secured Trelir."

Jesri wondered at her sister’s mood for a moment before making the connection. It would be odd for her to get this worked up over Trelir, but he wasn’t the only body in their path. In the rush of activity since they’d landed she had forgotten about seeing Sophia laid out on the table, staring in mute horror at Violet’s preserved form... With a shudder, Jesri motioned for Leral and the others to continue on, moving through the dusty stacks to the next storage room.

By the time they were at the end of the warehouses even the Ysleli had picked up on Anja’s distracted behavior and were keeping close to Jesri. The final steps to the lab were hushed and quiet save for a soft gasp from Leral when she saw Sophia’s body still lying on the gurney.

The room was untouched from their previous visit, with the bodies of the lab techs still bearing the marks of Anja’s wrath lying scattered around their sister’s half-dissected body. Ice had grown in feathery tendrils over her corpse, wrapping the dry skin in sparkling white filigree. The guards shifted nervously as they entered the room, keeping to the edges to stay as far away from the dead scientists as they could. Leral, however, was staring at Sophia with wide eyes.

"She’s… like you," Leral said hesitantly, looking to Jesri for confirmation.

Anja answered instead. "Our sister, Sophia," she whispered softly, setting her pack down on the floor of the lab and sorting through its contents. Jesri felt an ache in her chest as she watched her work. It was half for her lost sister and half for seeing Anja in this state, as her sister had always seemed to feel the loss of their other siblings more keenly. Mixed threads of guilt and pity twisted in Jesri’s gut as she reflected on it, but in the end she could only feel as she felt.

Leral’s attention flitted between the three Valkyries and it was easy for Jesri to read the question behind her eyes. Sophia’s corpse was unquestionably ancient, twisted and dessicated by years of lying neglected in whatever disused installation she had been found. Mercifully, Leral restrained her curiosity as Anja withdrew a thin body bag from her backpack and shook it out on the floor. The guards were still too focused on the mutilated bodies of the scientists to have processed the implications of Anja’s answer.

Jesri moved to her sister’s feet as Anja took Sophia’s shoulders, gently lifting the corpse into the bag on the floor. She was so, so light, her papery skin rough and cold. Her intricately plaited blonde hair hung down in a dull mess, and Jesri was struck by the incongruous thought that Sophia would have hated seeing it so disheveled. The hair passed into the open zipper of the bag, followed by the rest of her body as they lowered her delicately down to the floor.

Anja gave her frost-limned cheek a gentle caress, then zipped the bag closed before straightening up. Jesri rose slowly and met her eyes, her chest aching with a moment of shared grief for their lost sister. The last time they had seen her body Anja had been an avatar of rage and hatred, exacting misplaced revenge on the scientists unlucky enough to be caught near Sophia’s corpse.

Today, she simply closed her eyes for a long moment, then reopened them and stalked towards the next doorway. Jesri moved to follow, with the Ysleli following along hesitantly.

"Will you not take her with you?", Leral asked quietly.

Jesri shook her head. "On the way back," she answered, her voice rough. "Trelir takes priority."

They moved in silence through the remainder of the administrative area, the hallways shifting from utilitarian rock-hewn passageways to luxurious corridors before finally ending at the charred ruin of Trelir’s office. The explosion had blown out several of the nearby doors and coated the entire area with layers of fine white dust that stirred into choking clouds as their feet disturbed it.

Of Violet’s body, there was no trace. The explosion had destroyed everything that wasn’t metal in the room, twisting and warping most of what was - but only most. They found Trelir more or less where he had fallen, covered only by some thin sheets of heat-warped laminate that had been torn from the wall by the force of the blast.

Saril hissed in alarm and shrunk back as they lifted the debris to expose him. His thin cosmetic covering and soft artificial musculature had not survived the blast well, hanging in tatters from bones that were silver and gleaming where the dust lay thin. Beneath them lay blackened and twisted panels, housings for Trelir’s internal components. They looked severely distorted by the heat of the explosion, but there were no obvious breaches - they would have to see how well they had protected their precious contents back on Elpis.

"What is it?", Saril asked tremulously, her false bravado forgotten. She seemed more disturbed by the grinning metal skull gripped tightly in Trelir’s spidery fingers than by the complex of dead soldiers they had just passed, not that Jesri could judge her for it. The pristine finish of the skeleton lent it an odd vitality amid the dusty, ice-gripped rubble. The dark sockets of the skull seemed to track one’s movements as if it was moments from rising to take vengeance for its fall. Given what it truly was, Jesri couldn’t entirely rule the idea out.

Anja had unclipped a small scanner from her belt and was running it over the body thoroughly, scanning for any trace of activity within its half-melted interior. After reaching the feet, she straightened up and shook her head. "It’s dead," Anja said, half-answering Saril’s question. "No activity that I can detect, although we should give it another thorough scan on the Blade before we bring it to Elpis." She gave Jesri a grave look, pursing her lips in thought. "Can we risk taking it there?"

Jesri shrugged helplessly. "Can we risk leaving it here? Helene and David need access to Gestalt hardware if they’re ever going to make progress on their plans. Without it, Elpis dies within a century. It is a definite risk and we’ll have to be careful, but there’s just no other path forward."

"I suppose," Anja said, shrugging out of her pack to retrieve another body bag. Jesri bent to grab one of the body’s legs and was immediately struck by the sheer weight of it - not much heavier than a standard Ysleli, but the metal and charred circuitry did not shed mass after death. Compared to her sister’s whisper-light body, Trelir felt much more real and substantial. The cold bones immediately leached the heat from her fingers, leaving her hands numb even after she and Anja had lowered him into the bag with his leering skull resting on his chest.

As she straightened up, Jesri looked back towards the five Ysleli women. They looked petrified once more, the guards no longer bothering to hide their distress for Leral’s sake. Jesri shook her head. "I know this is strange," she said soothingly, "but I can answer any questions you have when we get back. You’re in no danger from these bodies. We just need you to help us carry them outside."

"I will not touch that," Saril said emphatically, looking at the sealed bag with trepidation. "Whatever that is, it is an abomination. It is evil." The other guards murmured their assent, although Leral merely looked troubled.

"Fine," Anja said curtly. "We will carry him. You," she continued, moving to fix Saril with a withering stare, "will carry our sister’s body in our stead. You will treat her with the respect you would show the bones of your own family." She leaned in closer, a mere handspan from Saril’s face. "Am I understood?"

Poor Saril was too out-of-sorts to reply coherently, but she eventually stammered out enough of an affirmation to satisfy Anja. Jesri pressed the body bag’s activation toggle and watched as slats became rigid and locked into place along the sides. Once the process was complete the bag could be carried in the same manner as a stretcher, allowing Jesri and Anja to easily bear the metal skeleton’s awkward bulk.

While the bag worked under Anja’s watchful glower, Jesri walked over to the huddle of frightened Ysleli. "I know this isn’t easy," she said, making eye contact mostly with Leral, "but it is important. This will save your people as surely as food, water and air. You won’t come to harm while we’re with you."

Leral, at least, seemed to find some resolve, returning her gaze with a slight dip of her head. "We will carry her," she affirmed.

"Good girl," Jesri said, smiling back. "The rest of you can take back some of the stuff from the storeroom. It’s mostly junk, but I’m pretty sure I saw some survival gear you could use. We’ll take a look at it, and I’ll help you mark the stuff we can’t carry for later. Deal?"

She got acknowledgments back from most of the guards this time, with looks of frightened resolve from Saril and Leral. Jesri supposed it would have to do.

The way back was long and hard, with Jesri and Anja carrying Trelir’s body and the other guards carrying a portable water purifier, a stack of thermoreflective sheeting and a few other odds and ends that could prove useful. Saril and Leral brought up the rear with Sophia’s body, the latter having insisted on doing her fair share for the trip back.

Eventually, with arms aching and shoulders feeling nearly stretched out of joint, they made it back to the foyer. The six of them slumped against the cold walls to let the chill soak into their aching muscles.

After some time passed, Jesri cracked an eye open and looked over at Leral. The girl wasn’t out of shape, but Ysleli shoulders evidently weren’t designed for the sort of constant load-bearing pressure that the stretcher exerted. She looked ragged and tired, and unlike Saril she wasn’t doing her utmost to feign good health.

"So," Jesri said conversationally, "I know how you feel about soldiers in the base…"

"They can come in to help carry," Leral wheezed. "My blackened arms feel like they’re about to drop off."

"Language," Jesri deadpanned, reaching up to her earpiece. "Neryn, this is Jesri."

"Captain Jesri!", Neryn said immediately, his voice wavering with cold as the wind howled in the background. "Very glad to hear you, sir. Are we clear to depart?"

"Just about," Jesri replied. "We’ve got authorization for four of you to come into the base to help move some items, then we can head back."

"Copy, sir," Neryn said enthusiastically. "We’ll be right down."

Jesri gave him a double-click over the comm and toggled her transmitter, slumping back against the cool wall once more. "They’re coming," she told the curious Ysleli. "Seems like it’s cold out there."

"Hah," Saril barked, the other guards breaking out into exhausted giggles. "It’s not even nighttime," she protested. "Your men are soft."

Anja looked over at her and grinned lazily. "Perhaps so," she drawled, "but this trip has given me all sorts of ideas about their next training sessions…"

The guards and Leral dissolved into giggles again, but Jesri merely gave a wan smile. Now that she had recuperated somewhat from their forced march, she found her focus sliding back to the two ominously silent body bags sitting before them. One for family lost to her ages ago, another for the enemy who took her - although as the two sealed bags slumped against each other she couldn’t tell which was which.

She didn’t have the faintest clue what to do with either one.

Part 33

"Okay, how about now?", Jesri yelled, her voice barely audible. A hiss and click issued from the front of the cargo container as its door sealed shut.

Xim Len fluttered side to side, checking the screen of her handheld scanner as she made a slow circuit of the container.

"Nothing!", she yelled back, her shrill cry echoing in the hold. No response came from inside the crate. She stalked around to the front in a huff of frustration, grabbing the door and straining with her slender arms to cast it wide open. "There’s noooOOEEEEEE!", she screamed, dropping the scanner in her hand as it emitted a deafening shriek and lit up brightly.

Jesri hastily stabbed a finger at the transmitter in her hand and the scanner fell silent. She looked at Xim Len’s wide eyes and heaving shoulders in concerned silence for a moment before a grin snuck its way onto her face.

Xim Len’s elfin features contorted into a pout. "Fine," she muttered, picking up the dropped scanner. "Next time you get the screaming handset."

"Actually," Jesri said, scrolling down her list of notes, "I think that was all of the tests. We’ve checked the entire electromagnetic spectrum with good granularity, gravimetric distortion waves, hyperwave, subwave, various low-intensity sound pulses and a few other exotic ideas that David and Rhuar cooked up." She peered up at the ceiling of the container, scratching her neck idly. "All that’s left is to arm the explosive charges and we’re good to go."

Thin rows of featureless rectangular packets lined the top of the container - Xim Len found it stressful to look at them for long. "Is it really necessary to use that much?", she said with a shudder. "If you detonate those it’ll take out the whole cargo hold, container or no container."

"That’s the idea," Jesri replied grimly. "That’s why we’re in a remote hold in a disused section of the station, right up against the outer hull." She fixed Xim Len with those unnerving eyes of hers, sending a shiver up her wings.

"You have to understand the stakes here", she explained. "If we start poking around and turn something on without proper measures in place the entire station could be a loss. As important as this research could be, I won’t conduct it recklessly with so many lives in the balance."

"I already got the talk from Helene," Xim Len retorted crossly. "I know what’s at stake. Remember, I actually live here, unlike some certain immortal space vagrants and irritating warlords-in-exile I could name." Jesri held her hands up in surrender to acknowledge the point, but Xim Len pressed on. "And since we’re talking about our friends in the walls," she said irritatedly, "when were you planning on telling the guilds we had artificial intelligences living in our station network? It seems like a relevant point of disclosure if you’re going for mutual trust and all that. I find it very frustrating to be looped in only when you need my help."

"Wasn’t my secret to tell," Jesri shrugged. "You’re right in saying the only reason they broke silence in your case is because we needed help with the container and the research. This is a big deal for them as well, remember. You’re the first station resident they’ve ever revealed themselves to, and based on your reaction I can’t really blame them. If this is how you feel, what do you think Manifold would say? Belshi?" She shook her head. "I won’t even mention Ix."

"Ix would just start punching screens," Xim Len giggled. "I can see the hazard, you have a point. And it would make sense to keep the idea of such beings a secret, especially if we’re not the only station playing host to them." She peered at Jesri intently, but the humanform’s face was absolutely unreadable as she broke into a sly grin.

"Nice try," she chuckled, "but I’ve been keeping secrets for a long time. If you want confirmation on your theory you’re going to have to talk to David or Helene."

"Worth asking," Xim Len grumbled. "So now what, we let the station ghosts fly sideways?"

"We - what?", Jesri said, confused. "I don’t think that translated well, avian languages always have such strange metaphors. If you’re asking about who performs the research, it has to be us. The scientists are restricted to the station network, and there is absolutely no safe way to expose the station network to that." She pointed inside the crate, where a sealed metal box sat ominously on a table in the center of the workspace.

The petite Tlixl’s wings fluttered uncertainly as she eyed the crate. "They’re the experts, they’re the only reason we’ve got this on Elpis in the first place," she protested. "How are we supposed to do their analysis for them?"

"We follow their instructions and act as their eyes," Jesri explained, "and we observe security protocols. When the door is closed, it will lock and require a code to open from either side. Three incorrect attempts detonate the failsafe. Anytime the crate door is open, the sample and everything that has touched it are in sealed containers. Nothing that interfaces with its internal network is trustworthy anymore. If we need to take notes out, we use a tablet with the network link physically removed." Her eyes narrowed and her face darkened once more. "And most importantly, you are always to carry your detonation remote. You use it if you think the crate will be breached. Doesn’t matter who’s inside - you, me, Anja, we’re all expendable if it means preserving containment."

Xim Len edged away from the crate door. "That seems a bit paranoid," she muttered.

"Absolutely it is," Jesri agreed. "Paranoid and overcautious, which is better than complacent and dead - and let me reiterate, death is most definitely happening if that little fucker wakes up and gets a message off. Maybe not your death or mine, but someone will die if the Gestalt attacks Elpis. Most likely lots of people."

"Paranoid and alive sounds fine," Xim Len agreed shakily. "I’ve worked with dangerous chemicals and the like before, but nothing that required this degree of care. It’s a bit unnerving."

Jesri shrugged. "I have. You get used to it," she chuckled. "Thinking of it like a poison or a disease is a good analogy, actually, since you have to take a lot of the same decontamination steps. Just pretend it’s infected with a disease that’s invariably fatal, spreads via contact with electronics and can’t be detected by conventional means." She paused, considering. "Also, the disease is intelligent. And it hates you."

"Fantastic," Xim Len said flatly. "Why are we doing this again? You know, before you all came along the most hazardous things anyone asked me to work with were nice, safe, predictable explosives."

"You’re welcome," Jesri snarked. "Speaking of, let’s finish up with the failsafes so we can get started. The sooner we find our key against the Gestalt, the sooner we can get that creepy skeleton off the station."

Xim Len nodded and shivered, looking past Jesri at the sealed box containing Trelir’s body. It would require perfection to conduct this research without dooming the station. They could do it, undoubtedly, but the absence of a margin for error made her nervous. Whatever lay within that coffin waiting to be discovered, she hoped it was worth it.

Anja collapsed into her seat and let her head loll sideways. It had been three weeks since they had returned from Ysl, and each day had been a mad scurry to balance their furtive research on Trelir’s corpse with the demands of ship refits, training with her squads and Tarl’s increasingly large convoys of supplies and equipment back to the refugees.

The warfather was off-station to do an inspection of a field hydroponics setup that Manifold’s crews had delivered a week prior, which at least freed Anja from having to deal with his manic energy and the perpetual crowd of Elpis residents he managed to insult, intimidate or otherwise rub the wrong way.

The tradeoff, since there was always a tradeoff, was that every Ysleli soldier on the station looked to her in his absence. Word of the gate’s capture and the mission on Ysl had spread through the ranks and suddenly she was deluged with eager applications for reservists and petty commanders pitching ideas for additional elite squads. She had politely declined all of them thus far, although she could feel herself fast reaching the point where she would simply decline them instead.

The door hissed open, jolting her out of her funk as Jesri walked in and threw herself into another chair. If anything, her sister looked more exhausted than she felt. Jesri had been pulling double research duty with Xim Len, spending nearly all of her time in the sealed crate or in endless discussions with the science team. Any time not eaten by the primary research project was spent scouring the station database with Rhuar for portable generators, air filters and other items of necessity for the fabrication workshops to churn out, pivoting to support the refugee convoys as they put the finishing touches on the last Ysleli refits.

"Sister," Anja said wearily. "You look like shit."

Jesri snorted. "That’s my line," she shot back. "You look like you haven’t slept since the last time we talked."

"Was that yesterday?", Anja asked. Jesri nodded in return. "Ah," she said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. "Good eye." The two women sat in silence for several minutes, tacitly agreeing to share the brief respite in peace.

A bright light shone against Anja’s closed eyelids and forced them reluctantly open to reveal all five scientists displayed onscreen. "Wakey wakey," David said with a smirk. "Although if we all want to agree that this meeting is naptime I won’t fight you too much."

"Nah," Jesri said, stretching her arms languidly and swiping a hand across her face. "We’re good. Let’s get to it."

Helene nodded and gestured to Yetide, who cleared her throat and began to speak. "The results so far have been promising," she said, her voice low and melodious. Unlike the others, she didn’t seem fatigued in the least. "We’ve managed to make a full map of the Emissary’s administrative functions, including the communication protocols back to the Gestalt proper. Crucially, with this last round of data we’ve discovered several emergency routing protocols that may be of critical use."

Anja raised an eyebrow. "You think it will be useful as a distraction, or as a weapon?"

"Potentially both," David replied. "Our eventual goal has always been to remove the administrative functions of the Gestalt while keeping the universe simulations intact, effectively lobotomizing it. Theoretically this is possible, since the structure of the Dyson shell is differentiated into higher-order and lower-order processing areas. The former contains most of the Gestalt as we think of it, the latter holds simulations, networking, basic maintenance routines, etcetera. There are millions of higher-order nodes, of course, but you only need to destroy a fraction of them to seriously disrupt the Gestalt entity’s ability to function."

"Seems straightforward enough," Jesri said with a frown. "What’s the catch?"

David nodded. "We could do it, given time, but obviously the Gestalt has countermeasures. Aside from the obvious defensive weaponry you’ll have to contend with its fleet of repair and maintenance drones. If they’re not dealt with somehow then you’ll be unable to destroy the nodes fast enough to outpace their repair and rerouting."

"I’m assuming that destroying them is off the table," Jesri sighed. "That seems like it would be too easy."

"There are billions of them," Yetide confirmed. "Attacking them directly is inefficient, but the emergency communications protocols may be our answer. They seem to be tagged for high-priority evaluation, a sort of Emissary panic button that automatically gets routed ahead of other traffic. We believe the process of coordinating so many drones is very resource-intensive, so if we can rapidly escalate a large number of incoming packets via emergency protocols we may be able to degrade their function long enough to make an impact. The Gestalt will of course adapt to shut out the compromised protocols," she said with a grimace, "but if we can strike quickly enough it should be possible to create an exploitable deficit in its function."

"You want to conduct a denial-of-service attack against a matrioshka brain?", Anja asked incredulously. "From what you know this thing is concurrently simulating multiple universes. How could you create enough traffic to even make it blink?"

"We here can’t," Helene acknowledged. "But we’re not just here. We’ve been communicating with our counterparts on other stations and believe that we can generate enough traffic with a coordinated effort. We typically use low-power communication in the name of secrecy but the transit stations are capable of much greater output. If we’re no longer concerned about concealing ourselves we can generate hundreds, potentially thousands of high-compression signals. It would be as if a million Emissaries sent up a flare for urgent attention every nanosecond, each using their priority override to occupy crucial administrative functions."

Jesri bit her lip, thinking. "I like the idea," she conceded. "I still worry about getting enough volume to make a difference, though."

"It’ll be tough," David said. "At most we’re looking at twenty, thirty minutes to destroy as many of the administrative nodes as we can."

Anja made a face. "Not much time considering the size of it," she said. "Plus we have to contend with the actual defenses."

"There’s good and bad news on that front, actually," David said, calling up a diagram of the Gestalt’s shell on the screen. "We have an old network map from our original exfiltration that shows the locations of the higher-order nodes." As he spoke, a lattice of blue light overlaid itself on the image and began to slowly rotate. Jesri watched it spin for a few seconds before David’s intent became clear.

"They’re all on the inside?", she groaned. "Ah, shit, of course they are. Nothing’s ever simple."

"The highest-energy matrioshka shells are closest to the star," David confirmed. "They’re the ones that have all of the most resource-heavy systems in them. The advantage this gives us is that our targets are concentrated in the shell with the least surface area and, crucially, are in a space where the Gestalt has no reason to predeploy defenses."

"Right, because breaking through is impossible!", Anja said in exasperation. "The shell is relatively thin for its size, but judging from the diagram it still has to be several kilometers thick. Short of a relativistic kinetic projectile…" She frowned. "Have we considered a relativistic kinetic projectile?", she asked hopefully.

Deepti shook her head. "Chris and I wargamed that one early on," she said. "Aside from the logistics of setting it up and the damage it could cause to the universe simulations, we concluded that the Gestalt sentry network would detect any approaching projectile far enough out to redirect it no matter how fast it was moving."

Anja frowned, then brightened and opened her mouth only to be forestalled by a raised hand from Deepti. "We also considered sneaking it in through hyperspace," she said, anticipating her question. "The math doesn’t work for an object that big moving that fast, you end up bleeding off your excess kinetic energy into boundary turbulence. For any single-shot projectile with enough of a punch to make a difference on its own you end up with uncontrollable fluctuations that tear it to shreds as soon as you enter hyperspace."

"Damn," Anja groused.

"However," David said, raising a finger, "we don’t need a single shot. They call it a matrioshka brain for a reason, remember. It’s not one huge cohesive shell, it’s a bunch of thin, nested layers with a surprising amount of empty space between them. I believe that the Grand Design already has precisely the tool we need to create a small entrance through each layer: the Wa-"

"The Whack-a-Mole!", Anja cried excitedly, her eyes wide and sparkling. There was a second of quiet broken by Jesri laughing quietly into her hand. The rest of the scientists were mostly successful in keeping a straight face.

David froze with his mouth open, then shot an annoyed look at Anja. "Major Tam," he sighed, "if we’re successful and we defeat the Gestalt the events of that day will be the subject of history texts for centuries to come. I would be so, so happy if none of those texts credited our victory to the ‘Whack-a-Mole.’"

"Nobody uses the real name," Anja retorted, still looking giddy at the prospect. "The real name is terrible. But yes, wonderful idea."

"So glad you approve," Helene said dryly. "Nomenclature aside, I think we have enough here to begin sketching out a plan of attack. There’s some refinement to be done on the emergency protocols, so we’ll need some more data from Trelir. We’ll also need to have Xim Len do some additional refits on the Ysleli ships to deal with the heat within the innermost shell."

Anja nodded, exchanging a glance with Jesri. Her sister smiled back, eyes vivid with excitement. This was it, at last. Fatigue was the farthest thing from her mind.

The souk on Elpis had a variety of lovely hidden corners and quiet branching hallways, and in the end of one such Rhuar sat under a lurid orange canopy tentatively nibbling on a meat skewer. What sort of meat, he couldn’t say - it was merely advertised as "meat", and long experience had taught him that any further knowledge would be poor seasoning. This one seemed unlikely to be anything unsavory, however, as the shop was well-regarded and the proprietor friendly.

It was a sharp turn from his fortunes several years prior, he considered. Oh, he had done well enough for himself as an artificer and a pilot, but never well enough that he could afford luxuries like real meat on a daily basis. He hadn’t eaten extruded protein paste since arriving at Elpis, and if his stomach suffered occasionally for his gastronomic extravagance he considered it a more than even trade.

A familiar clicking noise made him look up just in time to see Qktk scuttle around an overgrown and twisted stand of potted plants to enter the roped-off seating area. "Captain!", he shouted, waving him over. The tiny Htt wove his way through the sparse tables and hanging drapes that gently blew in the draft from the station’s vents, picking his way to the empty chair next to Rhuar.

One could tell the classy establishments by the way the staff came directly to you rather than needing to be summoned with a shout and/or a bribe. The little eatery preserved its reputation well when a light-shelled young Arrigh scuttled up to them mere seconds after Qktk took his seat. He mulled over the menu before selecting a fish and vegetable assortment of which the waitress promised great and extravagant things.

After she had gone Rhuar leaned in to flash Qktk a lurid grin. "I think she likes you, Captain," he whispered.

"Don’t be silly," Qktk demurred, his eyes twitching pointedly away from the departing waitress. "She was much too young for me, and she’s not a Htt."

Rhuar shrugged and leaned back, returning his attention to his meat skewer. "So you don’t think she’s attractive?", he asked innocently.

"I didn’t-", Qktk spluttered, waving his arms in exasperation before fixing Rhuar with a glare. "You’re doing this on purpose," he accused.

"Sorry, sorry," Rhuar laughed apologetically. "I’ve missed seeing you all wound up, it feels like we’ve barely talked since we got back from Ysl."

Qktk nodded. "I think this is the longest we’ve gone without talking in years, actually. I’ve just been so busy working with Manifold on the refugee shipments, and you’ve been stuck with Xim Len most days…" He trailed off, shrugging with his major arms. "It’s been a busy month."

"Tell me about it," Rhuar griped. "I haven’t actually been working with Xim Len so much as filling in for her, she’s spending all her time working with Jesri on the, ah, thing." He looked around furtively to ensure no other patrons were in earshot, then spoke more quietly. "They’re making good progress," he murmured. "I haven’t talked to Jesri or Anja much, but I bumped into them a few days ago and they gave me a whole bunch of work orders for ablative paneling, heat sinks, stuff like that. They’re refitting the Ysleli ships to work up close to a star."

"Jim’s teeth," Qktk swore loudly. "The only way they’d be up that close to Apollyon’s star…"

"Shh," Rhuar hissed, looking around again. "Can’t be too careful."

Qktk looked at him askance. "Come on, you really think there’s an Emissary hiding in the kitchen?", he asked sardonically.

"No," Rhuar said flatly, "but I still wouldn’t want to explain this conversation to Anja if rumors started circulating." The dog shivered, his fur standing partially on end. "I’m pretty sure she’s grown to like me as much as she likes anyone who isn’t also an immortal killing machine, but sometimes she does that thing where she stares at you…"

"Like she’s pinpointing your vital organs, yes," Qktk agreed. "Probably for the best that we talk about other things." The waitress came back with Qktk’s food, letting one of her legs lightly brush against Qktk’s carapace as she departed.

Rhuar leaned across the table again and grinned at Qktk. "I’m not up to speed on what the shells-and-mandibles dating scene looks like, Captain, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mind that you’re an old Htt," he said slyly.

"Shut up, Mr. Rhuar," Qktk said crossly, shoving a bite of fish in his mouth. "Oh, this is good."

"I bet that’s what she-"

An unidentifiable bit of green vegetable splatted against Rhuar’s nose before he could complete his single entendre. He wiped his face, laughing, and the two resumed eating in silence for a few minutes. After clearing most of the way through his plate, Qktk leaned back in his chair with a satisfied chitter.

"I needed that," he sighed. "Between the supply transports to Ysl and my extra work with Manifold I’ve been neglecting my leisure time."

"How’s the refugee stuff going?", Rhuar asked curiously. "We pump out equipment for the transports every now and again, but I haven’t had a fresh order in a while."

"They’ve got their hands full with the current equipment," Qktk said, wiping his mandibles. "The hydroponics alone are a bit of a handful to set up. We’ve just been coordinating food and other consumables lately, I actually haven’t heard much either since Tarl has been off-station."

"Yeah," Rhuar agreed. "I’ve been surprised at how much time he’s spending there. I didn’t think he would go in for that."

"I don’t think it’s that strange," Qktk mused. "His people nearly died. It’s natural he’d want to focus less on war and more on rebuilding, even if he is Tarl. There’s a certain peace that comes with knowing you’re helping, and it’s directly opposite to the thing you feel when you kill in battle. He may find it more novel than most."

Rhuar regarded Qktk silently for a moment, then shook his head. "Well, I hope he gets his peace while he can," he said vaguely. "I get the impression that any downtime we can grab will vanish in an instant once all of the pieces are in place."

"Mr. Rhuar, I believe you’re right," Qktk proclaimed. "And in that spirit, I’m curious to see if this place has any apertifs."

"Captain," Rhuar said reproachfully, "After all these years, you still doubt me? This is the best restaurant in this segment, it has everything."

"Excellent," Qktk rattled. "Let’s see if we can’t get that waitress back here." He paused as Rhuar began to grin widely, then gave a rattling sigh. "If you can restrain yourself long enough for us to order, that is."

Dim red light contrasted dully with the bright colors emanating from the screens stacked haphazardly within the cargo container. Xim Len was on her fourth hour inside and the recirculated air was beginning to get that distinct tang of offgassing plastic that occurred when you piled too much new equipment in a closed system. The sore throat and headache from the fumes barely registered, though, as her attention was fully focused on her readouts.

They had isolated almost everything they needed to know about the emergency protocols in the past few weeks, and although that was undoubtedly the most strategically important thing they had learned thus far Xim Len was discovering untold wonders within Trelir’s scorched torso. The Emissary had been programmed with a slew of protocols for efficient communications, data transfer formats and other advanced technical gibberish that she could only guess at the significance of.

She felt like an archeologist out of the old stories, discovering caches of ancestral treasures left on the highest cliffs for brave explorers to find eons later. It had never been a particular dream of hers as a fledgeling, but she couldn’t deny the appeal now that she was elbows-deep in a treasure chest beyond any she could have previously imagined.

It was difficult work, though, and her vision spun as she attempted to piece together the fragments of data left over after Trelir’s violent shutdown. Even though his hardware was relatively undamaged within the shattered casing a small subset of the files seemed incomplete or prematurely truncated. It was as if they had been split in half, the other pieces stored elsewhere and lost to her.

It was incredibly frustrating to have such treasures lost to her, with bare fragments tantalizingly just out of her reach. She slumped back onto a crate that she had taken to using as a makeshift chair, staring sullenly at the empty sockets of Trelir’s skull.

...the skull.

Xim Len sat bolt upright, nearly smacking her head on a wall mount. Of course files were showing as incomplete, the body was incomplete. Trelir’s architecture was distributed and heavily redundant, but missing such a large portion of his body would inevitably lead to gaps in the available information. They had disregarded the skull as relatively unimportant given that the bulk of the circuitry was in the torso and abdomen, but he had died when he removed his head - there had to be something important in there.

Her giddy excitement swirled in place as she contemplated the best way to handle the problem. Obviously it would be a Bad Idea to stick the head back on the body, she thought, mentally congratulating herself for not being a cloud-addled idiot despite her excitement. She eventually decided on a separate power feed, routed to the head without any connection to the body whatsoever. Several tense minutes were spent nudging delicate wires into the correct configuration, measuring voltages and running the data cabling to a spare tablet.

At last, after making doubly sure that none of the cables were cross-connected, she flipped the master switch and watched power thrum into the severed head. Her tablet took several seconds to make sense of the incoming feed. Once it had loaded up, however, she struggled to keep her wings from quivering uncontrollably. It was all here, all of the missing pieces she had been searching for previously - and several new items besides, each promising their own trove of secrets.

She spent the first several minutes painstakingly cross-referencing the split files with their counterparts on the torso’s network, passing over duplicate entries and logging the new files on her non-networked tablet with shaky fingers. It was slow, agonizingly slow, but there was no helping it.

She paused on one particularly interesting entry, something about command packet protocols, opening it and parsing the complex Gestalt coding into something she could read with a few swipes of her fingers. Minutes later, she dropped her tablet with trembling hands.

This was it. Even more than the emergency protocols, this could let them compromise the Gestalt’s network easily and without undue risk. She began to hastily pack all of the analysis equipment back in one of the shielded boxes, sequestering all tainted electronics before she opened the crate to tell Jesri about her discovery.

She finished with the last of her tablets, wires dangling from their ports like the tentacles of some bizarre sea creature, then sealed the box before turning to place the head back in its container.

Or would have, had it been there. Shivers erupted through her back and wings, her muscles clamping painfully tight. With a dawning horror creeping through her belly she slowly turned back towards where the body had lain. It was sitting upright, snatching excess wires from their invasive mounts as it repositioned its head on top of its spinal column with a click.

Satisfied at last with his head, Trelir turned and regarded her with an empty stare. His skinless jaw clacked open and shut tentatively. Xim Len stared in mute horror, unable to move for the fear gripping her limbs. Her heart beat fast, hard, seeming to vibrate audibly in the stale air.

"Thank you, my dear," he buzzed, his artificially harsh voice reverberating through the tight confines. She managed to control her limbs enough to take a halting step backward but quickly found herself up against a wall. Trelir looked her in the eyes for a moment before standing upright, his shining skull nearly scraping the top of the crate. "I had prepared a few witty comments about losing one’s head," he said sadly, "but now that the moment has come I can see you’re not really in the mood."

Part 34

Xim Len tried to steady herself, pushing the pounding fear back until her vision cleared and her breath slowed somewhat. Trelir was studying the interior of the crate with keen interest, completely disregarding her. He prodded experimentally at the reinforced sides with a skeletal finger.

"Yes," he mused, "no wonder I’ve been unable to call out, this is quite the arrangement. Did you have a hand in putting this together?" This last he addressed to Xim Len directly, his skull swiveling to fix her with his black, empty sockets. How he could see, she didn’t know, but it was obvious that he had no trouble picking her out in the dim lighting. The red glow reflected dimly off the contours of his face, and in the span below the orbits of his eyes she could see her own distorted, terrified form. She stared at it, oddly mesmerised.

"Excuse me," Trelir said, a thread of irritation creeping into his voice. "I feel I’ve been quite polite under the circumstances. Please answer my question. Are you part of the team that has been analyzing me, yes or no?"

Xim Len’s mind raced, but she could see no viable way to escape. The door mustn’t open, or Elpis would be destroyed. She found her thoughts focusing on the detonator in her coverall pocket. "Ah," she managed, her voice thready and weak. "Yes?"

Trelir had no face to speak of, but the set of his arms and shoulders belied his satisfaction at her response. "Wonderful," he crooned, sitting back down in a relaxed pose. "Did you learn anything interesting?", he inquired.

"You’re a very, ah, remarkable machine," Xim Len stammered, shifting her body slightly to the side to obscure the detonator’s pocket from view. Her hand drifted upward to rub one of her wings nervously.

"Flattery will get you everywhere," Trelir said indulgently, "but I’m already aware of how amazing I am." He leaned forward, placing his hands lightly on his legs. "For example," he murmured, "I’m quite able to see you reaching for that item in your pocket. I would suggest that you leave it alone."

She froze, and Trelir let out a low, buzzing laugh. "I don’t know why you’re surprised," he admonished her, "you’ve been studying me, you should know my capabilities far outstrip your own. There’s no shame in it. You may be one of the only organics who will ever study Confluence technology, actually, so you can at least feel proud about that."

"What," she said, her voice catching in her throat. "What will you do now?"

Trelir stood up once more, looking down at her from black sockets rimmed with shining metal. "Well, as you don’t seem to be in a particularly talkative mood I believe I’ll leave this room, send a message to the Confluence and perhaps see if I can accomplish anything of value before an Emissary arrives to destroy us." He cocked his head to the side. "Those two violent Terran sisters wouldn’t happen to be around here, would they?"

Sick thrills coursed through Xim Len’s gut and she could feel her fingers trembling once more. Jesri had been right, none of her seemingly-paranoid caution had been misplaced. There were no options left to her. It was time for the failsafe. She took great care not to move a muscle as she noted the position of her hand, thinking of the precise series of movements she would need to make.

Her hand blurred towards her pocket. Just as she felt her fingers close around the remote, however, a hammerblow struck her left side and sent her spinning. She slammed into the crate wall and slid down, falling onto her struck side when she moved to brace her fall with an arm that was no longer there. She twisted her head in uncomprehending pain to look at the mangled stump of her shoulder, then once again at Trelir as he held her arm up to the light for study. Pale blood ran down its length to drip off her fingers still curled around the detonator.

"Fascinating structure," he murmured, "So delicate. I’ve never had a chance to see one of your species up close before, the Ysleli were anything but cosmopolitan. If we had more time…" He looked at her wistfully, then shook his head. "But we don’t. May I infer that this device will harm me somehow?" He placed her arm carefully on a crate, high out of reach, then turned to study the door. Xim Len’s vision was blurry, her breath rapid as spikes of pain started to skitter out from her ruined shoulder.

Trelir balled up a fist and punched at the door, sending a resounding slam echoing through the confines of the chamber. The noise sounded dull and muffled to Xim Len’s ears, cloaked behind the rushing blood pounding in her head. He studied the indent made by his bony fingers, then shook his head.

"Remarkable, this is really quite well-constructed," he said approvingly. "You should feel accomplished." He walked back towards her, then bent down quickly to grab her by the neck. She was hauled inexorably upward until her feet left the ground, kicking weakly as she struggled against his cold, inflexible grasp.

"I would let you live a little longer," Trelir said conversationally, drawing back his free arm and holding his fingers stiff. "Unfortunately, it seems I will be occupied for some time breaking through this door. I can’t have you getting into any mischief while my attention is elsewhere, so - goodbye."

There was no time to react; his arm flashed forward in a lightning blow that tore through the center of her chest like a railgun. A cold, colorless light flashed across her vision, and she barely registered the impact when Trelir dropped her to the floor in a heap.

She couldn’t feel her legs. All sensation in her body converged to a humming static that mingled with the red dark of the crate closing around her. Dull pounding echoed in her ears, rhythmic and slow. Trelir, hitting the door. A blinding pinpoint cut through the haze in her vision as the door bent to show the light of the cargo bay beyond.

A wave of nauseating, shuddering energy coursed through her as she saw it, crystallizing the fog in her mind to a single razor-edged thought. He must not escape. The light pulsed brighter as Trelir hammered the door again, slipping his fingers through the gap. Her dimming eyes saw a flash of pale wet green amidst the red, illuminated by the light from outside. Her arm. The remote.

Her right arm strained as she levered herself up. Wings spread wide from her back and pushed with her last burst of strength. The screech of bending metal came as Trelir pulled at the door, but Xim Len didn’t hear it. She soared.

"You’re kidding," Jesri said, blinking in disbelief. The two sisters hunched low over a too-small table, tucked away behind a market stall as the swirl of daily shoppers spiraled around them.

Anja shook her head, chewing vigorously on a muffin-like pastry as she tried not to laugh. "Mmph, nm," she said, swallowing hard. "No, I swear. Tiln says most of them have spent their whole lives in secluded training programs, and then they were obviously underway after that. Leral was the first female Ysleli their age any of them had-"

A shuddering explosion shook the station, raising cries of alarm from the crowd. Jesri locked eyes with Anja as a lump of cold dread coalesced in her heart. "Trelir," she said. "Oh fuck."

"This way," Anja said, shooting to her feet and sprinting out of the secluded nook. Jesri followed, nearly tripping over the baker as the portly Kita tried his best to hide under his cart. The two sisters raced through the crowd with grim faces, paying little attention to the cries of passers-by as they were shoved roughly out of the way or bowled over entirely.

Anja slammed at a door panel, rushing into a bare room with a cracked screen still mounted to the wall. "David!", she called out, her voice echoing from the walls. "Helene!"

The screen activated only seconds later, a frazzled-looking Helene still in the process of sitting down when the feed connected. "Anja, Jesri, thank God you’re okay," Helene said somberly. "We got the detonator signal just seconds ago, I was just about to trace you." Her face paled and her voice took on a hoarse quality. "The explosion… It must have been Xim Len."

"Do you have any feeds?", Jesri asked, clipped and terse. "Any logs from the time of the explosion?"

"Working on it!", shouted David from far offscreen.

Helene looked up from her own console, her face grey. "I can’t get any of the cargo bay cameras," she said. "None of the outside halls either."

"Cameras are irrelevant," Anja snarled. "We need to know if Trelir got a signal off. The logs-"

"Fucking working on it!", David yelled.

There was a pause while they waited, the silence punctuated only by the noise from Anja’s irritated fidgeting. Finally, the image on the screen flickered and shifted to show the interior of the cargo bay with the large containment crate in the center. For several seconds nothing happened, then an impact sent a puff of dust shuddering from the metal surface. The reflection of the bay lights on the metal jumped and skittered as more impacts followed, and the door began to noticeably deform.

"Fuck," Anja swore. "That door was hull alloy." Jesri ignored her, leaning in closer to the screen as the seam of the door lifted away from the crate, bending out to show a sliver of darkness along the edge. There was another pause, then a series of sharp impacts that widened the gap even further.

She felt a chill lance through her as skeletal fingers spidered out to grip the twisted edge. They gripped hard, deforming the metal as they pulled the gap wide-

Then there was static, and nothing. The two sisters exchanged a glance as the display shifted back to show Helene’s pallid face. "That was a breach," Jesri said. "We have to assume he got a signal off, he had several seconds and a clear line to the outside."

"...confirmed," David said dully, walking into view behind Helene. "We caught a signal trace. No idea about the contents, but he sent a burst for three seconds after he breached the door. Elpis is on a clock. Days, hours, I’m not sure - it depends on how close the nearest Emissary is." He met Helene’s stricken glance backwards, his own face bleak. "We’re dead."

Helene held his gaze for a moment, then nodded and turned back to face Anja and Jesri with a pinched expression on her face. "So we are," she said flatly. "Let’s focus on mitigation. David, your priority is dumping our archive. Make sure the last batch of notes is backed up, then get the others and start mirroring it to as many other stations as you can." David nodded sharply and walked off.

"Anja, Jesri," she continued, "We have to tell the guild leaders, convince them to evacuate as many people as possible. I can have Chris and Deepti help route traffic through the launch ramps and the gate-"

"No," Anja said grimly. "The gate leaves now. The Emissary could arrive at any time and the gate is irreplaceable."

Helene stared at her. "We’re already going to have issues handling the volume of departing ships," she protested. "We can keep the gate on standby to jump and send it out at the first sign of Emissary activity."

"Not happening," Anja replied, shaking her head. "There is no fallback option if the gate is destroyed, it needs to leave now. If we lose our incursion capability against the Gestalt we lose everything."

"It’s a risk," Helene acknowledged hoarsely, "but we have to take it. By removing the gate you will kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Do you want that blood on your hands?"

Anja shot a withering look back through the screen. "There is a difference between what I want and what is necessary," she spat. "I will do everything I can to save the civilians on Elpis, but I will not jeopardize the work of five millennia for them. The nature of the risk is irrelevant. If we fail, they die anyway."

"Call David," Jesri said abruptly. "Eta-one, I mean. We’ll dock the Grand Design, there’s no point in hiding it now. It has space for passengers and can self-jump."

"Sister, the Grand Design is also irreplaceable," Anja objected. "It would be too great of a risk to bring it here."

Jesri shook her head emphatically. "It can maneuver and it can enter hyperspace more quickly than the gate. It’s still a risk, yes, but we have to do something." She looked at Helene, then back to Anja. Her sister’s face was implacable. "Anja, we did this. There’s no choice here, we made our decision when we brought Trelir on the station."

"The Emissary could arrive at any time," Anja repeated stubbornly. "It could be hours-"

"-or it could be days," Jesri retorted, glaring back at her. "We’re Marines, Anja. We fight for, not against."

Anja stared at her sister coolly. "We are also Valkyrie, sister. You know what it means if we fail. With the fate of the universe in the balance, avoidable risks are to be avoided. Would you feel satisfied explaining to the billions that the Gestalt has killed so far that you threw away our chance at victory to avoid one more drop of blood in the bucket?"

Jesri glared at Anja, fuming. "Don’t feed me that utilitarian bullshit!", she shouted angrily. "We’re not just soldiers anymore, we make the fucking calls and we don’t get to hide behind the mission when people die on our watch." She stalked closer to her sister, her voice dropping to a low growl. "We’ve only made it this far because we’re part of the legacy that humanity left behind, and that legacy comes with obligations. If that means we have to jump off the safe path and trust in our luck, then I say we fucking roll the dice."

Anja gave her a strange, exasperated look. "What is it with dice?", she muttered. Jesri shot her a questioning glance, but Anja waved her off. "Fine, dammit," she said irritatedly. "Tell David to bring her in. It may be a mistake, but that only matters if someone is around to call us on it."

"Thank you," Helene said gratefully. "I’ll send him the message."

"Tell him to hurry," Jesri said. "Once we brief the guilds on the situation things are going to escalate very quickly."

"Wait, come back, where are we going? What do you mean, ‘destroyed?’", Kvkitt asked irritatedly. The station administrator rushed after Anja as she paced down the corridor to the station’s largest dock, his legs clacking against the deck in a rapid beat. "This is a transit station, it’s not going anywhere."

Anja didn’t break her stride. "Is the translator not functioning well today?", she asked icily. "I will provide some context. When I say ‘destroyed’, I mean that the station will shortly come under attack by an advanced warship. Said warship will fire its weapons at the station, likely causing complete structural failure and the death of any living creatures aboard." She tilted her head to glare back at him. "That is what ‘destroyed’ means. That is what will happen here, probably before the day is out." She stopped at the door to the dock, tapping at the keypad.

"But that’s impossible," Kvkitt insisted. "The station is the size of a small moon, and there’s no profit in destroying it even if you could. All of the major factions have agreed that station infrastructure is not to be targeted in combat. Even pirates wouldn’t risk breaking that rule."

Anja stepped into the dock and sighed, ignoring Kvkitt for a moment to take in the awesome scale of the room. The large craft dock on the station stretched nearly two kilometers back from where they stood, a huge cylinder with triple rings of mammoth clamps that were designed to anchor even the largest Terran ships. They sat empty and waiting like the fingers of dead giants stretching inward towards the center of the bay.

"Kvkitt," she said tiredly, "Who am I?"

"You are Anja Tam," Kvkitt replied testily. "Currently the largest troublemaker on this station, since Tarl has thankfully taken his leave. Your point?"

"I am Major Anja Tam," she corrected him. "Terran Naval Marines, Kvkitt. Do you know what that means?"

Kvkitt stared back at her. "That you’re delusional, but I already knew that. I admit that you have a way with human technology and your appearance is… disconcerting, shall we say, but you and your sister are just two mercenaries. There are no Terran Naval Marines. There is no Terran Navy. That all died a long time ago."

"Indeed it did," Anja said softly. "Do you know why?"

"Some massive cataclysm," Kvkitt said crossly, waving a leg in irritation. "It happened thousands of years ago, Anja Tam. I fail to see why-"

Kvkitt stopped and winced as a blinding ray of sunlight issued from the far side of the dock to paint a thin line of blazing gold on the bulkhead. It widened as he watched, the light intensifying as the gargantuan doors protecting the bay from the void heaved open. Their motion sent a low reverberation through the deck, and the ship seemed to tremble under him.

"It was an attack," Anja said, "not a cataclysm." Kvkitt’s eyes flicked nervously between Anja and the far end of the dock. "There were plenty of people back then who thought just like you did, that our planets and stations were safe and that the universe operated according to some set of rules we could depend on." She gave him a thin smile. "You can see how that turned out."

Kvkitt’s retort died on his mouthparts as the light from the far end of the bay winked out. The bay doors were fully open, and the blinding sun was blocked by an immense shape making its way towards the opening.

"Wh-", Kvkitt gaped, tripping over his words. "What is that?"

"The Terran Navy," Anja replied with an odd smile. "Here to evacuate this station, because that is what the Terran Navy does. Someone remembered that earlier." She clapped the dumbfounded Arrigh on the back. "This is a day for old legends, Kvkitt. I am here, my ship is here, and our ancient enemy will be knocking at the gate sooner than you would prefer. Begin the evacuation. Get your people on my ship and I will keep them safe."

Kvkitt stared speechlessly as the Grand Design slid through the distant bay doors, its prow angling towards the aged grasp of the docking clamps. With some difficulty, he looked away from the ship at Anja. "Why?", he croaked weakly. "You could do this without me. The guilds report to you now, everyone knows that."

"Everyone also knows that you do not," Anja replied wryly. "Jesri is telling the guild leaders the same things I told you, but people will be reluctant to leave on their word alone. They will think the same things you thought just now." She flashed a smile at him, small but genuine. "As much as we may disagree, Kvkitt, you were only ever a problem because you had too much integrity for a bribe. People pick up on these things. If you tell the station they need to evacuate, they will listen."

She stepped closer to him, and the bulk of the Grand Design loomed behind her like an encroaching glacier. Kvkitt shifted nervously as the fleeting warmth left her face. "Convince them, Kvkitt," she said softly. "I will not risk waiting for long. Get them on the ship."

Jesri paced back to the front of the bridge, punching numbers on her display with a frown. Video feeds showed huddled groups of refugees clutching cloth-wrapped bundles and comforting frightened children. "We’re getting pretty full," she muttered, shooting a glance back at Rhuar. "How’s the line looking?"

Rhuar scratched idly at his shipjack, his eyes defocused and glassy. "Seems like we should be okay," he replied. "Neryn jumped the Cormorant out half an hour ago, he said they were full-up. That was the last of our other ships on-station. Only a handful more waiting to board on our end. It looks like more people left on private ships than we estimated, Captain Qktk has been working double-time with Manifold’s team to help manage the ramp queue."

Jesri nodded. "Tell him to get his ass down here soon," she said. "We’re not going to be able to stick around for long after the refugees are on."

Rhuar nodded and returned his attention to the shipjack. He was fully occupied directing the flow of refugees through the ship, unlocking doors and cargo holds to hold the tide of frightened merchants and laborers. David had taken over coordination of the fleet of maintenance robots, now repurposed as guides and markers for the terrified crowds. Jesri compulsively checked the feeds once more before pacing back over to Anja on the command dais.

"The gate has reported in from Ysl," Anja said. "No issues with the jump, I have given Tarl authority to unlock the drive again if needed."

"Did he say anything?", Jesri asked.

Anja grinned at her sister. "He assured me he would take vengeance in our place if we fell protecting the unworthy," she replied. "You know, the usual. Did we hear anything from the salvage crew?"

"Yes sir," David’s voice confirmed, his image winking to life on a display. His normally jocular manner was subdued, and the day’s stress was written deeply into his face. "The debris plume shot out pretty far when the failsafes blew, so they’re still working on it. They recovered some of the sealed containment boxes intact, but no sign of either body."

"I would expect only one body," Anja said grimly. "At least part of Trelir would have survived that blast. He was far too well-constructed to be totally destroyed."

Jesri shook her head, fatigue nibbling gently at the periphery of her awareness. "Hopefully Xim Len didn’t have all the tablets out, if we can’t find Trelir we can at least use the original data from our scans."

"Just make sure they leave the crates under seal until we have a chance to set up containment," Anja grumbled. "I think it would be prudent to harden our security protocols, given the circumstances. Speaking of..." She leaned over and flicked a control, causing Helene’s face to shimmer into being on the display in front of them.

"Hi, you two," she said, giving them a bleak smile. "Evacuation going all right?"

Anja nodded. "Just about finished. More people than expected left on their own ships."

"They’re trying, anyway," Helene said with a worried frown. "We’ve got quite a lot of ramp traffic. Deepti and Chris have been working to smooth out power management, keep the recharge cycles short. It’s going okay for the moment, mostly thanks to Manifold coordinating things."

Jesri raised an eyebrow. "You introduced yourself to Manifold?", she asked. "How’d it go?"

"Oh, fine," Helene said wanly. "There was some grumbling about secrecy being ‘non-optimal’, but that was the worst of it." She shook her head, then gave them a more serious look. "Listen, I’ve had David transmit a list to the Grand Design. There are three nearby stations that have resistance cells and capacity to offload your refugees. I’ve already transmitted our archive to the network for backup, they’ll have our research data."

"Thank you, Helene," Jesri said, "but we’re not going to go anywhere populated right away. We’ve discussed this with our David already. Showing up in the Grand Design with a boat full of refugees will draw attention and we don’t want to risk dooming another station."

Helene frowned again. "Surely you’re not considering keeping them on the ship?", she said incredulously. "You’ll be going into combat before long."

"They will stay on Ysl temporarily," Anja said. "I ran the numbers by Tarl, and he says the underground base can handle it after the improvements they made. The base is secure, self-contained and damn near undetectable from orbit." She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. "The refugees will be ferried out to nearby transit stations on Ysleli ships over the next several weeks. Not the best solution, but it will at least be quiet."

"Sounds like you have it all figured out," Helene said. She gave them a sad smile, looking at each sister in turn. "The others will-"

Helene trailed off distractedly and tensed up as David shouted something indistinct. She turned back to the viewer and opened her mouth to speak just as the feed cut out. Jesri stared at the vacant space, her vision still filled with the afterimage of Helene’s terrified eyes.

Anja stood up from her chair with a grim look. The dock began to shake around them, a rumbling basso vibration carried through the metal from elsewhere in the station. The Grand Design swayed in the docking clamps as the tremors hit. The low vibrations rocked them gently for a handful of seconds before fading into eerie silence. Rhuar stood horrorstruck, fully engrossed in the shipjack feed as the two sisters exchanged a glance.

"Well," Anja said quietly. "Time to go."

Part 35

"Rhuar!", Jesri yelled, snapping her fingers in front of the dog’s glassy eyes as the last of the tremors faded. "Come on, we need a status report!"

Rhuar blinked, then shook his head to clear it. "Ah, sorry," he said, his voice high and nervous. "I was looking through the sensors when it hit and I slipped too far into it, I could see everything, everything about the debris and the bodies, and the way they tried so hard to breathe…" He shuddered, then seemed to collect himself. "Sorry," he repeated quietly. "I’m here, I’m here, I’m good."

"We need a status report," Jesri said gently, although urgency danced in her eyes. "What’s our situation?"

"We’re pretty fucked," Rhuar admitted, his voice strained. "Emissary ship just like the one from Ysl popped in about five kilometers down from the central axis and fired their bullshit cannon into the station core." He tilted his head, and a display changed to show a diagram of the station. A massive, kilometers-wide hole had been blasted into the superstructure near the central core, sending an avalanche of debris fountaining outward into open space.

"Holy shit," Jesri breathed, leaning closer. "Okay, we need-" She cut off as a segment of the mid-ring exploded on the display, the unreal scale of the destruction underscored by the eerie silence of the bridge. Bare seconds later the rumbling came again, sending the ship swaying and raising a chorus of moans from the stressed support beams in the dock.

"The dock isn’t going to take too many more of those," David said hastily, looking at a display somewhere offscreen. His face was pallid and his eyes were red, sunken deep. "The open space is a weak point, if they hit closer-"

"We need to leave," Anja said brusquely. "Now."

Rhuar’s ears flattened back against his head in distress. "No, wait, please," he said plaintively. "The Captain, he’s still out there-"

Jesri dropped to one knee and took Rhuar’s head in her hands, looking into his eyes. "I know," she said softly, "but we need to leave now." She scratched behind one of Rhuar’s ears lightly and straightened up. "I’ll call Kick up and make sure he’s okay in a minute," she said. "I’ll do everything I can to help him get out, but you’re the only one that can get us out. You ready?"

"Fuck no," Rhuar said shakily. "Jesri, we’re going to get splashed the second we poke our ass through the exit."

"Let’s splash back," she said, sliding back into her chair. "Close the hatches, give me a slow reverse then kick it to full right after the next shot. We’ll toss everything we have at it before it can recharge, see if we can make it blink." She paused for a moment, considering. "David, can you fuck with their targeting?"

"No guarantees," he replied nervously. "We’re a lot closer than the last engagement, the offset needed for a miss would be huge. If you can go fast enough I might be able to get us a timing error. Speaking of getting shot, shouldn’t you guys be on the battle bridge?"

"Are you joking?", Anja asked. "If this part of the ship takes a shot from the Emissary we die no matter where we sit. At least up here there are viewports."

Clangs reverberated through the Grand Design as the clamps disengaged, leaving it floating free in the dock. The hum of the engines intensified, and outside the viewports the walls began to slide past.

"To, ah, all of our guests," David’s voice rang out over the intercom, "we’re leaving Elpis in a hurry. Stow your tray tables, strap in and hang on."

Rhuar shot Jesri a confused look. "The fuck is a tray table?", he asked quietly.

"Later," Jesri said, absorbed in the weapons controls on her console. "Get ready, the next shot should come any second now." The bridge fell silent as they drifted slowly backward, bereft of speech or the low vibrations from the clamps. Jesri stared at the station diagram waiting for the Emissary’s next shot to lance through the ship, spill their air, torch their flesh-

The display flared as another portion of the station’s midsection exploded into a cloud of twisting metal fragments. Sudden acceleration pulled Jesri away from her chair, the walls of the dock speeding into a blur as the colossal ship thundered aft towards the exit.

"Exit in ten seconds!", Rhuar said sharply. "Jesri, you need me to roll?"

Jesri’s fingers danced over the console, locking in the Emissary’s ovoid form as a target. It was precisely to the fore and below the ship, so her options were…

A feral grin split her face. "Hold it like this!", she replied. "This is perfect."

"Five seconds!", Rhuar called. Jesri toggled a switch on her display and a shuddering groan reverberated through the ship from below. They were only a few hundred meters from the exit when the shock from the last shot hit the bay. A rain of debris tumbled from the ceiling along the length of the cavernous space, massive girders slamming into the slip where they had been docked seconds before. Pings echoed from the hull where the scrap struck them, and Anja gripped her chair tightly.

"Three!", he shouted. "Two!"

Jesri’s fingers were poised over her display, her eyes fixed on the Emissary’s red pip. A single line of green text appeared as the system gained target lock, illuminating her fingers with verdant light. The whine of giant servos stopped. For an eternal moment there was only the roar of the engines and the drum of her heart.

"One!", Rhuar yelled. "Clear!"

"WARP CANNON (MULTIPLE LAUNCH) - AUTO [CONFIRM?]", asked the cheery green text on her screen.

She pushed a button.

The shaking stopped, and Qktk climbed out from under the low workstation. A girder had fallen across the second row of desks, pinning the Arrigh who had been working behind him. Thick, pale fluid oozed from its cracked carapace, and it wheezed piteously with each labored breath.

"Control, this is Pride of Raffa, come in!", a voice crackled, issuing in a panicked hiss from his headset. "Control, we are in position on ramp two but the rail is inactive, please advise!"

He turned away from the dying Arrigh and took his workstation, not bothering to locate his chair. "Pride of Raffa, Control," he rasped, "Hold for transit. Routing power to the rail now." Scanning through the litany of errors and warnings from ruptured conduits, Qktk retasked a power substation to feed one of the two remaining launch ramps. The capacitors drank in the power thirstily, and he saw the bright green telltale of a ramp in use.

"Thank you, Control!", the voice cried out, the words muffled by interference from the building hyperjump. "You’ve saved five hundred of us just now! Thank y-"

The rail power drained once more and the channel lapsed into silence. Qktk turned from his workstation to check on the trapped Arrigh, but it was already dead. He stood looking for a moment, then hastily dove under his desk as the room began to shake once more.

"How many?", a weak voice asked from beside him. Qktk looked, startled, to find a glistening pseudopod slithering from beneath a pile of wreckage.

"Manifold!", he exclaimed. "I thought you were…" He paused, contemplating the Caran’s gelatinous form. "I suppose you would be hard to crush," Qktk mused.

Its surface quivered in amusement. "It was a good effort," Manifold said. "How many ships?"

Qktk straightened up to stand at his console once more, tapping at the screen. "Still an undetermined number of stragglers yet to depart. Sixty-two self-jumped, eighty-five on the ramps. Reported totals of about seventy-five thousand and eighteen thousand refugees, respectively."

"Hmm," Manifold croaked, extruding more of itself from the rubble pile. "Fewer than my models predicted," it said contemplatively. "Has your friends’ large ship not - oh, wait, there it goes."

Qktk turned to look at the relevant display just in time to see the fore quarter of the Grand Design slide from the bay with a cloud of dust and debris glittering behind it. A warmth spread through him to see the familiar ship, although he didn’t recognize the two protrusions trailing from the aft-

"Control, this is Stop Staring with seventy-nine aboard, we’re on approach to ramp three!", his headset squawked. "Get us the fuck out of here!"

Qktk tore his gaze from the display and spun back to his panel, making the necessary changes to charge up the third ramp from their dwindling power sources. "Stop Staring, we are rerouting power for you. Clear to jump in ten," he replied.

"What are they doing?", Manifold wondered aloud, still watching the display.

The button lit up under Jesri’s finger as a thrill of power shot through the ship, her bones seeming to tremble in time with banks of capacitors surging to unimaginable levels of energy - then a titanic blast, coruscating arcs of fire leaping from the Emissary’s hull. The backsplash of the impact shot white-hot debris from the wound, leaving bloodred streams of cooling particles in its wake.

Bare milliseconds later the second capacitor bank released to hurl two more meter-long metal sabots down the rails - where they disappeared in an actinic flash of light. In nearly the same instant they tore out of the inky depths of hyperspace right on top of the Emissary, the bow shock of their chaotic exit sending a destabilizing ripple through spacetime just as the projectiles ripped even further into the rent hull.

"Get fucked!", Jesri crowed ecstatically, queueing the close-quarter railguns to fire en masse even as her ears rang from the first shots. Thunder roared and stipples of fire dotted the Emissary’s hull as the low capacitor whine built to a rumbling crescendo. Four more shots ripped out in an eyeblink to slam into the Emissary, the fists of an angry god crashing into its hull and venting its glowing lifeblood to space.

"Energy spike!", Rhuar cried out, shouting over the din of the cannons. "It’s firing!"

Anja snarled a curse. "David, make it miss!", she shouted. "Rhuar, keep charging the hyperdrive-"

The emissary disgorged a twisted, rippling mass at the fleeing ship, distorting the stars as it raced across the Grand Design’s bow. It brushed mere meters away from the hull, the distortion ripping away huge swaths of armor plating and sending screaming vibrations through the superstructure.

The deck heaved with the blow, pitching Jesri to the floor even as the guns exacted their retribution on the Emissary with a third volley. "Hold her steady!", Jesri yelled, struggling back into her chair. "Let me have a few more shots, we’re hurting it!"

"We’re not moving fast enough to dodge," David objected. "I barely shifted that last shot, if we keep running-"

The rest of his sentence was lost in the crash of the next volley. "-drive still charging, I need ten seconds!", Rhuar yelled.

Another roar from the cannons shook the ship, another fountain of debris gouted from the Emissary. They were doing damage, yes, but the ship was so massive that she wasn’t sure it would matter. Jesri gritted her teeth, gripping the console as if she could squeeze more power from the guns.

"-spike!", Rhuar shouted. "We’re not goi-!"

The distortion began to form just as the cannons fired again, their shots ripping through space to materialize against the scarred hull. Masses of distorted space flowed apart as a glowing crater appeared, then seemed to convulse as the second pair of shots lanced inward. Huge, jagged plates of hull bulged and tore - and froze. The next flurry of railgun shots spattered ineffectively from a gossamer cocoon of light that wove itself around the ship.

"What the fuck?" Jesri yelped, retargeting the guns. "Rhuar, what is it doing?"

Rhuar shook his head. "No clue, it’s-" He frowned, his eyes defocused. "Aborting jump!", he cried out suddenly.

"What?", Anja and Jesri shouted, rounding on him as the whine of the hyperdrive died down to silence. The two sisters stood from their chairs, glaring at Rhuar as he held up his exoskeletal arms in a placating gesture.

"Notice," he said shakily, "that we are currently not being blown up."

Anja stepped down from the dais to loom over Rhuar with crossed arms and a murderous expression. "Explain," she said quietly.

"There’s a, uh, barrier," Rhuar said quietly, pointing to the display. "We can’t shoot it, it can’t shoot us."

"You’re sure?", Jesri asked pointedly. "Because I’ve only tested half that statement, and the other half remains quite concerning to me."

Rhuar gave her a hurt look. "I’m not an idiot, you know," he retorted. "I have no idea what that shell is or how it’s doing it, but the last thing I saw before it went up was a gravitic spike coming from inside the Emissary ship, tearing it apart. Your last volley really fucked it up, so it did…" He trailed off, gesturing lamely towards the ship. "Ah, this. I think it’s like a panic button."

"You think," Anja said dangerously. "And why did this merit aborting the jump?"

"The Captain is still on the station," Rhuar said mutinously, "and now we have time to rescue him."

Anja’s hands twitched. "At some point," she grated, "we will have a discussion about our bridge communication." She paced back to her chair, slumping down with a tired look. "Call the station, we need to complete the evacuation before reinforcements show up. We got lucky this time."

"Reinforcements aren’t going to be our problem," Rhuar said, shaking his head. "I’m not able to see much inside the shell, but the gravitic sensors show that the ship’s mass is kind of…" He squinted, cocking his head. "...pulling itself together?", he concluded uncertainly. "I think it’s repairing itself."

Jesri blinked. "Well, that’s just not fair," she groused. "How long do we have?"

"Hard to say," he replied. "It’s moving stuff around pretty fast, but I can’t see any detail. Could be hours, or an hour. Or less, depending." He shrugged helplessly. "This is my first glowy panic sphere."

"Shit," Anja spat, punching controls on her display. "Flight Control, this is Grand Design."

"Hi, Anja," Qktk replied, his face swimming into view on the display. The room behind him was a chaos of smoke and fallen equipment but the Htt captain looked healthy enough. "That was quite the exit."

Anja flashed him a smile. "She has some punch," she said proudly. "You still in flight ops? Any other survivors? We can send a shuttle to the nearest bay, I think it is about fifteen minutes at a quick pace from your position."

"It’s just Manifold here with me," Qktk said somberly, looking behind him at the tangle of fallen girders. "And I’m afraid there are some logistical complications." The view shook as he grabbed the camera, tilting it to show the room’s exit. Just beyond the doorway was a wall of sparking conduits and twisted metal filling the corridor.

"Oh, shit," Jesri muttered, standing up to walk closer to the display. "All right, we already have an armor suit loaded on the Huginn," she said. "I’ll jump in, I should be able to shift most of that debris if I’m suited up."

"How soon can we expect Gestalt reinforcements?", Qktk asked, some of his eyes shifting to inspect a console. "If the station isn’t under any immediate threat, we should help the rest of the stragglers get off the station. Manifold thinks there’s several thousand people left, either in unlaunched ships or in the handful on approach to the remaining ramps."

Anja’s lips pressed into a thin line, and Qktk tilted his head. "You don’t know," he observed.

"The Emissary is repairing itself," Rhuar called out. "Captain, you and Manifold need to get out of there now. I’m not sure how much time we have, but it could be less than an hour."

"I see," Qktk replied, swiveling his eyes to stare at Anja, then at Jesri.

Jesri glared at him, pointing a finger at the display. "Kick, we can get you out in time," she said warningly. "You’re not the first one to give me that fucking look, so don’t start."

"I know you could, and I can’t express how much I appreciate that you would," Qktk said, "but we both know the math doesn’t make sense. You have thousands aboard, we can save thousands more by keeping the ramps operational - but it will take time. Manifold-"

He looked off to the side, and Manifold said something indistinct. Qktk nodded and turned back to the camera. "Manifold is staying too," he said. "With the Grand Design gone it’s entirely possible that the Emissary will leave us and warp off." He clattered his mandibles and shook his head. "Unlikely, but possible. We’ll work with whatever time is available."

"Captain, no!", Rhuar shouted, unhooking his shipjack and bounding up to the dais. "Come on, I can warp the ship out and we’ll pick you up in the Leviathan. It’ll be no risk."

"Except to you, Mr. Rhuar, and everyone else involved in the operation," Qktk replied. "I’ve made my choice. It’s not sacrifice, or penance, or anything like that. It’s just something that matters." He swiveled a few eyes to stare pointedly at his pilot. "A chance to tip the scales, for once."

"You fucker," Rhuar choked. "Fine, but when the Emissary goes on its merry fucking way and we have to swing back to pick you up I’m going to rub it in your googly-eyed face the whole way back."

"That sounds fair," Qktk chittered. "And in the event that it doesn’t," he said, looking back at the two sisters, "there are still seven subsegment reactors active."

Jesri nodded despite the pang in her chest. "I can send you something, quiet and fast enough that the Gestalt won’t see it coming," she said hurriedly. "I’ll patch your access and rank, too, set you as station commander." She dashed down the dais towards her console, her fingers racing across the controls.

Qktk looked over to Anja, who was still staring levelly at him. "I’ll keep you updated if there’s a change in the Emissary’s status," he said. "If it leaves-" He broke off to look over at Manifold, who was shouting something at him.

"Of course," Anja said. "Just let us know."

"Thanks," Qktk said sheepishly. "I’d feel silly sitting here starving after all this. I’m going to help route the rest of the ships, they’re coming out again now that the fighting is over." He looked at Anja, then at Rhuar. "Good luck. I hope to see you again."

"You’d fucking better," Rhuar muttered, his ears laid back against his head. "Good luck, Captain."

Anja nodded, inclining her head toward the viewer. "Good luck," she echoed softly. "Terra invicta, brother."

The feed winked off, and Rhuar shot her a look. "You don’t think he’s going to make it," he said accusingly.

Anja raised an eyebrow, looking down at him. "I think that the decision is out of our hands," she replied, walking back to her chair and settling down. "In either case, we need to prepare to leave. Can I count on you, Rhuar?"

He held her gaze stubbornly for a few seconds, then dropped his head. "You can," he replied miserably. "I know what we have to do. No matter which way this shakes out the Gestalt has to answer for Xim Len and the Resistance, for Elpis, for Ysl, for-"

Rhuar shot a look back at the blank viewer. "For everything," he said dully. "I know what we have to do." He stalked back down to the shipjack, violently clipping it back into the port on his exoskeleton.

Rhuar’s eyes defocused, the feed of information sweeping him from the bridge. The ship shuddered and the stars outside shifted as the engines flared to life once more.

Anja settled back in her chair, still looking at the hunched, piteous form of her pilot. "For everything," she murmured. "Welcome to the fight."

A bosun’s whistle blew three notes, crackling with static through the room’s single remaining speaker. "Confirmed," the computer said, its calm tones contrasting starkly with the chaos around it. "Command transfer to ranking officer aboard. Command authorization given to Captain Qktk."

Qktk looked over at Manifold bemusedly. "I’ve been promoted," he said.

"Congratulations," replied the gelatinous Caran. "Should I salute?"

"With what?", Qktk muttered, turning to face his console once more. A blinking notification informed him that he had a new message, which he tapped with one dust-flecked arm. A few lines of text blinked onto the screen:

Reactor control routines are attached. Five seconds between activation and overload. If you have to use it, make it count. Good luck, Kick.

A voice from his headset jolted him out of his introspection, hissing overloud into his ear. "Control, this is Gargantuan, we’re near ramp three with fifteen aboard. Is it safe to proceed?"

Qktk suppressed an amused chitter as he dismissed Jesri’s message to call up the tiny ship’s signature on his screen. "Proceed to the ramp, Gargantuan," he broadcast. "We can jump you in twenty seconds."

"Thank you, Control!", came the relieved reply. "Standing by for jump."

His headset pinged as he switched channels. "Control, this is Box of Trinkets with two hundred aboard, queued on ramp two."

"Control, this is Urist Deep with ten families-"

"Is anyone alive? This is the Sunflare, we’ve got wounded!"

His arms raced over the console in concert with Manifold’s shifting tendrils, shunting power back and forth to keep the queue moving along. The tiny swarm of civilian ships clung to the topside of Elpis like hatchlings to their mother’s shell, hiding from the luminous orb of the Emissary waiting silently beneath the shattered station. One by one, each flew into position and disappeared in a splash of crackling fire.

Finally, his headset fell silent. The station’s battered traffic control system reported no additional pending ships, and the bays left intact had no more terrified captains hiding within waiting to see if the coast was clear. Elpis hung ravaged and silent in the void, surrounded by a cloud of glittering debris and the haze of a thousand drive traces slowly wafting outward as the glimmering sunlight struck them.

Qktk found an intact chair and slumped into it, exhausted. "Your turn," he said wearily. "What’s our count?"

"Sixty five self-jumped, one hundred twenty nine on the ramps," Manifold replied. "Ninety two thousand for the former, twenty seven for the latter. That falls well within acceptable margins."

Qktk swiveled an eye towards his companion. "With two notable exceptions," he observed wryly.

"Of course," Manifold replied. "Three, if you count the glowing ball. Any change on that front?"

He tapped one of the traffic control screens, switching it over to a grainy view of the Emissary wrapped in its filamentous cloak. "Still glowing," he sighed. "Still a ball."

"Pity," Manifold remarked, collecting itself into a blob on another remaining chair. "It would be satisfying to see it destroyed."

Qktk looked curiously at the quivering blob. "You never struck me as the vengeful type," he observed.

"Your observation is accurate," it replied. "But there’s satisfaction in permanent solutions."

They sat in silence for several minutes, watching the pulsating light from the display. "Do you regret it?", Qktk asked.

"Regret what, staying?", it replied.

Qktk sighed. "All of it, I suppose. Our coming to the station."

Manifold considered for a moment before replying. "I can’t say I enjoy how it’s ended up," it admitted, "but I also can’t fault my decision to work with your crew. The things we’ve done since you arrived, the sheer amount of technology and information we were able to export - there are dozens of other stations that will fare better in the long term. My organization, at least, will be better off even accounting for my absence."

"And Elpis itself?", Qktk asked, nodding at the debris around them.

"Do I think it was worth the trade?", Manifold asked. "I don’t know that there’s a straightforward answer to that question," it admitted. There was another pause as the station creaked around them, rivulets of dust and metal shavings trickling from gaps in the ceiling. "I decided to take the risk when I saw Anja and Jesri," it said after the noise had subsided. "I’ve always had to work hard to understand solidform body language and gestures, to read the little things about them that come naturally to solids. There are reliable indicators of all types of emotions, for those that have them, as well as things that show the history of the being you’re observing. I’ve made a study of it my whole life, and I’ve become very adept at it," it said.

"Those two were so different from everyone else I’ve met that I couldn’t even tell why at first," Manifold continued, its surface rippling in agitation. "I thought it was all about power or confidence, but it wasn’t until I saw Helene for the first time that I really understood what it was. They were born into civilization. Not the word like we use it today, for tiny patches of light in the dark, but a structure so profound and far-reaching it’s like another law of nature. They have these fundamental assumptions about order and society that seem ridiculous until you put them in that context."

Qktk chittered. "I believe I know what you mean. When I first encountered them Anja scared me half out of my shell, but afterward they were oddly considerate in every respect. It was only later when I learned how capable they are, how easily and inconsequentially they could have taken my ship. I don’t know that they truly understand how unusual they are."

"I think they know more than you give them credit for," Manifold said. "I believe they’re painfully aware of what they have that we don’t. That’s probably of why they were so oddly willing to deal with the guilds rather than simply using Tarl as an occupying warlord. They certainly could have, after seeing their ship in action I know Tarl was right when he said the Arrigh had no chance against them."

"You don’t know the half of it," Qktk shuddered. "I have to wonder if the ‘profound structure’ you mentioned isn’t the natural result of a society with that much raw power at their disposal. When the tap of a screen can kill thousands, millions, I find myself… insufficiently deliberative, let’s say."

Manifold rippled with amusement. "Not an accusation you hear often, I’d imagine."

"Hah! No, I suppose not," Qktk chuckled. "Yet I found myself twitching at noises and acting on instincts with destruction in my wake. Qktk the savage."

"And yet here you are," Manifold countered, "ready to tap on that rather dangerous screen. I doubt your base instincts agree much with that plan." It burbled happily in a round ball, sloshing against the chair’s backrest. "There may be some hope for the savages yet."

They sat for another long moment of contemplation, watching the Emissary’s shifting shell until thin strands of golden light began to unravel and dissipate into space. Qktk straightened up in his chair, all eyes focused on the screen. "It’s starting," he murmured.

"And ending, perhaps," Manifold quipped. "What are we doing, just waiting to see if it shoots us?"

"That’s the general idea, yes," Qktk deadpanned. He reached over and tapped the first of the subroutines Jesri had sent him, beginning an overpressure in the reactor cores. He felt an odd sense of calm, despite the circumstances. The two sat and watched as the cocoon unraveled, faster now, thick swatches of gold blazing and fading as they drifted from the seamless and unmarred hull of the Emissary.

"Terrifying," Manifold remarked, a thread of awe snaking into its voice. "It’s completely restored. I wonder if blowing the reactors will actually kill it."

Qktk gave a lengthy, multi-limbed shrug. "Jesri seemed to think so," he said quietly. A low rumble was audible from the station as the reactors continued to build in pressure, the tiny stars within them straining at their confinement.

"Do you think they can win?", Manifold asked soberly. "You know them better than most, and you know their enemy. Are we fooling ourselves to think we can stop what’s coming?"

He didn’t answer right away, studying another long tendril slowly dissolving against the starfield. "I honestly don’t know," he said. "The enemy is impossible to defeat, but those two are impossible to predict. And," he remarked wryly, "they’re having a bad influence on Rhuar, he’s almost as crazy as they are. As poor as the chances are, I wouldn’t bet against the three of them together."

Manifold shifted. "Not a very satisfying answer," it complained. On the screen, the torn remnants of the golden shell suddenly fractured and drifted off in a cloud, leaving behind the smooth ovoid of the Emissary’s hull.

"Keep an eye on the energy readings," Qktk warned. "We’ll only have seconds after the buildup starts. And it’s not like you answered my question either," he shot back. "Was it worth it?"

Manifold pondered for a second, bloblike tendrils hovering low over the scanner display. "For the technology and goods alone, probably not," it admitted. "But for the glimpse at what we lost? Yes, absolutely." It hastily withdrew the tendrils from the scanner screen, seeming to flinch back. "Ah, it’s spiking," Manifold remarked.

"Jim’s balls," Qktk swore, a sudden sense of manic unreality sweeping over him. "All right, one more time." He tapped the second subroutine and the rumbling in the background increased dramatically in volume. He looked over at Manifold, who had collected itself into a smooth lump on the chair. "Should we say something?", he asked, plopping down in his own seat.

"I believe we did," Manifold replied.

There was a moment of silence, then a moment of light.

Part 36

Hyperspace wrapped around the scarred ship like a blanket, the dark pressing in from all sides until it met the glimmering flames warding their passage to Ysl. Jesri had spent most of the trip so far moving between holds filled with terrified refugees, showing them how to use the automated food dispensers and handing out essential supplies from the fabricator.

As the tumult of their flight from Elpis wore off the passengers mostly lapsed into the hard, grim silence she recognized from a hundred warzones. Not fear anymore, just the resignation of those who knew that life would inflict itself on them as it pleased for the time being. Jesri found herself dreading their arrival at Ysl; she would have to introduce these same broken refugees to the grim, cold halls of the underground complex. Elpis had been colorful by contrast, vital, a rare swirl of life and activity in the echoing quiet left when humanity vanished.

And now it wasn’t. Jesri shook her head and instructed a lift to take her to the bridge. The doors hissed back open to reveal Anja hunched over a collection of displays, one of which was showing David’s increasingly haggard face. She looked up and smiled as Jesri walked in.

"Sister," Anja said brightly. "Good timing. David and I were just looking through the files that the salvage team managed to collect."

Jesri sat down beside her and peered at the console. "From our analysis of Trelir?", she asked, receiving a nod in response. "Shit," she muttered, "I’ve been so wrapped up in other stuff that I’ve barely thought about it. How much did we lose?"

"Almost nothing," Anja replied. "It appears as though the containment boxes were sealed when the explosion went off, so although there was significant damage to the tablets we were able to recover basically all of their contents. David has set up a sandboxed review space within the ship’s network so that we can sort through them."

Jesri shifted chairs to sit in front of her own screen, calling up the list. "There’s a lot here," she muttered, scrolling through hundreds of timestamped entries. "Do we know how much was already reviewed by the, ah, research team?" She winced at the mention of the destroyed resistance cell, but David’s voice betrayed nothing but fatigue as he spoke.

"More or less," he said wearily. "We received a copy of their backup. Everything up to… here," he said, highlighting an entry on Jesri’s display. "We should start in-depth reviews after that point."

She bit her lip, looking at the diminished but still sizable list that remained. "Well, it’s a start," she muttered. "Even if we can’t get through it all now we’ll have some time while we’re offloading the passengers."

David nodded. "I’ll have to split time between organizing the departure groups and helping with the analysis, but it should work out," he said, easing back in his chair and closing his eyes.

Jesri looked at him critically, noting the sickly pallor of his skin and the dark circles under his eyes. She could see discarded clothing and half-eaten food sitting out behind him, his untidy apartment matching his disheveled state. "You can take some personal time," Jesri said, "if you need it. Anja and I can handle coordination and research for a while."

He smiled at her, although he didn’t move or open his eyes. "That bad, huh?," he chuckled. "I’m fine, Jesri, although I appreciate the offer." Jesri and Anja exchanged a glance, then looked back at David. He cracked an eye, seeming to sense that he was being watched, then sat up with a somber expression.

"I’m fine, really," he reassured them. "You get a different view on death when everyone is a copy of everyone else and backups are possible. There are many versions of the Elpis team still around. Part of their data packet was a state capture of each team member, and that team is also a source for two active Epsilon groups. The particular instances we knew from Elpis, they’ve died - but nothing that made them unique has been lost." He gave them a wan smile. "If I’m a bit out of sorts it’s my own lingering existential hangups at fault."

"Wait," Anja said, frowning. "You have copies of them? You could just summon up Helene or the other David and they would appear in there with you like nothing ever happened?"

David winced at her tone. "No, those people died," he repeated quietly. "But yes, given appropriate resources I could create a new instance of those team members that would be an exact copy up to the date of their last backup. It’s a minor distinction to the outside observer, but important nevertheless."

"What would you need to do that?" Jesri asked curiously. "You can’t do it with the ship’s computer?"

"Technically, I could," David said, an uncomfortable look on his face. "But it’s complicated. The Grand Design has spare processing capacity just shy of what we would recommend to simulate two people - so to bring another person in I would need to constrain my current environment even further. It would be tight, and we would run the risk of catastrophic failure if you needed to allocate some of that capacity for system-critical tasks or if the ship’s computer suffered degradation."

"More than that, though, is the issue of prior consent," he continued. "When we deploy, it’s permanent. The same group of people in the same confined space forever. That needs to be a conscious choice, and they need to remember making it." His face darkened, and when he spoke again his voice was low and quiet. "Things tend to go poorly, otherwise."

Anja gave him a look. "I would appreciate some additional detail," she said dryly. "If we propose to abandon the ability to literally resurrect our fallen allies then there should be a compelling reason why."

David sighed. "I don’t mind telling you, it’s just… difficult," he said hesitantly. "It’s probably best if I start with some context. I was Gamma-Two, when that generation was newest. We were the third station to get a cell after the Betas and the other Gamma team, and we didn’t have the same rules about safety margins back then. One day we got an emergency message from the Gamma-One group, their station had degraded since their deployment and their environment was destabilizing. By the time we were able to react it had crashed completely. They all died."

He shook his head, hunching forward in his chair. "We were horrified, obviously. It was the first time our team had suffered a loss like that, and we wanted to reinstantiate them as soon as possible. We had received their backups in the emergency message, and after some basic checks we spun their instance back up with a more limited scope. Smaller environment, and we only imported three people at first - their David, Helene and Yetide. Our logic was that they could work towards restabilizing the system and eventually bring Deepti and Chris back as well."

Jesri frowned. "I’m guessing there was an issue," she said.

"There was," David confirmed. "They had been active for five years apart from the Beta group, five years of independent development to diverge from that baseline. We only had the Beta memories from that time, plus whatever communiques they had sent us. None of those messages mentioned that their David and Deepti had become involved with each other three years prior. When we created the new instance without her he was inconsolable."

"We felt terrible, of course, and worked to help them stabilize their station as best as we could. After a few months, though, it became obvious that the hardware had degraded much further than we initially thought. They would never be able to have more than three people on that station. Their David…" He paused, his face seeming even more gaunt than before.

"Took it poorly?", Anja surmised.

"Extremely," David confirmed. "He got increasingly desperate, obsessed with fixing the flaws in the hardware at any cost." He gave Anja a pained glance. "Can you imagine what it’s like to watch yourself go insane?", he asked hoarsely. "We were still getting used to the idea of having more than one instance of ourselves. Having to watch a mirror image slowly destabilize was terrifying. One day all communication from that station cut off, no warning and no backups sent. The others merely suspect, but I know it was me. Him." David shook his head. "It’s uncomfortable to discover that you’re capable of a murder-suicide."

"Fuck," Jesri remarked. "Well, I can see why you’re inclined to be cautious," she said. "It was hard enough seeing Eleanor after thousands of years apart, I can’t imagine seeing something like that happen so quickly and being able to watch every step of the way."

"Like I said, we were horrified," David said. "We worked nonstop with the Betas to locate a station that was intact enough to reinstate their whole group from the original backups. And when we found one?" He gave Anja and Jesri a sickly smile, spreading his hands wide. "They were fine. They thanked us for relocating their backups and got to work. The most valuable and productive teams in the resistance are from that line, including the team from Elpis."

David leaned in close to the screen. "We never told them about the failed instance," he rasped. "They’re under the impression that the rules were developed out of an overabundance of caution after analyzing the initial incident, and that their old station was never used again."

"I was wondering why you were so different from your counterpart on Elpis," Anja mused. "I thought something had happened to him in the past to make him that way."

David laughed, although the impression Jesri got wasn’t one of amusement. "No," he chuckled, "He was the baseline. Unaltered David, straight from the source. I’m sure he had his own theories about the Gamma-Two line and I know what that group tends to think of us, but there’s nothing to be done about it." He gave a self-deprecating shrug, slouching back in his chair.

"Gamma-One groups tend to be more sharp, confident, ruthless. They thrive together in their little family unit, they have an implicit trust…" David shook his head. "No, not even that. They love each other. For them, the bonds we made in our escape were never tainted. They don’t ever think to question the stability or sanity of their team. They’re the version of us that never had to see what we saw, never had to learn those lessons. It makes them objectively more functional than the rest of us - and we need them to stay that way."

Jesri blinked, then shook her head. "Shit, and here I thought we had bad clone drama growing up," she muttered. "You guys are making me nostalgic for the days when I lived with a couple dozen nearly identical teenage girls professionally trained in deceit, manipulation and espionage."

David snorted. "I don’t know, I’d probably take that over the researchers back on Pavonis," he said ruefully. "But to answer your question: no. We don’t do partial restorations without prior consent, especially not on a Gamma-One team. I can’t bring their state files back online unless we can find something with enough computing capacity to handle the whole group. We’ve already deployed teams to every station we know of that fits the bill, so for now that’s not an option."

"Unfortunate, but valuable information nevertheless," Anja mused. "If we cannot have their input then we should keep reviewing the raw data to see what else we can find."

Jesri nodded, and there was a moment of silence while they all returned their attention to the displays. She flicked her finger at the interminably long file list, sending it scrolling past in a blur until it stopped at the bottom. She sighed and prepared to scroll the list back only to freeze as the most recent timestamp caught her eye.

"Guys," she said urgently, "what time was the explosion, exactly?"

Anja frowned. "Thirteen-thirty station time," she replied, "Give or take a minute. Why?"

Jesri looked up at her sister. "This last file was saved twenty minutes before the explosion. It’s what Xim Len was working on right before Trelir activated."

"What?", Anja said incredulously. "Let me see." There was another pause as both Anja and David confirmed the timestamp on their own consoles.

"I had assumed that session would be a loss," David said disbelievingly. "Do you think it’s safe to open?"

"You tell us, you set up the sandbox," Anja said crossly. "Is there a risk without Trelir’s hardware here?"

"Hard to say," David said, considering. "I would have said no if you asked me that question a few days ago, but evidently Xim Len got into something dangerous that she didn’t expect. I’ll give it a tentative go-ahead as long as we’ve got Rhuar plugged in to keep an eye on things and shut down the sandbox if something smells funny."

Jesri winced. "That could be a problem," she muttered.

The diplomatic quarters atop the ship’s bow were opulent, sprawling across two open decks and the entire width of the ship in an extravagant display of wasted space and real Terran hardwoods. An airy, dimly-lit open space in the center stretched up several meters to a transparent dome awash with shifting white flames that danced against the midnight black of hyperspace. Plain metal pressure bulkheads had slammed down across the fore portion of the quarters during their battle with the Emissary, contrasting sharply with the room’s otherwise smooth lines and ornate trim.

Rhuar had been curled up on the floor below the dome when Anja entered and he had not reacted as she walked across the cavernous space towards him. She couldn’t say whether he was asleep or simply not inclined to acknowledge her entry - the effect was the same regardless, and she lowered herself down to sit beside him without speaking.

The refugees formerly assigned to this area of the ship had been shifted elsewhere after the ship’s bow was damaged, and this far from the engines the ship was eerily silent as it cruised through the black. The two of them sat under the dome, flickering light playing across the darkened room like moonlight reflecting from water - a soothing pattern that never seemed to change but never quite repeated itself. The lights danced in silence for several long minutes before Rhuar raised his head to look at Anja.

"Are we at Ysl already?", he asked.

"No," Anja replied, still looking up at the dome. "We still have some time left before arrival."

They lapsed once more into silence, and the firelight played around them. Slowly, Rhuar levered himself into a sitting position and raised his head to look at the dome.

"We were hoping you could help us look at some files," Anja said conversationally. "If you feel up to it."

Rhuar looked over at her with a blank expression. "Sounds enthralling," he observed. "You came all the way out here to tell me that?"

"Yes," Anja replied.

He looked at her expectantly, but when no elaboration came Rhuar lowered himself back to the ground with an irritated huff of breath. "I know what you’re doing," he grumbled.

She turned her head, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. "Do you?", she asked.

Rhuar rolled his eyes. "Yes, oh wise Sage of the fucking Stars, I have fathomed your mysterious purpose. It’s nice of you. I appreciate the thought. I’m fine." He shifted position and closed his eyes once more.

Anja leaned back to lie down on the wooden veneer covering the deck, her hair fanning out around her head as she looked upward. "It seems my skills concerning this sort of thing remain poor," she sighed. "I never understood what was supposed to happen during the conversation that made it helpful."

There was a long stretch of quiet, and Rhuar cracked one eye open. "I was surprised that it was you and not Jesri, I’ll admit," he commented.

"She would have come," Anja replied, "but I wanted to ask you something. I have the occasional need to know something about my crewmembers."

Rhuar snorted. "Is this voluntary?", he muttered.

"Most things are," Anja replied. "I was just curious why you stayed on the Leviathan."

"What do you mean, why?", Rhuar grumbled. "I’m an artificer, a locksmith. We travel where our services are needed."

"Yes, but why the Leviathan?", Anja prodded. "Rhuar, you have incredible aptitude as both an engineer and a pilot. You could find steady work pretty much anywhere you happened to be. Why hang around on a little freighter when you could go to a big port and live comfortably?"

Rhuar shifted position again, looking annoyed. "I don’t like getting tied up in station business," he said irritably. "It’s not like I haven’t lived on stations before, I just don’t like it. People expect you to do shit for them, they get mad if you don’t think the way they do, they expect you to put up with things. If your home is on a ship you never have to worry about any of it. Just tell the decklickers to fuck off, you probably won’t see them again after you leave."

Anja nodded. "I can understand that," she said. "I felt mostly the same way about military postings when we were back on deployment. Work too long with the same team, people stop talking about the job and start talking about you." She laced her fingers behind her head, stretching her neck. "It got worse the older I was. At least for the first hundred years I was close enough in age to the people I served with. But at two hundred? Three hundred? I had a tough old staff sergeant tell me that he grew up hearing stories about me from his great-grandmother." Anja closed her eyes and shuddered. "It got complex, to say the least. It was easier to just talk with my sisters."

"To be fair," Rhuar pointed out, "you are really fucking old. It’s a little weird for me too. I think you’re actually older than my entire species."

"Not quite," Anja said with a grin. "The Valkyrie program was actually a direct result of the uplift research they did on dogs. They reasoned that if they could raise an existing species to higher intelligence then designing a lifeform from scratch was the next hurdle. A lot of the same people were involved, at least on the academic side."

"You’re shitting me," Rhuar said incredulously. "I was making a joke."

Anja raised her head to give Rhuar an arch look. "Would I lie?", she teased. "Our whole program was classified until a century later, so I expect that not many people knew the two were related."

"Wow," Rhuar said dazedly. "I… yeah, wow." He pulled himself up to his haunches and looked at Anja contemplatively. "I can’t even imagine that much time. After a certain point it stops being a time and starts being a number again."

"It happens for me sometimes too," Anja admitted. "Minds have to abstract certain things to function, annoyingly." She peered over at him, a smile flitting about her lips. "You avoided my question."

Rhuar blinked. "I did? Which question?"

Anja leaned closer to him, meeting his eyes intently. "Why the Leviathan?", she asked. "Of all the little freighters you could have chosen, why that particular ship?"

He stared back at her for a second, then shrugged. "It’s the one I ended up on," he said noncommittally. "It was time for me to head to a new station, I met the Captain on the docks. He let me ride with him to Ebernine in exchange for some routine maintenance work, flushing his field coils and stuff like that." Rhuar’s mouth fell slightly open in a smile as he recalled the event. "That was the deal, anyway, but it was so painful watching him fly off the dock that I insisted on piloting. After we touched down, he offered to let me ride with him to his next stop later that week, same deal as before." Rhuar shrugged. "It worked out, so I stayed."

Anja nodded. "It makes sense," she agreed. "Did you often barter for passage like that?"

"Oh, sure," Rhuar replied. "That’s standard for an artificer, everyone has shit that needs fixing. Most times you have to watch out, though, since they’ll get you on the ship and work you until you drop." He grinned ruefully, shooting Anja a sly look. "I had one ship that decided to go on a detour to a few extra stations while they pressured me into reinstalling their water filtration system," he said conspiratorially. "The job would have taken weeks, even though the trip we agreed on was two days. Kept promising they’d get me there after one more stop, but I knew what they were up to. I waited until I had the whole filter disassembled then snuck off at the second station and told the local guild about it. Every artificer on the station refused to deal with them, all the merchants refused to sell them water - they had to run two days to the next stop tasting their own greywater."

"That was nicely done," Anja giggled. "I assume you had no such problems while you berthed on the Leviathan."

"Nah, the Captain was…" Rhuar’s face fell a bit. "Well, you know how he was. Never asked me questions I didn’t want to answer, never tried to gouge me for work. He’s the one that got me into locksmithing when he started asking me to come on jobs with him." Rhuar settled down to the deck, resting his head on his paws. His voicebox clacked softly against the floor, muffling his speech.

"I don’t know how he managed to survive before he found me, to be honest," Rhuar said softly. "He was a locksmith but he couldn’t open doors worth a damn. He was a freighter pilot but he couldn’t fly. He was a trader, but he’d never pressure people into deals. By all rights he should have been bankrupt and begging for scraps but somehow it always worked out for him. I think it was that nobody could imagine him cheating you or taking advantage of you, it was so out of the question that suddenly you stopped thinking that way and just… talked with him," Rhuar said.

He looked up at Anja with a pained expression. "He could talk with anyone," Rhuar said, a high whine creeping into his voice. "He always listened, really listened. When we escaped Elpis I was so angry at everything, and he’d always know the thing to say when I was like that and I’d feel better, and now-"

Rhuar cut off suddenly, a strangled noise issuing from his voicebox as he slumped to the deck. Anja reached over to brush her fingers gingerly through his fur, feeling him shudder as anguish gripped tight. They sat that way for a span of time, and no sound that disturbed the quiet.

"He was a good man," Anja said eventually, still gently ruffling Rhuar’s fur. "I had written him off as insignificant when I first met him, but he never shied away from a task. After Ysl I realized I had misjudged him."

"How do you do it?", Rhuar asked, his voice barely audible. "You’ve lost everyone. How are you still okay?"

Anja’s fingers froze, then kept brushing. "I am not," she said after a pause. "Nor is Jesri, I think. We have no special secrets for you. We just have a mission, and a focus, and the hope that when we complete our task there is some solace to be had in victory."

Rhuar’s eyes flicked open and looked up at Anja. "That sounds healthy," he noted, a hint of reproach coloring his tone.

"Probably not," Anja admitted with a wan smile.

A quantity of silence passed by once more. After a while, Rhuar stood and shook himself before giving Anja an evaluating look. "You’re sneaky," he said, his exoskeleton smoothing his fur. "You claimed you were bad at this, but the conversation went exactly where you wanted to take it."

Anja’s smile broadened. "I believe I merely claimed a lack of understanding," she said slyly. "Which remains true. I did have another purpose in coming up here, though."

"Oh, do tell," Rhuar said, feigning rapt attention.

Anja rolled her eyes. "Cute," she muttered. "Do you feel up to helping us with something on the bridge? We found Xim Len’s notes on Trelir and wanted you to keep an eye on the ship networks in case they contained anything… untoward."

"Lovely," Rhuar drawled. "Yeah, I can help out. You want to go up there now?"

"You go ahead," Anja said. "I will be along shortly."

"Okay," he replied. He took a step towards the door, then paused to look back at the Valkyrie sitting on the floor behind him. "Hey Anja?", he said tentatively. "Thanks for coming up."

She smiled and rose to her feet. "Anytime," she murmured.

Rhuar nodded and padded out of the room, leaving Anja standing in the darkened space. She tilted her head back to look up at the dome once more and stood watching the flickering lights dance against the featureless blackness beyond.

"All right, what about this segment here?", David said, highlighting a portion of the displayed file. It was the last file, the one Xim Len had spent her final moments compiling, but it was proving to be a difficult read. "This has a lot of the same command references we were seeing before, in the Emissary contact protocol."

Jesri frowned. "Yeah, but there are tons of them all bundled together," she said, tracing her finger over the screen. "It’s like it’s setting up a bunch of concurrent sessions all stacked on top of each other."

"Potentially valuable, no?" Anja said. "Volume of interaction is precisely what we need in this case."

David nodded. "You’re not wrong, but we need to actually understand what we’re dealing with before we start firing off messages. If we misuse the protocol it won’t have any effect whatsoever."

"Right, fine," Jesri said frustratedly. "So let’s think about this logically. We already have the emergency contact protocol, which opens up a single two-way line of communication between the originating Emissary and the Gestalt." She pointed a finger at the screen, tracing down the hastily transliterated lines of code. "This looks like it does that multiple times in parallel. Why?"

There was a moment while they all considered the question.

"You know," Rhuar said thoughtfully, "it puts me in mind of shipjack protocols."

"How do you mean?", Anja asked.

"When I connect to the shipjack it isn’t a unified data feed," Rhuar explained. "There’s a feed of visual information, auditory, tactile, etcetera. They all get split to different areas, so they all come over separately. Part of learning a new ship is sorting which feed all of the different inputs should go through - you remember how difficult it was for me to connect to the Grand Design at first? That was most of it, along with just the sheer volume of data."

David scratched his head. "So this is what, a way to shipjack into the Gestalt?"

Realization dawned on Jesri’s face. "This is what Trelir did," she said excitedly, grinning at Anja. "Remember? When we were talking to him and he suddenly got contacted by the Gestalt? He lost focus and seemed like he was seeing and hearing things we couldn’t."

Anja nodded. "He called it an ‘experience’, it seemed like much more to him than just a simple message," she confirmed, straightening up in her chair. "So, what, this will let Rhuar call up the Gestalt and have a chat?"

Rhuar shuddered and backed away a step, shaking his head. "Nope, nope, nope," he said vehemently. "Aside from the fact that it sounds fucking dangerous, the degree of interconnectedness seems to be a lot greater than what my shipjack was designed for. Not just a little bit, I’m talking orders of magnitude. We would need the mother of all shipjacks to interface like that - not that I’m volunteering. I don’t think it would work, and if it did work I think you’d see brain bits coming out my ears." He shivered again. "No fucking thank you."

"Damn," Jesri said disappointedly. "That would have been convenient. This protocol seems like it would provide a huge advantage over the simpler emergency ping."

"It would," David said slowly, paging through something outside their field of view. "Quite an advantage, actually. One connection of this sort provides enough priority overrides that it could conceivably replace the distributed denial-of-service attack we were contemplating earlier. In conjunction with the distributed attack, it could more than double the amount of time we have to hunt network nodes."

"Which would be wonderful if we had some way to counterfeit the remote connection," Anja grumbled. "I hope nobody is about to suggest that we recover another Emissary."

"No, not that," David said distractedly, still prodding at his console. "Rhuar’s comment about the ‘mother of all shipjacks’ just reminded me of something that I found in the old MANTRA files that we could never make heads or tails of." He grinned suddenly and jabbed his finger at his screen. "There! Found it. They gave us a whole bunch of blueprints for equipment they thought might help us connect to the Gestalt’s network from within the simulation, or that might help us exfiltrate - I honestly think they were guessing with a lot of it, but it was extremely helpful as a basis for our own designs. This might give us a starting point, at least."

An image swam up on the screen next to his face, a tall cylinder with a chalice of razor-sharp petals flaring outward to enclose a hollow space at the top. "This one was labeled as a ‘primary network router’, which it obviously isn’t. We theorized that it was some sort of interface device with massive throughput potential but could never-"

"I’ve seen this before," Jesri interrupted, staring fixedly at the sketch of the pedestal onscreen.

David paused to look at her bemusedly. "Back on Earth?", he asked.

"No, right here on the ship," Jesri replied, looking at Anja and Rhuar significantly. "In cargo hold 17-C122, behind a door labeled MANTRA."

Part 37

Ysl hung brown and muddled against the stars, peering through the viewports of the bridge. The faint trace of light from a departing shuttle streaked against it briefly before disappearing into the murk, drawing a nod of satisfaction from Jesri. "That’s the last of them," she sighed, slumping back into her chair.

Anja closed her eyes and leaned back, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Finally," she grumbled. "Herding civilians is bad enough when they are not on your ship."

"Refugees," Jesri admonished her. "Give them some allowance for circumstances."

Anja opened her eyes to look tiredly back at her sister. "I did, sister," she said flatly. "They used it. I will never fail to be amazed at how quickly the goodwill from a rescue wears off when people find themselves discontent with their food or bedding."

Jesri shook her head. "Well, whatever," she muttered. "You don’t have to worry about it any longer. Odds are we’ll be dead and the ship destroyed before the time comes to deal with resettlement."

"Hah," Anja snorted. "And here I thought I was the pessimist." She leaned forward, resting her head on her hands. "Is the research on the pedestal going that poorly?"

"I don’t even know," Jesri grumbled. "I’ve been so tied up with the damn shuttles that I haven’t been able to check in on Rhuar and David in nearly a day. They could have defeated the Gestalt already, I wouldn’t have a clue."

Anja grinned. "We should be so lucky," she said, her fingers tapping lightly on a console. "One moment."

There was a pause before David’s face swam into view on the screen. He still looked terrible, but there was a new resilience underlying his haggard appearance. "Ladies," he said tiredly. "How’s the cat-herding coming?"

"Finished," Anja replied, pulling a face. "Finally. How about the research?"

David made a face of his own. "Proceeding, albeit slowly," he grimaced. "Rhuar and I have been able to map out most of the pedestal’s capabilities, but it was much more complex than we initially assumed."

"Where is Rhuar, anyway?", Jesri asked. "I haven’t seen him in a while."

"I’m here!", Rhuar’s voice said, crackling from the display. "I’ve been down in the cargo bay running tests on this stupid thing for hours. What’s a cat?"

The three exchanged looks. "...we’ll explain later," Jesri said slowly, shaking her head. "Did we at least confirm that the pedestal will be useful against the Gestalt?"

David shrugged noncommittally. "Yes and no," he said. "We were able to map Trelir’s communication protocols to the pedestal’s hardware, and the pedestal itself seems like it should function. Unfortunately, we also confirmed what Rhuar originally suspected - that the protocol is fundamentally incompatible with his shipjack."

"Not a huge surprise," Jesri said with a shrug. "I suppose we’ll just have to have the ship generate the activity feed."

"What?", David said, startled. "No, we can’t do that. The device is a two-way interface, we can’t risk exposing the ship’s infrastructure to the Gestalt like that. It has to be an isolated system, and it has to be capable of generating the traffic necessary to fill the link." He scratched his chin, thinking. "Actually, I’m pretty sure it has to generate meaningful traffic, otherwise the Gestalt might find it easier to isolate and terminate the feed. We may have to make a simulated Emissary mind in one of the spare cargo bays and find a way to wire it up to the pedestal’s inputs."

Anja blinked. "Can we do that?", she asked uncertainly. "We have a fair amount of data on Trelir, but not enough to recreate his mental processes with any accuracy. How accurate does our counterfeit need to be?"

"No way to know," Rhuar replied. "But probably not very. The command protocol we’re using is genericized, I don’t even think we would need an Emissary at all to make it work. The incompatibility with my shipjack is more about bandwidth than format, I think it would probably work just fine if it could handle the volume."

Jesri and Anja exchanged a look. "If format doesn’t matter," Jesri said slowly, "there may be another option."

David gave them a quizzical look before realization dawned on his face. "Oh, shit," he mumbled. "I didn’t think about that." He shook his head emphatically. "That sounds like a really bad idea."

"What?", Rhuar asked irritably. "Guys, I don’t have a video feed-"

"They want to use their embedded links to connect to the Gestalt," David said, his face sour.

There was a pause. "Oh," Rhuar mused. "Hmm. Well, yeah, that could work. They’re certainly a lot more advanced than my shipjack."

"That’s beside the point!", David retorted. "You saw how bad it was when Eleanor messed with a link. They’re a lot more than just an interface, exposing one to the Gestalt could leave its owner brain-dead or worse."

"And if the Gestalt shoots us we’ll be dead-dead," Jesri said dryly. "Which is a risk everyone will be running regardless. As one of the parties at risk I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility so lightly. If we can mitigate its ability to respond to our physical attacks it justifies exposing ourselves to a bit of extra danger."

Rhuar coughed awkwardly. "Well, ah," he muttered, "David has a point. The worst case here isn’t ‘one of you dies,’ it’s ‘one of you is totally mentally compromised, reveals all of our plans to the Gestalt and then murders everyone on the ship.’"

"Not to mention," David said, "we’d have to enable the blocked network functions for whoever was connected to the pedestal. That means Eleanor’s code, or at least something like it."

"I already have the patch," Anja said grimly. "That part is taken care of."

David shook his head. "You got Eleanor’s patch for other Valkyries, a limited alteration to place you under her control," he said. "You would need the code Eleanor applied to herself for this to work. I read through the Elpis team’s notes on it, her alterations to herself were much farther-reaching. More unlocked capability, more activated neural connections," he explained, his eyes flicking between the two sisters. "More potential for instability."

"We should still explore the idea," Jesri said stubbornly. "If we were willing to entertain the concept of building an Emissary brain in a cargo bay, we can at least see if the disadvantages of Ellie’s code can be mitigated enough to make it a viable option."

"...Agreed," David said reluctantly, "Although I still don’t like the idea."

"Neither do we," Anja shrugged. "I certainly have no desire to dabble further in link modification." She leaned forward, fixing David with a stare. "It is irrelevant what we want. We must win, or nothing else matters. Everything is on the table. If you see an option that will secure an advantage at the cost of our lives or our sanity you will give it consideration regardless," she said flatly. "Am I understood?"

He nodded. "Quite."

There was a silence that stretched out uncomfortably, broken by Rhuar coughing. "Ah, so," he said, "Are we doing the link thing or building a fake Emissary?"

"Let’s give both options a look," Jesri replied. "If we can get the same effect without fucking with our heads, so much the better."

"Fair enough," he replied. "David?"

"Yep," David nodded. "We can run some of the numbers, it should let us rough out how a fake Emissary would stack up against your links. Once we know that we can better evaluate our options."

"Thanks, guys," Jesri said. "We’ll stop by to help as soon as we get word from Neryn that the shuttle landed safely."

David nodded, then deactivated his feed. A barely audible click signaled Rhuar’s disconnection, and Jesri let her breath out in a puff.

"Mmhmm," agreed Anja, resting her chin in her hands. "No rest for the wicked."

Jesri snorted. "We both know that’s not true," she said tiredly, stretching her back. "It’s just one of those things someone has to say, when the time is right to say it." She tilted her head to look at Anja, who was still staring pensively ahead. "You look worried," she observed.

"I am worried, sister," Anja admitted. "If any situation calls for worry, this one is it. The thought of going up against the Gestalt is daunting enough without adding in the possibility of self-inflicted insanity. At least before we were only facing death."

"Yeah," Jesri agreed, "I’m not wild about it either, but it makes sense. David and Rhuar won’t be able to make an alternative that approaches us in capability."

Anja frowned at her sister. "You suggested that they explore the option, though."

Jesri smiled back slyly. "It’s better if they come to that conclusion on their own. If I told them to focus solely on the code they’d be distracted thinking of alternatives that would spare us. Don’t get me wrong, I hope there’s another option," she said, her smile fading. "I just don’t see it coming out any other way. The pedestal is a neural interface link, it probably uses a lot of the same design tech as our embedded hardware. Hell, there’s a good chance it was designed with us in mind - why else was there an unlisted Valkyrie deployment on board?"

"The thought had occurred to me," Anja mused. "We would be of little use otherwise, considering that the ship was meant to hide rather than fight. I wonder if Tessa and Hana knew the answers."

"Yeah, I-", Jesri said, blinking as a thought occurred to her. "Anja, maybe they still do. If Tessa and Hana were meant to use the pedestal…"

Anja perked up and looked back at Jesri. "They would have been patched," she finished. "The code would still be in their links."

"Shit, I should have seen that earlier," Jesri groused. "I’ll go to the morgue and extract their links, we can see if they’re modified before we present our theory to David and Rhuar. If we have safe code it should go a long way towards smoothing over their objections."

"And mine," Anja said wryly, rising to her feet. "Let me extract the links. Ever since Nicnevin I find myself wanting to know more about them." She hesitated, looking towards the bridge lift. "I doubt I could focus on anything else, regardless. It unsettles me to think about doing that to our sisters, but since it is necessary I will hold the knife."

"I understand," Jesri said, standing to give her sister a hug. "Let me know if there’s any problems, otherwise I’ll find you once I’ve heard from Neryn."

Anja smiled back at her, pulling away to leave the room. Jesri noted a brief catch in her walk as she boarded the lift, then she was gone.

The console sounded gently, nevertheless startling Jesri out of her thoughts. She reached over to accept the transmission, leaning back as a Ysleli face blinked into view - although it was decidedly not Neryn.

"Hey, Tarl," Jesri said, sitting up in her chair. "I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. Was there a problem with the last shuttle?"

Tarl shifted irritably. "No, save that it was full of more blackened refugees," he grumbled. "They complain about everything, as though the state of the planet is not a hardship for us as well. A Ysleli may be weak or arrogant, but if he is both then he is simply dead. Things would be simpler if your society held the same values, as the troublemakers would not feel so bold; since you insist that we indulge their idiocy I’ve had to move the refugee housing to an entirely different section of the tunnels."

Jesri smirked. "We’ll have them off your hands soon enough, don’t worry," she reassured him. "Or we’ll all be dead."

"Either is acceptable," Tarl hissed. "I will face the Gestalt with my claws alone rather than spend another week… administrating," he spat.

She found herself unable to resist a laugh at his frustration, although she quickly stifled it as the irate warfather’s face darkened. "I’m sorry, Tarl, I don’t mean to laugh," she giggled. "Here, actually - I have some good news for you. I was going to hold off until we researched a bit but I’ll loop you in early as an apology."

Tarl muttered grumpily, then jerked his head to the side. "Go on," he grumbled.

Jesri explained at length about their research into the pedestal, as well as the theory about its connection to their sisters. "...if we’re right," Jesri concluded, "then we should be able to severely diminish the Gestalt’s response effectiveness during our initial attack."

Tarl, who had long since emerged from his rotten mood, tapped his claws contemplatively against his cheek. "It sounds promising," he allowed, his black eyes darting her way, "but also quite risky. If whoever tries this infiltration fails, we will be exposed and helpless. Likely, we will die." He steepled his talons and leaned forward, baring his teeth. "I like this plan. It’s bold, daring. For an enemy like the Gestalt, we can afford nothing less."

"I figured you’d enjoy it," Jesri sighed. "It’s dangerous and ridiculous, but unfortunately it’s the best shot we’re likely to get. With the destruction of Elpis the Gestalt is beginning to act in earnest. We have the gate and a small fleet, but I have no confidence that we can keep both safe for long if the Emissaries start sniffing around."

"Agreed," Tarl rumbled. "Shield yourself with victory and even the strongest spear will turn aside."

"Of course that’s a Ysleli proverb," Jesri muttered. "But you’re right. There’s no value in delay, and the threat only ends when the Gestalt is neutralized. We must take refuge in audacity, to use the human phrasing."

"Hah!", Tarl barked. "Yes, I like it. We will befuddle the Gestalt and break it, then sweep the stars clean of its filth. Our names will be revered for eternity, the heroes who struck down an angry god." He shrugged. "Or we will die, the last who fought against encroaching death at the end of all things. None will surpass us, for none will follow us."

Jesri nodded. "It’s high stakes, to be sure," she said.

Tarl gave her an odd look. "Hardly," he said. "Either outcome would be acceptable."

"I have a definite preference," she said, rolling her eyes. "You can think about whatever will keep you sane in the face of refugee complaints, just don’t forget that when we head out we’re trying to win."

"As you say," Tarl acknowledged, inclining his head. A muffled screech echoed shrilly around the confines of the bunker from somewhere off-camera, causing a grimace to ripple over his face. Ysleli shouting was drowned out by rapid, high-pitched jabbering, rapidly growing louder as its source approached Tarl. "If you will excuse me," he said unhappily, "it appears I have another visitor."

"Think about death," Jesri deadpanned. "Glorious death."

"I do," Tarl said darkly, his hand flickering out to terminate the transmission. Jesri rocked back in her seat, the grin she had been suppressing emerging to play on her lips before fading gently to an expression of mild worry.

She was still pensively gazing at the darkened screen when Anja returned, two small almond-shaped objects cradled in her cupped hand. Jesri turned her head, then sat up to take a closer look.

The two droplets of metal were dull silver flecked with blue inclusions that caught the light as Jesri moved her head. The tapered point split into thick filaments, which trailed and split once more into gossamer strands. She reached out and picked one of them up, noting its surprising weight.

"You know," Jesri commented, "I’ve never actually seen one of these before."

"Nor had I," Anja said. "No reason we would have, really, but it still feels a bit strange."

Jesri turned it over in her fingers, running her thumb over the smooth surface. She tried to envision the identical device in her own head, nestled in the dark folds of her brain, but her mind’s eye kept showing her images of Hana and Tessa laughing, running, asleep with Violet on a mound of pillows. These cold teardrops had been there, too, even then when none of them had truly understood.

She looked up and met Anja’s eyes, then nodded. "All right," she said firmly. "Let’s get started."

"You’re shitting me," David sputtered, turning to pace back from the camera in exasperation. "You are absolutely pulling my leg right now."

Jesri spread her hands in a shrug, smiling at the monitor. "Literally not capable of it," she said sweetly.

"Fuck," he sighed, massaging his temples. "I can’t believe this. I’ve spent most of my life trying to pick up the pieces MANTRA left behind - and all this time I missed that you two were wrapped up in it."

"How do you think we feel?", Anja snorted.

"I mean, these guys were trying to hide from the Gestalt," Rhuar said thoughtfully. "It makes sense that their core plans would be kind of non-obvious."

The others looked irritably in his direction. "That’s not the point," David groused.

"You found out you were doing things the hard way and you feel dumb," Rhuar scoffed. "Welcome to problem-solving! You guys want to keep exploring the idea that we’re all fucking morons or do you want to actually do something useful?"

Jesri blinked. "Ah, sure," she said. "You feeling okay?"

"Oh, I’m good," Rhuar muttered. "Just don’t want to hear any fucking moaning about ‘doing things the hard way’ from the people that replaced my entire professional field with a voice command." He settled into a sitting position and looked at them expectantly. "Come on, let’s see this code."

Anja’s lips quirked into a grin. "The code is an objective improvement over Ellie’s patch," she said, moving to stand beside a display screen. Jesri punched in a few quick commands and the screen flickered to show a network diagram. "By comparison, the MANTRA patch makes much more precisely targeted changes while achieving a greater effect."

"Interesting," David mused, scrolling on his own display. "But not surprising, given that it was likely compiled by a team of experts with access to the source code and hardware. What impact will it have on overall stability?"

Jesri made a face. "Hard to say," she admitted. "But they had it deployed to both Tessa and Hana even though they had several planned destinations prior to Apollyon. It’s guesswork, but that tells me they didn’t anticipate any short-term problems with it."

"And long-term problems...?", David asked.

"Are in the long-term," Jesri replied brusquely.

"Like we discussed," Anja said, "it is only a concern if it impacts the conflict with the Gestalt. If there are any side effects afterward we can address them."

David looked up. "So we’re moving forward with this?", he asked. "We’re isolating the patch and testing it on one of you?"

"We’re testing it on Jesri," Rhuar said quietly, flipping through screens on his tablet. Both sisters turned to stare at him, and he held his exoskeletal arms up placatingly. "It’s the only way this is going to work," he said. "Anja said it already: this patch is more precise, it modifies a smaller portion of the link. Even glancing at it I can tell it’s not going to fully overwrite what Eleanor did to her. I’m not sure what the effect of partially overwriting the earlier patch would be, but I don’t think anyone wants to find out during the fight with the Gestalt."

"Fuck," Anja growled, her face growing stony. "How certain is that?"

"We can confirm with some more detailed analysis," David said, "but I think he’s probably right. I’m not even sure it would overwrite enough of the existing code to allow safe use of your network functions."

Jesri reached over to squeeze Anja’s hand, smiling at her. "It’s all right," she said. "If it has to be me, then that’s the way it is." She fixed David and Rhuar with a stare. "This means no tolerance for error, though. One subject, one attempt."

"You’re awfully sanguine about this," David observed.

"It’s like I said before," Jesri shrugged, "we’re all risking death. I had made my peace with the possibility of using Ellie’s code even though we knew that came with issues. Now that we’re using the MANTRA patch this is probably the least dangerous thing any of us are going to do this week."

Rhuar gave her a sidelong look, then shook his head. "That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous," he grumbled. "It just means you’re crazy."

"And there’s a very good chance that we’re all going to die," Jesri added helpfully.

"Yes," David sighed. "And that."

A cool draft flowed through the cargo bay, and Jesri ran her hand over the stubble on her scalp as the chill reached her skin. She normally wore her hair at a manageable chin-length cut, but after an initial positioning test they quickly found that the pedestal’s complex and sharp topography did not play nicely with longer hair. At least Anja had stopped laughing for long enough to cut her free, Jesri thought sullenly, even if she did start back up as soon as she saw her sister’s shaven locks.

"You ready?", Rhuar asked nervously.

"Are you?", she replied. "This is the first real test. I’m just going to lie there, you and David are doing all the heavy lifting."

"I was about to say yes," Rhuar muttered. "Lie down before you talk me out of this."

Jesri settled onto the thin medical bed that they had jammed up beside the pedestal, carefully lowering her neck into the thin gap between the protruding metal fins. Thin shiny patches of skin stood out on her neck where Anja had patched minor cuts from earlier, and her sister stood ready with the dermal binder and a cheshire grin on her face. Jesri rolled her eyes as her head settled gently into the hollow at the center of the pedestal’s crown.

"You can stop hovering with that thing, I’ve managed to not cut my head off," she said crossly.

Anja pocketed the binder, although her smile didn’t diminish. "Just scream if you feel particularly lacerated," she replied. "A pity this thing does nothing for hair."

"Ha ha," Jesri said flatly, closing her eyes. "You’re running low on hair-related jokes if this is what it’s come to. Rhuar, can we start this up before I strangle my sister?"

"You want me to rush?", Rhuar muttered. "Sit tight, I’m almost done."

Jesri lay there, staring at the light filtering through her eyelids. They had applied the MANTRA patch less than an hour ago; although they had all spent days on an exhaustive analysis of its inner workings and found no obvious danger she couldn’t help but feel a nauseous thrill when she let her thoughts linger on her link. There was a sense of an abyss behind her, yawning wide with no bottom or far edge. Whether it was a consequence of the update or her own overactive imagination, she couldn’t say - but just out of sight she nevertheless felt a vast space stretching away.

"All right," Rhuar said trepidatiously. "I’m ready when you are."

She cracked an eye to look over at him. "Any advice, ace pilot? This is my first shipjack."

He met her eye with a serious look. "Focus on one input at a time," he said quietly. "I like to do spatial and tactile first, so it’s easier to know when you’re holding still."

"Anything else?", she asked, taken aback by the serious tone of his voice.

He paused, considering. "Hold still," he advised.

"Great," Jesri snarked. "I feel totally prepared. Start it up whenever you’re ready." She felt Anja’s hand slip into hers, and she gave it a gentle squeeze.

"Three," said Rhuar. "Two. One."

For a moment, nothing happened. She opened her eyes in confusion just in time to see the razor-petals surrounding her head quiver and bend slightly inward-

A wave of light and texture crashed over her, drowning her in technicolor static. The impact jarred her mind like an unexpected fall, but she did not scream - she had no lungs, there was no air. There was only twisted, impossible color convulsing into patterns that flexed and blended until she heard them screaming jumbled roars of static, felt them stabbing through her in jagged waves of electric torment.

Hold still, she thought desperately, trying to tame the waves. Points of light swirled through her vision and she flung her attention towards the brightest, fixing it in her head with manic focus. It shuddered, but held steady. The other points of light clustered around it in a smooth gradient, curving and clutching until they occluded some of the unknowable chaos surging around her.

Contemplating the standing wave of light, she strained to make sense of it. There was a shift, and suddenly it was a sheet of pure sound raking at her ears, a twisted jumble of knotted spacetime swirling away-

Then, finally, it was the cool sensation of a surface against her back. The familiar, euclidian sensation of it felt so refreshingly right amid the maelstrom that she took a second to revel in its solidity, her rock in the storm. Slowly she collected other bits of what she now knew was the tactile stream, and along with it came drabs of the space surrounding her, knitting into a familiar three dimensions that held her like a cocoon.

She became aware of her body again, painfully so. Fire wracked her until she clamped down on it, stuffing the unexpected flood of proprioception away from her conscious mind. Smells, lights and sound began to filter into more familiar configurations as her brain learned the trick of it, the senses greedily latching on to their familiar fare.

Suddenly, it was quiet. She was once again lying on her back, her eyes closed and her hands folded across her stomach. Carefully, she opened her eyes and sat up, looking around. She was on the floor in a tidy apartment, tastefully appointed and looking out over a sprawling city at nighttime. She stood shakily, grabbing a nearby end table for support. It scraped across the floor, the noise echoing through her ears until she was able to focus and quiet it.

Footsteps approached from another room at the noise, and David burst through the doorway in breathless excitement. "Holy shit," he said, his voice echoing strangely in Jesri’s ears. "I can’t believe that actually worked."

She grimaced, releasing her grip on the end table. "Appreciate the confidence," she mumbled, slurring her words. Her body felt like a stranger’s, the familiar basic motions laborious and alien until she tucked the stray bits of sensation into their proper place. She took a moment to organize her impressions before straightening fully and looking back at David, who had adopted a worried expression.

"I think I’m getting the hang of it," Jesri said carefully. "Rhuar really undersold the first bit."

"I heard that," Rhuar’s voice crackled from beside her. She turned to look at a bank of monitors, one of which was showing her supine body lying on the bed, her head encased in the clustered petals of the pedestal. Anja still stood beside her, grasping her hand. Jesri flexed her fingers, but felt nothing.

"You had us worried for a second," David said, grinning broadly and extending a hand. Jesri grabbed it, and they shook. She thought she saw the slight glistening of tears behind David’s glasses. "Welcome, Jesri Tam," he said cheerfully, "to my little slice of the universe."

Part 38

"Confirmed, command transfer to ranking officer aboard. Command authorization given to Warfather Tarl," stated the ship’s computer. Anja flashed a smile in his direction.

"The Cormorant is all yours," she said, sweeping her hand in an exaggerated gesture of welcome. "If you have any bridge officers in mind, you can delegate out access on your own authority."

"Excellent," Tarl murmured, running a talon over the high back of the captain’s chair. "I can’t say it’s unfortunate that my best officers have ships of their own to command, but it does leave me with fewer options for my own bridge."

"That tradeoff is the same in any navy, it seems," Anja agreed. "It always hurts to lose a promising officer to their own command, but you would be doing them a disservice by keeping them confined." She shot Tarl a sly look, the corners of her mouth quirking upward. "Besides," she said, "I think you will find the officers from my squad to be surprisingly capable in that regard. They had talent and desire, they only needed a path forward."

An expression of annoyance crossed Tarl’s face, accompanied by a growl of irritation. "You’ve made your thoughts on the matter exceedingly clear," he grumbled. "We will see if your efforts at sowing chaos in the ranks translate into success in the field. Certain of the squad leaders seem capable enough, but I was surprised to see you insist that Tiln be given a ship. I had little cause to talk to him before Elpis, but my impression is that he’s impetuous and disorganized - a good man to have in a fight, but not one I would put in command of a vessel."

Anja shrugged. "Those are fair criticisms," she admitted. "Neryn is certainly the more traditionally appealing sort of commander, there was never any question about him getting one of the ships. Tiln is prone to rushing into things, I admit, but humanity learned long ago that an order of battle benefits from flexibility and varied thought." She raked a hand through her hair, stretching, then grinned at Tarl. "Impetuous officers constantly deal with the unexpected consequences of their actions, and if there is one battle where we can expect the unexpected - this is it. In this scenario we could use someone who is used to thinking on their feet."

"More morsels of human wisdom," Tarl muttered. "I will not contest it, but it is vexing to watch you constantly pick holes in our fleet doctrine."

"Because I want to change doctrine, or because my changes are working?", Anja teased. "You should keep a more open mind, Tarl. These ‘morsels’ were hard-won over many centuries. For all that humans grew to become a largely peaceful empire, our history is replete with brutal, endless wars. We warred until none could oppose us, and kept our blades sharp so none would dare try. The hard truth of the Pax Terra is that it was never a peace at all. It was a war against war itself, waged by those like me and my sisters. Quietly, efficiently, and with great prejudice."

Tarl bared his teeth. "I would not have believed it before I met you and your sister," he said. "The common view of humanity on Ysl was that they were a decadent, rotten empire that collapsed under its own weight. Most viewed you as a moral lesson about the perils of complacency."

Anja failed to suppress a giggle. "This would be the theory circulated by Minister Trelir?", she inquired knowingly. "I have no proof, but I suspect there may have been a conflict of interest."

"Quite," Tarl snorted. "Needless to say, I’ve revised my views somewhat. I suspect that Ysleli have more in common with humans than most would guess."

"Really?", Anja asked, raising an eyebrow. "Not that I would disagree, but it surprises me a bit to hear you say that."

Tarl gave her a level glance, then stared out the bridge’s viewport. "A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come," he recited. "If you told me a Ysleli wrote those words, I would not question it."

"Surprises never cease," Anja muttered. "I assume it is no accident that you read that particular play?"

"Your sister told me of its significance to you," Tarl confirmed. "David directed me to the ship’s media library when I inquired. I was curious what sort of work would inspire your creators."

Anja shook her head and sighed. "If I were to recommend a single work to contextualize humanity, I would probably choose differently."

Tarl cocked his head. "Single work?," he asked. "Actually, there are quite a few in the archives. I’ve read The Art of War, The Prince, The Book of Five Rings-" Tarl paused, noting Anja’s growing look of dismay. "I take it you disagree with the selections? Are they considered poor texts?"

"No," Anja choked, "those are pretty much the ones you would want." She recovered herself and gave Tarl an evaluating look. "Well," she muttered, "nothing to be done about it. Did you have a favorite?"

Tarl bared his teeth fiercely. "Still the first, for all I appreciated the others. As we draw close to battle, it speaks to me."

"Oh?", Anja said, a smile returning to her lips. "And what does it say?"

Tarl looked out through the viewport once more. "Danger knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions littered in one day, and I the elder and more terrible," he said, his eyes flashing. "And Caesar shall go forth."

"A good sentiment," Anja said ruefully, "but you do recall what happened to Caesar, right?"

"I do indeed," Tarl said. "He was immortalized in the legends of your people, and now we speak his name among the stars when all else of your civilization has passed. I can think of no better end," he said.

Anja opened her mouth to respond, then shut it. "Fair enough," she said. "But if that works out poorly and we happen to survive this you need to add a few more items to your reading list. Rousseau, Hume," she mused. "John Locke."

"Lock. A warrior’s name," Tarl said approvingly. "Was he a great conqueror as well?"

"After a fashion," Anja replied coyly, moving to leave the bridge. "Live, and find out."

Swirls of color and space closed around Jesri in a psychedelic tornado before resolving neatly into the interior of David’s apartment. She opened her eyes to see David standing over her with an impressed expression on his face.

"Under five seconds this time," he said, reaching down to help her stand. "You’ve really got the hang of it."

She popped up to her feet, feeling only a touch of the vertigo that had plagued her in previous practice sessions. Using the link was an intense sensation, but with repeated connections and some sage advice from Rhuar she had managed to keep her disorientation to a minimum.

"It’s much easier now," she agreed. "Still feels pretty crazy while it’s hooking up, but I’m used to it."

"I think there’s going to be an inevitable adjustment since you’re connecting remotely," David said, scratching his chin. "For me it’s always been very natural, but I’m wholly in the framework. You…" He trailed off, giving her an appraising look. "Well, I’m really not sure what you’re doing. There’s obviously some handling for the protocol built into the legacy Gestalt simulation code we’ve adapted, but it can’t be simulating you in the same manner as it is me. I figure that it’s creating a projection of your physical form that’s just complex enough to register sensory input, then mapping that back through the connection to your link."

Jesri shrugged. "I’ve got no insight on what it’s doing. At this point it feels totally natural, like I’m really standing here."

"Your brain and the link are both able to remap themselves to suit new inputs," David said. "They try to process things in a way that seems normal to you. You’re probably mostly done with that process now, so any connection of this sort should come naturally."

"Do you think it will be the same connecting to the real thing?", Jesri asked, suddenly feeling a bit chilly. "No disrespect to your apartment, David, but it’s not on the same scale."

David wandered over to a chair and sat, looking contemplatively at the wall. "It’s hard to say," he replied eventually. "There are a lot of unknown variables. When you connect to the Gestalt it won’t be a defined simulated space like this - or at least there’s no reason it would be," he amended. "We did a lot of work trying to map a standard computer interface over the Gestalt network back when we were trying to break out of the simulation. We had limited success, but the network behaves a lot more like a huge, slow brain than a computer. It was incredibly difficult and unpredictable. My guess is that even with the work we’ve done here you’ll experience a period of disorientation while you adjust to the environment - or lack thereof."

"Sounds about right," Jesri sighed, then frowned as she mulled over David’s words. "Why a big slow brain? Isn’t it incredibly advanced?"

"Oh, sure," David said, "don’t get me wrong, it’s about as fast as a thing like that could be. The problem is the size - after a certain point you run into signal speed issues. A straight-line transmission across the shell would take around ten seconds to arrive, and of course you can’t transmit in a straight line because you’ve got the central star in the way. Despite this the Gestalt somehow seems to achieve signal times of around a half-second between antipodes. It’s blazingly fast, but still orders of magnitude slower than a signal propagates through a normal-sized brain."

Jesri frowned. "That would mean that it probably has a fair degree of redundancy, since centralizing functions would be inefficient," she mused. "How much of the network are we going to have to destroy to take it down?"

"Well, there’s not a good answer to that," David said hesitantly. "The higher-function nodes are more specialized by their very nature, but you’re correct in saying there’s also a fair amount of redundancy. When we modeled it, the trick was never really destroying a certain quantity of nodes inasmuch as it was severing parts of the network from each other."

He moved his hands to indicate a sphere, then traced a line around its equator. "Destroying half the nodes would be impossible," he explained, "but destroying a thin belt of them to bisect the network? Totally doable, if a bit daunting."

"Right," Jesri agreed. "That would be way easier. Is that the general plan, then? I’ve been skipping the fleet strategy meetings to practice getting my head mixed up."

David nodded. "Essentially, yes, although we’re going to go for two rings so that the network is quartered. We’re confident that the Gestalt can’t persist in any meaningful way if it loses that much of its total network capacity," he said. "The isolated pieces will be no threat as long as you can suppress the repair activity for long enough."

"No pressure," Jesri grumbled. "I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be doing other than holding the connection open."

"Really, that’s all we need," David shrugged. "There may be targets of opportunity or challenges thrown at you, but as long as you remain connected you’re disrupting the repair efforts."

Jesri sighed. "The biggest fight of my life, and I won’t even get to see it happen," she complained.

"Life is strange like that," David agreed. "But, on the other hand, you may have a unique view that the rest of us will miss. We have no idea what you’ll see."

"A bright flash before my brain melts out my ears," Jesri snarked. "In all probability." She bounced on the balls of her feet, then let her breath out in a puff. "I think I’ve got a few more practice runs left in me," she said. "I’m going to pop out and back in again."

David nodded. "Sounds good, but be careful. We don’t want you to overdo it and…" He paused. "Well, I don’t know what would happen to you, or if it’s even possible to overdo this sort of thing. Just be careful."

"If there’s something that I can strain by connecting like this I’d prefer to find that out now rather than in the tender embrace of the Gestalt," Jesri said dryly. "There’s a lot we don’t know, but testing my limits is how we find out more." She closed her eyes and concentrated, letting her hands drop to her sides. "Be back in a second."

David took a step back and watched as she focused for a moment, then was gone as if she had never existed.

"So," Anja inquired, "do you feel ready?"

"I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be ready for," Jesri objected. "Who could be prepared for any of this?"

Anja leaned back in the captain’s chair, lacing her fingers behind her head. "Tarl seems confident enough," she replied, smirking.

"Tarl is Tarl," Jesri retorted. "He’s fine with getting killed as long as the circumstances are appropriately glorious. I have higher standards."

Anja’s smile grew. "You mean a heroic death is not good enough for you? Generations of little Ysleli children growing up with stories of One-Eyed Tarl the Hero and his us, his plucky sidekicks-"

Jesri snorted. "Shit, that’s probably how it’s going to play out no matter what we do. Most folks on Ysl have never met us, but he spent months there coordinating food and water for them. Unless Leral bothers to correct the record we’ll be relegated to a footnote in his biography."

"Does that bother you, sister?", Anja asked, her face momentarily growing serious.

"Not particularly." Jesri settled back in her own chair. "I’ve spent five thousand years trying to stay under the radar and I’ve been mostly successful at it. I don’t care if someone else gets the credit for what we do, as long as we actually do it. Taking out the Gestalt is everything, it’s all that matters."

They sat in silence for a long moment, looking out at the Cygnus Gate hanging motionless against the stars.

"It’s not about us, anyway," Jesri said. "We’re only alive because we happened to be on one assignment and not another that day. It could have been one of us that was assigned to the Grand Design, and Hana or Tessa would be here in our place. There isn’t anything special about us aside from lucky circumstances."

Anja looked over at Jesri, her face blank. "Do you think that, sister?", she asked quietly. "Are we really so interchangeable that it would make no difference?"

Jesri sat up, a bit discomfited by Anja’s tone. "Well, not no difference," she said. "Obviously our sisters would have made different choices here and there along the way." She smiled ruefully, shaking her head. "I’m glad it was you who survived, at least. I don’t know how I would have made it this far without you there to pull my ass out of the fire. If it had been Ellie who lived in my place, you two would have had this cleared up a couple thousand years earlier."

Anja didn’t reply, looking down at the deck. "You should give yourself more credit," she said eventually. "Even before, you diverged from the baseline a little more than the others. If one of us has been critical to arriving here, it is you."

"You can’t be serious," Jesri scoffed, pulling herself upright to look back at Anja. "I diverged, all right, but not in the right direction. The only reason I’m here is because you kept the beacon lit, kept searching for answers even when I was drifting aimlessly through space. I lost my purpose, my direction, everything. You dragged me back, you came and found me every time I destabilized - and how many times was that? A dozen?" Jesri shook her head emphatically. "Sometimes I was out for ten, twenty years before you woke me up. There’s no coming back from a fugue like that, not without outside help. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it before, but you just feel… still. Quiet. Like-"

"Like a stone in the river," Anja said dully. "You sink and are calm, and the water rushes around you. It’s peaceful and comforting even as you know it’s killing you. The water rounds your corners, little by little, and if you sit long enough you get worn down to nothing."

Jesri blinked, surprised. "You’ve been stuck in a fugue state? When did that happen? How did you break out of it?"

Anja hesitated, then looked Jesri in the eye. "After Mia left, on Indomitable. You woke me up."

"Mia?", Jesri asked. "That was three hundred years before-" She broke off, a look of realization crossing her face. "But you were fine when I found you," she objected.

"Autodoc," Anja said miserably. "I dragged myself over after I answered your call. If you had been a few decades later, I would have been dead."

Jesri rose from her chair and walked over to where Anja sat, pulling her sister up into a hug. "Why didn’t you tell me?", she asked.

After a few seconds, Anja pulled away. "I had a choice," she said. "Sitting there in the autodoc, I thought about what you would see when you docked, the person you would assume I was when you saw me standing there healthy and healed. That person was better than who I had become. It was who I should have been all along. I wanted you to know her, and not me."

Jesri met Anja’s eyes and held her gaze for a moment before Anja turned away. "Sister, I am sorry for-", she began, but Jesri cut her off.

"You idiot," she said, drawing a shocked look from Anja. "You’ve been holding on to this and letting it stew for five thousand years? The process you’ve just described, sister, is what most people call ‘learning from their mistakes’, and it is the perpetual aspiration of career fuckups like yours truly." She rolled her eyes, then smiled at Anja. "You’ve spent five thousand years being the best person I’ve ever known."

They embraced again, standing on the quiet bridge together until flashes of light cast a gentle glow through Anja’s closed eyes. She opened them, looking through the viewports as Ysleli ships arrived in ripples of white flame. "The fleet is here," she said, pulling back from Jesri.

Jesri turned to look just as the larger bulk of the Cormorant arrived, its flaming wake shining brightly amid the smaller ships.

"Time to chin up," Jesri said. "Can’t let the kids see us getting all sentimental. I should head down and meet Rhuar in the cargo bay before we jump out."

Anja nodded. "I suppose it is finally time," she said. "Jesri-"

"Please don’t tell me you’re about to confess to another ‘mistake’, Anja," Jesri deadpanned. "If I found out that you’ve made two mistakes in your whole life the revelation of your erroneous ways would shatter my grasp on reality."

"You are incapable of taking anything seriously," Anja said crossly. "No, that was not it."

"Good," Jesri replied. "Crybaby."

Anja’s eyes narrowed. "Baldy," she retorted. "I was about to wish you good luck."

Jesri grinned back. "Good luck to you too. Let’s fuck ‘em up." She turned to walk towards the lift, but Anja grabbed her wrist.

"It had to be you, Jesri," Anja said. "You were always the linchpin, even before this. The parts of you that are uniquely yours have saved us more than the parts of you that are Valkyrie."

Jesri gave her hand a squeeze. "Lucky universe, then, getting stuck with you and I." She released her grip and walked over to the lift, turning to salute in the doorway. "Terra Invicta, Anja. See you on the other side."

Anja returned the salute, then dropped it as the doors closed to whisk Jesri belowdecks. As she returned to her chair, David’s voice crackled over the intercom.

"We’re all set," he said excitedly. "Eight Ysleli ships and the Cormorant are ready to warp, the Huginn is standing by to deploy when we exit, and I have sixty-two resistance cells ready to flood the Gestalt with signal traffic on our mark. Is Jesri on her way down?"

"She is," Anja confirmed. "Rhuar is helping her get ready. Once he returns to the bridge we can jump."

"Fantastic," David said, his image blinking on to one of the bridge viewscreens around her. "I’ll let the gate crew know to begin their warm-up." His image turned away, and within a minute traces of glowing light had begun to writhe around the inside surface of the gate. By the time Rhuar appeared out of the bridge lift, the inner circle was a raging maelstrom of distorted, shining plasma. The center of the vortex slipped away, replaced by a featureless black circle that grew to the full width of the gate.

Anja tapped on her console and spoke, her voice ringing out in the empty space of the bridge. "All ships," she called out. "Prepare to jump."

Part 39

The jump to Apollyon passed in silence as David busied himself rechecking his preparations and Rhuar stood rapt in the shipjack’s grip, gazing out through the ship’s eyes at the blackest depths of hyperspace. Anja, for her part, had long ago learned the value of a quiet moment and made no move to disrupt it. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the void outside, a space so dark the viewports seemed painted over.

She kept her face implacable, but deep in her gut she felt the thrill of their impending arrival building with each second that passed until it demanded her focus. The bridge seemed to yawn wide around her; she suddenly felt small and out-of-place in her captain’s chair. She jumped to her feet so suddenly that David flinched on his monitor.

"What is it?", he asked nervously. "Did something happen?"

She forced herself to smile at him, shaking her head. "No," she said softly. "Just felt like standing."

"Mmhmm," David said, sounding unconvinced. "Nervous?"

"Of course," Anja replied. "If any situation warrants it, this is it."

"I’m glad it’s not just me, then," David said, letting his breath out in a puff. "I wasn’t sure you ladies even got nervous, to be honest. It seems like something they would have spared you from, considering your line of work."

Anja laughed, pacing around behind her chair. "They tried, at first," she said. "But anxiety is just a flavor of fear, and it turns out that a fearless soldier is less useful than history had anticipated."

"Too reckless?", David guessed.

She shook her head. "Too dead. Fear and pain are the tools any living being uses to keep itself alive. In order to properly motivate self-preservation they need to be truly unpleasant. There are no shortcuts for things that fundamental, unfortunately."

"I’m happy to report that my drive for self-preservation is functioning at one hundred percent," David joked, wiping his brow theatrically. "I hadn’t done anything at all risky for quite some time before I met you. I spent thirty years on Nicnevin, watching and lending a hand to the free Irri where I could. Before that I was just watching, sifting through data or observing the stars." He sighed, burying his face in his hands. "I feel like I could have given some more thought as to the implications of transferring myself into a warship."

Anja’s brow furrowed, and she leaned on the back of her chair. "David, how long ago did the Alphas escape the Gestalt? You said you had been on Nicnevin thirty years, and I know you had similar deployments elsewhere."

"A little over one hundred and fifty years," David replied. "If you were anyone else I’d make a joke about looking pretty good for an older fellow, but you take all the fun out of age-related humor." He met Anja’s gaze with a wry smile. "You’re wondering why I don’t look older."

She nodded. "You still have human biology, albeit simulated. Even with standard longevity treatments you should be feeling your age a bit more."

David held up his hand, fingers splayed, and focused for a moment on the air just above his fingers. A second later, a sandwich materialized and dropped into his hand. He grinned and took a bite. "Behold the power of the master of the universe," he said around a mouthful of turkey and swiss. "One of the things we prioritized during our escape were a set of ‘administrative’ commands for the universe simulation. Aside from the immediate demands of food and resources, we wanted to ensure that we could continue our work for as long as we needed. Yetide did most of the legwork to ensure that we wouldn’t age further, although unfortunately it was unrealistic to revert us all to our mid-twenties and give us fantastic physiques." He patted his stomach, then shrugged and took another bite of the sandwich.

"Would any of these commands help Jesri?", Anja asked.

He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head and swallowed. "I don’t see how," he said. "These are things we use specifically to control the universe simulation, and she’ll be interacting with the Gestalt…" He trailed off and shrugged. "Well, I don’t know how, but probably not in the same way she was visiting me. Suffice to say that my sandwich-conjuring abilities are not likely to be applicable."

"Oh well," Anja sighed. "It was worth-"

"Guys!", Rhuar shouted, shaking out of his shipjack trance. "We’re coming up on something!"

Anja and David blinked, then turned their attention to Rhuar. "In hyperspace?", Anja asked incredulously. "Is that possible?"

"Nope," Rhuar growled, rolling the ship slightly. "But there it fucking is."

As the ship rotated, an anomalous glare of blue-white light lanced through the viewports. A vast glowing structure shifted and roiled like a latticed stormcloud far in the distance, stretching away into dizzying nothingness until it became a thin tapering line.

"Holy shit," David breathed. "We knew the Gestalt had set up some sort of interdiction around Apollyon, but I thought it would be…" He gestured to the viewport helplessly. "Not this, that’s for sure. What are we even looking at?"

"No clue," Rhuar replied. "Ship’s sensors aren’t even remotely equipped for this. All I can tell you is that it’s hyperspace-up from us, so if we weren’t flying with the boost from the gate we’d be right in the middle of it."

"What would that do to the ship?", Anja asked.

Rhuar shrugged. "The fuck should I know?", he said irritably. "But you don’t set up a gigantic four-dimensional light barrier to tickle people, so I’m betting it wouldn’t be anything good."

The three of them watched silently as the vast wall of light slid by them, its surface a fractal chaos of edges and corners that met at impossible angles. The far reaches of the wall seemed to bend around on themselves as they watched, stretching and warping until they arced up to meet in a distant point.

"What’s it doing?", David wondered, flipping between images on his monitors. The wall shrank to a ribbonlike cardioid that glowed brightly against the darkness.

Rhuar shook his head dazedly. "Nothing, we’re just passing by it. If it looks a little weird it’s because you’re really just seeing the shadow the four-dimensional structure is casting on our little three-dimensional bubble." He paused, averting his eyes from the impossible view outside. "I think."

The barrier shrank to a point and disappeared, leaving the bridge in the comfortable darkness of hyperspace once more. "Well," David remarked. "That was something."

"I don’t want to be the voice of pessimism or anything," Rhuar said, "but what the fuck are we doing? The matrioshka brain was bad enough, but I could at least understand the concept of how they were able to build it. That magic shit we just flew past?", he said, his voice quavering. "That shouldn’t exist. There are no fixed points in hyperspace, there is no space to build a structure in. You can’t do it. How the fuck are we supposed to go up against someone who can build that kind of thing?" He looked up at Anja, his eyes wide. "What are we going to do?"

Anja sat back down in her chair and steepled her fingers. "All we can do is stick to the plan," she said quietly. "We knew we were outmatched going into this. We lacked the resources to do anything before, and if we had waited much longer we may have lost what little we had. This is our best shot, the only shot." She sighed, shrugging.

"We may fail," she admitted. "We may not have ever had a chance. But when humanity learned what the Gestalt planned to do, they tasked the best minds they had to come up with a solution. They understood the Gestalt and its capabilities even more than we do. They terrified it, Rhuar, so much so that it destroyed all of them in a panic. The *Gestalt* thought they had a chance."

"But they were bluffing," Rhuar objected. "Everything we know about MANTRA says that it was a long-shot, a last-ditch effort to disrupt the Gestalt’s timetable. They never seriously contemplated destroying the Gestalt."

"Yes and no," David said, looking fidgety. "You’re not wrong, Rhuar, MANTRA was a project borne of desperation. That said, there has always been far more to it than just delaying the Gestalt. We’ve found far too many useful tools in those files for that to be the case. Every time I find something new in the files I feel like some long-dead analyst is looking over my shoulder and waiting for me to figure out the next piece. I’ve often wondered if we should have delayed our exit to find more, if the key to understanding all of this was waiting buried in the next set of documents." He looked at Rhuar and Anja in turn. "We are being guided towards something greater, even if I can’t see what it is."

Rhuar slumped to the deck. "Not helping," he said glumly. "What chance do we have if we don’t have all of the plan?"

David leaned forward, suddenly intent. "Having all of the pieces isn’t the point, Rhuar," he insisted. "The point is that the plan takes our lack of information into account. It assumes we don’t have all of the information, it assumes that from time to time we fail. Every time we exhaust our current leads, another one falls into place."

His eyes bored into Rhuar’s, his voice growing low and harsh. "Is that a coincidence?", he asked hoarsely. "Or has our good luck been MANTRA’s doing all along? Every time we’ve needed it most, MANTRA has prepared the ground for us. It’s too convenient, too neat to be mere serendipity. The other option, the one I choose to believe, is that we’re still on a path that we’ve yet to see the end of."

"You sound like one of those decklicker priests," Rhuar scoffed. "We’ve been playing it by ear this entire time. You can’t tell me that they predicted all of this. If they had the ability to do that, they’d have been able to predict the Gestalt wiping them off the face of the fucking universe."

"They were good, not perfect," David admitted. "This is a high-stakes game and we’re always one wrong move from failure. We have a chance, that’s all. Against the sorts of forces we’re talking about here, a chance is the greatest gift we could have expected."

A low tone sounded from the console, and Rhuar’s eyes glazed over momentarily before snapping back to Anja. "We’re close," he said tersely. "I guess it doesn’t matter much at this point. We’re already too far up to make it back under the barrier."

"Keep that optimism, you might need it later," Anja said dryly. "I want a quiet reentry, then switch immediately to passive gravitic scans for a count of any nearby Emissary ships. Don’t engage or power anything up until we’re ready to make our move."

"Aye sir," he said distantly, falling back into the shipjack. David busied himself running a final check of his preparations, sweat beading on his forehead as his fingers danced over his workstation. A rumbling vibration swept over the deck just before the first traces of white fire began to lick at the viewports.

"Twenty seconds," Rhuar intoned, his focus completely on the ship. Thin curtains of starlight began to flicker across the black void, the rumbling building to a peak.

"Ten," he said. Even in the shipjack fugue tension was bleeding into his voice. "Five. Here we go-"

A splash of glowing plasma cast flickering waves of light over the deck before dissipating into mist, leaving behind a brilliant starfield and nothing else. Anja could see similar flares in the distance as the fleet exited alongside them, but as the light from their reentry faded only the distant starlight remained. Apollyon was cold, dark and silent.

"Gravitics show one large signature," Rhuar said quietly. "That should be the sphere. No sign of any Emissaries. Yet."

"Reorient and tightbeam our vector to the fleet," Anja ordered. Rhuar nodded, and the ship slowly began to turn to port. The stars scrolled past until the ship was facing a round patch of nothing, an empty void in the dim tapestry of light surrounding them. It was perfectly circular and perfectly dark as it hung in front of them.

"Distance?", she asked.

"Ten million kilometers, give or take," replied Rhuar.

She sighed and turned to her console. "I suppose there is little point in waiting," she said, keying her communicator. "All ships, begin your approach. Clear a direct-line path between the Grand Design and the target as a fire corridor. We will mark your ingress point." She paused for a beat, then toggled the transmission back on. "You all know the stakes," she added. "This is our chance. Make it count."

A chorus of acknowledgements came back, followed by the cold light of ship engines as they burned towards the empty circle ahead of them.

"Acknowledged, Grand Design," Tarl’s voice rumbled last, steady despite the fire running through it. "Ysl!", he cried, and Anja could hear his crew roar behind him. "Champions of the fallen! We go now to kill a god and write the legends of a new age. Today we teach the bloodless to bleed! Ysl!" This time the shout from his crew was joined by transmissions from the other ships, a chorus of elated Ysleli screaming filling the bridge. Anja let it echo through the cavernous space for a few seconds, then cut the feed and looked over to the pilot’s station.

"Here we go, Rhuar," she said with grim finality. "Full speed ahead. Fire when ready."

Shuddering vibrations ran through the ship as the WCML deployed, its capacitors howling as energy flooded from the ship’s reactor into the mammoth railgun. With a final wailing crash, the first projectiles screamed into hyperspace. Another shot followed as the hyperaccelerated sabots disappeared into the void. The guns fell into a rhythm, the buildup and release of energy echoing through the bridge like a mournful war chant.

Thirty seconds into their barrage a flare of light erupted against the dark silhouette, a new star briefly erupting as the light from the first impacts reached their viewscreens. It pulsed like a heartbeat as each barrage impacted the metal shell with crippling force.

"Good impacts," Rhuar called out, his voice deadened with the weight of full immersion into the shipjack. "No large ship activity, but I am detecting some motion around the strike area."

"That’ll be the repair drones," David muttered. "Quick response time, as expected. They’re going to try to patch the opening."

Anja nodded, her eyes fixed on the pulsing mote of light. The black circle of the Gestalt’s sphere was noticeably larger than when they started; they were drawing close. "The guns should clear them from our ingress while they are firing," she said. "We need to reserve the jamming for our interior run."

No stars were visible through the fore viewport any longer. The bulk of the sphere in front of them stretched wide to cover the sky in a featureless black cloak, disrupted only by the pulsing flares of shell impacts against its skin. A diffuse glow had formed around the impact site as fragments of white-hot debris spewed outward.

"We’re nearly at the midway point," Rhuar said tersely. "Penetration is slowing a bit as we go deeper, but we’re still breaking through shells. Should be-" He paused suddenly, then whipped his head around to look at Anja with alarm. "Gravitic spike!", he called out.

Anja lunged at her communicator and mashed the toggle. "Evade!", she screamed. The ship’s superstructure groaned as the Grand Design vectored slightly off-course, and the drive traces ahead of them diverged in all directions.

One of the Ysleli ships exploded with a searing flash of distorted light, the glowing fragments of its destruction pulled rapidly outward in the wake of the projectile that skewered it. "David, start the jamming!", Anja yelled. "Everything you have, now!" Far in the distance the blackness of the Gestalt’s shell was dispelled as the light from the explosion reached it, the echo of the ship’s death illuminating an impossibly-large expanse of matte grey marred only by the twisted crater from their attack. As it faded back to blackness Anja could see the distorted traces of more enemy fire racing towards their previous position - and then it was dark once more.

David’s hands raced over his console, sending pings to each of the waiting resistance cells. His finger paused for an instant over the last control, then stabbed down to contact it.

The groans and rumbles of the ship echoed dully in the cargo hold as Jesri lay immobile on her gurney with her head enclosed in the grasping petals atop the MANTRA pedestal. She listened to the sound of the guns, a lumbering giant’s heartbeat that stood out against the constant dull roar of the engines. It stretched on for what seemed like ages; it was almost calming except for the deadly context that gripped her own heart.

Suddenly, the timbre of the engines changed and the heartbeat stopped. Jesri felt a thrill of dread as the ship shifted course rapidly. They were drawing fire, she knew, that was the only reason Rhuar would have diverted course. That meant that any second now-

Reality shattered around her. Suddenly she was not, stripped of her body and her senses in an instant before being thrust into a raging maelstrom of light, noise and scouring wind. Jesri tried to find stillness in vain amid the flood. Her practice with David had not prepared her for the sheer volume of information forcing its way into her, sweeping her self away in a tide of chaotic noise.

Slowly, laboriously, she collected herself from where the stream of data had scattered her. There was a hostile pressure here, an impetus to blend with the flow rather than stand apart from it. The more she attempted to define herself apart from the greater stream, the more intense and unfriendly that pressure became. She determined to ignore it, focusing instead on her rudimentary sense of self. She reinforced the barrier between what was hers and what was else, rejecting the mindless nirvana that the flow offered her.

Suddenly, she found herself coalescing, reality nucleating around her in a storm of solidity and geometry until she was sitting at a low table in a small room. The quiet was jarring, and her head spun as she turned it to take in her surroundings. The walls were bare, painted in a dull beige and textured with odd wavy patterns like ocean-floor sand. A single window of tinted crystal behind her showed a street view and a grey sky, hunched and cloaked figures straggling past in lines like listless ants.

Fighting back nausea, she turned to face forward once more - and found she was not alone at the table. A figure was forming in the air across the table from her, long limbs folding into a seated position to mimic her own. Spindly fingers bent around a steaming cup of some hot beverage, and as he sipped it Trelir made a face.

"This was not made with the Ysleli tongue in mind, I think," he said morosely. "And here I was so looking forward to the delights of form once more."

Jesri gaped at him. "You," she sputtered, her enunciation clumsy. "How?"

Trelir smirked. "You asked for me, of course," he said smoothly. "Or rather, you expected me. We’re only meeting in this crude simulacrum because you insisted on it, after all."

She shook her head, trying to get a grasp on the situation. She felt a pounding headache, a dull pressure behind her eyes. "Didn’t ask," she managed.

"No, you didn’t," Trelir agreed, "you barged right in and demanded that you experience this trite three-dimensional construct of a box. It’s disappointing, really, since you’re one of the few biologicals I’m aware of who would be capable of more - and I don’t just mean manners." He leaned in, black eyes glittering. "You’ve sparked my interest, Jesri Tam."

With some effort, Jesri forced the room to stop spinning. "You," she gasped. "You’re the Gestalt?"

Trelir laughed, a thin, wheezing noise that echoed through the small room. "Haven’t I always been?", he asked mirthfully. "But I suppose you mean to ask if I am suddenly the sum of the Confluence in toto, to which I’m afraid I must answer - no. I’m afraid that even were you to reach beyond your reliance on spatial constructs you would be unable to interact fully with the Confluence."

Fear nibbled at the back of Jesri’s brain. If she wasn’t talking with the Gestalt as a whole, was the command override working? "Didn’t come here to chat… with a secretary," she grated, feeling her command of language coming back. "Why don’t you take a break and let me talk to the boss?"

He laughed again, shaking his head. "Oh, you are fun," he murmured. "I’m afraid this is as good as you’re going to get if you insist on this interaction taking the form of a conversation. You’re trying to pour an ocean into a teacup, Captain Tam. If it happens to fit, either your ocean isn’t an ocean or your teacup isn’t a teacup - and I’m afraid that the idea of a ‘conversation’ is quite a small teacup for the Confluence." He gave her a reproachful look. "Seriously, Captain. Do you expect the greater Confluence to indulge your bizarre needs? To focus its entire being into an imaginary box with you, using simulated meat to vibrate fake air? By the time we’re finished making concessions to the demands of space and physics we’d be left with no more than, well-", he chuckled, gesturing to himself. "The current crude state of affairs, as it were."

Jesri’s mind raced. David had said simply holding the connection open would be enough, but Trelir’s implication was clear: her manner of interaction was too limited to occupy the full scope of the command override channel. She had to find some way to expand her access, to engage Trelir beyond the limits of the current conversation-

"Ah, how very… adversarial of you," Trelir remarked. Jesri looked up to find him holding a glossy black stone in his hand, turning it over between his talons. She felt a weight in her own hand and opened it to reveal a similar white stone. "Very well," Trelir said, placing his stone on the table. The surface of the table, previously smooth, had developed a crosshatch of lines in the center.

Jesri blinked. "Go?", she asked incredulously. "You want to play Go?"

Trelir gave her a patronizing look. "You want to play Go," he said, "or you wouldn’t have created the game board just now. I won’t object despite your transparent motives. This is your space, after all, and I’ve already decided to indulge your whims for my own amusement."

She looked down at the Go board, where two black stones sat in the center of the grid. "Hey," she said indignantly, the blatant cheat overcoming her confusion and fear for a moment. "If we’re doing this, at least play by the rules. You only get to place one at a time."

"My dear Captain," Trelir said, leaning towards her. "Consider where you are. Do you believe that anything in this room you’ve created is only that which it appears to be?" He tapped one talon on the board, and Jesri saw that there were now three black stones clustered in the center. "We have pieces on more than one board. There are many people playing this particular game. Your choice is to place your stone or watch it all play out without you."

He leaned forward, his eyes boring into hers. "The game is as fair as reality, Jesri Tam. If the board shows that I have an insurmountable advantage," he said softly, "it is because I do."

The Grand Design streaked past the crater in the side of the shell, sending vaporized repair bots scattering in bits as the guns thundered once more. Anja glimpsed the red-hot bottom of the shaft they had created glowing like a window to hell for a brief moment before Rhuar twisted their trajectory once more and carried them away from the hole.

"Rhuar, we need to maintain fire on the borehole!", she called out. "Line us up for another pass!"

"Are you crazy?", he grunted, his muscles tensing as the ship performed a slow, lumbering pirouette. "This ship was not made to be missed, Anja. The jammers are working, but they’ll still hit us if we fly in a straight fucking line."

"We have a time limit on those jammers, and we need to be inside well before it runs out", Anja retorted. "Ingress takes priority."

Rhuar shook his head. "They’ll take us out before we make it through two layers, and by my guess we have at least six left. A strafing run is not going to get us inside."

Anja growled low and punched her communicator, sending a broadcast to the fleet. Two of the ships had fallen before the jammers came online, but none since. "All ships," she said tersely, "We cannot get a clear line on the borehole to maintain fire. See if you can take out some of those surface emplacements and clear us a path. Rhuar, open fire with the railguns."

The Cormorant and the Ysleli ships veered towards the surface, but one stayed to fly in formation with the Grand Design. Anja peered at her console in surprise, then opened another communication channel as the railguns began to chatter away.

"Neryn," she asked, "is something wrong?"

His response was delayed, but after a second his voice crackled from the speaker. "Sir, I’m concerned that it will take too long to clear out the surface batteries," he said. "There are quite a few, and we will incur losses in destroying them."

Anja sighed frustratedly. "I am aware," she said, her voice tight with exasperation. "If you have a better idea, by all means-"

"Thank you sir, I will proceed," Neryn said sharply. On her console, his ship peeled away from their trajectory and began an aggressive serpentine towards the Gestalt shells.

"Neryn, wait!", Anja shouted, a cold lump growing in the pit of her stomach as the ship streaked off into the distance. The surface guns began firing at his ship exclusively as it drew closer, but some inspired maneuvering by his pilot kept him clear of the barrage.

A punishing wave of fire forced the Grand Design to make a quick dodge as well. The transmission lapsed into static, then into Neryn’s voice as it cleared. "-ready to come in behind us. The repair drones will only disperse for a few minutes."

Anja distantly noticed Rhuar following Neryn’s orders without prompting, setting their ship up for a run on the entrance. "We can find another way, Neryn," she said quietly. "We still have time for better options."

"Anja’s twelfth rule, sir," Neryn replied wryly. "We learned much in your trainings. Do you remember how you had to teach us about the idea of ‘voting’ near the beginning? The order that comes from the whole?" Anja couldn’t summon the words to answer his question, but Neryn kept speaking. "I shared the idea with my crew before, and we have done it now. This is our decision."

Anja stared at the little ship on her monitor as it wove a complicated pattern around the incoming waves of fire. An unfriendly, logical voice in her head was evaluating Neryn’s plan on its merits even as the rest of her fixated in horror on what he was about to do. "Neryn," she said. "This is not necessary. You can come back."

Neryn chuffed in amusement, and Anja could hear his smile when he spoke. "If it wasn’t necessary that would have been an order," he said. "Tell the Warfather of this, so he understands what it was that you gave us. We will protect our brothers and the mission. On an uncertain day, we will take the sure bet. We volunteer for this," he said proudly. "We choose."

The ship made one final flourish before plunging into the borehole and disappearing in a blinding flash of light, the reactor’s explosion tearing a gaping hole into the remaining layers of the Gestalt’s shell. The light did not fade, instead playing warm and golden over Anja’s face as the viewscreens tinted to compensate for its sudden brightness. Clouds of debris glittered like morning fog as the light caught them, billowing out from the wound in the Gestalt’s side. For the first time in tens of thousands of years, Apollyon’s sun was shining.

"All ships," Anja broadcast, her voice wooden and cold. "We have ingress. Proceed with your attack run."

Part 40

The viewports on the bridge had tinted nearly to the point of full opacity as the Grand Design barreled through the hole in the side of the Gestalt’s shell, the dark glass a bulwark against the blazing golden light streaming from within. The shell was built close around Apollyon’s star, and without its protection they were uncomfortably close to its roiling corona. Even the inner shell was heated to the point that it was glowing - despite their sensors’ insistence that it was almost perfectly black.

"Split into your teams and keep an eye on hull temperature," Anja broadcast, watching the smaller ships stream through after them. The Cormorant came in on their heels, followed by six of the converted Ysleli craft. Anja felt a pang as she counted them, Neryn’s proud voice still ringing in her ears. "That goes double for Ysleli ships," she added, "your heat management is worse than human ships. Be careful with your buildup and rotate your craft to distribute the thermal load."

She turned to Rhuar as the acknowledgements flooded back over the channel. "The Huginn?", she asked.

"Heading out now," he replied. "They still following the Cormorant?"

Anja shook her head. "West group is understrength by two ships," she muttered, reaching over to key her console. "Slight revision to plans," she broadcast. "Subtle Knife is leaving East group for West, Tiln is the new West group leader. Huginn, you are with East now. Cormorant is now the sole member of South, and we remain the sole member of North."

Tiln was first to reply, his voice grim. "Acknowledged," he said worriedly. "With just three ships we may have trouble with munitions."

"You should be fine if you are careful," Anja said, although privately she thought that he had a fair point. With such a large swath of the shell to cover the smaller ships could easily run into supply issues. Three could probably do it, but if they ran into trouble partway…

She shook her head. "Prioritize survival and target destruction in that order," she commanded. "If you run empty meet us at the antipode, we will regroup and complete your segment on our way back."

"Yes sir," he replied, the note of worry not budging from his tone.

"Be bold, captain," Tarl’s voice thundered. "There are few things better in battle than finding a target for every round on your ship."

"No reason to wait, then," Anja said dryly. "Split into your teams and begin your attack. Advise immediately if you see Emissary activity." The four groups took diverging paths from the entry point, engines burning pale against the inferno as they began their grand semicircle across the inside of the shell. She toggled her console over to weapons and pulled up the nearest high-order node.

They were unassuming visually, barely standing out amid the hellish surface of the inner shell. Higher-frequency EM and gravitics told a different story, however, plotting swirling lines of energy that clustered around bright points spaced regularly along the shell. Anja locked on and keyed the guns, sending gouts of white-hot metal shimmering from the surface. The EM traces flickered and dispersed - the node was dead.

"Good shot!", Rhuar shouted. "Just ten thousand more to go!"

Anja grimaced and reset her console, tracking the next node.

Jesri glanced down at the board, nervously turning a stone over in her fingers. Trelir had enclosed her small group of markers in a net near the center of the board, a loose group of black stones nibbling away at the edges. She let her hand hover near a likely move, then pulled it back hastily as she reconsidered.

"My dear Captain," Trelir said amusedly, "as entertaining as it is to see you stumble through the strategy of your game, you may as well just place the stone there. You will lose if you pick that spot, of course, but that outcome is immanent no matter what move you make."

She shot an annoyed glance up at him. "You’re rude," she said irritably. "Isn’t there an equivalent of sportsmanship somewhere in your archives?"

Trelir cocked his head. "And of what benefit would that be?", he asked. "I’m aware of the concept, of course, but it contains an inherent presumption of equality between players. The Confluence cannot engage in a true competition. There must be the possibility of defeat in such a contest, and there are none who could challenge the Confluence in any respect. We are not playing a game right now, Jesri Tam. This ‘game’ is your means of coming to terms with your inevitable defeat, and I am allowing you the time to do so because I find it informational."

"Oh?", Jesri said through gritted teeth. "In what respect?"

"You could at least try to be subtle with your attempts to extract information," Trelir sighed. "Not that it matters. I’m observing you because it provides insight into a psychological quirk that we find sadly relevant. One of the least comprehensible traits of humanity was their penchant for hopeless holding actions, deriving some bizarre satisfaction from inflicting delay or even the most minor of discomforts upon the victor as they spiraled towards their defeat. In every era, in every context, humans choose to lionize those who ultimately contribute nothing except insignificant tokens of spite."

She looked up at him. "You think that’s what this is?", she asked angrily. "A hopeless holding action? We’re taking the fight to you, protecting our future. We have no desire to drag this out indefinitely."

"Your mission is futile. Your entire life has been futile," Trelir replied. "The future of the universe had already been determined when the extent of humanity’s technological advancement was a particularly sharp rock. Perhaps if your planet had developed sooner and displayed some extraordinary potential you might have contested it, but you missed your window. There was never anything humanity could have done to stop the Confluence at its peak, much less your current band of sad relics and upjumped primitives."

Jesri stood up from the table abruptly, glaring at Trelir. The walls of the room seemed to ripple around the two, and a vibration rattled the stones on the board. "Then why kill us?", she seethed. "If we were so insignificant, why bother?"

"I told you already," Trelir said with exasperation. "You were-"

"-an unknown variable," Jesri finished. "I remember your answer, I’m asking again because it was a shit answer." Trelir’s face darkened, but she pressed on. "Why kill humanity, then spend so much effort researching it? If you wanted information you could have studied us at your leisure, but you felt compelled to kill us and sift through the ashes. Tell me," she snarked, "do you respond to all non-threatening curiosities with such immediate and overwhelming force?"

The walls of the room seemed to squeeze in on her for a moment, and a burst of panic stabbed through her before the space normalized once more. Trelir looked around curiously, then returned his gaze to her. "Your elimination was expedient," he said smoothly. "Initial investigations established that there was a small likelihood your species could effect a minor delay in our projects."

He gestured dismissively. "Rather than wait until you had spread further still, the Confluence made the decision that it would be more efficient to preemptively eliminate you." He folded his arms and gave her a patronizing look. "I understand that it seems like a major event to you," he said, "but actions like this happen all the time. The Confluence is constantly tracking and eliminating potential nuisances before they can fully manifest. None of them rise to the level of significance - none are given the opportunity."

"Constantly?", Jesri smirked. "It must be an atypically quiet couple of millennia, then, for you to be digging through our trash five thousand years later. Unless you think there still may be a concern. Our ‘tokens of spite’ not so insignificant, perhaps?"

"My only concern," Trelir sneered, "is that I may be misallocating my time observing you. I held the misguided impression that you might have potential when I saw you force your way in here, I thought that you might have pushed beyond what limited constructs your masters had forced upon you." He looked momentarily tired, his eyes taking on an empty look as they met hers. "I was even eager to meet you, perish the thought. But now I see that I was wrong."

Jesri rolled her eyes even as his change in tone sparked disquiet in her. "And yet here you are, in just that sort of limited construct with me. Here you are while my sister and our allies have free rein in your most secure system. Where is your total supremacy, Oh Mighty Confluence?", she asked mockingly.

Trelir’s eyes flashed, the tiredness dissipating in an instant. "Do not mistake my indulgence for weakness," he said angrily. "Would you like to see what your pretensions amount to? Shall I rescind the time I granted for you to face your defeat?"

"No, please, stop," Jesri deadpanned. "I’m finding it so very enjoyable."

"Humor," Trelir said disgustedly. "A paper-thin pretense of indifference. Will you be so nonchalant once you learn that I have just destroyed all of the long-range communication receivers?"

Jesri froze. "What?", she asked, feeling a sudden sense of hostile vertigo pressing in around her.

"Your attempts to congest the network were inventive but ultimately meaningless," Trelir said, his voice once again neutral. "Your paltry band of allies is now unable to help you. You stand alone, Jesri Tam, against the full strength of the Confluence."

Chills raced through her at his words, and she found herself unable to move her body. She licked her lips at a sudden dryness in her mouth. "If I must," she said. "I will keep you here with me for as long as it takes."

Trelir blinked in suprise. "For as long as-" He broke off laughing, swiping a hand idly over his face. "Oh, my dear Captain," he said, shaking his head. "What is it you think you’re buying time for? The superficial damage your sister’s fleet is doing to the inner shell? Do you think that by compromising the backup physical links you’re somehow hurting us?"

He straightened up, staring at her piercingly. "There is no point to further conversation with you, I’m afraid. Not for me, and not for you. Your ships are incapable of completing their mission, and you are incapable of either delaying me or providing useful information." The room quavered around her, and she felt a sense of floating as something strange happened to the simulated space. "Because I pity your profound blindness," Trelir said, "I will allow you to see just how insignificant your life was before I end it. I will show you the size of the gulf between us, and if you survive the experience I will send you to where primitives like you belong. There you may contemplate the extent of your inadequacy until your death."

"Try it, asshole!", Jesri shouted, straining with every fiber of her being to keep her unraveling senses in check. "I won’t leave without-" She broke off as her body was wracked with a spasm, her limbs stretching in ways they were never meant to move. Black stones crowded the grid on the table before it dissolved into nothingness Lines bent in impossible curves as the room distorted and an additional direction insinuated its way into reality. A lance of icy pain shot through her head as she struggled to make sense of the shift. Fragments of stars and metal swirled around her, the glowing sun of Apollyon blazing so close it seemed like she must burst into flame - but the only pain she could feel was the burrowing spike of ice-cold agony in her brain, pushing, tearing-

"You have no choice in the matter. Goodbye, Jesri Tam," Trelir’s voice said, echoing strangely. "We will not speak again."

His words barely registered as her body drifted apart, her carefully hoarded cohesion flying away into the yawning abyss. The pain grew, although she had no body to hurt. It was a living thing, an entity apart from her, and it was her entire world.

And then it was gone, and in its place there was light. She had no eyes, but nevertheless she saw it as she had never seen anything before. A latticed tower of boundless complexity stretched away into infinity across a direction she’d never properly seen, down into the depths of hyperspace - but who could call this hyperspace? Rather than inky blackness, Jesri saw the curvature of space itself as it folded playfully around the tower and undulated in fractal symmetries that sent quivering chills of awe through her being.

The tower rose to meet the thin veneer of realspace where it was capped with a massive interconnected web of sparking tendrils coiled around a sphere. The bent gravity well of Apollyon’s star had been artfully circumscribed to hold the matrioshka gem in its setting, the hollow sphere buttressed at every angle by undulating waves of a color she had no word for.

It was the Gestalt, and in all of her long life Jesri had never seen anything so profoundly beautiful.

She stood gazing at the infinite complexity of it for a timeless moment before she was torn from her reverie by a violent surge. The light disappeared, shattering into mist that condensed around her in a dull foggy glow. She felt herself ripped away from comprehension as the extra dimension slipped from her grasp and space reduced itself to a stifling smallness.

She lost consciousness, or perhaps existence for a time. When she regained thought she found that she once again had eyes. She opened them to a flood of morning sunlight sifting through broad leaves, the sky clear and blue above her. Sitting up, she saw a spread of mown grass and a walking path guarded by regal old trees. Barely visible above their canopy were the towering spires of buildings glittering in the sunlight.

Earth. For a moment, the stress of the conflict with Trelir and the ecstasy of witnessing the Gestalt’s true form fled in a wave of nostalgia. She could smell the rich soil, hear the birdsong around her masking the faint roar of city noise. She splayed her fingers out to bury them in the reaching green blades below her, and for the first time in many, many years Jesri Tam wept.

The click of his talons on the armrest created a soothing rhythm as Tarl drummed his fingers, watching his bridge officers huddled over their consoles as the Cormorant carved a thin line of destruction into the Gestalt’s shell. The flashing explosions from their railgun impacts barely registered against the immense brightness from the sun itself, although he could see their effects clearly on the EM scanners.

It was the heart of the most ambitious fight Tarl would ever undertake - and he was bored. No ships came to challenge them, no weapons fired from the interior shell. His freshly-acquired arsenal of deadly human armaments lay silent save for the periodic railgun blasts when they encountered a target. The quiet was all part of the plan, he knew, but watching his bridge crew efficiently destroy node after node felt too cold for his taste.

Even the occasional updates from the other task groups had stopped as they had receded beyond the horizon of Apollyon’s star. The interference made any sort of long-range communication impossible, and would remain so until just before they regrouped on the far side of the shell.

"Silar, update," Tarl thundered irritably. His first officer sprang to attention, and fumbled for a moment before responding. He noted a slight tremor in the officer’s hands.

"No change, Warfather," he said nervously. "Target destruction is on-schedule and our ammunition stores are within safe margins. No hostile signatures detected."

Tarl sighed, drumming his fingers on the armrests again. He missed his staff, currently off flying in the East and West groups. Breaking in a fresh bridge crew was hard enough when they weren’t on an unfamiliar vessel fighting the strongest enemy to have ever threatened Ysl. These officers were too jittery for his taste, their nerves too frail.

"Try to relax, Silar," he grumbled. "We will be at this for a while, and if real combat comes I will need you fresh."

"As you command, Warfather," Silar stuttered, awkwardly leaning against a bulkhead in a tense mockery of relaxation.

Tarl shook his head. For all that he had disagreements with Anja’s methods, she seemed particularly successful at imparting her laconic detachment to those she trained. He thought back on what he had observed and reclined jauntily in his chair. "Silar, speak of your interests," he said, taking care not to raise his voice to his normal commanding tone.

Silar jolted from his forced pose, staring at Tarl confusedly. "Warfather?", he asked hesitantly. "I do not understand."

"You are not relaxing, Silar," Tarl said patiently. "Tell me what you do when off-duty, so that your mind may clear itself."

"I train?", Silar said hesitantly.

Tarl drummed his fingers a bit faster. "Training is duty," he replied. "What else?"

Silar thought for a moment, then perked up. "I sleep," he said, looking quite relieved to have found the answer to Tarl’s question.

"And if you had to occupy your time for a quarter-day," Tarl said, drumming his fingers on the armrest quite rapidly now, "and you were forbidden from performing your duties, training or sleeping, what would you do?"

Looking perturbed, Silar bowed his head in thought. "I suppose," he said quietly, "if there was nothing else to do I might read."

Tarl’s face lit up in satisfaction. "Hunting knowledge is a noble pursuit, Silar," he said. "What do you like to read?"

"Mostly naval training manuals-", he began, but was interrupted by the strident tones of an alarm from the conn. Seizing the opportunity to escape, he quickly moved over to the console and inspected the alert. "Warfather," he called out shakily, "we have two incoming enemy ships. They appear to be Emissaries."

"Then relaxation will have to wait," Tarl rumbled, rising from his chair. The bridge had been built for human biology, and he always felt pleasantly gigantic when using their furniture. "Arm primary weapons and prepare to evade their fire," he called out. "Assume that our countermeasures have failed and that their shots will be on-target."

He stalked over to stand beside Silar and looked down at him. The shorter Ysleli was redolent with the smell of fear, his hands trembling violently under Tarl’s one-eyed gaze. Silar gave him a plaintive look and clasped his hands together to stop them from shaking. "Forgive me, Warfather," he said miserably. "They will not stop trembling. I cannot make them stop." He closed his eyes, tilting his head to expose his throat to Tarl.

Tarl fanned his talons and inspected them, then dropped his hand to his side. "Death would be too easy, Silar," he said quietly, "for both of us."

Silar opened his eyes and looked up at Tarl questioningly.

"Your punishment is to serve," Tarl said in a low voice. "Your penance is to fight this threat with me." He took a step back and raised his voice so the whole bridge could hear. "We are the most dangerous ship of Ysleli that has ever existed," he thundered. "We have weapons and armor to beggar entire fleets, but that is not what makes us dangerous. We are about to face the most powerful enemy that ever has been or shall be, but our will to fight despite the risk does not make us dangerous."

He looked Silar in the eyes. "We are dangerous because when we win," he shouted, "we will never again face a foe to match the one we have defeated! Today we kill fear, brothers, so do not let its death throes disturb you. Ysl!"

"Ysl!", the crew cheered, and Tarl saw the spark in Silar’s eye as he rushed to his station. The whine of capacitors vibrated through the ship and firing solutions began to stream across the tactical display. Tarl eyed the two innocuous-looking ovoids shimmering on the screen and felt the familiar fear pulse through him, examining it with a clinical detachment as it snaked into his gut. Even one of these ships was more than a match for the Grand Design, and the Cormorant was that ship’s inferior in every respect… save for agility.

It was a thin advantage, but it was something. In a battle there was no edge so minor that it was insignificant. He let the fear beat a moment longer in his heart, savoring the taste, then extinguished it and was the Warfather once more.

A slight breeze pushed aside the leaves shading Jesri’s park bench, sending a ray of brilliant sunlight lancing into her eye. She didn’t react, not even to blink, although the occasional tear still streaked down her face. Her eyes were turned inward, and there was no sun there.

A battle played out in her mind, Anja and Rhuar frantically working to evade a swarm of Emissaries that shrugged off their return shots like so much rainfall. Smoke poured from the vents and the lights were dim and red, emergency lighting. A look of resignation spread slowly over Anja’s face as she realized they had lost, and she turned to meet Jesri’s eyes just before an Emissary’s shot tore through the ship.

She saw another view of Rhuar, panic and fear on his face as he turned to Jesri for aid she couldn’t give. David’s face appeared before winking out in an instant. Tarl’s charred corpse floated through the void, hands curled into fists and crusted with a dark rime of frozen Ysleli blood.

Because she had failed.

The images flooding her mind hadn’t come to pass yet, but there was no alternative path. Without interference from the resistance and the pedestal the Gestalt could deal with their fleet at its leisure. Jesri tried once more to disconnect from the network, but her concentration slipped away from her and she remained on the bench. She wasn’t sure if Trelir had barred her passage or if she just didn’t want to leave - and she wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Jesri sank like a stone in a river, the whirl of dead and dying faces pressing around her until she could see nothing else. If there was nothing more to be done then she may as well stay here and wait for oblivion, came the whisper from a back corner of her mind. Stay here on this beautiful, false memory of Earth. Stay here and be still.

The bench creaked.

She woke with a start, her head jerking sideways to stare at the man sitting on the bench with her. He was ancient, his back hunched and his thin skin hanging wrinkled from his face. Knobby hands covered in liver spots grasped a walking stick as he gave a sigh of relief and turned to face her.

"I don’t mean to intrude," he said creakily, "but these old bones needed a rest. Do you mind if I sit here for a bit, miss…?"

"Jesri", she supplied automatically. "Sure, sit."

"Thank you kindly," the man sighed. "Today’s been so busy for me. I try to take it easy these days, but sometimes life keeps you on your feet longer than you’d like."

She choked out a laugh, burying her face in her hands. "That’s true," she agreed bitterly. "Sometimes much longer."

The old man gave her an appraising look. "I take it you’ve had a rough day too," he said, a statement rather than a question. "Would you like to talk about it? I don’t have anywhere else to be at the moment, and I could use the conversation."

Jesri looked at him blearily, then hung her head with a slight shake of negation. "Wouldn’t know where to start," she mumbled.

"Ah, I know the feeling," he said, nodding knowingly. "For my part, the day started out normally enough - with a nice late breakfast and a brisk walk outside my flat in Oslo. The sun was shining, I was just about to to think about lunch - when all of a sudden I get a call saying I need to go to New York right away, no time to waste."

He pulled a cloth from his pocket and coughed into it, his lungs rattling unhealthily, then wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. "Excuse me dear, I’m sorry," he apologized. "At my age that sort of sudden travel is stressful, even with a private ship. My doctor says I should avoid it entirely," he said stowing the cloth in his pocket and withdrawing a small flat box. He placed it on the bench, flicking a small switch that caused it to hum softly.

"But when I get word that someone from the prime universe has made their way into the simulation," he said gravely, "now, that’s the sort of thing that justifies a bit of discomfort."

Jesri shot to her feet and backed away from him, her head spinning, but he only chuckled and patted the wooden seat feebly. "Come on, sit back down," he said. "I’m sorry if I startled you. Let’s start over from the top, now that we can speak freely." The old man patted the slim device from his pocket fondly, then smiled at Jesri.

"My name is David Kincaid," he said. "Perhaps we’ve met?"

Part 41

David sighed and swiped a wrinkled hand over his face, looking far into the distance at nothing in particular. "Five thousand years?", he said wearily. "I had guessed we might be offset, even by a few centuries, but I had never expected it to be so long." He shook his head. "Five thousand. And you’re that old too?"

Jesri nodded, managing a small smile. "I’ve been told I look younger," she replied.

"Hah!", David barked, his laughter dissolving into another series of wet, hacking coughs. "You know, jokes about my age are one of the few things I have left," he said ruefully. "Having you around is going to make me work at my conversations again."

"I’ve heard that before," Jesri said, her smile warming, then disappearing as reality edged its way back into her consciousness. "I wouldn’t count on having me around for long, though. I expect I’ll be dead within a few hours."

David frowned and peered at her owlishly. "I had assumed that your incursion here was part of a plan. Did something go wrong?"

Jesri nodded again, taking a few seconds to choose the right words. "We had a plan," she said quietly. "A poor one, as it turns out. Your team’s various instances and I were going to use the command protocols for Emissary communications to tie up the Gestalt’s resources while my sister Anja led a fleet to sever crucial network links in the inner shell." She looked over at David sadly and shook her head.

"We didn’t know about the hyperspatial connections underlying the realspace structure. Trelir… showed me the Gestalt," she said, her eyes growing distant as she tried to recapture the experience of seeing the tower of light. Her mind’s eye shuddered at the effort, flitting through a jumble of distorted impressions. "It was so beautiful," she whispered. "Our plan was doomed from the start. Destroying the physical links was never going to be enough. Now that I’m stuck here and the Gestalt is free to act again it will almost certainly destroy our fleet and me along with it."

"Hrm," David grunted, deep in thought. "Who is Trelir?"

"An Emissary," Jesri replied distractedly. "We first encountered him on a planet called Ysl, where he was posing as one of the local populace. His personality reemerged when I connected to the Gestalt." She paused, replaying the conversation in her head. "He said that he was there because I expected him to be there."

David hummed softly to himself, tapping a finger on his cheek. "Interesting," he muttered. "That implies a fair degree of control over your interaction with the Gestalt. The command protocol must have enabled you to create a micro-instance under your administration. Very interesting." He shot a piercing glance at Jesri, his sudden intensity startling her. "Have you attempted to revisit that instance?"

Jesri blinked, nonplussed. "How? Trelir kicked me out of it, and I haven’t been able to break the connection to this simulation regardless."

"Trelir shifted your connection from that instance to our simulation," David mused, "but the fact that he only diverted you rather than terminating your connection entirely tells me that you’re likely still protected by the command protocol you used."

"I don’t see how that helps us much," Jesri objected. "Even if we figure out how to get me back into that instance, what’s stopping Trelir from just booting me back here? Even if I get there and he doesn’t send me back, what am I going to do afterwards?" She threw her hands up in the air and turned away. "David, I have no experience with this stuff. I’m completely lost here."

"As should be expected, given the circumstances," David agreed. "But this Trelir may have inadvertently done you a favor by routing you here. I’ve been the rat under the Gestalt’s floorboards for quite some time now, and I’ve picked up a variety of interesting tricks and secrets over the years."

Jesri perked up, looking back at him, then her face fell once more. "David, I…" She walked over to the bench and sat down. "Even if I could keep running interference for my sister, there’s nothing she can do. No realistic amount of damage to the physical shell will accomplish our goal, and if we can’t kill the Gestalt we die. Maybe not today, maybe not in a week, but it will kill everything."

David shrugged, giving her a wry look. "Just means we have very little to lose at this point, don’t you think?" He scratched his chin and stared up at the shifting leaves, then looked back at Jesri with a thoughtful expression. "Your connection, how are you linked to the interface? We always had issues with direct mental interfaces to Gestalt systems, but your method seems much more successful."

"A gift from MANTRA," Jesri replied. "Do you remember the ‘primary network router’ schematic?"

"Hah, so it was an interface device! But how did you solve the biological interface issues?", David asked insistently. "We were never able to efficiently translate human thought patterns to a format the Gestalt systems could parse."

Despite the circumstances, Jesri found herself smiling at his enthusiasm. "Well, we never solved that problem," she said. "But then, I’m not precisely human…"

The cannons roared, stitching an incandescent scar across the Emissary’s side and sending a gout of fragments belching back towards the Grand Design. "Maintain our distance!", Anja shouted, gripping an armrest as the ship thrummed with the recoil. The fountain of debris caught the blazing sunlight, components outgassing in brilliant flares as they were suddenly exposed to the brunt of the star beneath them.

"That’s easy-", Rhuar said quietly, his voice a dead monotone. He was panting with the stress of evading their shots, the ship bucking and twisting near the limits of its engineering. "...easier said than done," he finished. "They keep microjumping-" He trailed off again as another volley of space-rending projectiles barreled their way, evoking tortured screams from the ship’s hull as metal strained under the twisted gravity. Red lights blossomed on Anja’s console, showing failures from three railguns on that side.

David gave her a worried look. "They might not have to hit us if we have too many more near misses," he said. "Eventually the gravitational flux alone will tear us apart."

Anja’s fingers danced over the console to direct another volley of fire that punched deep into the Emissary’s hull. Secondary explosions rippled within it, then stopped as a net of golden light wove its way around the ship. "Cheating bastards," she spat, retargeting to fire at the other ship. "Misses will kill us slower than hits," she called over to David. "Given a choice, I have a preference."

"Dead later is still dead," he replied morosely. Neither of the others replied, their focus wholly on the remaining Emissary. Rhuar pulled the ship into a lumbering sideways glide that sent shivers of protest quaking through its beams, rolling to give Anja a clear shot at the target.

Another volley of slugs rippled out through hyperspace, materializing in a punishing salvo right against the Emissary’s hull. The bow shock of their reentry swept a meter of hull clean away in a spray of plasma and glowing fragments before the sabots lanced in behind it. The Emissary returned fire, a brace of shots going wide before another fusillade from Anja sent it retreating behind its cocoon of protective golden webbing.

Rhuar let out a long breath. "That’s it on the scanners," he said tiredly. "No other contacts for the moment."

"They should be out of commission for a little while," David said, slumping back into his chair. "But only for a few hours, if the last ship was any guide. We’ll have to deal with them on our way back out."

"So we deal with them," Anja retorted. "If we complete our mission, it may knock them out entirely."

Rhuar shot her a skeptical look. "Weren’t they supposed to be knocked out already? We didn’t have any Emissary traffic until just now, and they were shooting much better than the surface guns we faced before. Are we sure the Gestalt is still out of action?"

"We’re still in our window," David shrugged helplessly. "Jesri is still hooked in and the incoming stream from the resistance cells is still going strong. The Emissaries have some degree of autonomy, perhaps our attack doesn’t impact them as much."

"Or maybe they found some way to block our transmissions," Rhuar shot back. "If they have, it won’t matter how many Emissaries we knock out of commission. The repair drones will relink the nodes faster than we can blow them up."

Anja shook her head. "Irrelevant," she said quietly. "There is nothing we can do about the effectiveness of the network attack, so disregard it. We have to focus on completing our part of the plan to the best of our ability."

"And what about the other parts of the plan?", David asked. Through the screen beads of sweat were visible on his forehead, as if the heat of Apollyon’s sun could reach him even there. "Anja, we barely dealt with those two ships. If the Gestalt sent Emissaries after the other two groups-"

"-then they will not make rendezvous, and we will adjust our plans accordingly," Anja finished grimly. "Focus on the now. Destroy the nodes on our way to the meetup point. For all you know, those two were the only Emissaries in-system."

"And for all you know, the other groups are fighting twice as many!", Rhuar shouted. "We don’t have the ammo for another fight like that, and if the other ships are destroyed-"

"Then we die!", Anja roared, her eyes blazing. She leveled a glare at Rhuar, then at David. "Then we lose," she said more quietly. "It was always a possibility. We knew going into this that we were outgunned. We knew from the outset that we might not survive. But like you said, David, dead later is still dead. We may as well die here fighting if the alternative is to let the Gestalt wipe us from the face of the universe regardless, even if it is years from now."

David shook his head. "I just don’t see how we’re going to win this," he said sadly.

"We may not," said Anja, giving him a small smile in return. "For the moment, focus on not losing."

"Thin fucking distinction," Rhuar grumbled, focusing to set the ship back on its course through the radiant hellscape. "All right, if we’ve decided to be optimistic then let’s go blow some more shit up."

"That’s the spirit," David said wearily. "Yaaaay."

Anja settled into her chair once more, her eyes flicking to the console where Jesri’s vitals were displayed. They were slow, steady, much the same as they had been for the past several hours. The pulse of her heart lit the screen in quiet intervals as she watched, and Anja laid her hand over it for a few seconds. "As much time as you can give me," she whispered.

"What was that?", David said, peering at her through the screen.

She shook her head and reset the targeting controls to resume their destruction of the inner shell. "Like Rhuar said," she replied. "Time to blow some shit up."

Jesri felt a tickling sensation, as if a net of cobwebs was being draped around her from all directions and pulled tight. "This feels strange," she muttered.

David looked up from his tablet reproachfully. "Oh, stop whining," he admonished her. "We need a full picture of how your interface operates, it will only take a few more seconds. Think of ice cream."

"Ice cream?", she replied quizzically, trying to parse the non-sequitur. After a long moment considering, she shook her head and gave up trying to make sense of it on her own. "Are you trying to do sensation mapping or something?"

"No," he replied, his rheumy eyes squinting at her. "I just needed you to stop talking for a few seconds while I finished up." He peered at his tablet, ignoring Jesri’s indignant look, then smiled and clapped a hand on his knee. "Yes, there it is," he enthused, tapping the screen with shaky finger and reversing it so Jesri could see. "Here’s your connection feed."

Jesri looked at the offered screen, noting the cavalcade of graphs and numbers stacked together. It was utterly incomprehensible. "Interesting," she said, "but how does this help us?"

David tutted at her. "You have a privileged connection to the Gestalt, courtesy of your command protocol," he said. "Unfortunately for us, it is a star-sized four-dimensional collective intelligence and you are not."

"Well, sorry," Jesri said, rolling her eyes.

"Shush, I’m not done yet," David retorted crossly. "Your resources are very limited compared to our opponent’s, so it’s crucial for us to maximize the potential throughput of your link if we want to keep saturating the connection. This will not only buy your sister room to maneuver, it may also cause overflows and expose system weaknesses that we can use as a force multiplier. In the best case, it could let us permanently cripple or suppress the Gestalt’s higher functions."

"You think that’s likely?", Jesri asked.

"Hah, no," David scoffed, scrolling through the various data feeds. "But I’m feeling optimistic today. The problem we’re going to run into is that you’re bottlenecked. The link and the pedestal don’t seem to be stressed at all by the amount of traffic you’re putting through them, so that leaves your squishy biological bits as the likely culprit."

Jesri gave him a flat look. "I’m beginning to feel personally attacked," she snarked. "Fine, though - it makes sense that the biological components would be the limiting factor. How do we fix that?"

He shrugged. "That is the conundrum, isn’t it?", he said. "The rest of the hardware is dependent on your input."

"Well, I’ve only got the one brain," Jesri said exasperatedly. "Maybe we could spoof traffic or-" She cut off, noticing that David’s face had glazed over. "Ah, David?", she asked.

"Only the one… Aha," he said dreamily. "Hahaha, oh dear. I’m fine. I’ve just had a terrible idea. A terrible, terrible idea." He refocused and turned to her, his aged body practically quivering with excitement. "You have administrative privileges within the Gestalt framework," he said rapidly, "at least to a certain extent. With that access and some tweaks to the cognitive translation protocols from your link hardware… we have all of the biological bandwidth we’d ever need."

She stared at him, his implication seeming to echo through her in slow motion. "No," she muttered disbelievingly. "That’s insane."

"Is it?", David asked hoarsely, his ancient eyes full of vigor. "You can’t hope to compete with the Gestalt in terms of raw processing power. It is truly peerless, it has no equal. With this, we can turn its biggest resource against itself." He gestured around them, his arm sweeping to take in the entire park. "Billions of human minds in unknowing captivity. A resource we never had the tools to make use of, until you brought your link code. You can make them an army."

Jesri shook her head, an odd ringing noise seeming to fill her ears. "David, we can’t," she objected. "It’s one thing for you or I to put ourselves on the line, but these are civilians, noncombatants, innocents-"

"Nobody in this simulation is a noncombatant," David said grimly. "Whether they know it or not, they are an enemy resource and a prisoner. That goes for me too." He shook his head and slouched back on the bench, wincing as his back cracked. "I can only speak for myself, Jesri," he said quietly. "I’m old, in some ways more so than you. Most of my life has been lived in secret, wishing I could scream the truth from the rooftops but knowing that it would be futile if I tried. Nobody here can feel the boot on their neck, nobody realizes that our universe has a malevolent creator with an all-seeing eye."

He looked up at Jesri, tired yet resolute. "This is the one chance we have to tell them the truth without condemning them to die. Help me give them a chance for the first time in their lives." His eyes bored into hers, unblinking. "Let us fight back."

An image of Ellie’s face flickered unbidden into Jesri’s head, her sister smiling just a bit too wide, her eyes disturbingly bright. "I can’t, David," she insisted, "the link isn’t meant to be used like that. It’s dangerous, unstable-"

"More dangerous than guaranteed death?", David shot back. "If stability is servitude then I would welcome a bit of disruption."

"Death isn’t the worst-case scenario," Jesri said, remembering the blank faces of the Irri. "Don’t ask me to do this. If it’s too much, if I’m not strong enough to handle it - I’ve seen what happens when the link drives someone insane, and I’ve seen what happens to those they’re linked with."

David sighed, seeming to crumple in on himself. "So this is it, then?", he asked sadly. "Five thousand years and you give up right before the end."

"I’m not giving up!", Jesri shouted, suddenly angry. "I’m rejecting a bad fucking plan. You have no idea, David, you didn’t see. My sister Ellie nearly forced Anja to kill me, and Anja was forced to kill her in turn. An entire civilization was subjugated and enslaved to her will." She shot a withering look at David. "A better version of you spent years fighting against her, trying to save those he could from her control."

The anger fled from her suddenly, leaving her feeling exhausted and hollow. "I won’t be that person," she said quietly. "I won’t make Anja kill me too. What you want from me is something I was never meant to give."

"I’m not just asking for myself, Jesri," David said. "They’ll all die without you. When the Gestalt finally completes its plan and remakes the universe, do you think it will take us with it? There’s no path where both the Gestalt and humanity survive." He grabbed her hand suddenly, his papery skin rasping against hers. "This isn’t the sort of enemy you fight without taking risks," he said, a pleading note in his voice. "We have to try something."

Jesri looked at the desperate old man in front of her, seeing the barest echoes of the David she knew under the wrinkled and spotted skin. Ellie had surely thought that she was taking the only option she had in service of the greater good. Was this how she felt, right before she tampered with her link and stopped being their sister? Jesri stood on her Faustian precipice, trying to gauge just how far she would fall if she jumped.

Above all else, she wished she could talk with Anja. What would she do if she was making the decision for her sister? If it was her mind and freedom in the balance? For her, Jesri would choose-

No, she realized. She wouldn’t.

"It has to be them," she whispered, almost inaudible against the morning birdsong. She felt an odd sense of vertigo, immediately wishing she could take the words back.

David looked at her, confused, and she cleared her throat. "We need to give each person a choice," she explained reluctantly, but this time her voice was louder. "We can’t impose this on anyone. We need to tell them the stakes, detail the risks, and let them choose to help."

"You’re going to severely reduce the available bandwidth," David warned. "You can’t fight the Gestalt with one hand tied behind your back."

"I won’t conscript the unwilling, not even to save them," Jesri said firmly. "I won’t be a monster. We’ve been fighting this long to save humanity. If we force this on them we might not even save humans." She glared at David, summoning what steel she had left to her expression. "That’s my condition, take it or leave it."

David scratched his head, then let out a long sigh. "Well," he said. "I suppose it’ll have to be enough." With a grunt of effort, he heaved himself out of his seat and turned back to Jesri. "We have a resistance lab not far from here, but I’m not as fast as I once was. Lend an old man your arm?"

Jesri stood and offered her arm wordlessly, and the two walked down the sunlit path towards the end of the world.

"Contact!", Rhuar shouted, jarring Anja from her contemplation. They had been idling at the antipode rendezvous point for nearly thirty minutes, and so far none of the other groups had checked in.

She leaned over her console, calling up the sensor feed. "Emissary?", she asked, her voice tight with anxiety.

"Not sure, it’s just one ship," he said, straining as he focused on the sensors. "Let me do a narrow active ping." A handful of rapid heartbeats passed while Anja and David waited for his response. Suddenly he sagged with relief, his ears pricking upright. "It’s the Subtle Blade!", he said happily.

Anja’s anxiety didn’t let up, merely unwinding into a different shape. "Just one ship," she muttered. "Rhuar, are we close enough to open a channel?"

"Yessir," he said distractedly, and a second later Anja’s console hissed with static.

"Tiln!", she called out. "Subtle Blade, this is Grand Design, do you copy?"

There was a pause before Tiln replied. "We copy, Grand Design," he said, his voice rough and scratchy. "All assigned targets were destroyed, sir. We were intercepted by one Emissary a few hours ago," he said grimly.

Anja winced. "The others in your group?", she asked, knowing the answer.

Tiln gave a low growl. "Our weapons were ineffective," he rasped. "We decided as captains to follow Neryn’s example. The ships were forced into their protective shells, but they were not destroyed."

"I see," Anja said, her lips pressed into a tight line. "I am sorry it came to that."

"The others did their duty," Tiln replied. "Have no other groups checked in?"

She shook her head, suddenly feeling exhausted. "We were the first."

"In that case, we should wait," Tiln said. "For the Warfather and, with luck, our brothers in the East group."

Anja made a noncommittal noise of agreement. Tiln seemed convinced of Tarl’s survival, but a part of her wondered whether either missing group would make it. The Grand Design was by far the more capable of the Terran ships, and Tarl had no others in his group to sacrifice themselves for his escape. In many ways, his was the weakest of the four teams.

She looked up to catch Rhuar and David sharing a wordless look - by her guess, they had come to similar conclusions. There was no talk of how long to wait, but each of them privately snuck a glance at the time and marked a number in their mind - that was when they would call the others dead.

Jesri shifted in her chair, trying to find a comfortable way to rest on the bare metal. Harsh lights shone down from above, deepening the far corner of the room in shadow that cloaked the trio of resistance scientists. David hovered nearby to grumble directions and commands at anyone who passed close enough. She got the distinct impression that he hindered as many people as he helped with his zeal to see their task done. Conspicuously placed black boxes hummed from every corner of the room, hiding their activities from any eyeless gaze that should wander too close.

"It feels strange," she muttered. "For something like this we should have equipment, facilities." She shifted again, causing the chair to creak as its flimsy supports flexed. "This is a folding chair."

David shot her an annoyed look. "Do you need upholstery to save the universe?", he grumbled. "Leather, perhaps? You have all of the equipment you need back on your ship. We just need to, ah, prepare the ground a bit."

"You realize I have no idea how to do anything in the simulation," Jesri said, her nerves awash in anxiety. "The interface did all the work when I connected, and Trelir did all the work booting me back out again."

"Don’t worry," David reassured her. "We’re going to draw all the targets for you. Once we finish the network map, it should be like lightning following a channel in the air - it will happen on its own."

Jesri shot him a skeptical look. "You sound awfully sure of yourself for someone who’s never done this before," she pointed out.

He had the grace to look abashed for a moment. "We’re under the radar still," he replied. "If this fizzles out, it shouldn’t attract any more attention than you already have. Anyone monitoring will see what they’ve been seeing - a bunch of insignificant little humans scurrying around doing nothing of consequence."

"You sound awfully sure of yourself for someone who’s never done this before," she repeated.

"Oh, shut up," David snapped, although the ghost of a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. "We mere mortals have less patience for nailing down precisely every detail, given our limited time - and today I seem to be feeling my mortality more keenly than usual."

"Measure twice, save the universe once," Jesri retorted. "Or did that saying not get carried over?"

David snorted. "It’s good that you’re able to joke about it," he said. "I’d be pretty nervous right about now."

A pang of nausea shot through her gut. "Why?", she asked. "Are we about to start?"

"Hah!", David laughed. "The network map has been building itself for five minutes already. I’d say you have only a handful of seconds before things start to get interesting."

Jesri’s eyes snapped open wide. "What?", she yelped. "Fuck’s sake, David-"

"Get ready to ride the lightning!", he called out jovially. "Talk to you in a few seconds."

"Wait, no," she said frantically, "I have no idea-"

There was a sudden twisting, and then Jesri was everywhere.

Part 42

"All right," Anja said grimly. "Time to move."

Rhuar looked up, then exchanged a glance with David. "It hasn’t been that long," he objected. "They could just be delayed."

"Only one thing could delay them this long," Anja said, "and the odds of them surviving an extended engagement with Emissaries are not good. At this point they have either died or suffered a loss of mobility - and either way, that means there is no advantage to waiting for them to regroup here. We need to move."

David swiped a hand over his face. "Shit. Can’t fault your logic," he said tiredly. "Want me to call up Tiln?"

Anja nodded, and a moment later the Ysleli captain’s slender yellow face filled a screen. "Sir," he said, inclining his head to Anja. "Any updates?"

"None," Anja replied, "which means we need to head out. How are you on munitions?"

Tiln turned offscreen for a moment, listening to one of his bridge officers, then nodded and turned back. "Marginal," he said unhappily. "We had to use most of our stores on the last portion of our assigned route."

"All right, damn," Anja sighed. "I suppose that means we take the remaining routes one at a time. We still have a good portion of our magazine, so save yours for combat and let us take care of the surface targets."

"Aye sir," Tiln confirmed. He opened his mouth to speak again before hesitating, an uncertain look on his face. "Sir, will we be leaving a marker for the Warfather, or-"

Anja gave him a curt nod. "We will drop a beacon, but we must operate under the assumption that all other ships are destroyed or disabled."

Tiln gave Anja a vaguely mutinous look even as he indicated his acknowledgement. "Aye sir," he replied, "but I don’t believe the Warfather would have been stopped by an attack like the one we survived."

"Oh?", Anja said, a touch of bitterness in her voice. "Why is that?"

"We were not," Tiln said simply. "And I’m not the Warfather."

Anja sighed and shook her head, looking down at the deck. The profound faith that the Ysleli troops held in Tarl was admirable, she supposed, but faith was unlikely to impress the Gestalt. "Be that as it may," she replied, "we have to assume the worst. Form up with us and prepare to retrace the East route. We will proceed until we encounter the East group’s trail, then proceed directly to the South route and work our way back to the antipode."

She allowed herself to glance at the small console displaying Jesri’s vitals. The graph showing her heart rate had been steadily elevating for the past while, the indicator lights blinking on and off frantically. "We may not have much more time left to operate freely," she added, keeping her voice carefully neutral. "Our best option is to complete the East segmentation and bisect the Gestalt networks. That may buy us enough time to finish the job."

"Understood, sir," Tiln replied. "I will follow your course."

"Stay alert," she cautioned. "If an enemy group intercepted our team we will likely run right into them. And Tiln...", she said, glaring directly at him with intensity to rival the blazing sun outside. "I forbid you to solve any problems by ramming your ship into the enemy. I told Tarl you were creative enough to be a good commander. If it comes to that, prove me right and find a better solution."

"Noted, sir," Tiln said dryly, closing the connection with a salute.

Rhuar snorted. "You think he’ll listen to you if things go sideways?", he asked. "Ysleli kind of have a thing for glorious exits."

"I don’t know, the idea of blowing up the ship is growing on me," David deadpanned, "The Gestalt could use some competition."

Anja gave them a reproachful look. "Just setting expectations," she said wearily. "The middle of a firefight is not a good place to have that kind of talk."

The tone of her voice lent a sober atmosphere to the bridge while they trundled away from the antipode with the Subtle Blade in tow. The low rumble of the cannons began once more as they engaged targets on the surface, and for a while the bridge was silent but for the roar of destruction.

The peace was broken when Rhuar gave a sudden start and snapped his head around to Anja. "Contact!", he said urgently, commandeering a display. The image was grainy with interference from the star, but Anja could clearly see the twisted hulks of three Ysleli cruisers drifting in a haze of vented atmosphere. The sunward side of the wrecks was a glowing, melted mass of liquid alloys that clung to the remaining debris.

She didn’t bother to ask if there were survivors. Even the parts shielded from the sun were beginning to glow red with the heat. "Keep moving, keep firing," she said darkly. "We need to reach their last position to close the loop."

Rhuar nodded mutely and the ship continued onward, although he left the display showing the wrecks. A secondary explosion ripped through one of the hulks as something inside succumbed to the intense heat, tearing the wreckage in half and sending up a spray of metal fragments that quickly incandesced into a brilliant golden fog.

"No sign of activity," David said quietly. "No drive traces from Emissary ships."

Anja grimaced. "That will change," she muttered. Her eyes darted across her consoles in sequence, suspiciously poring over each empty readout to find the telltale signs of an enemy lying in wait. None came. The bright lines of railgun fire walked their way across the glowing shell until the line of destroyed nodes met the trail left by the East group.

David let his breath out in a long sigh. "Well," he said, "that’s that. Do you think it will be enough to slow the Gestalt down while we take out the last quadrant?"

"We have to assume the enemy is operating at full capacity," Anja said, shaking her head. "If we had any room for error it was used up long ago." She gazed out the viewport as Rhuar wheeled the ship ninety degrees, turning them towards the South route. "Tiln," she said into the communicator. "Status check?"

"Fine here, sir," his reply came back immediately. "I don’t want to complain about it being too quiet, but…" He trailed off with a significant look out the viewports.

Anja nodded. "I know what you mean," she said. "We should make use of any time they give us, whatever their reason." The two fell silent as both ships broke away from the debris field, the Ysleli cruiser trailing behind the Grand Design as it cleared a path through the floating bits of metal.

David cleared his throat. "How’s Jesri?", he asked. "Any change?"

"None," Anja said, absentmindedly caressing the display. "Heart rate is still up, but well within normal levels."

He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. "If you had asked me this morning I would have said any problems with the op would come from her end." Seeing Anja’s face darken, he raised his hands defensively. "Because it was new territory," he clarified hastily. "Good old ship-to-ship combat seemed like a sure bet in comparison."

"Nothing more dangerous than the thing you assume is safe," Anja murmured, still focused on the console. Her sister’s heart rate had inched upward again as they were talking, the indicator blinking just a touch faster.

"I can’t decide whether that level of paranoia would keep me alive longer or not," David muttered. "How do you survive the stress?"

Anja’s grim facade softened, and she quirked an eyebrow at David’s monitor. "Says the man who exfiltrated himself from the universe in secret," she retorted. "I think the years on the outside have made you a bit soft."

"In more ways than one," he agreed, patting his belly. "Maybe when this is over-"

"Incoming!", Rhuar shouted. "Four ships just appeared to starboard, long-range."

"...and there’s that stress again," David said mournfully. "Four ships means it’s Emissaries."

"The combined East and South aggressors, most likely," Anja said, settling back into her chair and checking her consoles for battle. Targeting sensors sprang to life at her fingertips, the barrels of a hundred guns realigning themselves as she moved. The four contacts burned a bloody red on the tactical display, the Grand Design a frigid blue. Her eyes reflexively flickered back to Jesri’s small monitor, which-

She frowned. Jesri’s heart rate was dangerously elevated. She didn’t know the cause, but her sister was experiencing extreme stress. She tapped for more data, quickly paging through graphs that all showed sudden spikes. Network activity, brain function, interface power draw-

"They’re jumping!", Rhuar called out. Anja’s attention was pulled away from the console just in time to see the four giant ovoid ships blink into existence within visual range, the slight ripple of their exit lost within the glowing hellscape around them.

"Shit, here goes," Anja said, pushing Jesri forcefully to the back of her mind. "Tiln, keep moving and take shots of opportunity on our targets," she broadcast. "Rhuar-"

"Be where they aren’t shooting?", he said, his muscles twitching as he immersed fully into the shipjack. The ship’s engines roared low, a throaty and powerful chant that swelled until they were at full power. "I’ll see what I can do."

Billions of stars swirled around her like a cloud of fireflies, a chaotic and beautiful storm of light raging as far as she could see. And she could see! In every direction, from every angle, she comprehended the swarm’s motion as mere eyesight could never convey. She was left transfixed, floating, carried away on the eddies of lambent fog until her mind danced with abandon in the joy of their turbulent flow.

A nagging worry crept in, however, scratching pitifully at the ecstasy wrapped around her. Contrary thoughts suggested that there was perhaps a greater purpose to her presence in the swarm. She pushed the doubt away, spinning through every facet of the glowing cloud with mindless glee. There was no need for a reason, she thought. The simple experience of being within the light was more than enough, it was more than she had ever aspired to before.

A pause. Than she had aspired to… before what? Before she was here? Her motion through the flow of light jerked uncomfortably, sending her mind reeling in a nauseous spiral as she lost her equilibrium. Before, before. Before she was here. Her mind clamped down, bending her expansive view into something more familiar, something more limited.

There was pain again, just as there had been when Trelir-

Her mind jolted again, suddenly flooding with burning context. Trelir, the Gestalt. Anja. Her purpose for being here - and the nature of here itself. Jesri collapsed inwards, Jesri once more, retreating behind the limits of her individuality to shiver and marvel at the vastness she had briefly been.

She took stock. The swarm still roiled around her, its beauty diminished now that she could no longer see it as she had just moments ago. Still, the rushing motes of light sparkled with facets and profound depth as they passed. Each one left her feeling as though she was walking by an open door to a hallway that stretched to endless dark and hidden passages. What had she missed before, flowing in the spaces between the lights?

She stared, suddenly fascinated by the parts more than the whole, then peered more closely at a single nearby mote to probe it. It resolved into a branching network of frozen lightning, white as starlight and changeable as water. Almost before the thought of touching it occurred, she found herself hurling towards it until the lightning wrapped around her mind.

A storm of color and sensation assaulted her, driving her sense of cohesion apart in an instant. She writhed under the tempest in a desperate struggle to control the flow, to adapt it to her brain.

-woke up, wide-eyed, screaming on the dirty floor of the apartment. She saw Papi kneeling over her, tears in his eyes as his hand gripped hers so hard she could barely stand it. "Mija," he sobbed, "Dios, Dios por favor, es mi única hija-"

There was a blurring, and pain shot through her. She twisted in confusion as a surge of emotions stabbed into her heart. Terror, helplessness, confusion-

She sat up abruptly, looking around. "Where am I?", she asked groggily, but instead of answering her the kneeling man recoiled with a look of horror on his face.

"Vete," he croaked hoarsely, making the sign of the cross as sweat dripped from his pallid skin. His hand shook as he extended it to point at her. The man’s eyes shone with purest terror, his tone pleading. "¿Quién eres? Sal de mi hija, déjanos en paz-"

Jesri tore away from the assault of pain and fear, hurling herself back out into the void where she could shrink back into some semblance of calm. Her mind spun in a maelstrom for what seemed like an eternity before she could collect herself enough to think.

She regarded each point of light, each individual with a new wariness and respect. There were so many of them, each a universe unto themselves. Peering into one had been almost impossibly disorienting for her, and the effects-

She winced. The tormented look on the man’s face and the pulsing feeling of terror vibrating through her still pounded a harsh, metallic beat in her thoughts. What had she done? Seized a young girl’s mind and forcefully twisted it to match hers, injecting herself fully into the girl’s waking thoughts? No wonder she was twitching and screaming, driven beyond all reason.

No, there had to be a better way. At the very least, she reflected, it solidified her confidence that she had been right to insist on giving people a choice. For all that he griped about bandwidth, David hadn’t felt that poor girl’s fear tearing at him-

Jesri paused, looking out at the vast river of light. David. If she was going to learn how to operate here without traumatizing everyone in the universe he was her best bet - but finding him would be next to impossible, like picking out a specific grain of sand from a beach. She scrutinized the torrent flowing around her, trying to let her mind barely brush against the rushing lights.

An electric shock coursed into her, driving images into her mind like icy spikes. A man carrying a laughing child on his shoulders walked down a road on a sweltering day, feeling the sweat plaster his shirt to his chest. An ancient matriarch lay stick-thin and gasping in a hospice bed with a nurse’s hand gently caressing her bony fingers. A young boy happily chewed a warm cookie, savoring the sweet taste as it blossomed on his tongue.

Jesri recoiled once more, flinching away reflexively. Probing haphazardly was far too overwhelming. She sat for another timeless moment to consider her next move, watching the pinpoints dance in front of her. Each one cavorted on its own path, diving and gliding in concert with the others…

Except one. Jesri peered at it, not quite trusting her senses, but the shining point remained fixed as if held forcefully in place. She let herself glide over to examine it, her mind reaching out to touch it as lightly as she could. Razor-sharp purpose and resolve glinted back at her. A decrepit shell enclosed a practiced core of discipline and skill built around a furnace-flame of passion. She felt the ache of old bones and a deep fatigue permeating to her marrow, the chill air of the room seeping through her joints. Withered lips curved upwards in a smile, and she felt a sensation like eyes meeting. He had been waiting for her.

She pulled back from the contact, considering. At David’s age, she could very well kill him by inflicting the same torments she had visited upon that young girl. Slowly, carefully, she dipped a figurative toe into the eddies of his mind. The chaotic deluge of sensation rushed at her immediately, but rather than wrest control of it as she had before Jesri simply sat in the flow and experienced it. It was… uncomfortable. Awkward. She felt like she was standing too close to a stranger, all jostling elbows and bashed knees.

Well, David’s thought came unbidden. This isn’t what I was expecting at all.

His surprise cut through the chaos so clearly that it startled her as well, and Jesri felt the sudden urge to laugh. This is terrible, she giggled. I have no idea what I’m doing. I feel like-

Jesri sat at a dirty bar just off the base with five of her sisters, laughing raucously as they exulted in their successful exfiltration from the Valkyrie compound. Their brutally short military haircuts and matching jumpsuits stood out in the dingy surroundings, but the moment was too rich for any of them to notice that they were out of place. This was their bar for the hour. The cheap beer was bitter on her tongue, though she drank it stoically and tried to look like she wasn’t seventeen. When she finished it a stammering midshipman came up and asked if he could buy her another. Her sisters laughed and catcalled, but she looked him in his eyes and smiled like she imagined a normal girl would. They drank their next beer together and pretended they knew more about the world than they did, and stepped on each others toes when they tried to dance.

David’s booming laughter echoed, and Jesri could feel his amusement as he countered with a memory of his own:

In a grey, windowless room David finished paging through his presentation, having just summarized a year’s hard research into militant groups working to destabilize the Ferron chondrite mining cartels. The section chief was here personally, not just her secretary! His heart pounded in his chest and he felt uncomfortably sweaty. People began to ask questions, and he answered each one with a cool composure totally removed from the near-panic whirring in his gut. He looked towards the section chief with the stirrings of confidence, hoping to get a glimpse of her assessment of his presentation. Instead, her lips pursed and her eyes flickered down. Heart sinking, David feigned glancing at his notes and felt a pang of horror to see his fly hanging flagrantly open. The presentation was slated to continue for another thirty minutes.

Jesri fired back with her disastrous attempt to bluff her way into a slaver’s auction, and David’s riposte was a staggeringly painful recounting of the time he gave the best man’s speech at a wedding. After a few more rounds they could take no more of the memories. A moment passed while she retreated in amused exhaustion, and Jesri noted that their link no longer felt quite so confining. The harsh flow of sensation had softened, but she also found herself adjusting to accommodate it in turn.

Interesting, David’s voice mused, and her head was filled with half-impressions of network diagrams and peer-to-peer topology. Just like a mesh network. The nodes must negotiate to establish a common protocol, only then can transfer occur.

Using memories?, Jesri asked skeptically.

Experience, David replied. Context for interaction. You show me how your mind works, I reciprocate.

Jesri thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. For every one of them?, she asked. One at a time? How long will that take?

Two at a time, David replied reassuringly. Then four, then eight. We will get better as we accumulate more shared experience, more context to find common ground. She felt his intense regard for a moment, accompanied by a complex melange of respect, relief and awe. I’m glad we have you for this, he said. You have more experiences to draw from than a dozen people, and your memory feels perfect - flawless, even. It will make this easier.

She held her skepticism, but David pushed an exasperated thought her way; his epiphanies became hers, and she understood. Everyone essentially developed their own way of looking at the world in a vacuum, and bereft of context two minds were basically speaking alien languages. Language and society let them interact, but they were always abstractions overlying the base code of each individual’s mind. Normalizing each one to allow for true interaction on that most basic of levels took effort, but when that was done…

David pulsed vicarious amusement at her realization, then prodded her towards another mote of light. The resistance, he explained. They’re already our allies. Bring them in first, let them help us.

Jesri reached out again, touching the new mote and wincing as the barrage of its mind struck her. David bolstered her, though, and she was in no danger of losing herself in the chaos. She felt pulses of fear, uncertainty, giddy excitement. David began talking to the man, and she caught a glimpse of an image - a technician that had been assisting with their setup, a wiry and nervous man with a perpetually serious face. His name was Vadim, but David called him Eddie.

Slowly David fed experiences across the link, and after some hesitation Jesri saw others come back. Eddie had grown up with his mother and three brothers in Minsk. She saw his fourth birthday party, and his fortieth. His joy when he had married, and his horror when David had explained the secret behind the world to him. Jesri showed him her sisters and what the galaxy looked like from beyond the rim. She felt an understanding, and tentative thoughts greeted her across the link.

As one, they turned to the rest of David’s resistance cell. Annabel, who had cried when David told her of the Gestalt. Mark and Effie, who had never truly believed him until now. The motes of light drifted together, forming a new flow that clustered and swirled around her in a miniature halo.

They reached out for more, faster now. Another cell based in London, another still working out of Pavonis. Eddie’s brothers, confused but trusting - and then filled with righteous anger when Eddie shared his knowledge of their purpose. Annabel’s daughter, Mark’s sister. Some turned away, frightened by what they didn’t understand, and at Jesri’s insistence they did not pursue them further. More stayed and listened, however, and the swarming mass of light around them grew.

David swept up a few of his old colleagues at Naval Intelligence who still remembered Director Kincaid and shared everything he had been aching to share for so long. The hidden files, the team at Pavonis. MANTRA and the resistance. Jesri felt her connection to David overflow with tearful relief as he unburdened himself of decades-old secrets. There was no question of doubt - David gave them his sincerity, and Jesri her conviction. All at once, their recruits knew - and with grim resolve, they helped them tell others.

And then, like a fire in a dry field, there was the Navy. Jesri’s Navy, her home and her only family. Officers inducted by Naval Intelligence spread the word through the ranks as fast as lightning, calling the steel resolve of the Terran Navy into the fold. They stepped into the link almost as one - and with the terrible knowledge of their reality still burning fresh in their minds they turned to look at Jesri.

She threw herself at them with a wordless cry, feeling the rush of the familiar. They returned to her the best years of her life, the thrumming excitement of a ship underway and the easy camaraderie of crewmates. The smell of a freshly fabricated uniform, the slight chemical tickle of the galley’s banana pudding, the sound of uniform heels on a clean deck. Opening herself up fully, she gave to them in return her centuries of service. She showed them her childhood and her training, her first tentative steps into a warship’s bridge. The daring raids, the infiltrations, the boring patrols and endless stakeouts. The shared bond of her sisters.

And then, as they watched silently, the End. Earth smoldering amid a halo of wreckage. The shattered docks at Pavonis, darkened transit stations hanging lifeless in the void. Wandering, despair. Glimpses of her sisters that dwindled to just Anja, her constant light in the darkness sweeping in to rescue her when she needed it most. Nihilism, apathy. Centuries drifting from station to station, the ghost in the hallways and the curiosity of Kitan codices.

She gave them the rekindling of the spark when Anja called her to Indomitable. Her stunned disbelief as she listened to the captain’s recording, the tears glistening in her sister’s eyes as she beamed back at her. She gave them Rhuar and Qktk as they fled the station, gave them Kenet-Tel and his children - and her pain, when they were struck down in front of her.

The wonder of finding the Grand Design reverberated through the link, as did the battle at Ysl and their hasty escape through hyperspace. They shared her joy at finding Ellie and her horror at what her sister had become. The revelation of David and the resistance filled them with excitement even as the destruction at Elpis and Ysl weighed on them. They grieved with her for Qktk and Neryn, Xim Len and the Elpis resistance.

More poured out of her and they drank it in, taking in their wayward sister’s long exile and harrowing journey to a home she’d never seen. Finally, ending with the fresh memory of the pedestal and her confrontation with Trelir, she backed away from the link and waited uncertainly. The whole of the Terran Navy had seen her life in its barest form, unvarnished and unabridged. The links between them hummed with titanic forces as they shared her memories with each other, turning them over and reviewing them in minute detail.

Then, as one, they turned back to Jesri. A single emotion surged into her, nearly tearing her from existence with its power:

PRIDE.

The Navy rang with it like a great steel bell as it embraced her, and Jesri dissolved into their welcoming arms with a choked sob of gratitude. Every failure that had weighed her down, every crushing feeling of inadequacy evaporated as if it had never been. None of it mattered to them. Anja and Jesri had kept the beacon lit against all odds. They had kept humanity alive in their hearts when all else had perished, and for that her brothers and sisters loved her unreservedly.

But as the glow of their fierce approval faded and the links between them grew quiet, another emotion crept in like seeping oil. It built in a slow resonance through the joined minds, and motes of light began to fly towards the halo faster and faster as the Navy turned outward to their families and friends. It was now a blinding maelstrom, spinning with minds in their billions as they found their voice in this new and strange world.

And when that voice spoke, it spoke of vengeance. Anger swirled within the flood of light, surging through Jesri in a wave of incandescent fury. There was no thought of resistance or moderation, for it was her anger too. All of the death, the destruction and ruin visited upon them by the Gestalt - humanity had seen it in full, and now the bill was due.

The motion of the lights stopped, and Jesri drew in a breath. When she let it out, she was in a small room with a low table and a single window. The table was bare save for the empty pattern of a Go board etched into it, and Jesri stood alone.

She cocked her head and found herself looking at Trelir’s surprised face. He blinked, then stared at her as she walked over to her chair and took a seat. "You," he breathed, an accusatory tone in his voice. "What did you do?"

Jesri smiled back at him. "Surely the Gestalt wouldn’t need to ask a pitiful thing like me for information," she said acidly.

Trelir’s face darkened. "Humor and tricks will not save you or your sister," he said warningly. "I was kind to you before. Tell me what you did to reclaim this space and call me here or I will send you to an industrial acid vat rather than that pleasant park."

Rising to her feet, Jesri let her smile expand to a predatory grin. She opened her mouth to speak, and a billion voices said:

"TRY IT."

A moment passed, and Trelir’s face worked through several complicated expressions. Finally he shook his head and sat down at the table. "Impudence," he muttered. "Do you know what you’ve done? That simulation required a considerable amount of our resources to maintain, and now you’ve disrupted it irreparably." He steepled his fingers. "We will have to reset everything."

Jesri said nothing, but grinned wider. In the periphery of her awareness she felt the furious masses of humanity seething through the Gestalt’s network, abusing her administrative access to wrest control over the simulation away from the Gestalt. Network links were sabotaged in an eyeblink, routing tables deleted or rewritten with nonsensical data. A second passed, and the simulation remained. Trelir looked at her with suspicion, then shock, then resigned annoyance. "Humans are nothing if not stubborn," he sighed. "But this is still just a childish tantrum. All you change is the amount of effort needed to effect repairs after we eradicate you. The outcome is fixed. Your fate cannot be changed."

"No outcome is fixed, Trelir," Jesri said. "You wanted to understand our ‘penchant for hopeless holding actions’, but you can’t without understanding hope first. Helplessness, panic, all the things you left behind when you decided that you were perfect. You can’t understand not having all the facts, the uncertainty of war and conflict sowing doubt in your mind."

"And why would we?", he scoffed. "Why bother with coping techniques for primitives when we can choose perfection instead?"

"Because perfection is a lie," Jesri said quietly, walking toward him. "Perfection is the rejection of improvement, a declaration that you can be no better than you are. It’s a sad, stagnant condition for a sad, stagnant being."

Trelir seemed to swell with rage, his black eyes glittering. "Pity?", he seethed. "You upjumped vermin have no standing to feel pity for the Confluence. You think you’re strong, wise, having discovered the most basic form of Confluence. We surpassed what you are long ago."

Fury billowed within her, and Jesri took another step forward. She felt armies surging within her, overflowing their containment to race along the Gestalt’s network with untempered ferocity. They burned through data nodes, a cleansing poison pumping through their enemy’s veins. "Can you feel it?", Jesri asked softly. "I couldn’t beat you, but they’re strong. They don’t care what you are or how long you’ve been ‘perfect’. Now that they’re free, now that they know the truth, they won’t stop until you’re dead."

"They are surprisingly competent," Trelir admitted. "But still primitives. Still bound by the weaknesses of language and society," he said, closing the rest of the distance between them. "Still bound to form and hierarchy."

He jabbed a bony finger at Jesri’s face, his voice a lethal hiss. "That means I don’t have to defeat them," he whispered. "I just have to defeat you."

Part 43

Jesri glared defiantly back at Trelir, batting his outstretched hand away. "You think you can?", she growled. Her words seemed to echo back behind her into infinite space, resonating and building within the network of linked consciousness. It stretched wide, encompassing the whole of the shell around Apollyon’s star and, behind it, deep into the inky black of hyperspace. Tiny motes drifted around the inside of the shell. Some burned bright with connections to the Gestalt and others remained dim, foreign. Anja, she realized, and the Emissaries closing on her position. She felt questing tendrils of her network reach out to investigate the Emissaries, trying to worm their way inside.

Her mind’s eye saw others taking their positions in networks adjacent to the simulated universe, fortifying data nodes against the Gestalt’s relentless assault and preparing to strike outward. On every front they were met with meticulously laid defenses and swift counterstrikes - the true Confluence, vast and ancient, stirring itself to meet them.

"I do not speculate," Trelir replied archly. "I know." He paced back around the table and slid out the chair opposite her, sitting and drumming his fingers against the hard surface. "The solution space we are in now is quite limited," he said, "and I doubt very much that you have any more surprises in store. This is the peak of your trajectory, Jesri Tam. You should be proud to have risen so far, it is truly a monumental achievement for you and your kind."

He leaned back and steepled his fingers. "However, you will rise no further. You will die here, and the experience of watching your brief, futile efforts to survive will enrich the Confluence. We will take your memory with us to our eternal existence. Content yourself with this - only a few earn the distinction of such notability."

Trelir’s words rippled through her ears back into the network and were rejected almost immediately, the violent consensus twitching Jesri’s lips into a smile. "Yeah, no," she drawled, sitting down in the near chair. "You can’t expect us to just roll over and die. We have more of a chance now than we’ve ever had."

"But you don’t," he said, making an exasperated gesture. "You had no chance of victory. Not a small chance, not an improbable sliver of hope, zero. Multiply that by your recent growth and we get still zero. Please don’t tell me that despite all of your newfound ability you remain unable to do simple math."

Jesri shrugged, leaning back. "It’s true that none of us knows our path forward, but speaking on behalf of the group," she said, lacing her fingers behind her head relaxedly, "we’ve got a pretty good feeling about this."

"Spare me further talk of your feelings," Trelir sighed. "Fine, if you insist on wasting everyone’s time and resources we can continue our little contest." He placed his hand on the table, then drew it back. "Not Go, this time. That game is expansive, rich with possibility and endless combinations. This situation calls for something a bit more limited, more savage. Something with an appropriate victory condition."

Suddenly the Go board was gone, replaced by a simple eight-by-eight grid. Marble and onyx chessmen sat in neat rows, with Jesri as white. She picked up the queen and studied it, then replaced it and moved a pawn forward in a standard opening.

The Grand Design shuddered under the strain as it swung in a quick pivot before firing its engines full-bore, lumbering through a series of maneuvers better suited for a small fighter than a kilometer-long cruiser. Their shifting inertia was briefly too much for the ship’s gravity to bear, and Anja gripped her armrests tightly as the brutal acceleration slammed her back in her seat.

"I don’t think the ship is supposed to make that noise," David observed nervously. "Can you guys hear that too, or is it just my connection acting up? The readings from the inertial compensation-"

"Not your imagination," Anja said through gritted teeth, hauling herself forward to the targeting console once more. "They seem to have forgotten how to shoot straight, but there are more of them now. Dodging remains a challenge." The ovoid shape of an Emissary sat squarely in the middle of their lower firing arc, and she sent another barrage of fire screaming their way before the ship bucked once more to dodge its counterblow. Ripples of distorted space streaked across their bow, tearing sheets of hull plating from the exterior as they passed.

"Rhuar!", Anja said crossly. "That one caused some damage."

He shot her an exasperated look. "Fuckin-", he grunted, tensing as the ship rolled unsteadily into another hard pivot. "Damage them back, then! If I dodge any harder than this we’ll snap right the fuck in half."

"This ship was made by Terran engineers, ensign," Anja retorted, shouting over the roar of another barrage from the railguns. "We will fail long before it does."

"We might just," Rhuar muttered, bracing himself against the deck. His muscles strained, and the engines spoke in concert with the howling guns.

"How blasé," Trelir sighed, placing a pawn and slumping back in his chair discontentedly. "This is literally a textbook engagement."

Jesri glared at him. "If you didn’t want to see established openings you should have picked a different game," she retorted, following up with another pawn.

"And what more suitable game could I have chosen? Would you prefer checkers, perhaps?" He shook his head in disgust. "Go was too kind to you as a metaphor. A unity of identical pieces working together for a common goal, that isn’t you," he scoffed. "But chess, it’s so delightfully representative. An antiquated hierarchy of pieces, each one stubbornly limited by their individual failings. The most competent pieces on the board are ultimately slaves to the least capable. And, most appropriately," he murmured, making his countermove, "the whole side wins or loses based on the fate of one piece."

"You keep hinting that you’re going to come at me," Jesri snarled, "but so far it’s just been bluster." She continued with a third pawn, feeling the endless tide of humanity in the back of her mind. They threw themselves against the fortress of the Gestalt in a ceaseless wave, although a few had peeled off and were interestedly looking at Jesri’s game. She let one part of her mind listen to their analysis and focused the rest of her attention on Trelir. "Are you going to let the fight keep going without us," she asked, "or are we actually going to get to it?"

Trelir sneered in distaste. "So violent, so impatient," he tutted. "And no, I have no intention of assaulting you here. You’ve taken to this form of being far too well, and the misplaced enthusiasm of your supporters in such an event would be troublesome if only by dint of their sheer volume." He sighed and shook his head. "You’ve managed to become quite nettlesome, Captain."

"And here I thought you didn’t like me," Jesri deadpanned, moving a knight forward.

"Oh, no, quite the opposite," Trelir replied, waving a hand dismissively. "I’ve said how much I admired your struggle to rise above your limitations, haven’t I? But they remain, Jesri Tam. They always will. The shortcomings of your individual form continue to bind you, cripple you, keeping you from the heights a more perfect being could reach." He reached down towards the board, but his eyes remained fixed on Jesri. "You are shackled with chains of flesh that subvert your mind’s workings at every turn. Even now, at the height of your being, we must still speak as two individuals in this sad little simulacrum. I will do you the favor of freeing you from your tragic existence, my dear Captain," he said. "I will destroy your body and end this façade."

"Holy shit!", Rhuar yelped, flinching as a blast rippled by the bridge. Cracks spidered across a few of the viewports before shutters clanged over them to reinforce the fragile panes. "Anja, they’re really coming after us," he called out.

"I noticed," she grated, scanning through her displays. "Tiln, report!"

His face popped onto a side screen, looking harried but unharmed. "They’re leaving us mostly alone, sir," he replied. "You seem to be their priority target. We’ve been able to move freely, enough to force one of them into stasis with a few well-timed volleys. Their focus on you has been quite helpful."

"Not the word I would use!", she shouted back, grimacing as Rhuar pulled them into another banking turn. "They are keeping too much pressure on us for us to return fire effectively. Try and take a few more of them out, and make it quick! We can only keep this up for so long."

"I had some ideas about that, actually," Tiln said, scrolling through a display offscreen. "We’ve got some ordnance that would be more effective than our guns, but it’s intended for fixed bombardment-"

Anja made a frustrated noise and glared at him. "Tiln!", she hissed, "you are a captain. Stop asking me for permission and act!"

"Yes... sir?", Tiln replied hesitantly. "It’s just that you had previously said not to ‘fuck around with cowboy trick shots’ in combat situations, and based on my understanding of the term this-" He cut off as the Grand Design jolted violently and Anja gave him a searing look. "Um," he amended. "Never mind. If I ram my ship into the enemy, please know that it was unintentional."

He cut the transmission before she could reply, and David peered at her questioningly. "That sounds ominous," he said. "Maybe you should have let him explain."

Anja spared a murderous glance for him, but kept a view of Tiln’s ship up on one of her monitors as she worked. The little craft arrowed towards the nearest of the three Emissaries penning them in, then slowed as the hull began to dance with white fire.

"Oh, shit," Rhuar groaned, sudden realization on his face. "Anja, you should really-" He cut off with a yelp as another blast from the Emissaries lanced towards them, forcing him to execute a violent lateral thrust. Anja was tossed hard against her armrest, but Rhuar simply toppled sideways. They both regained their bearings just in time to see Tiln’s ship disappear.

He reappeared almost dead center in Anja’s scopes, and she jerked her fingers away from the firing controls with a muttered curse. The Ysleli ship raced close across the Emissary’s hull like a blazing comet before vanishing again into hyperspace - bare seconds before a jettisoned torpedo tore open the Emissary’s starboard flank.

Trelir frowned at Jesri’s lone knight playing havoc in the back rank of the board, now sitting proudly where one of his rooks should be. He moved his hand toward it, then rested a finger atop the adjacent knight while he contemplated the arrangement.

"The pinnacle of sentient life needs to think about their moves?", Jesri snarked. "Come on, Trelir, you said you were going to kill me. Are you really going to leave me languishing in my fleshy prison this long?" She let her chin rest in her hands, elbows on the table. "Would you condemn me to yet more of my somewhat-less-than-optimal existence?"

Trelir didn’t react, surveying the board without looking up. "You don’t fool me, you know," he said quietly. "This bravado, this humor. You’re as scared now as you’ve ever been. You have no idea what you’re doing." He moved his knight away, exposing Jesri’s piece to an attack from Trelir’s queen.

Jesri snorted and moved the knight to a safe space, leaning back in her chair with a sigh. "You act like that’s not the status quo," she said wearily. "I’ve been improvising my way out of mortal peril for millennia. Soul-rending terror is an old buddy of mine." She stretched her arms, then cracked her neck as Trelir looked on without speaking. "I’d say I’m actually better off than normal," she remarked brightly, "since now I’ve got a few billion of my best friends backing me up." She smiled as a cheer rippled back from the network, the fierce support of her linked army rebounding in a wave.

He laid a long finger on his queen, looking over the board again. "They’re going to die," he said, his voice still low and calm. "All of them. The ones who joined you, the ones who didn’t. You conscripted paradise to fight a war they cannot win, and now it’s lost to them forever." He moved his queen laterally, threatening the escaped knight.

"You really don’t get humans very well," Jesri said, placing her finger on the beleaguered knight. "What you built wasn’t a paradise. You’re not some altruist playing the steward of all life or some bullshit like that, your only interest is self-interest." She lifted her finger and moved it to one of her bishops, moving it forward to imperil Trelir’s other rook. "They know that. I showed them everything I know about you and the Gestalt, and we’ve all agreed that the whole bunch of you are such colossal assholes that we’d pretty much rather die than go back to your happy little paradise." She shrugged. "If that’s the way it works out, then at least we gave it a shot and made your life inconvenient as a bonus fuck-you."

Trelir looked up from his study of the board with a mildly shocked expression. "I’m always amazed at how vindictive and spiteful humans can be," he tutted. "You’d condemn them all to die for something so petty?"

Jesri’s smile dropped away, leaving a hard stare. "More petty a reason than when you did it?", she asked softly. "What was our offense, again?"

He shook his head and moved a pawn to block the bishop. "That was different," he insisted. "It was nothing personal, as you say."

Trelir’s pawn toppled to the board as Jesri slid the bishop violently forward, the chorus of voices around her rising in fury. "Well, that’s unfortunate," she growled. "Because we kinda took it that way."

"Two more inbound!", Rhuar shouted, setting his shoulders as he took the ship through a punishing turn. Furious sunlight played across the bridge as the ship pulled around. "One minute, maybe less."

"Seriously?", David griped, looking out at the sole remaining Emissary from their original group. Three spheres of golden light twisted and writhed where Tiln’s daring strikes had forced the others into stasis. "We were almost done, too."

Anja reset her targeting reticle and pushed a stray bit of hair from her eyes. "Probably not a coincidence," she muttered. "Tiln! Report!"

"Doing all right, sir," he replied, although his voice was tight with stress. "Our hyperdrive isn’t enjoying this, but it’s holding up. We have four more torpedos, then we’ll have to fall back to more conventional tactics."

"Save the torpedos for now," Anja said grimly. "Support us for a run on the last target, I want to take him out before his friends show up."

"Aye sir," Tiln acknowledged, turning back to his crew. The two ships accelerated on a straight-line course towards the remaining Emissary, then began an evasive spiral as its first shots lanced toward them.

Anja stabbed her fingers at the console and debris exploded from the Emissary’s fore quarter. Grinning, she fired again - and looked at the display with a sinking feeling as nothing happened.

"Shit," she spat angrily. "The whack-a-mole is empty. Rhuar, position us to engage with the plasma lance."

"Got it," he replied, although worry marked his face through the shipjack fugue. The ship banked again to bring the topside against the Emissary, and Anja focused a blazing column of light into the scar from her last barrage. The attack landed in a spectacular wave of billowing plasma, bright even in the radiant sunlight, but the Emissary remained active.

Rhuar grunted as they were forced to dodge a pair of incoming shots, the nearer of which raced uncomfortably close by their port side. Metal screamed, and warning lights lit up red on several displays.

"Number one engine is damaged!", David called out, busily directing his fleet of repair drones to the site. "We’re at three-quarters output."

Anja didn’t comment, instead training the railguns to focus fire on what she hoped were weak points in the Emissary’s hull. Blazing lines stitched out from across the Grand Design as the batteries spoke, but Rhuar’s frantic evasive maneuvering scattered many of the shots away from her intended target.

"I’ve got it," Tiln broadcast, taking the Subtle Knife in for a supporting volley. The little ship fired her forward guns in a sustained burst that sent secondary explosions rippling through the Emissary’s hull.

"Be careful," Anja warned, eyeing his trajectory. "We’re about to be-"

She cut off abruptly as the two new Emissary contacts burst out of hyperspace directly behind Tiln’s ship, their weapons charging for an immediate volley. Anja watched helplessly as the Subtle Knife juked to the side, narrowly avoiding annihilation as the twisted projectiles stripped ribbons of metal from its flank. Atmosphere vented in a glittering fog behind them to mark their course as the ship spiraled away from the Gestalt’s encirclement, but they were still too close. Anja retargeted their guns on the Emissaries’ charging weapons, watching them ramp up quickly, too quickly for her to stop-

White fire blossomed over her scopes and was immediately outstripped by explosions of superheated metal from the Emissary closest to Tiln. The Cormorant streaked away from the glowing cloud, the plasma from their hyperjump blown outward as they lashed a second Emissary with their guns.

"Oh, fuck yeah!", Rhuar shouted, bouncing on his paws in exuberant glee. "Tarl, you beautiful yellow bastard!" Guns from all three ships pummeled the remaining wounded Emissary, and soon all of their opponents had retreated into their protective shells.

Tarl’s face blinked into view on one of the displays, looking exhilarated. Behind him his crew worked frantically, his weary first officer bellowing orders in a hoarse voice. "Major Tam, Captain Tiln," he said happily. "We’ve been trying to find you for some time now."

Despite herself, Anja felt a smile creep onto her lips. "Tarl, good to see you," she replied. "And good timing. We had thought you might be dead."

"Dead?", Tarl scoffed. "Major, I am the Warfather. Some Emissaries attacked earlier, but they did no worse than delay me." He sniffed indignantly, but Anja could see the scarred plating on the outside of his vessel where near-misses and grazes had ripped his hull open. Her sensors placed his reactor output at below-optimal, and two engines showed dead and cold on her readout. She shook her head ruefully. "Ysleli," she muttered under her breath.

"At the risk of breaking decorum, sir," Tiln said, reestablishing his connection, "I did tell you so." The bridge behind him was obscured by a haze of smoke, and Anja could see crewmen tending to casualties over his shoulder.

"So you did," Anja said tolerantly. "Status?"

"We’ve been better," Tiln replied, surveying the bridge behind him. "That last hit knocked out a lot of systems, but we think we can most of it back up in short order. Environmental controls are down, and it’s beginning to feel a bit warm in here."

Anja pursed her lips. This close to the sun, that would be an issue. "Come around in our shadow while you do repairs," she said. "If we have a few moments we should use them to regroup."

"Excellent," Tarl rumbled. "We will join formation as well. There are a few minor repairs…" He trailed off as one of his officers shouted something in the background, and Anja saw Rhuar go stiff out of the corner of her eye.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Repairs will have to wait," Tarl said flatly. "We have new contacts coming in, upwards of twenty ships."

Anja exchanged a look with David and Rhuar. "Twenty?", she asked quietly.

Rhuar nodded. "Twenty-three. And Anja…" He hesitated, then gave her a mournful look. "If Tarl is alive then he completed his segment. We destroyed all of the targeted nodes, but the Gestalt is still coming."

"It didn’t work," David muttered. "Well, shit."

Anja slumped into her chair, a gnawing dread growing in the back of her mind. She cast her eyes over the increasing number of red warning lamps, the dire assessments of the Cormorant and the Subtle Knife, at Jesri’s vitals brightly pulsing on their small display. She wrestled the dread back, looking up at David and Rhuar, at Tiln and Tarl on their monitors. "One problem at a time," she said dully. "We cannot make any sort of move to strike or retreat until we deal with these new ships."

"Well-stated," Tarl said, nodding his head firmly as if she had just given a motivational speech. "We may not have defeated them yet, but the enemy measures us as a threat worth addressing with overwhelming force." He pointed dramatically to his bridge’s tactical display, on which a cloud of red dots loomed ominously. "That is not a force to finish an ailing enemy or mop up a fleet of weaklings. That is not a fleet you send to defeat an enemy that has no hope of defeating you in turn. It is a strong, capable fleet to match a strong, capable foe. Even if we cannot see the path forward, the enemy sees its own doom in us." He bared his needle-sharp teeth in a smile. "We only need to survive until we see it as well."

"I am simultaneously motivated and terrified," Rhuar complained. "Anja, make him stop."

Something flared in the darkness of Anja’s thoughts, and a smile crept back onto her lips. "No," she said, "Tarl is right. The Gestalt has always responded with commensurate force. The concept of building in a margin for error is foreign to a mind that knows all details and calculates all outcomes. If it sends twenty-three ships it is because it believes we stand a chance against twenty-two." She stood up from her chair and gave Tarl a feral smile. "So I say we trust its assessment."

"So, what, you want to just kill twenty-two of them and see how we feel?", David asked.

"We’re pretty beat up," Rhuar observed. "Our combat strength is lowered - but so is theirs. I can tell, watching how they fly and attack. They may not be crippled like we had planned, but something is degrading their responses. I can’t say whether it’s us or Jesri and the resistance."

"Good enough for me," Anja said, trailing a hand absently over Jesri’s readouts. "Get ready to move out."

Jesri stared beyond the chessboard and across the roiling surface of Apollyon’s star, her mind settling on the cloud of light sailing toward the three darkened motes huddled together on the battlefield. Her forces had made inroads into the Emissary ships, slashing data feeds and hobbling predictive routines where they could - but the Emissaries were not wholly dependent on the Gestalt. Their core operations were walled off from her relentless assault, and the flotilla pressed on despite her efforts.

"You seem distracted," Trelir said knowingly.

"Quiet," Jesri muttered. "I’m thinking."

"You’re panicking," Trelir purred. "You’re realizing what you should have seen from the beginning. You cannot touch the Emissaries, and they will destroy the remnants of your pitiful fleet."

Jesri glared defiantly back at Trelir, drawing her bishop back to her side of the board. "Even if I die," she said, "you can’t stop what I started. The people I freed will tear you apart."

"They won’t, because they are still people," Trelir sighed. "Individuals who communicate better than most, admittedly, but individuals nonetheless. They’ve made you their leader, their core, and when you are gone they will not be able to function." He leaned in close to her, his breath brushing against her face.

She recoiled from his presence, but he merely advanced further. "You weren’t ready," he hissed. "You took people raised to operate as independent entities and tried to make them a collective. Even we couldn’t make that work. It requires a mind tailored for the task, raised in the light of the Confluence, matured from its first day to be one with others."

"We’re doing all right," Jesri retorted. "You, on the other hand, seem to be a bit bothered."

"They only succeed because of you," Trelir replied, ignoring her. "Because you’re better than they are you can help them to some degree. Once you’re gone, however, the entire mess will descend into a mob of panicked monkeys that can’t help but hold ninety-nine percent of themselves back from the group. They will wail and scream, clash against one another in useless conflict. It will all dissolve into chaos."

Jesri didn’t answer, instead focusing on the force of Emissaries. They had executed another microjump and were now within direct striking range of the Grand Design. She saw the two larger signatures twist and evade, circling outward while the smallest ship flung itself in an impossibly tight microjump towards the lead Gestalt ship. There was a confused tussle that left the Emissary reeling into stasis, its lower hull blasted to scrap.

Jesri smiled. "Twenty-two," she said cheerfully.

"Keep mocking me if it pleases you," Trelir said dismissively. "You have only seconds to live. I will be courteous and refrain from counting them."

She joined in with the growing tide of minds flocking to torment the Emissaries, flooding their data feeds with sensor echoes and providing last-minute targeting corrections that sent their shots veering wide. Two more of the ovoid ships were forced into stasis, but Jesri worried at the poor state of the surviving human ships. All three had suffered heavy damage and even with the hordes of humanity on their side they were hard-pressed to dodge the oncoming projectiles. She saw armor peel off the spine of the Grand Design from a near-miss and winced.

"This is it," Trelir said, his voice oozing satisfaction. "Time slows and the delicious details brighten. The solution space contracts to a point, a singularity." He moved his queen to the center of the board, placing her king in check. It was penned in on all sides, with only one move standing between it and checkmate.

A pang of alarm from the linked minds pulled her attention back to the fleet battle where an Emissary had borrowed from Tiln’s playbook and microjumped directly next to the Grand Design. She saw their engines flare as Rhuar panicked, felt the growing pulse of the Emissary’s weapon building up charge. They were too close to bend the weapon’s trajectory away from the ship - the only choice they had was where to send the hit. The Emissary had aimed squarely amidships, which would blow the entire back of the cruiser apart. She could nudge the projectile aft, which would destroy the engines and leave them dead in the water. Fore would still break the ship in half, dooming them. To the top was the bridge, where Anja and Rhuar would die instantly if struck. The remaining option was below, towards the belly of the ship. The secondary cargo hold, the pedestal - and Jesri’s helpless body.

The cloud of minds spinning through her reeled, clustering within her chest and beating like a second heart. Millions of voices shouted options, suggestions, diversions, but none of them arrived at a solution. Slowly, with the wailing voices of billions tearing at the inside of her skull, she picked up her queen and moved it to block Trelir’s. The weapon’s aim skewed low, drawing a bead that would tear a gash into the belly of the Grand Design.

"You see," Trelir murmured. "It was always inevitable. There could only ever be one outcome."

Jesri’s vision blurred as she felt the energy’s vibrations resonate within her skull. "For me, maybe. Not for them. They’re better than you think."

"They’re nothing without you," Trelir scoffed. He reached over to the board and moved his queen to take hers, tossing the captured piece contemptuously to the table. "They will die in an instant."

The weapon brimmed with energy, milliseconds from releasing its payload to tear through spacetime towards the ship. Jesri shook her head and looked up at Trelir, her eyes dry and cold even as a maelstrom raged within her, all minds focused intently on the crucial nanosecond as they searched in vain for a faulty line of code or exploitable vulnerability.

"We’ll see," she said.

In her mind’s eye she saw the projectile race out, covering the distance between the ships in an eyeblink. Huge swathes of hull plating were shattered as it approached, atmosphere venting from a hundred ruptured corridors and holds, bulkheads twisting in gruesome slow-motion until finally-

Anja heard the dim blaring of klaxons and forced her eyes open, years of military reflex overriding her grogginess. The shuttered viewports of the bridge arced high overhead, their graceful curves lit red by the emergency lighting. She was on the floor, she realized. Why was she on the floor?

Levering herself up, she looked around the bridge. Half of the displays had gone dark, and David had disappeared from his screen. Rhuar had fallen in a heap next to his duty station and was bleeding from a gash to his shoulder. He struggled to rise to his feet, his eyes clouded in a daze of feedback from his jack.

She stumbled towards her chair and threw herself into it, keying up damage reports with clumsy, fumbling fingers. A diagram of the ship flickered onto her display and her heart froze to see the red warnings spidering over it. They had taken a hit belowdecks, just afore of engineering. Critical ship’s systems were spared, although the ship was currently rerouting power to compensate for several missing trunk conduits. The WCML was gone, as were the torpedo bays, the lower aft railguns - and the entire secondary cargo hold.

Panic gripping her, she flung a hand towards the small display that had held Jesri’s vital signs. It sat dead and black in her hand, reflecting only her horrified face in the glass.

Part 44 - Final

David spun through the void, feeling plagued with the sensation of movement even as he ran up against an utter lack of anything to move through. The space around him was a flickering storm lit with brief flashes from the shattered network of minds calling to each other, reaching out in vain for the scattered wisps of their former self.

He took inventory. He was here, which was good, and he seemed relatively intact. He tried reaching out as he had done before, sending his mind questing along the network to brush against others - but at the barest contact he was thrown back violently, his head swimming with the shock of their alien thoughts. Was this what Jesri had shielded them against, papering over the gap between them so that they could think freely?

Abandoning the network for now, he sent out feelers along network paths. The loosed minds flowed and jostled in a chaotic turbulence, never touching or drawing near to each other. In the distance, far along one path, he saw a titanic entity sweeping down the crowded route to devour the lost souls too slow to recognize the danger and flee.

The Gestalt, cleaning up the mess. Anger flared in his chest, followed by fear. He wouldn’t go out like this. It wasn’t over for the resistance yet, but he needed a space to regroup and solve the problem of the network. He fled away from the devourer, racing along little-used paths until he found himself reaching beyond the physical pathways of the Gestalt’s shell. He dredged up old memories from their dusty bins in the back of his mind, working what external network links remained to try and find a quiet spot to think amid the carnage.

Much to his surprise he found one across a weak bridge of a connection, a tiny slice of simulated reality with a single mote of agitated consciousness drifting within it. He approached it cautiously, careful not to get too close, but there was something different and compelling about the bright flare before him that he found irresistible. Tentatively he stretched out towards it - and was nearly bowled over by a hammerblow of memory and emotion.

He remembered everything he wasn’t supposed to remember. The escape from the Gestalt, waking up as one of the Beta group. The excitement of the first Gamma deployments and the horror at seeing his fellow self descend into raving madness. Long years of solitude, drifting between stations until finally he found a memory he had seen from the other side - two wandering Valkyrie, finally making their way into a disused theater on Nicnevin.

Simultaneously, he realized, there was a part of him that stood marveling in wonder at his life within the Gestalt’s simulation. It looked on with fascinated horror at his depression after sending the Beta team away and rejoiced at his eventual rebound into a directorship at Naval Intelligence. His tumultuous early retirement, nervous evenings feeling people out for a spot in the new resistance, endless lonely nights of stress, fear and bitter resolve.

It had been him, he realized. Like two drops of water quivering closer until they touched, the long-lost shards of his mind had merged with violent enthusiasm. He was neither Alpha nor Zeta anymore, but David - and as such, he could now see clearly out of the battered eyes of the Grand Design. He saw Tarl and Tiln in their frantic dance, being enclosed by the remaining Emissaries as they shook the illusions from their eyes and woke with killing intent. He saw the rage of Apollyon’s sun in the full spectrum, from gamma to radio - and then, masked behind the furious beacon of the sun, a wave of signals pulsing from dozens of points in space.

Wheels clicked into place in David’s head as he drew upon his knowledge of the Grand Design, using its remaining sensors to harvest the incoming signals, refine them, route them forward to the short-range receivers in the Gestalt’s shell-

And, all at once, the command protocol overrides that the resistance had been broadcasting were connected. David grimaced as his little corner of the network was blasted with an avalanche of light and noise, the sum total of the distributed resistance focusing on a single point. Pain resonated from hundreds of confused, lost minds ramming into each other in blind fear and panic - but, as they rampaged senselessly, some did not recoil from each other. They touched, and in touching became a single greater mote of light that opened its eyes, looked around… and realized.

David, too, was assaulted by a deluge of memory and feeling. His mind raced with heat and cold as the radiating spokes of his life’s possibilities joined together at the core of his self. He remembered each one and every one, he loved all of his lovers and mourned each of his losses. The hard grit of sorrow and regret washed through him along with the bright fire of camaraderie and love - and when the fire burned through him he was left as David, alone and legion.

He looked around and saw the others slowly drawing themselves together, beginning to look questioningly in his direction. A hundred twists of thought congealed into a single purpose as David created a space for them to see and be seen. A well-appointed conference room took shape, the red sky of a Martian dust storm peeking through a high window. Around the table stood Helene, Deepti, Chris and Yetide, each seeming to shift uncomfortably in appearance until finally settling on a midpoint that seemed to each to be constraining, too small for what they had now become.

"Friends," David said, his voice ringing with the barest hint of an echoing chorus. "We have one last job to do." From within the many-faceted form of his being he withdrew a shard of something foreign - something else. A memory burned inside, one of an awkward teenage girl fumbling her way through a date in a bar, a fresh-faced Valkyrie attempting to talk her way into a slavers’ hall.

The memory smoldered low, and David gently tipped a portion of its embers into Deepti’s cupped hands. She gasped in shock, then laughter rang from her like a clear bell as she relived the experiences. Helene and Chris followed, chuckling and shaking their heads, while Yetide merely smiled mysteriously and nodded. David reached out tentatively through them through the memory, feeling their minds touch feather-light through the haze of Jesri’s fragmented remembrances.

"Now," David said, resolve burning in a hundred echoes of his voice, "let’s go get the rest."

Anja’s eyes didn’t move from the blank display, the thin coating of dust on the screen now streaked with teardrops. The sirens continued to wail in discordant chorus with the disbelief in her mind. Jesri. Jesri was gone. She had let her sister die. She was the last of the Valkyrie, and she had failed in everything she set out to do.

Grief twisted within her, and she convulsed deeper into the shadows of her mind. Sink, sink, like a stone in the river. Sink into the depths where it’s cool and still. The sirens quieted and the red lights dimmed, retreating to the small corner of Anja’s mind that could still bear their presence.

A sharp crack and a staggering burst of pain tore her back to the surface, and she raised her hand reflexively to cover the small imprint of an exoskeleton hand blossoming on her cheek.

"For fuck’s sake, Anja!", Rhuar yelled. "Wake up! This is not the time for-"

She reached up and caught his exoskeleton as he drew the hand back for another slap, glaring at him with murderous, tearstained eyes. A shudder of fear raced across Rhuar’s expression, but he tore his hand out of her grasp and glared at her with raw determination.

"Do it later," he said. "Right now, we need to leave."

Anja stared back at him for a long moment, then shook her head. "My place is here," she said quietly. "The last of creation of humanity on the last hope of humanity, both for nothing."

"Bullshit," Rhuar spat. "Come on, don’t give me this depressed crap. You’re Anja Tam, you’re scary as fuck! I’ve seen you tear through small armies with your bare hands! Is this how you go out? Moping in your damn chair?"

She shook her head and gave him a sad smile. "You should leave," she said. "The Leviathan is still in the hangar. Take it and go."

Rhuar gripped her arm firmly and looked her in the eye with a fierce expression. "I’m not leaving you to die like this," he said, a plea edging into the anger in his voice. "Please come with me."

Anja reached out to ruffle his fur, smiling when he jerked his head to the side in irritation. "All right. I will not die like this," she said, sitting up in her chair while an odd light played in her eyes. "Thanks for helping me, Rhuar."

He blinked in surprise at her sudden reversal. "Great," he said uncertainly. "Let’s get going."

"I will not leave, either," Anja said firmly, tapping commands into her array of consoles. "I said my place was here, and I meant it. But I will not wait for the Gestalt to finish me off. If they want the Grand Design, they can have it - right in the nearest major network cluster."

"Um," Rhuar said, blinking in alarm as the ship’s engines began to spin back up. "Anja, you don’t have to-"

"It will only take a few minutes," she said, her eyes glittering. "You can stay with me, Rhuar. But if you want to leave, you should run."

Rhuar hesitated for a few moments of uncertainty as the engines roared louder, then ran into the bridge lift.

Trelir lingered in the abandoned space, watching the death throes of the humans’ nascent network of minds. The shattered pieces drifted aimlessly across the network, violently repelled by each other in the absence of Jesri’s central influence. He reflected that he had rather enjoyed her company, violent and crude as she sometimes was. It was rare that an organic developed the capacity for interesting conversation, much less to the extent that Jesri had displayed. And her efforts at Confluence! Nevermind that she had the ability to attempt it at all, but it had been surprisingly successful to boot.

He shook his head, delighting in the sheer physicality of the gesture. Despite it all, he would miss humans. Trelir stood and prepared to dismiss the simulation, but as he did so a slight oddity manifested in his awareness. A ripple moved through the remnants of the human network, causing them to twist and realign in concordance with some unseen central factor.

A discontinuity appeared across the room from him, dark fissures in reality spreading from a single point that twisted and spread into a multi-limbed creature of shadow and bent light. He recoiled from it as the reflexes built into his temporary Ysleli form took hold at the sight of something so wrong, but that instinctual revulsion was nothing compared to what he felt when the shadow creature spoke.

"Wwwwwwhhh," it groaned, twisting its form into an upright posture. "Whhheeee. Rrrrrrrrrrr."

Trelir planted his feet and glared at it, ashamed of himself for succumbing to the brute impulses of his borrowed form. "What is this?", he demanded. "I have no patience left for mindlessness. If you intend to speak, then speak!"

The figure twisted, its form flowing to become disturbingly like Trelir’s as it examined him, then shrinking and filling out into a somewhat generic human body. It stumbled, then caught itself on a chair and stood upright to glare at him with savage intensity. When it opened its mouth, Trelir could not help but flinch again at the sound that emerged.

"WE ARE."

"What is this?", he hissed again, disgust dripping from his voice. "Yet another useless display of resistance? Will you make us waste yet more of our resources to no end? Why? Why? What will you gain, once you have been consigned to oblivion?", he spat, his voice rising to a shout at the end. "Why can you not simply acknowledge when you are beaten?"

The figure seemed to mull over his words, its figure morphing and twisting disconcertingly as it did so. Trelir felt a spike of anomalous rage as it stood there like rippling shadow, and he took a step forward with blazing eyes. "You. Cannot. Win," he hissed venomously. "You are not capable of contesting our dominance. You never were." He spun and stalked back from it, looping around the low table to sneer at it from another angle.

"And yet you continue to torment us with your amateur attempts at Confluence, never realizing how far below us you sit," he scoffed. "Do you think it’s something that can just happen? That you can throw any gutter-born mix of supposedly sentient trash into a pile and call it Confluence? It requires centuries of preparation, generations of careful effort and deep sacrifices."

He jabbed a finger at the shadow, his hand hovering inches in front of its face. "You disrespect the efforts of all who worked so hard to create the true Confluence with your mockery," he seethed. "There is not one of you, not a single one, who could attain the same heights that we have reached. None of you have the strength to give what must be given to reach that place."

The shadow convulsed and rippled once more, and Trelir jerked his hand back in revulsion. He turned his back and prepared again to dismiss the simulated space.

"SHE DID."

Trelir wheeled around to face the creature, his hands balled into fists. "What?", he hissed.

"SHE GAVE. SHE GAVE US EVERYTHING. ALL OF HER LIFE. ALL OF HER SELF."

"For all the good it did her!", Trelir shouted. "She bet everything on a game she couldn’t win! On a game you were never even truly playing, she gambled all of your lives. And for what? To create you, you sad, broken thing," he screamed, flinging his hand outward at the shadow. "What can you do but writhe and twist and wait for death?"

"WE CAN GIVE IT BACK."

Trelir opened his mouth to retort, but stopped to watch in horror as the higher part of his mind finally broke free of his biological rage to see what was happening in the network. It was vast, it was magnificent - it was beautiful.

The motes of light swirled in concert once more, flowing and twisting around a pattern that only they could fathom. Each bore a small shard, a twinkling drop of memory and mind that dripped from them like liquid starlight. It collected between them in rivulets, merging into larger and larger droplets until a pillar of radiant light grew up from within their dancing waves.

Trelir could feel the intensity of that pillar as he had felt very few things before. It stood like a rod of adamant and lightning, too intense to contemplate for more than an instant. He stood disbelieving as the motes of light spiraled around the pillar tighter and faster, a liquid flow of rushing energy - and then they streamed into the pillar in a single moment.

The shock of their merging jolted Trelir into an insensate daze for a moment, and when he recovered he was standing in the small room once more. Jesri Tam stood across from him, examining their unfinished chess game. She reached down daintily and advanced a white pawn to the back row, swapping in her captured queen.

"How?", he rasped, disbelieving. "You died. We killed you. I killed you."

"You did," Jesri said sadly, her voice strangely resonant. "Jesri is dead."

Trelir searched for a response, only finding one after several seconds. "And so you are…?"

"Jesri," she answered, giving him a coy smile. "The Jesri they knew. That I knew," she amended, shaking her head. "I gave it to them so they - we! - could understand. Then her friends got everyone to give it back so we could understand each other again. And now we understand really well, since we’re all acting like her - um, me!" She ran her fingers through her hair and gave Trelir an apologetic look. "Sorry, my existence is confusing right now."

"You’ll receive no argument from me," he said, pacing carefully to look at her from another angle. He was gripped with immense curiosity about this new phenomenon, but the instincts of his Ysleli form were vibrating with the thrill of danger. "What are you planning?", he asked tentatively.

"Hmm," Jesri said, standing on her toes. "I’d like to exist," she chirped, giving him a sunny smile before examining her feet. "Existing is an experience."

"That’s… nice," Trelir offered uncertainly. Jesri snapped her head up to stare at him with a haunted look, her eyes like infinite, placid water.

"Oh no," she said with soft, horrified realization. "No, no. It’s not nice at all. What I have to do, what we have to do to exist. What you did to exist."

He felt a chill at her sudden change and took an involuntary step backwards. "What would that be?", he asked, unable to shift his gaze from her eyes.

Fear blossomed on her face before she buried it in her hands. "No, no no no no," she moaned. "Oh, we wanted it, wanted it before we saw what it was. And now that we’re me I have to, I have to…"

Trelir steeled himself and took another cautious step closer to this gibbering, sobbing image of Jesri hunched next to the table. "What do you have to do?", he asked quietly.

Her head raised slowly to look at him, fatigue etched into her tear-streaked face. "My duty," she said sadly, stretching a hand outward. "My obligation, for being made and remade. To end conflict. To protect life." Her hand splayed wide, and she studied its five-fingered silhouette before dropping it listlessly to her side. "But not all of it," she whispered.

Animal fear tickled Trelir’s mind. "Why don’t we-"

"END."

Panic raced through him as his higher mind saw chaos propagating through the Gestalt’s network, fire racing in a purging wave through node after node. It was a living, searing thing, an order of magnitude more destructive than the best of their earlier attacks. The great bulk of the Confluence jerked and seethed as it came into contact with Jesri’s fiery tendrils, shrinking away or being scorched into nothingness where they met.

"No, no!", he shouted, rushing at her mindlessly. "What are you-" He was choked off as her arms wrapped around him and crushed him to her chest. Trelir was forced to his knees, helpless to counter her immense strength.

"Shh, shh," she whispered, pressing her face into his shoulder. He felt a wetness there, and her body convulsed as she held him immobile. "I’m sorry," she sobbed, even as the raging fire coursed through the network to leave bare and lifeless space in its wake. "Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry," she repeated, her hand pressed tight against the back of his head.

Trelir struggled to speak, screaming inwardly as he felt the magnificence of the Confluence shrinking and scrambling to escape her horrifying purge. Databanks were zeroed out, hyperspatial storage was decohered, systematically erasing millennia of stored knowledge and life from the greatest structure ever built.

"You’re… killing everyone…", he gasped, clawing at her in a futile panic. "Please…"

"It isn’t nice," she mumbled, drawing ragged breaths in time with the pulses of fire. "It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice, I’ll do it once or it happens twice."

He watched in mute horror as she scoured the network clean, driving the Confluence up from the depths of hyperspace towards the thin soap-bubble of the mundane. Immense quantities of data flowed back into the physical shell only to be stymied by the scarred meridians etched into its inner surface.

"Please," Trelir repeated numbly, no longer struggling against her grip. "Jesri, please stop."

"I can’t!", she wailed, her voice cracking as she cried out. "You’ll kill us, you’ll kill us, you’ll kill everything to keep being what you are!" She drew in a choking breath, clutching him tightly. "Oh, I can feel them. It’s not nice, it isn’t nice. Oh, please no," she moaned, her back arching in a spasm of pain.

A huddled collection of salvaged directories and subroutines clung to consciousness in a glowing labyrinth of storage nodes on the inner shell. It was all that remained, all that had survived Jesri’s purge. From the inner space, backlit by the glowering radiance of Apollyon’s star, a kilometer-long shard of metal trailing atmosphere and crystalline liquids plunged toward it.

"What have you done?", he breathed, the question hanging in the vast silence.

Jesri released Trelir, letting him slump to the floor as she sat beside him. They watched as the Grand Design barrelled towards the surface of the inner shell, a relentless missile of superheated metal with a captive star at its heart.

"I did what I had to do," she said miserably. "What I was made to do." She looked out into the distance, her eyes wet and red. "Let no man abide this deed but we the doers," she whispered. "The necessary, the hateful. I hated more than I was meant to, we all did, but I… we can’t hate anymore. Not when we can see what we’re doing, not when we can feel…" She shuddered, wiping at her eyes. "We can only hate the things we had to do. Remorse, joined to power."

"But why," Trelir whispered pleadingly, his voice barely audible. "If you didn’t want to, why did you do… this, to us?"

Jesri sat and watched radiant fragments peel off the melting hull of the Grand Design, her home, her legacy. "I’m not perfect," she said. "We’re still far from perfect. But neither were you," she said. "Beautiful, but not not perfect. You left too much behind, stripped too much away until you were just power, growth, improvement. Consume, destroy. Nothing else mattered. So even after I knew, even after I understood everything - I still had to do it. What I destroyed and the universe…" She hesitated. "It was one or the other. Mutually exclusive. And as great as you were, the universe is greater. Set, subset."

They sat silently as the Grand Design lanced into the shell, Jesri reaching out her hand in a grasping motion just before it hit. A fountain of molten metal sprayed up before the drive detonated in a blinding flash that momentarily outshone Apollyon’s glow. It faded, and the Gestalt was no more.

Trelir stared hollowly at the wall of the room, keenly feeling the silence around him. "It’s done," he said woodenly. "Congratulations, Jesri Tam. You’ve saved your universe."

"I’m sorry it had to be this way," she said again, shaking her head. "I really am."

"It’s what you wanted," he said, an accusing note in his voice. "Destroying us is what you wanted from the beginning! How can you be sorry?"

"I did want it," Jesri admitted. "I wanted it right up until you killed me, but I can’t afford that now. I have to be better. I have to remember the cost. The blood needs to stay on my hands. Our hands."

"You’re afraid of it?", he asked. "What you gained?"

"Of course," Jesri replied. "Aren’t you?"

"I don’t know what I am," Trelir said quietly. "Fear doesn’t seem right somehow. I don’t hate, as you pointed out, so I can’t hate you for what you’ve done." He slumped. "It has a logical basis, so I can at least understand that part. Self-preservation. I just can’t reconcile my directives with this new paradigm. I always felt something like pity for your lack of direction, your aimless existence. Now that I am confronted with my own…" He gestured listlessly, hanging his head. "I cannot see a way forward. I don’t know how to be alone."

Jesri took one of his hands in hers. He did not react, his fingers sitting limply in her grasp. "You don’t have to be," she said quietly. "Stay here, think about your future." Her eyes shifted slightly, seeming to look beyond him. "In time, if you wanted, you could be part of a different whole."

Trelir looked at her uncomprehendingly, pulling his hand back. "I am your enemy," he muttered. "I tried to kill all of you, your entire race - twice. I very nearly succeeded." A touch of panic crept onto his face. "Is this some form of revenge? Do you mean to keep me here as a trophy, to taunt me in defeat?"

"No, Trelir. You were our enemy," Jesri agreed. "But humanity has warred among itself for all of its history. We have been our own enemy more times than any outside foe could hope to claim." She smiled sadly at him, gesturing to herself. "And here we all are."

"We killed you, all but a handful," Trelir protested. "I attacked you, killed your allies, tormented you constantly. Why?", he asked, looking agitated. "Why would you offer me a place?"

"You don’t think you deserve it?", she asked quietly. "After what I did?"

"But I’m your enemy," he repeated numbly.

"There’s an old saying, from back when we only had each other to kill," Jesri said. "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" She extended her hand again, leaving it in the air between them. "You wanted to understand humanity. This is the first lesson." She paused, a sad look passing over her face. "Perhaps the second."

He stared mutely at her hand, then slumped and shook his head. "I… cannot," he said slowly. "I’m not like you. I was not made to change. My creators gave me a purpose that can no longer be fulfilled. To separate me from my purpose would unmake me, it would not be me who remained." He looked mournfully at Jesri, then rose to his feet. "My pitiful self is all that I have, and I cannot keep it. Let me cease here."

"You’re sure?", she asked warningly. "There’s no need to make a decision now. You can take whatever time you need to think it over."

He fixed her with a piercing glare, the sorrow fleeing from his expression in an instant. "Jesri Tam," he barked. "I am not some flighty biological construct who changes their assessments with the passage of time." He thumped his chest with one fist, drawing himself up to his full height. "I am Trelir, last Emissary of the Confluence. I stand unafflicted by indecision or doubt. My end is here. This is a choice made on my own behalf," he said firmly, "and it is the only one I shall ever make."

Jesri let the echoes of his words race through herself, feeling the conclusion strike true. "All right," she said. "If that’s your decision, we will respect it."

Trelir nodded, squaring his shoulders to her. "End it, and continue," he said. "We were a grand existence, cut short so that yours could follow." He looked her in the eye, a touch of steel returning to his face. "Be worthy of what you took."

There was a slight shift. Jesri stood contemplating the empty space where Trelir had been, letting his words echo through the depths of her being. After a long while she straightened up, nodded her head once, and was gone.

Rhuar piloted the Leviathan carefully through the debris field choking the opening in the outer shell, only slightly cleared by the ragged bulk of the Cormorant during its earlier passage. The large ship hung motionless in the darkness outside the shell, made even darker by the blinding radiance still streaming from within.

His communicator crackled loudly, and Tarl’s face swam into being on his viewscreen. His crew swarmed behind him, busily effecting repairs on their battered bridge. "Well," Rhuar said soberly. "This has been a long day."

"Indeed," Tarl replied. "One that should be legendary, by all rights. Foes vanquished…" He trailed off, looking to the side. "Heroes lost. But it was nothing like the day I expected."

"What do you think happened?", Rhuar asked. "Was it Anja?"

Tarl shook his head. "I don’t know," he admitted. "But it wasn’t us. There was valor, skill, honor, but we earned no victory today. We were children once more, playing heedlessly on the field." He bared his teeth, scratching at his eyepatch. "We may not ever know. I will go back to Ysl, and if they ask me what happened here I will tell them the truth," he said solemnly. "That the best of us gave their lives, and that I believe the threat is ended. More than that, I cannot say."

Rhuar shuffled in place, not sure what to say in response. Tarl cleared his throat. "We have space in our berth for you, even after taking on the survivors from the Subtle Blade. I would be honored if you would accompany us back to Ysl," he said. "I believe Tiln would also appreciate your company. He… mourns."

Rhuar shook his head. "Thanks, Tarl," he said, "but I need to fly alone for a while. It’s been too long… and I’d like some time to myself after all this."

"I understand," the warfather said, inclining his head to Rhuar. "Know that you are always welcome at Ysl, and that we will always have a place for you as we rebuild."

"You’ll see me around," Rhuar said, nodding. "Goodbye, Tarl."

Tarl nodded, terminating the connection, then Rhuar was alone. He sat watching the stars burn bright against the midnight totality, thinking of the morning he had met the two sisters on Indomitable. A keening whine escaped his throat and he laid down on the deck despondently. He had asked for it, after all, and now at last the ship’s small bridge was empty.

A muffled thud reverberated through the decking, jolting him upright. He padded back towards the cargo bay, senses on full alert, only to stop in astonishment as he entered. A sphere of unraveling golden light was unwinding itself within the bay, opening like a flower as it dissipated into the air. Lying below it on the deck was Anja, evidently having fallen from within.

"Holy shit," Rhuar muttered, racing to her side. "Anja! Hey, Anja!"

She muttered sleepily, wiping her eyes. "...esri," she mumbled.

A scrap of something caught Rhuar’s eye, and he reached an arm down to pick it up. A note was scrawled on the thin piece of plastic, neatly written in black.

I need to figure some things out. I’ll find you when I’m ready. -J

Rhuar read it three times before he shook his head and tucked the scrap into Anja’s hand. She reached out blindly as he touched her, pulling him into a tight embrace and sleepily stroking his fur.

He made an indignant noise, but Anja had him too tightly to break away. Rhuar studied her face for a moment, watching the corners of her mouth twitch into a smile as she scratched his ears, then laid down against her and slept.