While I drank my wine and smoked a few more cigarettes with Justin, I thought about his toast. About what my return to power would really mean. For him, his people, and everyone else living under BuyMort. Now that Molls was gone, I had no reason to seek a quiet life. My war was returning to me. My hatred for BuyMort, for morties, and for all the suffering that was caused because of them.

Back on board the Pykrete, Soshanna slowly healed from the shock of the cult’s attack. She made plans to get personal security in place and started taking the security needs of her affiliate far more seriously. To her credit, she didn’t break up with me over it. Instead, she leaned into our relationship even harder and even started love-bombing me. It mostly felt like stress relief, a healthy physical outlet.

I was happy for the additional affection, but it worried me about her mental state. Shoshanna had gone from a happy go lucky socialite with no responsibilities to a war-torn woman afraid for her own life and the lives of everyone in her affiliate.

Save the Cubes had become a target. A potent, still mostly hidden enemy was plotting and scheming against her, and I saw it in her face daily. She was stressed, and worried.

Once our mission failed to produce any sign of Cube on the first, most likely path on our map, we hurriedly switched to the second most likely. This involved an FTL jump that took us into a different section of the void between galaxies. There was no sign of tampering with our maps and they had been secured quite quickly after the first attack, so the crew felt safer once we were in the second search path.

Questions were repeatedly raised about how long we would stay and search. Each path on our flowering maps took at least three days to search at sub-light speeds. The Pykrete would coast along on the main path while the Navigator ranged and searched for Cube with its advanced sensors. Once the area was declared empty, both ships would move to another area to continue the search.

In theory, we would find Cube on one of the primary paths. But even that could take months, and the crew morale was lower than I had expected at this point in the expedition. Of course, an attack from stealth ships fielded by a violent cult would have that effect on most any crew.

I continued to go back and forth between my ship and Justin’s as I began planning out the early stages of the campaign with him. He put aside a sizable war chest to run advertisements with, in the range of ten trillion morties. It fluctuated based on the day, as did any fund of sufficient size, simply due to morties being worth more or less depending on the market.

Shoshanna did her best to stay focused and keep her spirits up, but the crew wore at her daily. Within a week of the attack, her hide-and-cry sessions had become nightly occurrences. I found myself comforting her, reassuring her, and letting her use me for her own emotional well-being. The love bombing continued, and she told me she loved me or couldn’t make it without me several times in the course of a few days.

I shared everything with her on the Pykrete. We slept together in her sleep netting, or I just held her while she slept. She insisted on eating with me, again in her cabin. As the days passed, Shoshanna grew more and more distant from the crew. She isolated herself from everyone on board aside from me, and I quickly became her emotional lifeline.

The combination of deep space and stress were starting to become a real problem for her.

I helped in what ways I could, using Molls’ old lessons to help Shoshanna maintain and improve her mental health. She began doing zero-g yoga three times a day and often stopped whatever she was in the middle of to do a quick deep-breathing session. As I watched the young woman I started thinking more and more about abandoning the search and taking her home.

When I broached the subject with her after our second path failed to produce Cube, she vehemently objected. Shoshanna told me that it was her expedition and she wouldn’t accept it ending in failure so quickly. Our scans of the third path on our map were not showing anything yet, but she told me she had a feeling about it.

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My own uneasy feelings grew as the search progressed. The crew was starting to mutter about going home and their hazard pay bonuses were starting to weigh on their minds more and more. Our supplies were dwindling faster than we had anticipated. The crew was stress-eating and eating out of boredom.

Our captain informed us that he had only three days of alcohol left, which gave us a definitive point for either resupply or a portal home for him. At our expense, of course. In his drunken state he often complained to the pilot and threatened to report us to Silken Sand’s affiliate management department.

Any hearing they convened would be the equivalent of a malpractice lawsuit, and with my involvement I suspected the department wouldn’t call balls and strikes in a fair manner. If anything, it would be the perfect thing to sink my upcoming campaign before it ever got off the ground.

I kept a particularly close eye on my security plants. They’d had their com access cut as well, which left them only BuyMort and MortMobile to report back to Axle. While it was a risk, I trusted Axle enough to figure he wouldn’t turn my location over to the cult outright. The guards kept their cover, only they and I knew about their mission.

After we arrived on our third search path, the rest of the map was starting to look impossibly massive to me. I sat and thought about each thin petal circling its core and held off despair. There were dozens of possible paths, and all we could do was slowly search each of them and wait.

Even with my advanced cognition the expedition was starting to get to me. I distracted myself by scheming with Justin Lee, spending time with Shoshanna, and spying on my security guards. They were clearly briefed that I had better senses than their average targets, but I could still hear them when they exchanged information.

I’d learned their routine, and hovered just above the supply room they had sound-proofed with thin, rolling mats they brought on board hidden in their personal items. The air vent allowed sound through, even while it was closed, and the ship would mark the room for maintenance if they blocked it even temporarily. They met for only two minutes, exchanged important information, and then split up again. They would also use the room to make their reports via MortMobile.

Each time they called the entity, I felt his presence touch my mind. He seemed to be just looking, for lack of a better term. Trying to see if this familiar presence was indeed someone of importance. I felt nothing about our deal, or even my history when he was skimming my mind. Just a faint sense of familiarity and curiosity.

The guards always kept their devices at low volume, but I could hear both ends of their conversation. Axle and his people were still underestimating my crystalline colonies, which gave me continued hope that they had remained a secret during my century-long absence.

Their reports rarely had anything I cared about stopping Axle from learning. They hadn’t heard who my friend on the ship defending our fleet was, but they had reported its presence and nature. No doubt Axle was focusing an investigation on Midnight while I floated in search of my old pet and friend.

Just as my impatience, stress, and boredom were peaking on the third day of our path, we found him. The Navigator called over, and I could hear the excitement in their crew’s voices as they described the sensor hit they had just recorded.

An electrical resonance ahead of us in space. That far out, with no celestial bodies within a thousand light years, there were very few things that sensor hit could be. The next, cleaner and more focused sensor sweep came back with a square shape to the resonance.

That was cause for immediate celebration on board both craft. Shoshanna sobbed in relief on the bridge as soon as the report came through.

We were exactly on course to encounter him, which also confirmed the accuracy of their mapping system. Shoshanna clung to me as the camera crew recorded, crying and laughing at the same time. She was ecstatic her expedition had found their first Cube, and I said nothing to ruin that moment for her.

But soon the crew was up on the bridge looking at the sensor reports and starting to worry about something I had known was coming.

“Now that we’ve found him,” one of the net-handlers said. “How sure are you that you can convince him we’re here to help? A cube that size could literally eat both of our ships.”

“Cube won’t do that,” I told them. “If I have to, I can handle him in a fight, knock him away from the ships.”

The grumbling and occasional shouted question continued for a time, until I finally told them to go rest and prepare. We had work to do, finally, and most of them became eager to get started once I reminded them of that fact.

Once the excitement of the discovery had faded, the documentary host left the bridge. The cameraman stayed in case anything else exciting happened, and I convinced Shoshanna to stop obsessing over the sensor reports.