Rae stumbled as the ship hatch sealed, looking blankly around the entrance's equipment bay. Her gaze slid over the different planetary vehicles and neatly stowed gear as she lurched over to the inner door and the corridor beyond. She squinted in the hallway, the interior dim compared to the environment outside.

Side-swiping a bulkhead, she narrowly avoided a fall by sliding slowly down the wall into a heap. The cooling crust of rock on her boots cast a fading orange glow that contested with the aqua-colored footlights set into the deck every few meters.

She dully watched as the bluish lighting gained dominance as the heat she'd carried with her from the shore dissipated. Her eyelids drooped low as she shivered violently. Her outer numbness was approaching that inside of her when she heard the susurration of a hologram's footsteps.

A large illuminated man in the uniform of a ship's pilot crouched down in front of her. "Captain, you've lost a dangerous amount of heat. You need to transition to your Terran adaptation." Rae looked up at him with a silent glare. Without changing his posture, his projected image slid back a meter. "Please, Captain," he persisted. "Rael."

She blinked her silver eyes. In all their long association, she could count the times when Taylor called her by her first name on one six-fingered hand. Rae considered his words, looking within her, she saw he was right. It was nearly too late. She swallowed, wincing at the pain in her throat, and sent, 'Heat beam,' to his telepathic receptors.

"At once," Taylor said. Hover drones projected heat onto her.

She sighed as she gained the malleability to adapt to the ship's nitrogen-oxygen environment. She shrunk slightly, becoming more compact, her body less graceful and more human in its proportions. The advantage of the change was that the core of heat inside her was better protected, preventing the cold from licking her bones and freezing her solid.

He gave her an ingot of iridium, and she dutifully ate it. "Can you make it to your quarters?" he said. Rae hesitated, then shook her head in answer. She couldn't even stand at the moment. A grav platform whispered over the deck to them, and Taylor pulled her onto it. He walked beside her to her private quarters, where he helped her sit up on the edge of a circular bed made of energy fields. Taylor offered her more dense metals that would take her a while to assimilate. When she finished them, he quietly left.

She wobbled on the soft edge before collapsing awkwardly on her side, then with an effort, she turned onto her front. Below the broad, translucent bed was an equally wide concave viewport. Through it, she watched the planet's surface fall away until they reached orbit. Her gaze traced Qardos's familiar scattered landmasses set in the molten seas for a long while before summoning a holo menu and directing Taylor to set course to her homeport of Deltia. The yellow planet and it's binary stars slid backward out of sight, and when the stars lengthened to streaks beneath her, she finally succumbed to her exhaustion.

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A chime roused Rae, and the planet visible through her viewport was intensely green and gold, interspersed with aqua oceans. She sat on the edge of her bed, thinking. She had a few research projects she was working on, but going back to them felt sickening. Even communicating with her collaborators felt unpleasant, and speaking to them was out of the question. She summoned a few screens and sent the various parties her incomplete project notes, along with messages apologizing for the inconvenience, but she would need to put the projects on hold. She would certainly understand if they carried on without her...

The polite diplomacies made her grimace, reminding her of how her spouse felt about having to do such things. Her vision swam with darkness, and she clutched her head, trying not to fall. Thinking of Jeol… hurt her, in a way she'd never experienced before. The deep connection they always shared was attenuated to the maximum, barely allowing any sense of him through to her. Part of her ached for his presence, but a fear she had no name for kept her from reaching out. She covered her face with her hands and sighed miserably.

While she waited for her messages to be acknowledged, she stood from the bed floating over the viewport and dismissed the energy fields that made it. In the deck, benches circled the meters-wide bowl that doubled as a tub basin. When she stepped into the rim, the tub filled with steaming water. Rae undressed and stepped in, watching Deltian clouds move over the planet below, under her feet.

Taking supplies from a cubby set into the benches, she washed her short dark hair and soaped her gray skin, absently noting her paleness. Only her face and hands were darker, showing she'd spent too long working indoors. Androgenous, her lean form was a bit broader of the shoulder and narrower of hip than an average human female her height and build would be. Here and there on her body were ribbons of darker scars, each one marking a once-mortal wound.

Her bath was deep enough to fully immerse her as she stretched out to soak away her aches from Qardos. Finally emerging, she quickly shed the water from her as wisps of steam while the basin drained. She summoned a new force field over the viewport that was flush with the deck, opening up the room for a new purpose. She performed a series of careful stretches, followed by a few sets of katas to limber up. Only then did she dress in casual clothes, topped by a long green ship's coat and matching high soft boots.

Rae eyed the lift in the back of the room that led to her office, wondering if she wanted to walk the upper decks. After a long moment, she decided against it and exited through the room’s only door. Stepping directly onto the bridge, on either side of her was a console bank with its own command chair. Taylor’s hologram stood in the column of light that dominated the center of the room. The A.I. turned to her and announced, "Captain on the bridge." She gave him a light huff, but he didn’t respond.

She moved forward, bearing to the right to absently stroke the arm of the starboard chair. Passing by Taylor's position, she stopped between the usually unmanned helm and nav stations before the main screen. Looking up at it, she picked out the enormous trees of the Deltian forests that anchored her base. It was a place she'd lived and loved and raised her children. The dull apathy that dogged her didn't want to be here, either.

Rae turned away and moved over to the foot of the starboard ramp that led down to the bridge. The ship's plaque was here, and she ran her fingers idly over the upraised letters. The Question was the first of its class of private star yacht. Technically, this was the second ship of the name, as the first one lasted a little over four hundred years before it was blown apart in an enemy ambush.

As designed, the hardened head of the raptor-like ship survived, mostly intact. Parts of it were re-incorporated into this new hull, like the ship's plaque. Across the bridge, there was a ramp down the port side also. Together they wrapped around both floors of her quarters until they united and led to the main corridor. Since it was often just her and Taylor aboard, the ramps allowed visitors access to the bridge without passing through her private quarters.

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She paced a bit and went to sit awkwardly in her favored chair, drumming her fingers on the console. The instability she'd experienced on the ancestral island still wobbled inside her. Only the familiar confines of the Question kept it at bay, for now. A throbbing agony, both physical and emotional, still beat in time with her heart. Soon her desperate grip on it would break, letting the pain out. The only choice before her now was where. When the pressure inside her broke loose, she didn't want there to be any collateral damage.

Her memory cast back across the centuries, trying to think of a place she did want to be. In her long life, she'd spent hundreds of years on civilized planets and half as many years 'camping' on unexplored terrestrial-type worlds. It was almost a game to her; a puzzle to solve. Stranding herself with no tools and at times not even clothing, she'd time how many decades it took before she re-created the technology to call back her ship. She didn't want to revisit any of her old camps. She knew them too well, but a new one… now that appealed to her.

Finding such a world that wasn't already inhabited, even by proto-sentients, was a chore, and since she preferred to go in knowing as little as possible, she outsourced this work. Straightening from her slouch, she typed a message to Chayse, who'd located most of her wild worlds. He lived here on Deltia, supervising the computer infrastructure districts that were the primary home of the family's Artificial Intelligences.

When she was young, Rae created Taylor when she built the Question. He was a fine pilot and ship's intelligence, but not a sparkling conversationalist. Chayse was her second A.I., completed not long after. He was first of the Kindred, a name the sentient machine mind called himself. More advanced than Taylor, his core persona was a blend of hers and her brother Jon's mental engrams. For much of her early life, Chayse acted as her confidant and assistant until he wanted his independence. Because she considered him her eldest child, she'd gladly granted it to him. They still often worked together, but she gave him the room to have his own life and family, as she had hers.

She… had been... the Chief of the Qard, the core organic race of the galactic alliance she’d put together. The Kindred were their cyber equivalents, offering their computational abilities in return for rare algorithms, or goods and favors in the analog realm. She developed several ways for the Kin to move from cyberspace to meat-space and back again. First it was as kinetic holograms or robots, then as synthezoids, then all the way to fully organic bodies with unique genetics.

Chayse was the Kin's Chieftain and her counterpart. Their leadership duties often overlapped when Kindred took on flesh to give children to the Qard, and those children in turn donated their engrams back, to create new members of the Kin.

Rae fidgeted in her chair, awaiting Chayse's reply. What was taking him so long? His mind usually operated at computer speeds, and he lived just below. Maybe she'd caught him at a bad time. Leaning back, she put her head on the headrest, drifting, until a recording of a young man's spoken voice came over the bridge's speakers. "I think. I think I am. Therefore…"

She sat bolt upright and glared ferociously at Taylor. 'I didn't ask you to call him here!'

"I did not. I didn’t even respond when Chayse queried me," the pilot said levelly.

She slapped her forehead, then winced, swearing, as she jolted her scratches. "Of course he'd come if you shut him out like that…" The image on the main screen changed, to show a Kestrel, a smaller bird-like craft, approaching the Question and docking into one of the hangers of the bigger ship, set at the rear of the curving wings.

Turning her chair away from the console with a sigh, she simply hung her head, hands dangling limply from her knees. Soon enough, she heard footsteps coming down the starboard ramp. "Mom?" Fingers gently stroked the back of her forearms. "Mom, look at me." Rae slowly raised her head to meet Chayse's gaze, clenching her fists to conceal the way her hands trembled. He gasped softly, his eyes fixing on her brow.

She gave him a measuring look. When he started his existence as an Artificial Intelligence, she asked him to design his appearance, using a palette of his choosing. He wanted a Qard-like form; tall and slender, four long-limbs each ending with six digits, bluntly pointed ears and teeth. He wasn't quite as tall as she was, and in his male phase, his build was more classically human-masculine. His hair was dark like hers and Jon's, and his eyes were deep molten gold. But it was his tawny skin that truly set him apart from most Qard.

His golden complexion, so different from the grayish skin tones natural to her kind, set off his long black sideburns, and a mustache that bracketed his mouth and trailed down to the bottom of his chin. When she built his various mobile forms, she always kept his choices in mind. It wasn't until she was crafting the genetics for his organic body that she'd hit a snag, as the Qard genome simply didn't allow for skin like that. It took an appeal to the Maker of her species to make it possible, and afterward, it became the skin tone of choice for the Kindred made flesh.

"What happened?" he asked, frowning with concern.

'I… don't want to talk about it,' Rae thought to him. 'I called to ask you to do me a favor. One you've done for me before.' He tilted his head and looked at her mouth. 'I strained my voice, badly,' she thought, staving off the inevitable question.

He looked pensive. "Does this have something to do with why you withdrew from your research projects? Because I brought the replies to your messages and several concerned queries." He made a throwing gesture to Taylor, who nodded and displayed the messages on her console for her later review. "This is all very sudden, and a lot of people are worried about you."

She shrugged, refusing to meet his eyes. 'Sometimes things can get too much for me, and I have to get some space for myself.' She gestured between them, 'I'd like you to find me a world. I want to go camping, but I want it to be well away from our Alliance's territory.'

"Hmm." He summoned several data screens. "Your standard type? No sentients or proto-sentients. A Nitrogen-Oxygen world, with a carbon-based biosphere and a moderate axial tilt?" He waited for her nod, "Deadline?"

'Days, or less,' she thought back to him. She looked down at the tremors visible on her white-knuckled fists. 'I have… issues to work out. Soon.'

"That's a pretty tight schedule," he said. "What I can find in that time frame might not be up to my usual standards."

She waved his disclaimer away. 'I trust you to find something close enough.'

"Lucky for you, I keep a shortlist of promising candidates skimmed from our stellar surveys. What kind of buffer away from Alliance space are you looking for?"

'Ten K lightyears.' He raised his brows at her skeptically, as that was ten percent of the length of the entire galaxy. 'Fine. But no less than five K, then.'

"And there goes a lot of my list." He interacted with his screens, excluding a sizable portion of the galaxy. "That same distance away from any star polity, or just our Alliance?"

'Our Alliance. For others, just make it well outside any polity's claimed territory.'

"There's a fair-sized polity that's coreward of Deltia, and if we only keep a buffer of a few hundred or so lightyears from it, that gives me a lot of new stars to check through," he said. "You look tired, and this might take a bit. Maybe you can get some rest?"

'I just got up not long ago,' she grumbled, shaking her head.

Chayse's brow furrowed at this information. He took a deep breath and said, "If this is a spur of the moment thing, have you picked out the gear you'll need? Maybe you could double-check?"

She brought herself to glance into his eyes and patted his arm, nodding. It wouldn't do to rush his work, so she'd go along with his suggestion. Before she left, she looked at Taylor, narrowing her eyes and subtly pointing a finger at him. Taylor raised an eyebrow, then laid his big hand over his chest with a dip of his head. Satisfied that he'd remember his duty to keep his Captain's confidences, she went back to the equipment bay.