#23 (Ossory) [https://i.imgur.com/X5FDUp2.png]

Hold 78 was leaking. Did you forget about it? That’s what they wanted. They wanted it forgotten, lost, drifting through space out to the back end of beyond: to the Cloud, where information goes to die.

The contents of Hold 78 were secret. Or perhaps, secrets. Terrible, blinding, searing secrets. Secrets that destroy lives and minds and souls. Secrets making their last awful journey to their final resting place.

Knowledge cannot be forbidden, only contained. Unless you know, you cannot forbid. But of course you can minimise the knowing: containerise it and shrink it. Wrap it into a tiny conspiracy of secrecy, then roll it up and hide it, quiet and far away. Hold 78 was the natural extension of that policy: the last, final copy of that which must not be known but cannot be destroyed.

And it had been in there too long. It’s hard to keep secrets. Slowly, ideas make their way out. Quietly, gently, questing feelers of inkling had worked their way through the wall, through the floor – squeezing through microcracks in the nanocrete and winding through the inclusions in the welds, the ones the quality control engineers said weren’t there. Widening out into ribbony tendrils of suspicion, they stretched out into the neighbouring holds, into the duct spaces, into the access corridors; they clawed towards the master lock that bound all doorways and forbad all openings. Particles of knowledge bubbled out into free space and shot off down the gang-ways, tumbling and morphing in to sudden, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding certainties. They know! They know.

The master lock sealing Hold 78 had been chosen very carefully to afford an unbreakable seal. Of course, nothing was truly unbreakable. The Heavenly Sword of Est’Emper could have sliced right through it, for example, so this lock had been sourced from the ruins of an ancient city where it had been designed and built and sat on a tech-store shelf millennia ago, before the sword had first been forged, guaranteeing a fundamental causal resistance to cutting. A sure and certain barrier against any unauthorised entry. And of course any entry, any at all, was unauthorised as hell.

But all locks, really, are about knowledge. About memory. To open them you need this code or that password, this private key or that quantum phase vector. Even a physical key is itself a memory: a memory of forces and moments imprinted on unyielding metal for you to put under the plant pot by the door and then have to remember which one it was. With the simplest bolt, you must still remember to lock it. The passcode of this lock was of course the most secret of secrets. Information scoured and extinguished from record and mind. They’d even adjusted the most common random number generator implementations so those particular digits would never be produced in that particular order for the remainder of time. It was knowledge quite thoroughly forbidden.

Have you noticed why this was a bad idea?

As the last and ultimate information backup, the system of dumping secrets to the Cloud suffered from the same fundamental problem that all backup systems face: nobody cares until it’s too late.

The moment where the Cloud passed from “nobody cares” to “too late” was just then. Did you notice it? Exactly two minutes to Meitagenan Standard Midnight.

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Lextrazsahia “the Dread and Terrible” had been accused many times of being out of her mind. Usually, this was packaged as an insult: perhaps spat through gritted teeth moments before those teeth were turned into ionised vapour. Lextrazsahia however, took a wider view. She saw being out of her mind as an integral part of her job, her calling. Being out of her mind held many advantages for Lextrazsahia. One situation where it was particularly advantageous, for example, was when a very old friend has implanted a very new Bomb in the back of your brain. That could be a dreadful, and indeed terrible, problem if your brain was where you kept your thoughts. It was not, however, a problem for Lextrazsahia.

“You know,” said Lextrazsahia as she slowly unfolded from her chair, “you really must do something about the interior design of this ship. The aesthetic is… dreadful.” The pirate’s gaze slid grimly over the empty, grey-patterned walls of the WASTE bay: all hard angles, sharp lighting, and institutional access panels. “Just because one travels in a trash hauler doesn’t mean one has to like trash.”

Lextrazsahia held all but two of her claw arrays gently concealed in their carapace housings, trying to appear, if not friendly, at least not imminently lethal. No need to let Naomi know how much less effective her exploding head trick could be, not until Lextrazsahia was far away from here.

Naomi tapped one befingered hand idly on her knee. She watched uneasily as the gaudy ball of menace rose from her seat, visibly trying not to knock over the bay’s utilitarian furniture. No need to tell Lexie that the Bomb had also been programmed to explode anyway once her task was successfully completed. At least there would be one cleanly-tied loose end in all this mess.

The two old friends smiled at each-other.

Slowly, so slowly, a single inky black mote of secret knowledge slipped through a recessed light fitting and drifted down through the room between them. They know.

Both smiles froze into icy grimaces. She knows.

Lextrazsahia deployed all her claws and leapt forwards -- a vortex of rage and blades. Naomi threw out her hand, fingers splayed in the Ascenter warding sign, blue light webbing between them and bounding outward in a shield as she threw herself backwards out of her chair. Naomi brought her other hand across in a wide swipe, laserbeams extending from her fingers and slicing five red planes horizontally across the bay. Make that two red planes: three of Naomi’s fingers ended in ragged stumps, plasma channels sputtering and sparking as they pumped power to suddenly nowhere. Lextrazsahia grinned a wide, malevolent grin and advanced towards her.

Naomi balled her hand into a fist, and the firing circuits of the Nerve Bomb implanted in her old friend’s skull blinked active. Lextrazsahia’s head exploded in a plume of green fire, blanketing the ceiling in light, but the pirate being kept advancing, claws rending gashes along the floor. As the Nerve Blast ™ advanced down Lextrazsahia’s spine, the lethal failsafes she’d had built into her vertebrae over many long years of surgical insanity detonated one by one. The bay was bathed in purple, then red, then blue.

Naomi sliced a rent out of the ceiling and leapt upward, her enhanced muscles powering her up into an access-way on the deck above. Below her, the bay’s walls were blown outwards, nonocrete ripping and tearing like paper. Naomi stood, breathing hard. A series of tremors shook the ship as nearby plasma junctions blew out, followed by immense grinding thuds as the colossal emergency bulkheads slammed shut. The thuds grew increasingly distant as alarm signals traversed the longitudinal axis of the enormous ship.

Down the access-way, a floor panel blew upwards. A nimbus of purple flame illuminated the access-way and Lextrazsahia, or what was left of her, rose steadily up from the carnage below. Her feathers had all caught fire and burned through, leaving her body strangely diminished, like the skeleton of an owl. If an owl were composed entirely of blades and teeth and rage, that is (on Trihexalon Delta there are owls like that. Do not go there).

The Lextrazsahia-thing floated slowly, inexorably up the access-way. Naomi ignited the plasma torches on her seven remaining fingers, ready to turn the entire access-way into a hundred tons of ionised slag.

A doorway in the wall opened. A being dragged itself through. A being that was very, very definitely not a morning person. Its voice rang and thundered across the ship, the very walls singing in sympathetic reverberation.

“What on Meitagenous is all this racket?”