I was out the door, gun brought to bear more from muscle memory beaten into me from years of drills rather than anything my aching brain could manifest.

I'd marched out with determination, kicked down a couple doors and swept rooms with poise that would have made my old instructor proud when I suddenly stopped, feeling like an idiot. The ship was huge, like carried several thousand people out to sea for weeks huge. And I hadn't asked where the intruders had, well, intruded.

I considered my options and sheepishly spoke out loud to the walls, content in knowing that if he couldn't hear me, nobody would mock my stupidity.

To my relief, the bending of more metal conjured a sign pointing me towards the starboard section, a few floors below where I'd been mucking about.

Multiple assailants. They're carrying that device that halts my powers, so I can't track them very well. Yell if you need help.

I thanked the rusty sign, and it dropped right back to the floor. I then made my way with more haste, not bothering to clear rooms that seemed closed, or in many cases, sealed in when the structural abuse the ship had taken had jammed them up.

I scrounged what I could from the bodies along the way. Thermal goggles (because most of the place had lost power, running off emergency lighting), extra grenades and mags, and I even found an exoskeleton my size on someone who had undergone weight loss by means of dismemberment. A little bit of fiddling with the Chinese interface, and it managed to hook into my lace, which was gingerly posting in safe mode.

I found a porthole along the way, and was treated to a dizzying sight of us rushing above the clouds, endless sullen ocean below us, and the setting sun to the side. Something flashed in the clouds, an interceptor of some kind, still giving chase. A thump and obscured explosion suggested they weren't leery about shooting us down, but a massive metal panel hovered in place, and alongside a conglomeration of debris, blocked the hit with no damage to the ship.

It was a big one, you'd likely need a dedicated anti-ship missile to really put it out of action, and while the Chinese had those in spades, I doubted their guidance systems were quite built for tracking a flying cruise liner heading for orbit. Of course, they had presumably tried to nuke us once, and might do so again.

I crept along to the next floor down, and ran into the first batch of hostiles, albeit they were polite about it. I had a helmet on, and a Chinese exo, so they greeted me with queries my lace translated along the lines of "holy shit, you're alive?" and "do you need medical attention" instead of a burst of gunfire. I nodded at them, miming gratitude, and since I didn't expect my non-existent Chinese to hold up, gestured as if my speakers were busted. Given the condition of the exo and armor, they fell for it.

The two frogmen, all techno- amphibians with googly goggle eyes and menacing weapons, accepted my claim and waved me aside before stalking forth. Their mistake, because just as they went by, I unloaded a bullet into the furthest's head, and as the closer spun around in confusion, I kicked him in the knee, breaking it, and then stabbed him in the neck with a ceramic blade, leaving him making faintly accusatory gurgles as he slid aside onto the floor.

I wasn't a Marine or ever posted on the USS Virginia before the Secession, but I still swore by sic semper tyrannis when I could. Killing these authoritarian scum felt good.

I was patting them down for more gear when another frogman turned the corner, this one a little faster on the take or just less trusting about a man with no valid IFF looting his dead buddies. He shot me, the round hitting my back plate, but they'd sent the CMP with some of the good stuff and I wasn't hurt, instead managing to roll myself behind cover as I returned fire.

"Some help please!" I cried out as more rounds bit through the thin cabin wall, which shored itself up as more words embossed themselves in it, the bullet holes handy if inadequate punctuation marks.

Power blocker next room. They need to reach you.

Thanks for nothing bud.

Overly reliant on the Reality Anchor, one of the frogmen threw a frag in my direction. Unfortunately for him, while Hu Junya wasn't able to just crush him with the walls and ceilings, a metal ball thrown outside the range of their nullifiers was a convenient projectile to return to sender.

I chose a different tack, I'd been through this part of the ship once, and knew there was a section where the partition had collapsed, offering a decent sightline down what had been an access corridor with utilities tucked out of sight. There, I found a ready murderhole, and peeked through to spot a squad of PLA Marines readying up to meet me. The leader, in a bulky combat exo, wore a backpack that hummed and imbued the area with static charge. It was already heating up, and he looked mildly concerned about its proximity to his person, but seemed to be bearing it well, and for good reason. His portable Reality Anchor was putting in the hard yards, where parts of the ship threatened to collapse in on itself to deal with the interlopers, his device made the effect dissipate in a wide radius around him, providing some degree of safety. He turned away from me, yelling orders, and I lined up a shot, pulling the trigger to send a bullet into an exposed section of the Anchor. It was likely a prototype, rushed into service and not adequately shielded as required to make it PFC-proof, and my shot hit something vital. The results were gratifying, for me at least. The straining walls stilled for a second, and then they moved, crushing the officer and three of his men like ants in a trash-compactor. Another had a spear of metal lance through him, pinning him to the ceiling, while another vanished from sight as the floor below him gaped like an open maw. I threw another nade in for good measure.

I rushed out the instant after the blast, seeing one trooper down for the count, the other swearing and falling back while unloading suppressive fire. I pushed forward in hot pursuit, only stopping to unload my pistol in the face of the man who was struggling fitfully above. Chasing after the retreating survivor, I walked into an ambush.

It seemed the Chinese had been pushing forth by planting smaller Anchors along the way, wisely unwilling to venture where the coverage didn't extend. Thus, there was a team waiting in the rear, and they'd been alerted to my approach.

It was a wide open space, a relic from when the cruise liner catered to bored tourists voyaging to Hawaii and Fiji instead of refugees clinging to an existence exiled from their shores. There had been banks of hydroponics there, now dark but for fitful red light strips that only served to accentuate the gloom. Plants floated in soggy muck and shattered glass, a distant mockery of the real seaweed trailing from sides of the ship.

I'd opted to enter from a side door instead of just following the route the retreating soldier had taken, which is why I managed to get away with only a bullet to the flank rather than the hail of gunfire that saturated the naive approach. Cursing, I hit the floor, and got my bell rung by a round that just barely glanced off my helmet.

I threw two of the frags I'd acquired overhand, grateful that the tilt of the ship meant that my door was at a slight elevation as they slid down and detonated, only doing an subpar job of improving the interior decor.

A soldier in his own exo ran while his friends laid down more lead, bullrushing through the weakened divider that separated the next room from mine. He unloaded an automatic shotgun, the slugs chewing up furniture and a kid's terrarium, but just managing to miss me. In hindsight, the only reason I'd made it this far was that I'd been ensconced deeper within the vessel when the EMP hit, and these guys, likely clinging to the exterior or lurking nearby in their subs, had taken the worst of it. He chattered in Chinese, missing my prone form where I'd wedged myself when he was turning the place upside down, and I took the opportunity to return the favor, spraying him down.

This did less than I could hope for, because at some point in the ongoing firefight, I'd ended up switching to a magazine of plastic caseless ammunition someone had hopefully rationed for Hu Junya. While the modern world owes a great deal to the wonders of the material, it's less than ideal for bullets meant to punch through body armor.

So I rushed him back. Fuck you, I have an exo too. The impact carried both of us over the edge, and we tumbled the half a dozen feet below to slam into a miraculously intact aquaponics container. It wasn't intact for very long, and the fish, now mostly sushi, scattered to the winds as we crashed through and bounced off the floor. I bit through my tongue, and splashed my visor with blood as I straddled the bastard. He struggled with the whine of overloaded servos, kicking me hard in the gut, the sharpened toes of his exo gouging out ceramic, metal, and a tiny bit of my guts. For my part, I relied on a knee pinned on one of his arms to get leverage, and brought my ceramic blade down at his neck and clavicle, trying to hack through the joint.

Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a proper HEMA bout, but just like real medieval combat, it often devolves into two men in tin cans grappling around on the ground, because neither of them have weapons that can penetrate the armor of the other. I didn't have time to beat him into submission, and the joint proved surprisingly sturdy, so I found a grenade pouch just behind his back and pulled the pin.

He bucked like a wild mustang, desperate to dislodge me, but I held on for dear life, refusing to let him roll over. Then, with a muffled thump, he jerked up with the force of the explosion before collapsing again.

There I was, victorious but for my intestines slithering in my lacerated gut, surrounded by an unknown number of Chinese specops who were undoubtedly moving up to finish the job. And then the ship, which had been sailing smoothly upwards for so long that I'd forgotten it was supposed to cling to the waves, dived.

We had been chased by a squadron of jets as soon as we'd made the stratosphere, a mixture of sleek black stealth J-36Xs, and older J-20s holding onto their increasingly redundant human pilots. They'd been launching missiles, mostly intercepted by the small asteroid belt of crap Hu Junya had kept floating around the ship, and most that made it through only gored the massive craft, unable to break it apart when its structure was maintained largely by metahuman power.

Then they got bored, and fired another nuke at us.

A quarter of the aft of the ship turned into hot slag from thermal exposure alone, and the blast disrupted Hu Junya's ability to control the craft, or perhaps he'd decided to dive as an evasive maneuver when the destroyed shield meant that a dozen angry missiles were flying right for us.

I found myself floating up, with the dead soldier's legs wrapped around me, and not just floating, but headed for the roof with considerable speed. Screams and yells indicated that the others had been just as taken aback as I had, and I twisted, presenting the dead man I was wearing like a fanny pack in the direction where several troopers floated in disarray, flapping about like fish as they lost their footing. A real fish flopped off my visor, before I tore my enemy's shotgun from his death grip and unloaded in their general direction.

I was hit, tumbling this way and that, propelled by my own recoil as well as the bullets they returned to sender, but by this point, the UN had splurged on some degree of zero-g combat training for me in preparation for misadventures abroad. I let the corpse soak up most of their ammo, and didn't have time to process anything that punched through my armor.

They hit something critical in the exo that was holding onto me, and it unlocked its joints and sent the corpse spiralling with its arms extended like a starfish. I kicked off it, bounced off another wall, and collided midair with another trooper, this one without an exo. A kick to the head, despite the lack of leverage still broke his neck, and I brushed my hand over his own pack of explosives, relying on my exo's systems to activate them. He sailed into the midst of the others, and exploded.

This is a good time to point out that the ship had taken on a great deal of water throughout this whole ordeal, with the lower decks having outright flooded. I'd timed it right, when the explosive-piñata blew up on the ground, it weakened the damaged deck, and the tons of seawater sloshing about below noticed.

Then, gravity was back, the ship recovering from free fall and all of us hitting the floor, only to bounce up and down on our asses as Hu Junya tried his best to get his pilot's license revoked. I realized that this room had been part of some kind of waterpark in the good old days, with its central feature being a massive slide running down the middle. Not that I'd recommend it as fit for purpose these days. Too much broken glass and live grenades around, the risk of tetanus was unacceptable.

Now, instead of erratic bobbing, Hu Junya decided that the sky was for suckers and accelerated the craft down towards the ground. This meant that my position at the base of the slide now turned into its new top. Then, with tearing metal, the repeated impact of the water below made the floor largely give up the ghost, with a torrent of water breaking through the weakened barrier and then flooding the room. The men trying to gank me were swept off their feet, and even my exo, for all the strength it gave me, only held for a minute before I was knocked flying.

I scrambled for any foothold as I slid up the ramp, finding no purchase on the surface slick with salt water. I hurtled up, but ended up leaning into it, sliding on my bruised ass to where a confused soldier hung on to the handrails for dear life before I smashed into him feet first with about 50 extra kilos of weight from the exo. I grabbed onto the now vacant rails, locking the exo's joints in place, and thus managed to keep myself relatively grounded as the contents of the large space turned itself into the world's largest salt shaker. When it stopped, I detached and landed with a grunt of agony in the midst of utter carnage.

The pain was overwhelming, I opened up my visor and hurled an avalanche of vomit, fifty-fifty seafood appetizers and vodka, onto the floor which had resumed being the floor. I was a mess, with my bruises having bruises, and my efforts to move my left arm without the assistance of exos only broadcasting pins and needles, and then the sharp complaints of tendons torn in two. My gut, now exposed, was trailing an intestinal loop that squirmed in my shaking good arm before I crammed it back in and sealed the wound with staples. You don't need anesthesia when you're at Maximum Pain. I couldn't risk it, couldn't handle blacking out before I knew all my foes were dead, instead of only wishing they were like I was.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I limped over to the remains of the other PLA Marines, and discharged my pistols into their heads until they stopped jerking about.

I staggered over to a sturdy pillar, grabbed onto it with the exo arm that had my dangling useless meat in it, and locked onto it. Then, I fished out a bunch of combat stims and pain meds, used my residual knowledge of medicine, as applicable as it was to the insane shit the Chinese doped with, and then jabbed all of them into any part of me that wasn't already host to shards of broken glass.

I dreamt I was floating, nodding off for who knows how long. When I came to, against my desperate desire to fall back into the warm embrace of blood loss and death, I found that I was indeed back in zero gravity.

I absentmindedly found another autoinjector and slammed it into my shoulder, at this point I was more meds than meat. I noticed a beeping icon on the exo's HUD, indicating it had exhausted its emergency supply of blood and hemoglobin replacement nanites. Well, I suppose I had the CCP (R) to thank for not bleeding to death.

I limped through the halls like a revenant, being borne more by the exo than the torn shreds of my skeletal muscles. I ignored my lace's urgent warnings to seek medical attention, because I was the medical attention, and wandered the halls as signs conjured by Hu Junya suggested.

He wanted me to smash the last remaining Reality Anchor, the sturdy thing still warbling whatever let it repel metahuman powers even after its handlers had been tumble dried and then splattered on the walls. I examined it carefully, and found a convenient off switch that I flicked. The walls groaned and flexed, his powers finding free reign, and I collapsed to the ground, swore at him when he signed for me to come find him, and waited till the man came to fetch me.

I came to again in a coffin, but before I could raise hell, I noticed Junya walking alongside me. He was back in human form, at least visibly flesh and blood, and when he noticed my awakening, he willed, and the cushion of liquid metal that wrapped me like a cocoon slithered aside, letting me turn my aching neck.

I swore at him for a minute again, I'd thought of some good ones before exhausting myself and just lying back to relax. We were presumably in some form of orbit, because leaving aside him using his powers, we were in microgravity. My torn muscles were suitably grateful for the reprieve, I felt like a marionette with its strings cut.

"I did what I could for you, following the instructions from your lace. Blood, something to deal with the overdose of painkillers. But I don't think you're going to walk without assistance for a while." He explained, floating alongside me as we passed through a hallway, a pile of bodies pinned to the wall in a wrapping of wires so they wouldn't float in the way.

"Thanks. Dude, I was on vacation." I kvetched at him. He smiled ruefully, taking me to an on board infirmary. It was utterly trashed, so we settled for him acquiring more meds on my instructions, and then we went to the captain's cabin, which was more of a place to oversee the ship's systems since the autopilot handled most of the work.

"I'm going to try something, let's see if this helps eh?" He told me.

Metal flowed over me, following the contours of my limbs and filling the gaps in the exo. I flexed my arm experimentally, and it moved with the assistance of the system, while being enmeshed in the metal and protected from the environs. I looked in a mirror, and found I had acquired a coating of ferrofluid, or something decidedly non-newtonian that formed a sort of suit of armor. It looked sick, which distracted from the barely suppressed pain.

"I'm sorry I couldn't help you more. They were on my ass until I broke out of the atmosphere, at least a dozen jets, and swarms of missiles. I had to keep the ship together, and do my best to take care of the attackers. But since you took out the devices, I've killed the remainder" He offered me a helmet that clearly belonged to a fighter pilot, and I didn't ask what happened to the owner.

"How's the ship doing?" I asked instead.

He shook his head. "There's only so much I can do. After what that woman did to me, I'm so much stronger, and with more fine control. But there's a million leaks, and we're losing oxygen. I don't expect you're willing to go out and patch some spots are you?"

I shook my head vehemently.

"It's fine. Worst case, we have enough oxygen for a while, I'll use some of the parts of the ship we don't need to seal us away. And there's a submersible, made of something I can't control, and it was clinging to the ship. I brought it in, we can hide inside if we need to."

He fiddled with the bridge controls, some of the systems still functional, and managed to get a display to link to a camera on the outside.

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We were in low Earth orbit, the planet a blue expanse that stretched from horizon to horizon, with North America underneath. He'd wisely steered clear of anything close to Chinese territory, and we were buzzing east, just over Mexico.

The ship had regained its shielding: a brace of mangled jets, a few unlucky satellites, and miscellaneous material he'd scavenged along the way. It all spun around us as we stuck to our course.

"Now what?" I asked him. He looked a little stricken, as if he'd been expecting me to give him all the answers. Fuck, I really didn't feel like thinking, but a cruise liner, one that had been nuked, wasn't a particularly viable spaceship. I sighed, and put on my thinking cap.

On my instruction, we searched for functional cameras, and established a link to the systems of one of the jets via multiple hops on the electronics of dead Chinese soldiers to my new fancy helmet. Using their own cams and sensors, we hunted for air leaks, and he sealed them as best as he could. Unfortunately, the air pressure was still dropping, very slowly but steadily.

"Can you just boost to the moon? Take us there outright?" I asked.

"Eventually, but it's going to be difficult. I can exert a lot of force, but even getting us to orbit was a challenge. The life support-" He pointed at the map to indicate the community garden, and the now destroyed aquaponics- "isn't doing very well."

"Bring us back down?"

He stared at me like I was crazy. "Not without my son."

I wasn't surprised, even with his incredible strength, the Moon was a good distance away, and we would be flying by eye. The speeds involved in orbital dynamics were colossal, it was impressive enough he'd taken us this far.

I was going to plead with him to jettison me with something survivable when the dying systems of the jet blared at me with warnings of fast movers inbound. The thing had been surprisingly easy to work with, for some reason, my lace had a copy of a PDF manual for a J-36X, which had been uploaded to the community forums for a game called War Thunder when a player had a heated Gamer Moment and uploaded classified documents to argue that it should be brought down from BR 17.5 to 16.8.

The sensors were throwing a hissy fit at exposure to vacuum, but I managed to scan and find a pair of interceptors blasting our way.

They were squat, cylindrical craft, built around giant lasers in the same manner that the A-10 Warthog was built around its gun.

"Bogies inbound. ETA till intercept about 3 minutes." I called out.

"Fuck, they're still too far. I can handle the missiles if you give me some warning."

"Not missiles. Some fuck-off lasers, they're probably scared of setting off Kessler syndrome if they blow us up right now."

"Kessler syndrome?"

"We're going to break up into enough garbage to do a serious number on any satellites nearby. They don't want that, even if it's temporary." I explained.

The first laser hit a moment later, femtosecond pulses blasting our bow. They were ridiculously powerful, melting and blasting away chunks of material, and also dumping tons of heat. Hu Junya, on my advice, began extruding radiators from the hull to dump as much as they could, but more heat kept coming, to the point I could personally feel the mercury creeping up to uncomfortable levels.

"Throw something at them, anything!" I ordered, and then one of the J-36Xs went barrelling towards the interceptors still a hundred clicks away, with a cloud of other debris ahead.

The interceptors took it like a champ, their radar spotting the incoming shrapnel, and angling their own armor to take the hit. They dodged the worst of it, and were closing in for a concentrated hit that would likely end us when I noticed that I still had datalink with the craft.

This couldn't possibly work could it?

I hooked into the systems, overrode IFF, and then unleashed several Fox Threes, the missiles uncaging and then leaping at their targets, which were taken entirely by surprise. The J-36X had incredibly good radar absorbing material, so their scans had likely missed it, not that it was easy to spot in the megatons of shit we were dragging along.

The interceptors turned into incandescent plasma that bloomed ahead of us, whatever reactor or ultracapacitor running their lasers taking poorly to missile hits on their unarmored flanks.

I braced as we shook from the impact of chunks hitting us at relative velocities that made railgun rounds look lethargic, but with sweat beading on Hu Junya's brow, we pulled through, the ship now resembling a glowing ball of dull red steel as he tore it apart to maximize heat dissipation.

We sailed unimpeded for about an hour, steadily gaining altitude as he pushed on the craft, when we received a hail from an unknown source. I plugged in, making sure not to expose myself, and let him handle the comms.

It turned out to be the woman from Lumen, if her voice was anything to go by.

"Impressive. Are you still headed for the Moon?" She asked, her words crackling over the ham transmission.

"Yes. But I don't know if we can make it, this thing is one bad hit from disintegrating, and I'm not sure I can keep it together." He explained urgently.

"Don't panic, you're over the hard part. Listen carefully, there's someone who can help, you just need to head over here.."

She explained our target, currently in a congenial orbit several hundred kilometers ahead of us, which we could boost to reach.

It was the Tianyuan space station, built about a decade back as the crown jewel in China's burgeoning interplanetary program, before it was rapidly superseded by more advanced designs, let alone the interstellar ones.

A rotating hab, it put the ISS of my childhood to shame, and it had the life support and guidance systems to keep us alive till the Moon (though I resolved that this would be my final pitstop).

"There's someone there who's friendly to Lumen, and who I can possess to talk to you in person again. Try not to kill them, OK?" she advised.

"Wasn't planning on it." We both agreed.

Spotting it on sensors borrowed from the now the now well past their best-by J20s, we navigated towards the space station, which was a gleaming ring overhead where the sunlight caught it. I could imagine the panic its denizens felt as we approached, dwarfing it in mass and volume, a metal leviathan dumping megajoules of waste heat from a spiky assemblage of radiators.

They didn't launch their escape craft, likely afraid we'd fire on them. Instead, a point-defense laser and a pair of autocannons opened fire, but it was nothing we couldn't handle.

We lumbered closer, gingerly matching velocities and headings with the station as it flared thrusters desperately to escape. It wasn't made for rapid maneuvers, so we caught it with ease.

Someone begged us for mercy over comms, and on orders from Hu Junya, they jettisoned their defensive emplacements and prepared to be boarded.

We put up the kayfabe of him binding me in more metal, to make me look like a helpless princess along for the ride, and while we'd been traveling, he'd been practising with his expanded powers.

Exos taken from the dead were augmented with more metal, forming menacing golems that could operate semi-autonomously within the sphere of his fine control, now several hundred meters, while his more brute force approach easily reached the several kilometers of distance to the station. He gripped it with his powers just to be safe, and then morphed in front of me, his frail human form swelling to become burnished copper.

After some debate, we used the submersible to head over, it had a docking port, which while absolutely unsuitable for matching a space craft, could hold atmosphere if he messed with the dimensions.

He escorted me over, a harmless and (actually) gravely wounded prisoner, as we docked and crossed over. His powers swept ahead, and barring a few scared crew holding onto knives or tools, they'd been obedient.

I was sent ahead first, securely restrained.

"Everyone, please don't panic. I'm Dr. Adat Sen, from the UN, and he hasn't hurt me and he won't hurt you if you listen." I spoke as authoritatively as I could. I ached in the station's rotational gravity.

A petite woman in medical scrubs came over to look at me closer. "Won't hurt us? You're half dead!"

To be fair, I was worse for wear, my face bruised and pallid, my eyes red from micro hemorrhage, and half my tongue missing, which made for extra room for my swollen tongue.

Still, they listened, and while the other doctor fussed over me, the crew lined up for inspection, some of the civilians absolutely terrified. A child clung to her teddy bear even as her panicked mother berated her to throw it away, but I gently shushed her and said it didn't matter.

Hu Junya used the pretext of interrogating the crew to separate them apart, and when we got to a technician in yellow coveralls, the man suddenly stopped mid sentence, groaned, and then seized as his eyes bloomed with light. An avatar of the woman we'd seen before stepped out from him, trailing light. I double checked that we'd disabled all the cameras and monitoring devices aboard, but as long as they had metal, they'd been dealt with.

"Take the ship, if you jettison most of the mass and commandeer the engines aboard and the ones on the secondary craft, you can make it to the Moon in a day." She explained.

"Haven't they seized my son yet?" He asked anxiously, pacing about, the floor trembling under his new weight.

"The settlement he's in, Chang'e city, is free-er than most, even if it's under nominal Chinese control. It's no Hong Kong, the administration is stalling, they're terrified about what you'll do if they hurt him. We have agents waiting, get there, and we can make sure he's ready for you." She showed the layout of the city, nestled in a polar crater.

"And the rest of my family?"

She showed images again, helmet cams and CCTV from non-descript cities. Armored vans pulled over, the drivers of those not automated spasming. Guards doubled over, falling unconscious, and doors opened of their own accord, with confused and stumbling people trickling out. Men and women in masked hoods that made cameras glitch came out to escort them, and they disappeared into the night.

"Thank you. I promise, if you help with my son, I'll do everything you ask of me." A grateful old man said, blinking away tears.

"We'll get there. We have people who, if they can't quite see the future, at least have a hint of what's coming." Her avatar turned to me.

"And you, Blue Man, you're more important than you look. I'm surprised."

I smirked, but then an idea seized me. A bold idea. A heretical idea, one that could get me shot, or at least vanished into a high sec prison to never see the sun again.

I tried to quell my treacherous thoughts, but my heart overrode me and moved my mouth.

"I want my wife back. I'll do what I can, as long as you don't hurt those who don't have it coming. I don't want her to be a slave who dies in an unmarked grave."

I trembled, even though it made my muscles ache to remind me I should be still.

She appraised me closely, with an eyebrow raised. I felt a prickle on my skin, as something looked at me closer than I liked. I did my best to stare back into its metaphorical eyes.

"We can do that, but I must warn you, if you follow this course, some of the things you're going to do, even of your accord, will be things you will regret."

I steeled myself. "More than losing my wife?"

"No."

"Then it's done. Open your mind, I need to scrub this conversation from your memory, as well as some things I'm going to tell you, and implant some mild geass and compulsions in your psyche. While you won't remember this, until someone lifts it, you'll figure out how to reach out to us when the time is right." She raised an ethereal hand and waited for my assent.

"Do you really need my consent?" I asked.

She smirked again. "No, but if you go with it, it's going to hurt less. I'm also polite like that."

She touched my temple with her extended finger, and my world reeled. My lace chirped with alert codes for unhandled exceptions, and my vision doubled, tripled, no, broke into fractal whirls, wheels within wheels, all jagged and bleeding. Blood vessels in my brain balloon in aneurysms, neurons yell their outrage via uncontrolled neurotransmitter release that leaves me feeling like an MDMA comedown for days.

When it's done, I'm a slack-jawed zombie, going through the motions. I'm utterly terrified of Hu Junya, the mass murderer who slew three platoons of Chinese men, and who was later pinned with the deaths of hundreds of Taiwanese citizens when he released the energy of a nuclear bomb near the New Taipei fleet. That's leaving aside the atrocities he was accused of, out there in the stars.

I rejoined the huddle of demoralized refugees piling into Tianyuan, wincing at the kick of the boosters as we cleared the station, now being dismantled for parts.

I didn't understand why the giant metal demon who had held me captive for the better part of a day stood there to bid me goodbye, with sadness in his eyes.

I had a severe concussion or three, no wonder I was imagining things.