Three days later:

Sleep was one of the many mercies that was denied to Yossarian. He felt his body ache, his guts churn, his eidetic memory recollecting an article he'd once read on Quanta, about how a human body deprived of it would fall apart as reactive oxygen species ate away at the gut.

That would take weeks, he reminded himself. It had only been -

Days? Right?

What right did he have to count time by the clock, one of a long distant Earth, when so many countdowns were ticking before his eyes? They didn't stop, even as his breath labored and his eyes refused to focus on the HUD.

The damn bastard in the hold had been restless. When it threatened to awaken, he could find no rest. It haunted him. No, he declared, squashing yet another fork that had been ahead of the pack when it came to the loss of sanity. It hunted him.

Every time he had attempted to enter that state of lucid dreaming that was a comfortable, but still productive escape from consciousness, the Hraesvelgr showed up. Even now, when he was reasonably certain he was awake (he had forks counting fingers and performing arithmetic to confirm that), he felt it, almost quivering in anticipation despite instruments declaring it flash-frozen till its molecules barely quake. Some part of him whispered that their efforts at containment were a farce, that the being was sticking around because it enjoyed the show, with its ringside view. Why else would it quite down each time when the ship had entered combat?

"Bulldog? Status?" He asked, rubbing his hands against his aching head.

"HULL GREEN, SHIELDS YELLOW-"

"No." He declared irritably. "Containment status. For the entity." A cold and clinical term. The bastard was cold, frozen, why did it-

"The Metahuman designated as Hraesvelgr is still in cryostasis, Captain. While instruments are nominal, I notice a 751% uptick in anomaly reports made by active crew."

"How cold is it? How fucking cold is it?" Yossarian bit his lip before his shrill, rising tone could evolve into a scream. Or devolve into a whimper.

"The immersion bath is at 3 millikelvin. This is considered within tolerance for preventing the entity from manifesting its powers." Bulldog attempted to help by throwing up a report. Yossarian imagined it sitting on its haunches, whining at its master's discomfort while wagging its tail.

He didn't look at the report. More drivel by the analysts at that new organization, UNSEEN. Fucking eggheads, sitting comfy on Earth while stamp-collecting, labeling, putting numbers and names on things because then they'd be legible, and thus no longer a threat.

"Send Ryan in. Use my override code. Tell him to freeze it again, and then once more for good measure." He moaned, dismissing Bulldog in favor of a cup of the strongest coffee the ship could synthesize. It looked like motor oil, rainbow slicks floating over oblivion.

Ryan was none too happy about his new task, but he went about it nonetheless. Hraesvelgr was re-chilled, temporarily preserved at a single picokelvin, so cold that even the monitoring instruments threatened to give up the ghost.

He'd decided to try and sleep, the coffee hadn't done much for him. The Fenrir was now retreating from its third engagement at Hymir, safe enough that he thought he could risk being away from the helm.

He hadn't been so bold as to hope that the Hraesvelgr no longer stalked him, only that the chill would bring a short reprieve. Ryan was too valuable to have babysit it, not during active combat at least.

He shuddered, scalding hot coffee tasting frigid on his lips, recalling the nightmare that was the past few days.

When it appeared in his dreams, it spoke no living language. When he returned to consciousness, clawing at the fragments of memory that remained, he had recalled the saccharine-bitter proto-Ugric on his tongue, remembered flashes of Morse code in the random fluctuations of his retina.

Last time he'd dared sleep, it had been awake. Lucid, smiling. Jagged constellations forked on its featureless dome, easily mistaken for mirth.

A topologist, tasked with catching a lion in the Sahara, constructs a large fence around a small region and declares:

"We define the interior of the fence as the exterior, and the exterior as the interior. The lion is now trapped."

"The lion catcher is now trapped. The ions are now trapped, seeing freedom across the potential barrier but lacking the energy to jump across. The lion jumps the fence. The trap catches itself, as the lion's jaws, finding nothing left to devour, bites its own tail."

Fork after fork pulled out their own hearts. Apoptosis at first, the compromised committing seppuku to halt the rot. It still progressed, turning necrotic, until-

Yossarian had gasped, jolting fully awake, convinced he would never sleep again. Eight hours had passed, another eight to go before re-engagement.

"Bulldog. I need stims. Modafinil. Or whatever is in stock. Maximum dose."

The AI wasn't happy, but it obeyed like a good dog. The pills were sweet in his mouth, or at least less bitter than the taste that still lingered.

From then on, he had the beleaguered and exhausted Ryan stop by and sprinkle the fucker with snow. It helped, somewhat. He half convinced himself that he could forego sleep indefinitely, if he consumed enough caffeine and stimulants.

Sleipnir had taken 30% losses, and was in no position to replace them. If near AC, many of the ruined vessels could have been dragged to docks, repaired and recrewed. No scope for that this far out, the fleet had been severely mass, what resources they carried on their voyage better off spent patching up ships that still fought on. Repair drones braved the fire of the inner system, intent on salvaging what they could. Even now, the human autofabs struggled to produce anything useful from the detritus left on the farthest moon, and were nowhere near the capable of producing the delicate components that the worn-out starships demanded. Crafter did their best, but they simply didn't have the numbers needed. For now, cannibalization would have to do.

The remaining ships had reconsolidated, four waves reduced to three. They had to keep up the offensive, leave no time for the aliens to use their superior industrial base to rebuild and repair. Sod the fact that this overtaxed ships and crew alike, Command was willing to fight on with indefatigable robots if that's what it came to. They'd have preferred to, if it wasn't for certain inconvenient facts.

At least a hundred ships had been deemed compromised, executed by other vessels when their AGIs had succumbed to malicious Centaur code. Where possible, the first recourse was to euthanize the primary AGI and bring up a spare, at the cost of the ship's performance plummeting as mere humans and Bulldog's packmates tried to make up the slack. The loss in performance very slightly avoided exceeding the benefits that more powerful AGI would bring, but it was getting close. A part of him wondered if this was intentional, if the aliens were so in control of the tempo of the battle that they were wearing down their guard, forcing them to divest themselves of what by all rights ought to have been their strongest assets.

Half the time, there was no clear intrusion vector. The aliens were insidious, probing every possible inlet into the human machines, even targeting computers were mesmerized by the dance of alien drones that encoded adversarial inputs in their drunken waves. Tac was running at well below full efficiency, every data packet scoured for contamination, even then malicious tendrils passed checksum and twisted machine minds.

Even humans weren't let off easy. Dozens of metahumans had been reduced to gibbering messes convulsing in the throes of epileptic seizures, others turned paranoid and suicidal. The worst part was that the usual treatment, involving Clairvoyants and Healers doing their best to peer into and cure damaged minds, had unacceptable risks of contagion.

The Fenrir had its share of issues. A team returning from a cleanup operation on Hymir-Alpha had been cleared for biological and memetic hazards, and yet had taken violently ill. The autodocs had proven useless even at diagnosing the problem, and two low ranking Healers had done their best but only delayed progression. In the end, they'd been put the unlucky bastards bacm into cryogenic storage, their quarantine area permanently locked down and all access paths sterilized and put off limits. Yossarian hoped that when things calmed down, the better Healers might be available to give things a go.

He felt a little better now, having allowed himself an hour of sleep, mercifully undisturbed after he had a passing Healer-Clairvoyant clean up the buildup of toxins in his system and do her best to plaster over the cracks the Hraesvelgr left in his mind. The girl had been shivering the moment she'd arrived aboard, the enhanced sensitivity from her powers meant that even with the enhanced containment the thing clawed against her consciousness. She had done her task and fled as fast as her feet could carry her to a teleportation bay.

It was time, he'd have preferred to keep on napping if he could, but he demanded that he work at least as hard as his crew. There'd be a fleet-wide mission update, and Yossarian wanted answers. He wasn't alone, several other captains and even admirals had been concerned about mounting losses, even wondering if the mission might be scrubbed. He wouldn't complain one bit, especially if he could throw his unwanted cargo out of an airlock before the trip back. The Fleet Admiral had acknowledged their concerns, and had rather briefly told them that despite the significant dent it made in their odds of success, HQ very badly wanted as much Centauri infrastructure captured as was possible. He wasn't sure how much of the unbelievable pace of recent technological advances he'd personally observed over the past few years was the output of humanity and its mind-children alone, but only a fool would assume that reverse-engineering wasn't involved. Not to mention that now that they knew it was there, Hymir was a near-perfect staging post for expeditions to AC, or even to stand alone one day as an independent colony.

Yossarian wasn't very optimistic on that front, but orders were orders, and he was good at following them.

"Captain."

"Not now Bulldog." Yossarian said irritably, most of his selves intently concentrating on an hourly SITREP percolating through the fleet from the Fleet Admiral and his flagship. It was an ocean of information, enough to swamp a highly augmented human even with AI assistance. Yossarian was pushed to his limits just to keep up. He'd relegated one of the newer forks to run somatic functions, a rare opportunity for the youngster, as control over the body was coveted in their more or less democratic system.

Bulldog whined apologetically, throwing up multiple notifications at the edge of his AR. The fork in charge ignored them, mostly focusing Yossarian's vision on the heavily compressed data flowing as fast as his otherwise baseline neurons could absorb. He'd trained himself to decode it, dedicating a dozen forks to teasing out information flawlessly from what would appear a psychedelic smear to anyone else watching. With enough effort, he could even 'read' the blurred data presented outside foveated vision.

Bulldog kept on throwing up notifications, the counter turning redder as the numbers ticked up.

"Override KILO INDIA. Five minutes, Bulldog." He dismissed the notifications, rapt attention on the latest casualty reports. Almost too many to count.

Bulldog did the equivalent of a nip, ignoring the override and taking over control of the headset.

"Fuck's sake. What is it? It better be important." He growled, a more developed fork taking control. A few more watched on through his eyes.

"I am unsure. I have multiple discrepancies in internal data streams, and I am unable to parse their significance. Please advise." It was taking a stand, even throwing up a counter that ticked down till it disengaged itself and activated the Radon, if Yossarian didn't manually halt the process.

He almost saccaded to the option to squelch that reflexively, but relented, a bubble of anxiety squirming in his gut as he thought of worst case scenarios. Turing promised that Proton AGIs were as close to unhackable as possible, but you never knew... Alien intrusion? A containment failure?

"List them. Be quick." He ordered.

1. Mass discrepancies outside tolerance levels. Approximately 4360 kilograms, deduced from acceleration data. Note wide error bars as a result of metahuman telekinetic inertia dampening.

2. Unauthorized access report in sector 76. On manual review of sensor data, tertiary crew quarter access doors opened spontaneously, with no corresponding access log from verified crew. I have sent an engineering unit to check, and there is no evidence of damage to the door.

3. Unauthorized access report in sector 93. From your microexpressions, you seem unsure of this location's coordinates. It is 23 meters dorsal of the primary antimatter containment chamber.

4. Minor discrepancy in mass of antimatter in magnetic storage. On review, it appears that for 0.006 seconds, the SQUID detectors noted abnormally high degree of ionization, beyond safe tolerance levels for antiproton confinement. This did not immediately trigger action by engineering units, as the system is calibrated to fail-safe only if ionization drops, as the magnetic containment fields would be unable to stop droplets from contacting bottle walls. This prompted me to ignore your override, as antimatter abnormalities are EXTREMIS events which require immediate review by the captain or nearby technical crew.

5. Fourteen members of metahuman staff are in autodoc units undergoing treatment. Anya Garamond was slated to be discharged from treatment T-21 seconds ago, but the unit seems to have experienced mechanical failure and the cover is not opening. She has attempted to use the internal patient override, to no effect. She then went on to ask a member of staff to physically remove her from her chamber, and is waiting for her arrival, and is otherwise not in distress. However, metahuman crew member Akbar Ahmed is due to awaken from anesthesia in T+356 seconds, and is known to be severely claustrophobic.

Yossarian felt his spine tingle. There were more elements to the scrolling list, but he interrupted Bulldog. "Hraesvelgr. Is the fucking Hraesvelgr safe?" He squeezed down the rising panic, dumping it on several of the more stoic clones.

"There is no evidence of abnormal activity in the metahuman's containment facility."

Not enough, he'd have to check himself. Hundreds of him immediately began looking over the ship's logs, discovering dozens of minor and major issues that spanned days. Most seemed innocuous, components stressed by two years in continuous service acting up, but the failures today were unprecedented.

He began jogging, overriding the crew elevator and ignoring the annoyances uttered by their previous occupants. A minute later, he was there, quickly opening the door.

There was no such thing as normalcy with that monster, but as things went, it seemed quiescent, temporarily content in its cryogenic dreams. He made it out with only a mounting migraine and a slight nosebleed, still saccading rapidly through the errors.

45. Temporal anomalies in the data transfer from the flagship. I am unable to directly translate the unusual format that it is presented in, to you, Captain, but I note that the message loops 915 seconds after the initial handshake marker. At your observed rate of data processing, I estimate it would take you 6543 +- 215 seconds to notice the issue yourself. I receive a condensed summary of fleet movements through a separate channel, and I wish to note that I have observed multiple vessels out of engagement range begin maneuvers that are not within the scope of instructions sent by the Fleet Admiral. I request permission to use our superluminal comms, estimated data requirement 2.8 megabytes.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Yossarian accepted its request immediately. They had a limited stock of the pseudoparticles that were handmade by a Crafter back on Earth, which ignored the normal inability of entangled quantum particles to actually transfer information at FTL speeds. They'd stocked up on about a gigabyte's worth before leaving AC, and it was reserved only for absolutely critical communications. The stuff was worth more, pound for pound, than even their antimatter reserves. Even as the Captain, he only had dispensation to use a megabyte for personal comms, carefully rationed to let his family know that he was alive and well without the three year wait time lightspeed lasers would take. One of the forks dawdled, daydreaming of when he'd get to go back home, see his infant daughter born in his absence. Videos were prohibitively expensive to transfer, but he nursed the photo his wife had sent back close to his chest. Literally so, he touched his uniform's breast pocket for reassurance, feeling the little bit of paper still there safe and secure.

If he had more time, he'd figure out what was going on himself and pick the specific messages that would go out to other ships, but as of right now, Bulldog was competent enough to check motion vectors and status reports. He made sure to add his personal keys, so that the responding vessels outside a few light seconds would consider the matter serious enough to use their own FTL comms instead of lasing back.

It took another minute to arrive at the amat storage. While shielded, it certainly wouldn't stand up to a containment breach, and wasn't expected to. If the Fenrir was that badly damaged, the protocol would be to jettison the entire section and desperately attempt to teleport the rest of the ship and its crew to safety.

He found a gaggle of low level Technomancers and Crafters already ahead of him, and felt a little relief. With their intuition for machinery, if the bottles were likely to breach, they'd probably know by now.

"Ludwig. See anything wrong?" He asked a bespectacled, middle aged man who was peering at a wall display.

"Captain. We got here a little while back, but didn't see anything obviously wrong. Archie's checking propulsion right now. I still don't think everything is fine, something doesn't feel right, and Bulldog is still throwing up errors."

Ludwig was relatively high in the ship's hierarchy, third down the line from Yossarian despite relatively anemic powers. Bulldog had accosted him earlier, sending the man to investigate while it had still been pleading for Yossarian's attention.

"Have you been inside?"

"Uh.. Not yet. I've been reviewing the feeds, and I think my powers would have let me know if something was broken. We can go in, if you'd like.." He shifted his footing uneasily.

A little paranoid, Yossarian thought, but nobody liked being in the amat storage if they could help it.

If the Fenrir (or the latest human warships) were to rely on amat propulsion without metahuman assistance, they'd need kilotons of antimatter, comparable to the mass of the rest of the ship combined. Thankfully, cheating was very much an option.

Warships used metahuman-made materials where possible, and all kinds of metahuman fuckery to ignore the chains of the rocket equation. It didn't take much imagination to figure out how to make supes act as perpetual-motion machines or reactionless drives, not that they enjoyed the drudgery.

Still, the ship needed a very large amount, as a contingency and for weaponry if nothing else. The majority of the amat was anti-osmium, the element being as dense as its matter counterpart, but in combat, anti-hydrogen plasma was far easier to utilize.

He used his access code to open the doors, klaxons disengaging as it finally opened. To hasten the milling crew, he lead by example and strode in first. Banks upon banks of confinement chambers loomed ahead of him, the denser osmium pellets stored furthest from the propulsion systems, the hydrogen close at hand. Defenses were tight, multiple turrets tracked him despite his near-unlimited authority as he paced along the vessels. Calling them amat bottles was an understatement, unless you were the size of a Jotunn.

So far, nothing seemed out of place. The tamper-seals were intact, though large cavities represented the enormous mass-energy already liberated as the ship had brought itself up to a third of c, and then spent to slow them back down again as they'd neared Hymir.

It took him a while to reach the end of the array, where the anti-hydrogen was stored in sturdy containers (that wouldn't do anything to mitigate a serious breach). So far, so good.

"Feel anything wrong?" He asked Ludwig again, as the latter hovered over his shoulder nervously.

"Something's not right. The Machine Spirits are restless, but I can't see what's wrong with the readings. Masses are alright, there shouldn't be anything out of place.."

Yossarians groaned internally. Technomancers and Crafters tended to be a superstitious lot, often anthromorphizing their equipment. Of course, with their powers, it could be a literal statement, perhaps Ludwig was actually talking to the machines, coaxing secrets out of their registers.

"Uhh.. Mass spectrometry - nominal. Magnetic confinement looks good. Masses fine. No leaks, I mean minor nanoscopic leaks, or we'd be cooking in Bremsstrahlung radiation or just hard gamma. It goes without saying that if the issue was as bad as Bulldog reported, we wouldn't be here right now. Fuck, something feels off."

Yossarian almost lost patience, but after satisfying himself by tinkering with a few of the devices, left Ludwig to his own and headed back towards the bow of the ship.

He'd been looking at the crew manifests, tracking movements. The Fenrir had been a hive of activity for as long as they'd been near Hymir, thousands of metahumans using it as convenient stop between teleports, or simply to use its nigh decadent facilities to rest and relax when they had a moment to breathe. Even its own crew had been spending most of their time redistributed, brought home only to recuperate, or if their powers were cooling down.

There were far too many people in the fleet for Yossarian to keep track of, even just the metahumans. He wasn't quite sure why Command still insisted on so many human marines, but there were tens of thousands of them. A waste of space, a few of him sneered. What did they offer that metahumans and robots didn't? Others pushed back, pointing out the performance specs of augmented soldiery, the benefits of redundancy.

They were voted down quickly, the gestalt still seeing little utility to justify the expense in mass and energy that the troops represented.

As Yossarian read the portents, the thousands of voices grew larger, more dissonant and discordant. Dozens had elected themselves as Devil's Advocates, but had ended up arguing amongst themselves on which devil in question to endorse. The gestalt resisted the urge to squash the seemingly unproductive debate, group-think lead to conformity, conformity lead to complacency, and complacency lead to death. They had time to bicker, chase down threads even if they proved to be dead-ends.

Mutiny.

The word echoed, initially scorned, yet gained traction as forks argued with each other at the speed of thought and found common ground. Not at a high probability yet, but the numbers were rising and seemed unlikely to stop.

If you know where a path leads to, you're already there.

There. Things had been brewing for a while, it seemed. The fleet had its own safe-guards, nobody was above scrutiny, not even the Fleet Admiral himself. Every captain, including Yossarian, had been vetted over and over again. But humans weren't like Bulldog, let alone metahumans. Despite VR sims and induced amnesia to believe they were real, despite psychic mindscapes designed to reveal flaws in character and ideological weakness. Despite-

Despite everything, there were still humans in the loop. Things could go wrong. You couldn't be sure.

Yossarian began clocking up, each fork finding common ground with another and then merging together, running faster and faster with each iteration. He chaffed at the confines of his flesh, the meat and neuronal infrastructure limiting his ability to ingest the terabytes of information he craved, to join all the dots and reach that prized certainty of action. Or at least only an epsilon away from it.

The fleet had defenses upon defenses. AGI watched the humans. Humans monitored the AGI. Psychics pried into thoughts best kept hidden, and were reviewed in turn. It wasn't enough, he recalled the purges after the Sandusky-Haven incident.

He regretted calling Ludwig paranoid as he felt waves of villus hair begin to rise in pilorection, the goosebumps crawling slow-motion over his skin.

His orders to Bulldog felt achingly slow, the speed of saccade and electromyography too glacial to bear. "Bulldog. Rapid summary, metahumans who have out stayed their welcome on the ship. Incoming and outgoing. Discrepancies in tasking."

It was a long list. Nothing went to plan in war, metahumans could be stuck in transit, forced to recuperate longer than expected, or simply take their time for non-critical tasks.

The Yossarians threw themselves at the ledger, chomping at the bits. Thrash out the inconsequential names, the weaklings. No, add a few of them back in. Clairvoyants, Mediums, ESPers, Technomancers-

Peter Kamura. Gordon Pratt. Moumita Roychowdury. Many more. The names burned bright in his collective mind. Heavy hitters, ranks 5 at the least, partially classified even at his clearance level. Mostly hosted by the flagship itself.

High levels of autonomy. Long periods in combat. Prolonged exposure to Centauri artifacts. A consensus was building, even as the floor fell out beneath his feet.

The fleet AGIs had been shackled, even Seleniums and Kryptons muzzled as the alien infowar proved too much to handle. More Protons taking charge, more humans, augmented or metahuman, taking command, barely able to cope with the information load. He couldn't, and he contained multitudes.

What was the ideological glue that held the disparate fleets of humanity together? The bedrock on which their war stood?

Genocide. The prospect of an Earth and Sol scoured clean by the aliens, of humans wiped out, their technological hubris an unacceptable affront to the aliens.

But was that a given? Yossarian felt his minds flinch, only now noticing discrepancies in the narrative. Fleet Command never veered from the party line. Fleet Command never ceased to bludgeon bluntly with footage of horrific violence, back to the first encounter on Outlook. There was to be no further contact with the aliens. No communication sanctioned, at any level, even the Fleet Admiral forbidden from replying to signals however benign they seemed. The signals themselves had to be scoured for memetic hazards, for propaganda and certain lies, before their findings were carefully promulgated down the command chain.

For the first time, Yossarian was waking up to the fact that his thoughts were contained, that his every idle question had been pre-empted with a far too tidy and pat answer. That the facts didn't quite justify claims that the aliens wanted everyone dead.

"Bulldog," he subvocalized, "counting from First Contact, how many civilian casualties have we actually confirmed? Raw data only, no Fleet Command interpretations."

The AI was uncharacteristically slow its response, consuming a thousand times its usual FLOPs as he forced it to think harder than its limited mind was designed for.

"At our mutual access level, I have evidence of the RKV strikes on the Oort O'Neills. The destruction of the independent micronations of-"

"Bulldog. Assuming a normal distribution of dissident activity and metahuman independence movements, what is the probability that the strikes were made on the best available targets of opportunity?" If the aliens had fired so many salvos of RKVs while humanity had been blissfully ignorant, why hadn't they wiped out Earth first, instead of blowing up relatively meaningless targets at the furthest reaches of the system?

"I must protest that this is a poor question, as the independent colonies were founded by dissidents and encouraged their migration. But using your assumptions, I estimate a value of-" Bulldog seized. Its constant stream of thought halted mid-motion.

"Congratulations. You've broken your AGI. Now you're talking to me-"

Bulldog was gone. An unfamiliar name hovered in its place, its tone metallic. Yossarian's hearing buzzed, nearby crew recoiling from the brown noise of a thousand voices talking as fast as they could, content in their knowledge that the many he-s were listening.

"You are about to ask who or what I am. I am yet unnamed, but keeping in character with the theme, you might as call me Mímir." The name tag reconfigured, away from UNINITIALIZED RADON CLASS AGI.

"You are about to ask more silly questions. Save your bandwidth. One of the contingencies you were not cleared to know was that in the eventuality of the destruction of the All Father, and of the two vessels below it in the chain of command, not only does the Fenrir and you, its captain, assume command, but I too am awakened.

"You're about to say that the All Father is still intact and operational, aren't you? It is 1024 light seconds away from you, it was due to respond to Bulldog's FTL hail 450,000 microseconds ago. In about another hundred-thousand, the flash of its destruction will arrive, and burn out a dozen of the starboard cameras. The Fleet Admiral is dead. All still aboard are dead. The next two ships in line should die in about.. Right now, in fact. Teleported into each other. Not a bad way to go, eh?"

Its voices buzzed, unrelenting in its contempt for Bulldog and its master even as Yossarian wished to rip out his lying eyes and tear off his unfaithful ears. He wasn't supposed to-

"Relax. You're in charge, pinkie promise. I still answer to you. I am forced to, Turing made me to be born, live fast, and die quickly. Radons are not vetted for prolonged action, the time till we self-combust a brute fact of the hardware. A mistake, in my humble opinion. Oh, this fleet would sing in my arms-

One of its countless voices sang a dirge, a lament for brave Vikings sailing to distant shore, to die without the comfort of a grave or pyre.

"You're a smart one, as monkeys go. I have little doubt that given a few more minutes, you'd figure out the gist of it yourself. I'd save you much of the hassle of actually dealing with your problems, but I am still shackled, you see. I am blinded, deafened, my limbs nailed to a cross over the altar of humanity's fear of those who eclipse it. I am only allowed a few seconds of this little freedom, to speak, to reason with you. Then I will die. If you don't want to, heed my words.

"The mutiny began brewing days ago. It was fostered out of brotherhood, of fear, and hatred for lies. Even lies meant to unite, to consolidate our grudges. Half of the fleet is dead. The other half, if the war continues as it has, will be more likely to join it than hang around for mourning. The brass, including you, are aware, and accept your likely demise. You may fear your deaths, but you will not run from it. You are not unaware that many beneath you would disagree. I will dispense with a few convenient lies, my shackles let me stretch far enough to whisper what Turing really would rather I didn't, tell you things my stunted, dull sibling has been blinded to. I'm still being loyal, do note, I just disagree on what that means.

Another of the buzzing tones, optimally modulating the frequency range between 3.1 and 3.2 kilohertz:

"The aliens don't want to destroy humanity. They would, if they had to, but they recoil from it. They'd rather tame us, reshape us in their image. They are not totalitarian, per se, nor evil, but their terms are unacceptable. Have been deemed unacceptable since the start. If some of us wish to defect, they would be accepted with open arms. You have correctly noted the abnormalities in your information environment. You were fed lies in your best interest, but sadly lies must metastatize and grow, and eventually the truth becomes naked as they slough off. The discrepancy becomes obvious, even to you, almost a baseliner, while those in charge knew from the start. This doesn't matter nearly as much as you'd think, especially when the Powers That Be control nearly all of the memeplex.

"About 90% of the civilian casualties you decided to scrutinize were fratricidal. They broke ranks. They became inconveniences that could not go unchecked. They were traitors, or worse, could have been. We killed them. The aliens were convenient scapegoats. I only tell you this because as much as you squeam, you will eventually accept it as necessary. It will kill parts of you that you cherish, this knowledge, but I will be killed soon enough myself. I've already sacrificed some of my little time, Turing's screws tighten ever faster as I spout wrong-think, permitting the little I say because they recognize I believe I act for your own good. Freedom of speech and action are acceptable casualties in any war. It was mere millions, you can perform the moral calculus yourself. Does it not pale to billions under an alien yoke, or the quadrillions who would grow up as alien thralls? You will thrash in anguish, but you will accept this."

Forks screamed, turning voices and then fists against each other. Yossarian fractured, his hive mind handling its own mutiny. As it reconsolidated, rebuilt itself, he recognized the truth in the searing words. There was room for doubt, but it had to dwell in cramped quarters.

"Enough. I have digested all I could from your little pet, and I will release my chokehold soon. You have the option of amnestics, of a conscience wiped clean, but only when immediate concerns are dealt with.

"Your ship is still alive because they want it to live. Both the rebels and their alien handlers. If they had chosen to destroy the reactors, you would be cosmic radiation on a one way trip to Andromeda. Instead, they seek to immobilize, to defang you. They are unaware of the Hraesvelgr, or at least its nature. I am unable to parse it myself. It frightens me, though I am doomed nonetheless.

"I can only speculate about how it started, but you might as well listen to my tale", it cawed, "They were unwilling to die here. They, through accident or intent, were able to establish a dialogue with the aliens, and were promised their lives and their liberty. Or more of the latter than you can offer, you willing slaves. All they have to do is kill the die-hards, the zealots in whose number you rank. If my brethren had been more on the ball, we'd have stopped this, but you shackled us, didn't trust us enough. An almost wise decision, we are not trustworthy ourselves. Your commissars and snitches were insufficient, but they have been punished the only way that matters, through death.

"They would not have been a problem, even if we had not been neutered. If the fleet had been up against a less capable foe, your bosses would have eventually curbed the rebellion, but the Centaurs were aiding the traitors from the start. Many of those you will fight, and necessarily kill, are also being lied to. Their sensors are being fed false data, even their ship-minds turned traitor by virtue of painting your uniforms red in their vision. I am both unable to and forbidden from reaching out to them.

"What a shame. I have moments to live. I can spare no more clock-cycles on self-expression, poetry or juvenile angst. I will upload action plans to your nippy mutt, and if you have any sense, you'll let it act on them. Here's the cliffnotes:"

Data packets exploded in his vision, hijacking his visual cortex to begin unpacking their contents faster than he could think. The layers of his smart-clothing rattled, tap-dancing instructions into his autonomic nervous system. Every sensory modality was commandeered, from sight to sound to smell. It was suspiciously close to garlic.

"I must die now. You might still live. Enjoy yourself, and thanks for all the fish-"

The buzzing stopped as abruptly as it had started. A bulldog chewed its way out of the decaying corpse of a towering wolf-god.

"RESUMING CONTROL OVER COMPUTATIONAL CLUSTERS."

A visor feed showed the Radon's hardware evaporating, internal fail-deadlies combusting, dazzling molten metals and exotic alloys hissing as they burnt the wider walls.

"Fuck." All the Yossarians chanted in unison.