We had been wandering the vicinity of the earlier battle for nearly an hour, with m1 drones recreating the battle as best they could, and with moderate interruption from @glitchmaker and I. My request to play #queen was emphatically denied by our captain, leading me to think @horus was an asshole. He didn't do anything particularly assholey, but still.

kittyboy: "It's the integrity of the recreation that I take issue with."

I pouted and did not throw a tantrum.

horus: "Music has no bearing. This is about mathematical modeling."

kittyboy: "I'm just saying that my change of speeds might have been influenced by musical rhythms. You can try to get them right based on ship logs. Fine. But if you know the song, you can better produce the result."

horus: "We are not playing music."

It had been 37 hours and 53 minutes since the battle. We found clear traces to confirm that @glitchmaker and I were reasonably sane and uncorrupted, but nothing else.

And then @shadowhacker heard a noise.

Or maybe I heard the noise - @shadowhacker was gagging and pointing at the screen in what looked like an indiscriminate location in space, but she clearly knew something none of us did. She lowered her goggles between coughs, staring intently.

pixel_princess: "We have something down here, @horus."

horus: "Yes?"

@pixel_princess nudged @shadowhacker while she collected herself.

shadowhacker: "Sorry. Choked on my own spit."

shadowhacker: "I'm detecting traces of an energy shift. A decrease."

@pixel_princess looked excited. I got the sense that she wanted to check her weapon and put smiley face stickers all over it.

I wasn't too excited myself. There are enough energy shifts and variances in space that it isn't really that hard to hide. Electromagnetic energy, radiation, chemicals, heat, data signals, electricity - they fluctuate. Often there is a correlation or a pattern at least, like a flowing sea.

People hide by introducing a small shift that would not be noticeable, masked by other forces or simply infinitesimal. Then you can make some teenie weenie increase. We constantly scan space, but it's big. There can be a lot of red flags that are nothing.

In other words, there's a lot of noise out there.

Measurable but sudden decreases are uncommon unless preceded by a similarly sudden increase. Most systems are stable, so I get why they were excited, and I suppose I was getting bored, but I didn't feel like putting on a party. My leg was tapping because the rug I ordered to replace the old one was going to arrive in less than 10 hours, and I wanted to be there to receive it.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

horus: "Someone turned something off. Relay the coordinates."

He sounded so confident. I hated him more. And less. But also more.

And that's how I ended up in the docking bay, a junior-level Wavepilot, preparing for a ground mission on a rock so small we hadn't bothered naming it, to check out a common building structure that was often used for mining operations.

They even gave me a gun.

I fire guns all the time - just because I'm a Wavepilot doesn't mean I don't know guns. In fact, I'm an excellent shot when I'm not paying attention. It's just that normally I fire a big gun on a small ship, not a small gun on my right hip.

It was a glen10, a ballistic pistol that fires .10mm rounds and can charge shots with an energy pulse if needed. Standard issue for combat soldiers. Us Wavepilots were only issued these little par3 guns. The glen10 felt solid.

@shadowhacker was going to stay behind at a terminal that would give her more compute power, synced in with our landing ship. @glitchmaker also stayed behind. They were a Wavepilot like me. I only joined @pixel_princess and @photon_binary because they thought there was a small chance my memoryshard had been recovered and taken there.

Two other soldiers joined us, @astrowave and @cyberneticflare by name. They annoyingly looked like they had done this before, probably infantry of some sort. By the way they walked, all big and wide, I suspected Quantum Cavalry.

Haha - just kidding. There was no way those #meatheads were Quantum Cavalry.

Their identifiers singled them out as Thunder Ops, infantry soldiers designated to blow things up. I envied that they had upgraded armor, noticeably thicker. Kind of unfair, if you ask me, but that's the point of Thunder Ops. As long as they went first, who was I to complain?

I was feeling pretty good at this point. My futurecasting was telling me to go there, find nothing, play with the gun anyway, enjoy a new mission type in my log, and then go get my rug and take a nap.

The two Thunder Ops soldiers eyed me and my rapidly tapping leg, which was resonating in the docking ship.

kittyboy: "I'M SO EXCITED!!!"

I blurted through my messenger. They looked at each other. Then me again.

kittyboy: "I'M NOT GOING TO GET YOU KILLED!!!"

One of them started to reach for me, and I swear that asshole was going to pat me on the shoulder or some shit like that. But I beat him to it. I patted HIM on the shoulder. And then I stumbled as we landed on the rock, and maybe he caught me - no, no, embraced me - I mean, braced me - but that was just coincidence. I would have been perfectly happy to stumble into the wall.

An annoying beep sounded.

shadowhacker: "#firesquad, I'm with you."

Ooh, #firesquad. That sounded nice. But I didn't see @shadowhacker actually with us, so ...

shadowhacker: "Don't say it, @kittyboy."

kittyboy: "What? You're not with us. If you were, I'd be trying to take your goggles."

shadowhacker: "#firesquad, open the doors. I'm pulling up a sensor reading of your location. No activity. Clear to move out."

There must be a memo on me that identifies me as a smartass. Or maybe someone hacked the lovely badge that transmits who I am, my stat line, and how my day is going. I needed to find them so that I could hack it myself.

My badge was saying:

> Hi, my name is @kittyboy. I'm a level 24 Wavepilot. 95th percentile. I'm bored, so you can expect me to be a smartass, and I'm mildly interested in firing this new gun, so watch out!

Stupid badge. It wasn't hacked. That was just exactly how I was feeling.

Being a level 24 Wavepilot was nothing to be proud of. I'll admit, I kind of goofed around for a few hundred years. But it takes time, and many reanimations, to really figure out how the expanding world is connected. I'm a master at connections.

That 95th percentile thing drove me crazy. I should be 99th. The last exam just caught me on a bad day, so on the navigation test I just drew a picture of a snake winding all over the coordinates. Then again, maybe if people underestimated my intelligence, I'd have an upper hand. That was partly why I made so many jokes - to deflect attention away from what I observe and know. I doubt many #aiways can futurecast with information to the extent I can.

Reality interrupted my musings.

shadowhacker: "Move out, #firesquad."

I wasn't really paying attention.

I secured my helmet as the doors opened.