Tanya’s oxygen-starved brain was dimly aware of a sharp pain in her wrist, followed by her mask getting ripped off violently. She reflexively gasped the moment she tasted fresh oxygen, her lungs trying to flush out the rotten egg-smell of hibernation gases. Through blurred eyes she spotted somebody’s hand trying to untie her legs, though the angle made it hard to tell where the hand’s owner stood. Maybe if she lifted her arm she could see them…

The hand let go of her bindings and rose with her arm, and it suddenly clicked for Horizon. Her forearm was bent at nearly a 45 degree angle and her hand looked partially crushed. She scrambled through her implant’s menu options but as soon as she’d started thinking it her forearm grew warm and slowly, painfully, started to straighten out. As she was trying to ignore the pain from her bent arm she noticed her other arm, with a loose zip-tie still dangling from the wrist, trying to unbind her legs without any conscious effort on her part.

She focused and got her hand to pull away. Had that shadow AI somehow reactivated itself and taken control of her body while she was in torpor? As useful as it was, breaking her own arm in order to escape without her knowledge was frightening. She started looking for the AI’s control panel again in her HUD, but instead noticed a large number of message notifications.

1800 MechRat: Horizon, are you receiving this?

1815 MechRat: Horizon, please answer.

1830 MechRat: Please, I went to all this effort to penetrate their jamming.

1845 MechRat: Princeps is getting apprehensive, I can’t locate you, he’s tempted to blow the whole thing now.

1900 MechRat: I’m sorry Horizon, but the only thing I can think of is to remotely activate your shadow in “survival mode.” I don’t know what it’ll do.

Horizon rapidly composed a reply, sent it, and waited for his response.

Horizon: What the Hel! It fracked up my hand!

MechRat: You’re alive?! What happened, where are you?

Horizon: They darted me with some sort of paralytic, tried to break my legs, and then pumped my lungs full of H2S. That AI you turned back on broke my hand to get it out of the restraints while I was still asleep.

MechRat: Oh, wow, that must have hurt.

Princeps: Pilot, can you identify your location?

She quickly looked around the room, nothing but dusty metal walls and a bulkhead with an electronic control panel on the left. It almost looked more like a hastily cleared supply closet than a prison cell. The scent of rotten eggs reminded her of the hibernation gas and she located the source, a pallet of cylinders the size of a fridge, enough to keep her in torpor for weeks if she remembered right. Horizon reached out her good hand for the dial and shut it off.

Horizon: Looks like a closet, I’d guess on a small to mid-sized ship.

MechRat: I’m trying to triangulate your location, but it’s difficult with all the jamming.

Princeps: A closet?

Horizon: Yes, I don’t think they expected me to wake up this soon.

Princeps: Can you break out?

Horizon twisted her legs free of the zip-tie binding them, bending one leg in the process, and hobbled over to the bulkhead. She examined the control panel carefully, thinking of how she might be able to get into it.

She thought she might be able to pry the side up with her claws, midway between two of the screws would offer the least resistance, a medium effort for her enhanced strength. Horizon blinked, wondering how she knew that. Was it the AI? Unable to think of anything better to do she stuck the tips of her claws under the long side of the panel and tried to force it up.

She lurched back, the panel bending outwards toward her as she bent it near effortlessly. The panel left a triangular space where she’d pried that was large enough to force her whole hand in. Carefully she withdrew her claws from the panel, and noticed the holes they had left in it. She wondered how strong she was now, and received a readout in precise numbers that she had no context for understanding, which was then followed by an estimate of her pre-augmentation strength that was between half and a third of her current strength, while Lift was easily five times as strong as her.

Horizon wedged the fingers of both hands into the opening she’d made and pulled. With an awful wrenching sound the panel came free, exposing the mechanical guts of the door mechanism. She surveyed them quickly, pneumatic bolt should be removed, tear off hose to relieve pressure then rip mechanism out entirely if it doesn’t retract.

Horizon: I’ve cracked open the door controls, I think I can open it from here.

Princeps: Good, once you’ve opened it, incapacitate the crew and take control of the ship by the most expedient means you have.

Horizon: Yes, sir.

She had doubts that she could pull it off alone against invisible assailants with unknown levels of augmentation, but her augmented brain was already spinning up strategies of attack. She’d probably already blown any chance at stealth with the noise she’d already made, so she decided to focus on her commander’s directive for speed.

Horizon yanked the pneumatic hose off the locking mechanism, prompting a hiss of escaping air. The bolt loosened in the lock enough for her to rip it out, finally enabling her to shove the door open. She scanned the hallway outside the closet she’d been locked in, it was narrow, no curvature visible so most likely not a drum design. Either they were under acceleration already or still docked with the station. A clicking sound drew her attention to a ladder at one end of the hall, a feline tail and a pair of boots were coming down to her level.

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Without thinking, she leapt towards the ladder and yanked the newcomer’s tail down towards her. Caught off guard he lost his grip on the rungs and shouted as he fell. Horizon punched him in the head, driving it into the ladder and silencing him, possibly forever. He was wearing some sort of lightly armored bodysuit that flashed in a rainbow of colors where he hit the wall. She let him fall down to the bottom of the shaft, waited a couple moments to see if anyone would react, then scrambled up the ladder. Two sets of instincts warred in her head, one that said she was doing something incredibly unsafe and would slip and fall any moment now, the other had already calculated the exact placement of each step and handhold and just needed to place them.

The ship shuddered and Horizon abruptly felt weightless. They must have undocked from the station. She looked up to the top of the ladder and saw a half-open hatch, beyond which rested a window into a starry void. The gap through which she could see that void was gradually shrinking, but now she had an advantage.

The seasoned spacer raccoon launched herself upwards with all four limbs and straightened out into a ring-tailed torpedo. In the microgravity she sailed right towards the closing hatch and with her shadow guiding her she was able to slip through the narrow opening, though it was a tight squeeze at the end. Once she had pushed her way clear of the hatchway she found herself floating in a cockpit space not dissimilar from that on the Dustbin, two rotating chairs under a transparent aluminum canopy and just enough space to stand up and walk half a meter when under gravity. She didn’t have time to admire the view though, an almost supernatural sense of danger drove her to throw up her arm to block an invisible knife just in time.

Her blurred assailant drew back the blood-stained blade, and the little she saw gave her shadow enough information to approximate the location of his arm, and the torso and head attached to it. Before he could strike again she aimed a knee at his chest and knocked the wind out of him, prompting a rainbow of colors that spread out over his active camouflage, revealing his outline. Just as he was rearing for a second attack Horizon grabbed for the air where his other arm had briefly appeared, as soon as she felt polymer beneath her pads she swung him around into the canopy.

He was outlined by more multicolored bands of light, and Horizon took full advantage of his momentary visibility this time. She grabbed at the base of his helmet and plunged a full set of claws into his throat. He gasped and she felt hot blood trickle up her fingertips. His suit flickered a variety of colors, then finally gave out and he went limp.

Only then did Tanya realize everything that she had done. She withdrew her claws from the dying transgenic’s throat, releasing streamers of rapidly coagulating black blood. She held the bloody hand in front of her face, staring in disbelief at what she, no, the AI in her head, had done. As hazardous as spacer life could be in the Tiere system, she had avoided killing so far. Now, this thing some mysterious figure from another star system entirely had used her body to erase two lives.

Princeps: Pilot, report in.

Horizon: I…

Horizon: I killed them. I can take control of the ship now.

Horizon tore her gaze away from her bloody hand to the controls of the ship around her. She hadn’t flown this type of ship before, but the controls were similar enough to what she was used to. She could do this, she didn’t need some digital hindbrain’s help to…

Time slowed down, she turned towards the closed hatch she had climbed out of, vibrations rattled the vessel around her, and orange jets of flame burst through the seams in the floor. Horizon curled into a ball as the ship exploded.

The rush of fire was replaced by a steady hissing sound and an air current pulling her slowly. With hesitation she opened her eyes. The cockpit wasn’t completely shattered at least, they were usually designed to double as escape pods, but apparently whatever exploded in the drive section was more powerful than the manufacturer’s listed tolerance. Several jagged holes were leaking air out into the vacuum of space.

Her shadow helpfully estimated that the cockpit’s air would run out in five minutes if she didn’t plug them, but with her current O2 reserves she could operate sans atmosphere for 17 minutes. A total of 22 minutes, barely any time for a rescue.

Horizon: I’m alive, but running short on air. Where are you?

Princeps: What did you do?

Horizon: I didn’t even touch the controls. It must have been a dead man’s switch or something.

MechRat: The Resolution estimates we can reach you in an hour. Debris from that explosion is thick.

Horizon: I’ll be out of O2 in 22 minutes.

MechRat: Wait one minute.

Horizon sighed, then rapidly inhaled to make sure she didn’t lose the air to the void. She’d gotten spacer mods when she turned 19, like many other planet-to-space refugees who wanted to make a living, but she still despised sucking vacuum. Her retention capacity having been more than doubled was of little comfort.

The disembodied cockpit rocked with the impact of what had been a hull plate, reminding her that her time might be even more limited. Horizon looked out the rapidly spinning canopy, spying the fields of debris around her and one large white vessel visible through the floating scrap.

Horizon: Give me a vector, I’m going out to meet you halfway.

MechRat: This is a bad idea Tanya, just torpor and we’ll pick you up.

Horizon: If I do that there won’t be anything for you to pick up, give me the vector.

Grudgingly, the opossum transmitted the data for the Resolution’s flight path, which Horizon’s shadow processed into a dozen possible intercepts. When the air inside had become too thin for her to take a breath she threw open the hatch and carefully climbed out onto the exterior. Outside the cockpit-cum-escape pod was pitted with jagged metal and rotating so rapidly that she suspected they’d modded out her capacity for motion sickness as well. She searched the void for the Resolution, letting her shadow guide her gaze with glowing arrows on the edges of her vision.

There it was, a barely visible white blob between a couple floating clumps of scrap. She did the calculations in the blink of an eye and pushed off with all the force she could muster. And then she waited.

While she was small enough to fly through holes in the debris that the Resolution couldn’t fit through, she utterly lacked propulsion and was just coasting on what her augmented muscles had provided back at the start of her “voyage.” She would be lucky if she was still conscious when she reached the ship.

Her danger sense drew her attention to a square of hull plate in her peripheral vision. She just barely twisted out of the way of its passage, but at the cost of sending her slightly off-course. The deviation was only a few millimeters, but she would miss her ride by kilometers.

Tanya began to panic, despite lacking air to breathe she tried to hyperventilate out of reflex. She reached out for the hyper advanced ship that was still too far to save her…

And connected.

All at once she saw two fields from opposing directions. Herself diving at just the wrong angle to meet the ship, and herself flying a path that would no longer intercept the raccoon. There was just this one cluster of scrap between her two selves, and her ship-self had not thought of engaging the dark energy tractors. With as much effort as it would take to wave a hand, she swept the deadly metal shards out of the way, and reached out for herself.

Her fleshy body felt the gentle pull of gravity pull her towards the Resolution, gradually picking up speed perceptible only by the passage of the debris around her. But she was fading, her exertions had used up her oxygen reserves faster than if she had just stayed put and waited. She was dimly aware of a large EVA-suited figure leaping out of her airlock and towards her...