“Open a comm channel,” said Temera, as she did her best to assume an air of casual indifference.

“Yes,” Em paused, “Ma’am. Channel open.”

Temera made up a name for herself on the spot. “Zeren cutter, this is Captain Emilenia Antenius of the Ankala Rising. You’ve illegally detained a member of my crew. I want them returned.”

There was dead silence on the other end of the line as Temera eyed a distance meter. After a protracted pause, a voice came over the line.

“This is Captain Semmes of the Zeren corvette Antiosh. I am seizing your ship and you will remand yourself into my custody.”

Temera snorted. That drew a wild look from the teenage girl that Rinn had, she wasn’t sure what the right word for it was. Adopted, maybe? She winked at the girl and carried on.

“Yes. Yes. You’re very amusing, Captain. Except, we’re nowhere near Zeren territory. You have no legal authority here. Taking my crewman wasn’t a military action. It was just a crime. If you try to take my ship, it’ll be an act of piracy under your government’s colors. Are you ready to have your entire navy branded as pirates?”

There was another long moment of silence on the other end of the line before the Zeren captain spoke again through gritted teeth. “You and your crew invaded a Zeren facility. You will answer for that crime.”

Temera eyed the distance meter and then nodded to Em, who turned back to his console.

“What Zeren facility would that be?” replied Temera with airy cheer. “I did find an abandoned facility below, but this world is uninhabited. Even before that, it wasn’t a possession or protectorate of the Zeren Authority. Anything I found is mine by right of salvage.”

Temera would have paid a small fortune in hard currency to be able to see the Zeren captain’s face. She’d known some of that information before, but Rinn had given her a crash course on salvage and the relevant interstellar laws. She imagined that the Zeren captain was ready to tear out his hair at that point. He didn’t sound like a patient man.

“Captain Antenius, I am doing my level best to provide you with an opportunity to do the right thing. But my patience is limited. In the end, my ship is armed and yours is not. You will surrender to me.”

Temera glanced up at the hologram that stood next to the captain’s chair. The hologram pointed to a discrete, unassuming little button on the arm of the chair. Temera pressed it. The entire ship shuddered as a pair of gauss batteries lifted out of the wings and a rail cannon nearly as long as the ship itself descended from the bottom of the Ankala Rising. Temera looked at the hologram again. The illusion of the middle-aged woman looked positively smug. The two ships weren’t equally matched. The freighter ship was still just a freighter ship with no armor. It would only take a few lucky shots from the cutter to rip the hull wide open. Then again, the rail cannon now hanging off the bottom of the ship would only need one shot to disable the cutter. A lucky hit from the Ankala Rising could, in theory, destroy the Zeren’s cutter. It wasn’t quite mutually assured destruction, which was the bargaining position that Temera preferred in situations like that, but it was close enough to give the Zeren captain pause. Plus, Temera knew something that the Zeren didn’t. She knew where Kalan Rinn was at that very moment.

“Captain Semmes, it seems that I too am armed,” said Temera. “So, perhaps you’d like to dispense with the posturing and simply return my crewman. I think that would be best for everyone involved, don’t you?”

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There was a much, much longer pause from the Zeren’s ship. When Semmes came back on the line, it sounded like his anger was one minor disappointment away from exploding.

“Those modifications can’t be legal.”

“You may be right, but I have them all the same.”

“You’re still not a match for me.”

“That might matter if I needed to win. But I have everything I need to drag you down into the hells with me. Are you ready to bet the life of everyone on your ship that I’m not serious?”

Em spoke up, “The Zeren ship has cut off communication, ma’am.”

“Have they powered up their weapons systems?” She asked.

“No. Their systems are still offline.”

Temera frowned at the viewscreen. “I hate playing chicken.”

The girl frowned at her. Temera lifted an eyebrow at her.

“What’s a chicken? And how do you play one?” Fresia asked.

A moment of inappropriate amusement seized Temera. She had to work harder than usual to keep the smile off her face.

“Oh, they’re fearsome beasts. Huge. They’ll run you down. The only way to avoid it is to win a staring contest with them. Most people don’t survive their encounters with them.”

The hologram fixed Temera with a profoundly maternal and disapproving look. The expression caught her so off-guard that she sat up straighter in the captain’s chair. She supposed it wasn’t particularly nice to deceive the girl. Temera decided to make it up to her. It would have to wait, though. The middle of a standoff with a gunship was not the right moment. She found herself wondering just what that older couple was up to at the moment. Aside from a brief meeting with Rinn after they’d discovered Petronan’s kidnapping, she hadn’t seen either of them. She supposed she could read that as the freighter captain offering them some kind of forgiveness. She wasn’t sold on that take of the situation. She’d seen the rage at the kidnapping bubbling beneath Rinn’s apparent calm. It was plausible that he’d simply demoted the couple down to a second-tier concern in the face of dead Zeren marines. No matter what, Temera was deeply curious about what the pair had done to earn the displeasure of the annoyingly self-possessed captain.

Then, there was the matter of the ship’s AI. Temera had been on a lot of ships over the years and interacted with a lot of AIs. Most of them were helpful, knowledgeable, and almost automatically identifiable as machines. The AI on this ship came across as human to a disturbing degree. More to the point, only Rinn seemed to have been aware of the fact that the ship even had an AI. She eyed the robot navigator. The robot worked too closely with the ship not to have known, but someone would have had to ask about the AI point blank. A question they would only know to ask if they already knew about the AI. Most disturbing of all was the fact that the AI had apparently killed four Zeren marines in hand-to-hand combat. They’d overridden the lock on the cargo bay and found her there waiting for them. All non-military AI were universally programmed to avoid directly harming human beings. Even military AI were hard coded with rules of engagement. All she could think was that Rinn had either disabled those safety features, which was supposed to be impossible, or the AI had never had them in the first place.

Neither option satisfied her. The fear of a violent machine intelligence was firmly fixed as a feature in the collective consciousness of humanity. It went all the way back to the disasters on old Earth that triggered the first human exodus out into space. It had taken a while to spread and be codified into a universal practice, but there was an unspoken agreement between the peoples of every world that all machine intelligences would receive those prohibitions against harming humans. Not even the most militant terrorists in the galaxy had violated that agreement. Unless the ship’s AI was thousands upon thousands of years old, old enough to predate those widespread prohibitions, it just couldn’t exist. Temera doubted that any AI could survive that long and remain sane. Had Rinn somehow found someone insane enough to build him an AI without those restrictions? If so, why would he want it? Something was wrong with the whole situation, but she couldn’t see how it all fit together. She’d ask him about it when he got back from his little trip. Who knew? He might even tell her.

Of course, the odd nature of the AI also meant that Temera had exactly zero chance of taking true command of the ship. She’d toyed with the idea for a half-second when Rinn announced his intentions. The ship would simply ignore her or worse. She’d have to play this out to his script.

“Em, do we have a fix on Captain Rinn’s location?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s made entry.”