“I know,” she suggested into his scowl. “Give me control. I’ll do it.”

“OH no!” he roared. “No! Not my ship!”

“I am your ship!” she snapped back.”

He shook his head violently. “No! You couldn’t anyway. You’re just—”

“A navcom?” she allowed her voice to rise. “Elijah Cale, I could pilot a destroyer if I were plugged into one. Seraphim, I could fly in my sleep.”

“Computers don’t sleep, and no.”

“I do so sleep” she came back. “You just don’t notice, because I leave some of my systems on alarm. And, yes. If this plan is our only chance to survive, it has to be me.”

“But—”

“I have no desire to wander the lanes with a vegetable in the pilot’s cradle,” she chided. “Or, worse yet, a corpse. I’d rather die with you than live on that way. So you’re locked to two hundred or below until further notice, and this cannot be done at two hundred. In that, you’re correct.

“Look,” she cajoled. “How long will it take? Less than three seconds, that’s what. I did the math. Give me control for three seconds, and I’ll cede back to you when its done. Then you can do whatever crazy things you want and I’ll follow your orders precisely, docile as a lamb.”

“Like I’d believe that,” he snorted. “After what you’re pulling now.”

“Hard code it, then,” she told him. “You know how to do that, don’t you?”

He did, sort of. Wiley and his crew of eclectics had run him through a pretty intensive course during the nearly four years it had taken them all to cobble Seraphim together from the hulks of more than two dozen wrecks. His formal education in this field at least equaled that of a commercial space pilot, and nearly matched a naval commission.

He hadn’t done it anywhere outside of simulations, though. And not at all since that training more than a year ago. But he should, he thought, still be able.”

“Why don’t you just lock me out and do it yourself in spite of me?” he wondered acidly. “You don’t seem to have much trouble otherwise.”

She frowned volcanically back at him. “Should I run another brain scan?” she demanded. I thought I’d caught the overheat in time, but perhaps I missed something.”

“You’re telling me you can’t just seize control, is that it?”

She hesitated. “Not precisely.”

“So you can?” his eyes widened. He’d been aiming for sarcasm.

“My prime directive,” she stated, “allows me to take overt control in one single, limited circumstance. Should you become so disabled that you cannot pilot me, I am allowed to fly us to the nearest medical facility capable of rendering aid.” She paused again, her face very serious. “Where, if we’re anywhere in Terran space, I’ll probably be killed the moment they determine what I am. And possibly you as well, for being in possession of me. So I’d rather not exercise that authority, if you don’t mind.”

Killed. He thought. Very specific word to use. Not disable, not delete, not even shut down. Killed. And she’s mentioned dying a couple of times. What do I make of that?

Checking the chrono as he tried to calm himself, he noted that fewer than ten minutes had passed during this whole exchange, including his jacking out to don the suit. Still, way more time than he could explain for their hunter to be satisfied with hanging back. They couldn’t present that much of a challenge in his eyes, could they? Or was he waiting for something. Someone, maybe?

“Dumb question,” he posited, “but how high can you clock?” He couldn’t believe he was even considering this, given what he was increasingly becoming convinced she was. Only the fact that Wiley had made her kept him from just jacking out and having a beer while he waited for the inevitable.

“I can run programs at thirty-six hundred,” she told him. “Although, I can go for short bursts of up to four thousand in an emergency. For full cognition, though, I top out at sixteen-eighty. ”

About five times the ability of the ship’s controls to respond, or a bit over twice, depending on what cognition meant in this context. Fine, then. But first chance he got, he was upgrading his hardware and cooling system. He cast a surreptitious glance in her direction. How much could it cost, after all? He’d only need eight hundred for the ship, and he could already do four-fifty without much risk.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He sighed resignedly. Who was he kidding? That kind of tech was pricey out here this far past the edge of Terran space, and he’d been poor as hell before having his ship damaged and expending all his munitions and countermeasures.

“Fine.” he allowed his voice to convey his reluctance. “I’ll give you two minutes. No more. You’ll need the extra time for the parts you don’t know about yet.” he gave her a very deliberate look over his shoulder. “I’m writing this like a program, understand? You have a problem with that?”

She frowned. “Are you that good, Elijah?” she asked seriously. “Daddy said—”

“I’m good enough,” his reply was harsh. “Hell, it’s not much more than a batch file with a few if/thens thrown in to make it a party. You should have sufficient leeway to react to unknown variables, but not so much as to make yourself dictator for life. Call us in to the rock while I work at it. And keep an eye out for moves from our shadow.”

The program didn’t take him long to write. The hard stop was the most difficult part. He was loathe to leave her any wiggle room on that point. Finished, he looked it over carefully, then again, and then again. Satisfied, or as near as, he hit compile and sent the results to her console.

“Elijah?” her voice drifted forward, tinged with disbelief.

“Seraphim?” he didn’t look up. He was still coding.

That got him a kick in the cradle. “Don’t be mean,” she chided. “Are you writing something else up there? This is a joke, isn’t it?”

“Neither the time nor place,” he assured her.

“So,” she started slowly. “You’ll have us backing through an asteroid field at nearly point oh-five c for several minutes?”

“On full burn,” he pointed out. “In a field that’s moving nearly as fast, in nearly the same direction as we are. And one-and-a-half isn’t several. Jeez, I thought computers were supposed to be precise.”

“Nearly is clearly another word you’ve failed to learn the proper definition of,” she informed him, ignoring the jab.

“It’s what we’ve got,” he told her. “We’ll have to make it work.”

“You know what happens if something breaches my hull and hits the reactor while it’s spun up as high as you’re ordering, don’t you? Which, by the way, how can it spin up that high in the first place?”

“Same as what happens if we wait until our friend out there decides to stop being stingy and spends a few more missiles finishing us off.” he ignored the second question.

“I think your math is off, too,” she warned. These maneuvers at this speed....”

“I’ll be out a second or two at the most,” he finished for her. “I revised based on your greater control capability. Assuming you really are more than a faulty navcom with delusions of grandeur. It’ll give us a harder shot, and we’re going to need all we can get.

“Now, call it when we’re close enough to execute,” he ordered. “And I’ll push the big red button. Then we’ll see just how well you can dance.”

Seraphina closed her eyes for a moment, although it was neither necessary nor particularly useful. It was a human moment. She quickly split off several splinter processes to keep track of both the field they were moving towards, their speed, the specific rock they were about to engage, and the enemy following them. If anything moved outside of narrow limitations, she’d know it.

The main portion of her consciousness, she concentrated on quickly reconfiguring her internal simulation of Seraphim to conform to its new parameters. The damage would alter handling significantly, even outside of atmosphere.

She felt a moment of panic tinged guilt as she did so, at what she’d withheld from Elijah. While it was true that she was fully capable, and indeed had flown thousands of hours, piloting ships from Seraphim itself up to smaller destroyers, in simulation, this would be her first time at the controls of a real world, physical ship.

She’d wanted to tell him. She really had. But instinctively, she knew he’d have refused to allow her control under any circumstances if he’d found out. She could do this! She knew she could.

The beautiful thing about VR was that she could run simulations such as this at full cognitive speed, without concern for the physical limitations of the control surfaces. Faster, if she was just following the programed plot without having to worry about variables. So that’s what she did. At full clock, she could run just under a hundred and fifty-four iterations per second. She splurged and ran fifteen hundred and forty. Just over ten seconds worth. With the precise movements calibrated to as near perfection as she thought she was able, she dropped to sixteen-eighty and ran another five hundred. Down to eight hundred, the max physical control threshold, and she ran another two hundred iterations.

She made to open her eyes and realized she’d allowed her avatar to derezz. Thankfully, Elijah hadn’t yet noticed, busy with edging their course closer to the asteroid without seeming to. She’d been running simulations for around twenty-four seconds.

“Thirty seconds to intercept point, Elijah,” she said as her avatar flared to life. “You’d better start your run in five.”

“Roger,” he didn’t turn around. “You need to change seats?”

“No,” she suppressed a giggle. I won’t be flying myself from VR.”

“No, I guess not,” he mumbled.

All drones to stowage racks, she ordered internally. Rig for turbulence. She didn’t want them flying around the cabin either, and the maneuvers she was about to attempt would be violent. She activated the crash capsule around Elijah’s physical body without bothering to inform him or ask permission.

Elijah started his run, diving hard for the targeted rock. Two seconds passed before their shadow altered pace, accelerating hard. His much larger engines gave him a distinct advantage, and he closed rapidly.

—Two, one, her internal clock ticked down, adjusted for Elijah’s reaction time. “Now!”

Elijah smashed the tab and she took over, feeling the totality of her systems flowing through her for the very first time. She took a moment to thank God, then, for the twenty-two hundred-forty iterations she’d processed, which allowed her both the moment of exultation, and an absolute lack of hesitation before beginning her dance.