Your vision flutters open. Above you is the ceiling of your captain’s quarters. Gray, boiler-plate in its construction. Familiar in its inadequacy, along with every other miserable meter of the Mr. Memory.
A defeated sigh escapes your lips. They’re cracked, numb with pain from your previous scuffle. Fresh-picked fig tastes dance on your tongue. It’s another drug-fueled mirage. A disappointing reminder you haven’t learned your lesson the first time.
From this point forward, there is to be no more spezie on this craft. Nor any pirates, if you’ve anything to say about it.
Since you’re breathing, you assume the situation has resolved itself. You feel your injured leg, now bound like your shoulder. The lack of pain tells you it’s professionally dressed, and a dose of bene-gel has already been applied.
You prop yourself to your elbows in search of Dyle and his reassuring blue apparition. Instead, you find the mare. Sitting at your desk, absentmindedly flipping through the stolen datapad. There she is, covered in another crimson wave of dried gore, no doubt seeped through every crevice, encasing rogue hair rigid. It’s nearly camouflaged by her sorrel pelt, cascading from her unnaturally stained merlot lips, which she chews aimlessly.
But she’s pulled herself together. Gone is her filthy black body suit. A health hazard, you surmise. Instead, she’s encased in plastic.
It’s that failure of a poncho, a prototype, one of the first the pirate crew had pressed for her. Too small at the waist, where it’s torn under pressure, hinting at a stomach of contorting fur. Shoulders mended too broad. They fold back as she lounges, catching the recycling air, covering her in a swaying velificatio. A rancid green, opaque enough to shield her body beneath in shadows.
Under your lights, however, its contents are clear. Backlit, face scowling as always, perspiration drags along the plastic fault lines. They crinkle as she places one hoof atop the other, affixed on your desk. Droplets trace the knife-cut pant break from her calf down, past her thigh, covered in scars, and her purple athletic shorts, torn from continued use.
She grips her collar, shaking it with a huff, fanning free the hot air that collects around her combat brassiere. Like the rest of her, it’s a tree ring, tracking the cycle’s preceding events, at least three different smatterings of blood sullying it. Her sternum’s slave barcode sparkles, however, the diamond of white evidently spit-shined to its current perfect condition. It contorts, along with her oblong head, as she senses you rise. She turns to you expectantly, almost with a hint of concern.
“How long was I out?” You huff through your tired, burning lungs.
“A quarter of a cycle. But you’re mainly in one piece.”
“Mainly?”
“Sure,” she replies. A digit of hers circles towards your leg. Bound, expertly.
“And Dyle?”
“Repairs. He wanted me to tell you he’s running a reboot or two while we’re locked in here.”
“Locked in here?”
“If you don’t believe me, you’re welcome to try the door.”
Claustrophobia blossoms as you press the communicator to summon Dyle. As the mare described, only a busy signal responds. A stillness reverberates from the engines rather than the usual humming. The hatch is reinforced, as expected. It’s the only door besides the cockpit that is. When it comes to upgrades, you’re not exactly made of money.
You tilt your body, politely turning towards your cellmate. Surprisingly, you feel a presence at your hip. Your digits caress your sidearm. It’s your trusty 418, somehow recovered from the previous planetside engagement.
Had you remembered to grab it, while you squealing in pain, half-drowning on the tiled office flooring amidst the monsoons? Not a chance. Nor Reggie’s doing, you surmise, the now-deceased android finding little value in a mass-produced artifact like this. You wonder why the mare must have recovered it for you.
At the same time, you wonder if it has enough stopping power to drop her before she could make it across the room.
“It won’t do you much good,” she replies to your inner monologue. “Didn’t do Reggie any good either. And she had double the distance between us, and a gun that can actually pack a punch.”
She’s correct in her engagement assessment. The absurdity of the situation tickles you. What would Dyle do if he woke up and found one, or the both of you dead? He would berate whoever was left standing, no doubt. You for trying something out of the ordinary, her for reacting completely within her nature.
“Your ship said he’d toss us both out of the airlock if you didn’t wake up. He’s pretty loyal for that intelligent of an AI,” Ø once more interjects to you, this time without moving her mouth. Your feelings of confusion are quashed as a foreign emotion speaks to you through your orgones, overshadowing your local reactions of unease. She senses your telepathic bafflement and shrugs with her own. “I don’t know how we’re doing it, either.”
“Maybe it was the spike,” you muse.
An image flashes through you. It’s the command bridge of a distant vessel. You congratulate your crew on another successful prison break. You shake the hand of a familiar, smiling mercenary as he pledges to you his undying loyalty. Over the next two cycles, you both spike yourselves, hoping to integrate your psyches for better combat performance. Spezie, after all, holds the secrets to telepathy, magnetism, even mind-activated weaponry. Whether this is achievable, or only superstition, is of no genuine concern to you.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The phantom ship disappears from your view, the Cimarron galloping from reach, the mare’s memories scattering across the cosmos into nothingness.
“It wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. Since New Ta’izz, I’ve been able to see what you’ve tried to hide,” she sighs. “At first, I thought I was just getting the better of the meat. But after your spike, I can guess what you’ll do a step ahead. Before you can even decide. I’ve never heard of a synch that powerful, and not from a few handfuls of bottom-shelf spezie.”
“Do you think it’s your illness? Even if you its genetic, could it be contagious?”
“What illness?” she huffs. Intentionally, she avoids your eye contact. You want to push the issue further, to give some meaning to the murders.
She shifts uncomfortably. One hoof back over the other. Nervous hot air escapes her plastic collar. Her scowl grows more intense, as if she’s trying to block something from the front of her mind. Another memory, reacting to your request, effortlessly overpowering her mind’s defenses with a brief suggestion. It’s as if she were asleep again, unable to put up a mental wall to keep you away.
---
Waves of information crash and recede against you. There had been another mare. One of your sisters. Another one of over a hundred copy-pasted fillies that have meandered aimlessly through the galaxy.
You found her when you inspected the cargo of a captured slave ship. Someone had resold her when her legs failed, when her tendons disintegrated without explanation, when her bones became brittle at such a young age. Not much of the star athlete anymore. Not equipped for much else, either.
She touched your face, her same face, with those black-tipped digits. They were filthy, too. Unkempt and forgotten like yours. She whispered through her thin lips, her cheeks sunken, sickly and unnaturally aged. Apologies, she cried, sincere ones for your doomed sisterhood.
She said the disease affects you all. It grows in severity as the genetic line is further squeezed. Every five years, like you both, another sister would suffer the same curse of life. The industrial cloning process will continue, as it has for hundreds of years, barren soil forced to grow vessels for your partitioned, diseased soul.
Your sister wept as you grew angry beyond reason, your genome calling out for blood as it finally vibrated past its stable confines.
Your vision bathed in crimson as you rampaged, chewing your teeth into flesh. You hacked the captured slavers down, slicing skin from muscle to the horror of your crew. No more prisoners, no more hostages, you claimed as the Yuan Shih-Kai broke up against Eureka’s atmosphere. Deliberately scuttled, lost with all hands.
A certain diplomatic android contemplated whether your psyche had finally broken. Another familiar maquis offered her a cigarette and a reassuring smile. On your bridge, staring at the crumpling hulk, metal screeching towards the planet’s surface, you still tasted pulsating marrow. It wriggled between your teeth, bringing you Pavlovian satisfaction and proving your sister correct in her assumption.
That you, too, were unwell.
You brought your sister to a colony with rolling plains and sweeping valleys. One far beyond the reaches of civilization. She was gifted to a cloister who cared for her, the Cimarron unable to accommodate freeloading, no matter how familial. Whatever her illness, the abbess told you at her bedside, it was terminal.
In her tow, you dawdled near the infirmary, along the cobblestone pathways buttressed with broom bush and snapdragon. Sun showers drifted across Aprilia’s quiet surface, lingering over the convent. As always, you accepted the rain with a huff, making no effort to avoid it, letting your mane sop across your eyes.
A curse, the abbess mused beneath her habit. Such a burden could only be brought forth by the uncaring void, caused by some severed attachment to compassion. Until this connection is renewed, the pitiful offspring of such a covenant shall continue to self-destruct. You had pressed her, only once, for her assessment.
And the abbess recommended prayer.
---
Ø chews her lips. She feels her subconscious betraying her own defenses, allowing you full access to her mind. You snoop through, without regard for her opinions. Just as you had done those cycles ago, unconscious with her, fiery jasmine in your lungs, laying fur to skin in a chaste embrace.
Her ears plant on the back of her head, embarrassed. Perhaps she recognizes she needs help. Or, more likely, the mesmerism you feel compels her further. Suggestions, questions, drip off your tongue as sweat from her plastic cocoon. She finds herself unable to resist for long.
“Do you know how close you are to a cure?” You pry. “I assume that’s why you’ve come this far.”
“I’m close. Don’t ask me how I know, but it’s here.” She taps the datapad with confidence, towards that diamond of ocean in the endless expanse of galactic darkness, Nuovo Portolago. “And if we’re connected as I think we are, you’ll know it’s there, too.”
She’s right. It’s the end of your expedition. Once you’re there, the story will end. Whether she’s imprinted that concept within you, or the spike has altered your consciousness, you can’t surmise.
The roots of your teeth grow warm as you look into the holographic presentation of the planet. It beckons you to its marble colonnades and hand-chiseled fountains. It asks you to dip a shoulder into the saltwater, to purify yourself and all your wounds.
An unseen force nudges you. It hints, telling you she relies on your compliance. It’s why she’s kept you alive this far, to her own detriment.
“I don’t know why, but I need you alive,” she whispers as her hazel eyes stare into yours. Her tail stands on end. A cool air pings through her ribs, and a sense of frustration forms against her own ignorance. You’ve subdued her without a shred of conscious effort, and are now free to violate her psyche against her will.
This turns into a fury. It broadcasts to you in an avalanche of contusions and deglovings. Ten thousand ways she wishes to snuff you out, the object of her confusion. She’d happily trade you for her two crewmates were she given the opportunity. But she knows she can’t make that bargain, and if presented, she would decline anyway.
Instead of her blood rage, this murderous cavalcade comes to an immediate, premature halt. A magnetic force discards the emotion. It’s that same energy which has drawn you from a chance encounter halfway across the galaxy. It pushes you closer once more.
Somewhere in the recesses of her untamed mind, she has your same realization. You’re just plain stuck together.
“Do you know why it has to be you?” she asks.
“No,” you admit.
The ethereal force brings her to her feet. Strings of fate beckon her towards you, from trillions of kilometers away, and she places her hand on your wounded shoulder. She takes her place next to yours, and as her emotions oscillate within the raging torrent, you bring a palm atop hers. You don’t need to open your mouth to ask for her reassurance.
“But it’s almost over, right?”
“Sure,” she guesses.
The knife of the physical world cuts between your connection, and the hum of engines nearly ruptures your eardrums. Dyle’s consciousness wakes and regains control as you hear the room’s lock disengage. You both withdraw from your chaste embrace.
You take a moment to prepare a witticism before your AI can announce your imminent arrival to Nuovo Portolago.