You sit in your captain’s chair. White and blue stars glide across the Mr. Memory’s cockpit. This particular light-speed jump to nowhere comes to another brief stop, pulling the ship back into the void of space.
Dyle’s sensors scan the area, detecting no suns, planets, installations, craft, or anything of importance. A console lights up, showing that the communications array is once more in use. You watch Ø place a call to the Cimarron, which an operator claims, again, cannot be located for a connection.
“Think how lucky I am to have been seated here,” Dyle says. He recovers enough processing power to once more harass you about your decision-making. As if it were you making the decisions, and not the universe surrounding you.
“Come on, Dyle. Where would you rather be? Stuck in the middle of nowhere with a new crewmate, or spaced at the bottom of an ocean?”
“It’s a toss-up, I can tell you that.”
Another hail shoots out across the galaxy, directed towards the pirate queen’s ship. Unseen switchboard operators chitter-chatter as they route, reroute the communication from planet to planet in search of an endpoint, slurring their requests in local Cushitic, Strine, or other multitudinous Imperial-Xenic dialects. They churn their hand-cranked ionic magnetos, spitting tobacco onto concrete floors, some beneath plastic ceilings, others thatched, and many more adrift, like you, in the languid void of space. Their galactic game of hot potato finally ends at a conclusion that grants your mare a gratifying catharsis.
This time, the Cimarron explicitly declines her call.
You notice Dyle keeps his processing power spread thin. Even after a good fifteen cycles of familiarity, his sensors track her hoofsteps. A three-dimensional ghost of her thermal signature projects her every movement, the hologram trotting around the cockpit to her ignorance. Surveillance, he’s claimed, following her around the ship with suspicion. Either that, or curiosity.
A passive listing shows vital signs displayed next to yours. They track the medical impossibility of two synchronized nervous systems, harmonized, marching arm-in-arm. You activate the console, bringing Dyle’s consciousness back to the cockpit.
He understands your silent, unsaid reprimand to leave the filly alone for once. Killing time, you flip through the digital articles on file.
“Privateer, Lover Commit Corporate Espionage,” reads the longest article. Included is the unsavory video footage of a previous gunfight, an exclusive interview with a manhandled V-Level executive, and a still photo of two fugitives in a tender embrace. The item pairs with a fresh bounty listing on a familiar piratical mare, and is earmarked with information concerning a courier-turned-corsair, and, according to the central communications director of New Ta’izz, a particularly hostile rogue AI.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“You and your dopey schemes,” Dyle muses as the communicator fruitlessly powers down.
“Sounds like someone doesn’t want to be part of the team anymore.”
“Don’t worry. You can include me. I’m a cooperator.”
Your mare reenters the bridge. She peers over your side at the digital articles with a serious face. A frustrated snort brushes against your wounded shoulder as she meanders around the cockpit, dawdling at three-dimensional diagnostics screens at random, tweaking her digits over the buttons of nonfunctioning systems. She’s waiting for a goading before speaking her mind, a behavioral quirk you’ve come to recognize with familiarity.
“No luck?”
“None,” the mare responds immediately. She chews her lips and glances about for inspiration. Without a base of operations, or at least a combat-worthy ship, you both won’t get much further.
She drags her palm across your central console, tracing the declined call’s location. Her navigation bounces between the various systems, triangulating within space, focusing on Hu Shih, the commerce station where the Cimarron’s position was last charted.
Its registration lists its captain as one Sylvia Garobbio. You explore yet another recorded bounty listing, this one for a familiar caprine confidence trickster. Wanted for the crimes of defrauding a medical conglomerate of several thousand credits and leading her own recently stolen pirate fleet. Last known vessel of command, the Cimarron.
Your mare tosses the information to you and Dyle as she approaches from behind. She leans on your shoulders, letting her arms drape over your chest, pressing you into the captain’s chair.
A stray hand massages your bandages, testing their resilience after another application of bene-gel. Numbed pain radiates beneath her skin, shockwaves cascading against your chest. She feels it too, an empathetic pain blossoming beneath her bodysuit, rippling under her branded pelt. Her serious scowl falters, briefly, as she interrogates you anew.
“Have you been to the Hsi Yu system?”
“Can’t say I have. Dyle, what about you?”
“I’m not quite sure.”
“Doesn’t seem like Dyle has either.”
“Well, that’s where we’re going.”
Her fingers dance across the navigational console, selecting a meandering route that takes you through pirate space, unregistered gladiatorial sites, and coordinates of what you know subconsciously to be weapons caches.
“Really? On who’s orders?”
“Mine, yours, ours…” she sighs. “I can’t keep track anymore.”
She pauses over the input command. Dyle’s internal processes analyze the total distance and time to destination, chugging through the trillions of mathematical calculations. It will take you across tens of thousands of star systems, into uncountable situations of life-or-death, and staring down the barrels of creatures you haven’t begun to imagine.
The pirate queen draws a single, subdued breath of anticipation as you grip the ethereal reins with both hands. You take a chance, giving her a slight nod. As she confirms the flight plan, you both watch the far-flung stars drag themselves across the walls of the cockpit, the whispers of fate throwing you into what was always meant to be an inescapable future.