The mechanical soldier squinted its eyes, adjusting its armored hockey mask like Gizzy would. It even had her build, armored breasts, broad shoulders and all.

"See how well you copy this move.” She said suddenly shifting her feet and running away. She slid to a stop at the end of a hallway. It followed in confusion. She peered around it as Vicki and her double exchanged strikes and bites. Vicki finally landed the neck chomp and snapped its mechanical spine, tearing off the creature's head. The wall behind her moved, and a bundle of cables gave way to another thin lanky creature, sprouting flesh and fangs.

The beefier titan approached Gizzy as the door shut behind it. She smirked, hoping it would separate them.

“Alright you tanky bastard,” She said while powering up shielding. “What are you waiting for? Fight me. Go for it.”

...

The cloning tank hummed and the doors opened. Vicki gasped and sat up, holding her head and looking terrified.

“It’s fine, you’re okay.” Vinn said putting a towel over her. “Did the message work?” he asked.

“I think so. We have to go get Jack.”

“Orders were to stay and guard the ship against… well, you. The you that’s not as friendly. Orders from the Captain, AND Gizzy are that you stay here and stay safe, and I’m not leaving you. Jack can handle himself, and we have several plans for what happens next. Just relax and get your wits together."

...

Jack stood dumbfounded, rifle ready as a pistol holstered ginger man about his age strolled down the hall. There was a strange familiarity to his swagger, almost cocky and rebellious. If the hair was salt and pepper black and grey, and he was build a bit sturdier, he could have almost passed for his father.

“Hey there. Captain Jeff Spade. Welcome to the SS Circe.”

“There are no life signs on the ship.” Jack said skeptically.

“Well, that’s because your equipment doesn’t know what it’s looking for. Kinda hard to scan for life signs when you don’t know every form of life out there to scan.”

“You seem awfully human to me. Too human.”

“Well what would you prefer, exactly Jacky boy?” He asked, “White hair? Fangs?” He smiled. “The last organics we encountered called us Mechanovore. We prefer to be identified by our hierarchy numbers, so you can call me Jeff or One."

“What’s your crew count?”

“5, if you count the kid. We came out here for exploration, and found something we couldn’t seem to get away from. Two things. Firstly, a search for a list of items, and secondly, this black hole it lead us to. Turns out this ship is older than we thought, and the engines just weren't taken care of. Hell of a mistake to make. We got in too close, got the item, and found out that the distortion drive was just itching to break.”

“This isn’t your ship.” Jack said.

“It is now. We found it and searched it. Found nothing but dead people who starved long ago and no escape pods. The old crew was looking for the lost items, they found one and died for the second. The corpses weren’t about to argue with us or pull rank, so it’s our ship and our home now. Our item, and until we got stuck, our quest to continue.”

“Midwest accent, military swagger, red hair. You’re not just too human for comfort, you’re too me for comfort.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, kinda the opposite of what I was going for. You know we can’t get it perfect, there’s a lot of guessing and filling in the blanks.”

“What do you really look like?” he asked.

“Nothing you would recognize. Hell, nothing your scanners even recognized as life. We blended in with the ship’s mechanical systems until we decided you weren’t here to kill us. You just want the ship to salvage, or did you come for the blade?”

“We want to help. We thought the ship was abandoned. If we knew there were survivors aboard we wouldn’t have been as aggressive. We didn’t even know there was an item onboard. They just seem to find us. You need to come with us, this ship is screwed, and it’s not worth saving even if we knew how to fix it and pull it out of the gravity well.”

“Well there’s your problem Jack. We can’t go with you. You wouldn’t like that very much. You see we’re not just living in the ship as a home, we need a ship to survive. Mechanovore means one who consumes the machine, but the machine is as much consuming us as we are it. The ship is our host. Something we connect to and blend with. In the same way your organs need skin and bone to connect to just to survive, we need a hull and wiring.” He said, sitting down on a swiveling chair and propping his feet up.

"You really want 5 living beings intertwined with your ship, controlling its every system, communicating with each other through the cables and cameras? Gizzy would not trust that, and she’s right for being paranoid. Trusting that power over your family is a mistake. No, she’d make a fine ship if your crew was more like the reptilians of this one… already dead and less likely to give a damn. Seeing as how half of your crew is engaged in combat as we speak, I don’t think we are a compatible set of families.”

“Gizzy and... Vicki?” he asked.

“Well, Nicole is quite friendly it seems, Gizzy is far too defensive to share, and Vicki… oh she is an entirely new animal than any we have faced before.”

“Careful, that’s my wife.” He said coldly.

“Are you sure?” He asked. "You know, we can’t exactly read your mind like a textbook, but we can scan enough to get general feelings, emotions, blurry images from your mind. Like this man you both respect and love, but barely remember.”

“My father, Roman. You took your form off of broken bits of my father’s memory and scans of me.”

“Well I couldn’t just borrow your cloning device, I don’t even know how it works, and you all seem very mixed about it. Your Nicole is a very kind soul. We’re not sure about Gizzy, but Vicki’s first thought was to kill. Now I don’t know what you do exactly, Jack, but I know you’ve seen a lot of death, and your first instinct was to understand your target and decide if you needed to kill them. Her first instinct was to go for it. That’s the woman you love? Your feelings and the blurry memories of her seem different. Sleeping the day away, reading books in the window nook in the rain, a lot of tears, but not a lot of blood and violence. When did she change?” He asked.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Less than a year ago. She got bitten by something that mutated her cancer.”

“After that… what changed more recently?” he asked.

“I’m still trying to understand that myself.”

“My job is to protect my family. We have that in common without copying your physical attributes. As the captain, and as a father, my job is defending this ship and my crew. Your shy little wife is making that very difficult.”

“You’re a hive mind, using the ship as a host for your family. And your ship is running out of fuel, so you need our help.” Jack pieced together.

“Which is the only reason 3 is not killing your Vicki. As long as she ship has parts to draw from, we can heal and keep fighting, but that woman is not here to help, she is here to destroy. She has torn through 3 bodies so far, as far as she knows each one is a life lost and she has no regret or intent to slow down. We like your crew, but we reject your help with her on our ship. Leave the ship, or we will have no choice but to fight back, not with hate or with defense, but with purpose and with effectiveness. You understand.”

“I think I do." He said, rubbing his eyes and sniffing slightly.

“Jack…” Nicole said behind him, standing beside a weird copy of herself, just a little more childlike and more seamonster. “You need to see something.” She said, holding out her phone.

“Home.” Said copy Nicole, booping the screen.

“I don’t understand, is this… live video?” He asked, looking betrayed.

“Jack, she’s not Vicki anymore… that is. It’s a perfect clone of her from 2 weeks ago. Vinn did 2 full medical checks, she’s identical, just like your copies. She’s safe and alone and she misses you, and she’s on the ship waiting for you to come back. Please don’t do anything stupid and make her have to watch you step out of that cloning tank again. Don’t get yourself killed. Let’s go home.”

“You cloned Vicki, behind our back. You intended to leave her here and let the ship fall into the back hole.” He sniffed, “And just let her die. Clone her back all shiny and new again.” He said, fighting his own feelings on the matter.

“Vicki might be in there, suffering, bottled up like a prisoner without a voice to scream or a hand to reach out, or she may be gone already. Jack, let her go, let that monster go and go back to the ship to the real Vicki.”

“We’re all just… disposable one time use people, aren’t we?” He said, starting to cry and scraping his fingers through his hair in frustration.

“Unfortunately we are. But we can live our best life the best way we can, and that life is waiting for you, on that ship, sitting with Vinn and… let's just say Dee for simplicity’s sake. Don’t stay and fight, don’t lose yourself too. Come on Jack. Let's go home, this mission is over. We’ll find the next item on the Medusa’s never-ending list of weird mystical shit, and eventually do what we came here to do… save the ones we love.” He silently turned and stormed off towards the ship, the doors opening and letting him pass.

“Nicole. The list you speak of.” He said. “We have failed against what you are still fighting against.” He said while handing her a heavy chrome cylinder with black end caps. “Take it with you. We don’t need it anymore. Maybe it’s what you came here to find.” He said.

“What if you need it?” She asked. He chuckled and held his arms up as if to show the ship around himself. “We’re bound to a sinking ship, hoping to be rescued by a ship with no crew, or waiting to die alone. No host ship is coming to save us. No crew willing to die or share to save us, and you can’t help us. Jack said the engines are shot. We have a month left to be a family together and then our story is over. Take it. It’s what we died for, someone should have it.”

“It’s not fair… can you take a shuttle craft. Will that sustain you?”

“Not all of us. None of us will be the one survive and leave the others. We are a doomed ghost ship as your friend would say.” He smiled sadly as Gizzy came tromping her way through a series of opening doors, bloody and bruised and looking annoyed.

“We’re done here.” She nodded. “Thanks for the hospitality.” She coughed.

“You’re missing one of your family.” He said. Nicole turned the phone around and showed Vicki playing cards with Vinn and Dee in the mess hall.

“No we’re not. That’s not Vicki. You said if we refused to leave, you would have no choice but to kill us.” She said.

“I did.” The captain said.

“I’ll take you up on that offer. Close the door behind us. Vent her into the black hole when it’s shut.”

“Someone so full of love and understanding, Captain of her ship, giving the order to kill one of her crew. I’m so sorry for whatever lead to this difficult choice.”

“I’m not.” Gizzy said coldly. “We all die, we all repeat. It’s kind of our thing. Vicki is long gone and whatever that thing is pretending to be her was going to kill us all, so fuck her and every Monstrous pile of Pitch from that forsaken planet of parasites. They can all die in hell. I know in my heart if she returned, one of us or all of us would die by her hand. That’s not Vicki anymore. One has to protect their family from evil. You’d do the same for yours. I’m sorry we can’t save you.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t save her.” He said.

“We did… on solid state drives and backup files. This isn’t a ghost ship, it’s a home. We’re the ghosts on your ship.” Gizzy said waving Nicole to follow.

She waved at the Nicole copy who waved back enthusiastically. She welled up and sobbed, knowing she’d never grow up and have a full life, blissfully ignorant to their impending doom.

...

Gizzy sat on the bridge, watching as a flash of light and a small puff of flame shot from the ship, venting out debris and a single human shaped body.

She felt oddly satisfied and moderately ashamed to feel that way. She looked over at the sample vial of the back Pitch, locked away in the freezer. She kicked her feet up, finishing the details on her neon orange fingernail polish. She swiveled her chair and raised them to the vial.

“So you can’t miss it.” She said, staring with hate as it stared back, frozen in the tube. “Next time you even think about touching one of my crew…” She whispered to the vial. “I’m going back to your world and I’m gonna burn into ashes and kill every last one of your kind and I’m gonna sleep like a baby that night. Alcohol free and smiling. So if you can hear me in there you sticky son of a bitch… play dead. Play dead until you believe it yourself.” She finished, heading out of the room and in the direction of a hot shower. She stopped at the lab to drop off the item, and a piece of the Mechanovore that broke off during the fight. She looked at the metal tube they gave them, noticing a thin precision seam in the middle. She gave it a hefty turn and it unscrewed. From the soft centered case she drew a large dagger, gold and what appeared to be black plastic or soft stone decorated the handle and hilt. waves of black raised embossing flowing down the green blade. She held it to the light, seeing the light pass through and illuminate it like jade or green glass.

“Oh, I bet you would make a fine little weapon. What are you designed to kill exactly?” She asked it as if it might answer. She twirled it in her hand and gave a thrust towards the wall, firmly sticking the end into the stone brick. It tore through as if the brick was made of wet clay. She frowned, realizing she should not have reached the wall from that range. She pulled it out and noticed that the blade had doubled in length. She placed it down on the table and it retracted back to its 11 inch dagger form. “Oh we’re gonna get along nicely.” She said while grabbing a pencil and paper to take measurements for a sheath.

...

In the darkness of the black hole’s shadow, The Circe sparked to life, bands of red light flowing down the sides and to the engines. Vicki stepped over the bodies and down into a square pit, surrounded my glass mirrors. Her red eyes glowed and her naked body was covered only by streams of liquid metal, connecting to wires and the mechanical arms hanging from the ceiling. One of them reached up to meet her hand as she handed it a blue vial of Osirian DNA.

The display screen suspended in front of her showed the ship in red with escape velocity time reading 47 days, fuel expenditure in 23 days. The ships lighting brightened and the entire vessel buzzed with a blue glow. The screen flickered and now showed the ship in blue, reading Escape velocity time 22 days, fuel expenditure 677 days.

“Well that’s more like it.” She smirked, her right eye changing from red to blue and glowing brightly. Pieces of mechanical parts assembled behind her like a skeletonized throne as she sat back and began lightly drumming her claws on the armrests. “See you soon, Jack.” She whispered, grinning and waiting, staring at the escape velocity countdown as it lowered in seconds. It ticked down like a time bomb in the dark as lights and non essential power rerouted to the FTL drives.