It took another hour of walking, that comforting feeling of warmth that my shell gave me growing slowly as it pulled me closer and closer. The music helped pass the time, but Joel was right. I needed the exercise.
Being a manufactured human being meant I hadn’t spent much time actually using my body in my formative years, or even after leaving the simulation. I hadn’t really done much to hone my body after I was liberated from Foundation, either. I was skinny and frail, probably because of all the time I spent in the core module, basically disconnected from my physical body altogether, and there really wasn’t much sign of that changing. Hell, I didn’t really care to change it.
That is, until I was forced to use my body like this. I always wished I had taken the time to get in a little exercise when it came time to actually push myself.
By the time I was able to attach myself back to my home psychic network, I was exhausted. I’d already finished the second water ration I’d begrudgingly accepted on Joel’s terms, and I was more hungry than I’d remembered being for a long time.
Today had been exhausting. More so than usual on days with commissions like this. It was a lot of new experiences for me, too; none of which were particularly good. I was ready to be done with surprises for a while and shut myself in the core module for a week. I imagined it washing away all the blood and grime, and letting me forget my aches and soreness.
I felt home before I saw it. I smiled to myself as my mind linked up with the rest of my true self. It was good to feel complete. The reactor gently purred at my presence, and I felt power and warmth flowing through me in my gut, reinvigorating me for one final push home. The throbbing in my head returned, but with a rush of endorphins this time, the sense of power and familiarity overriding my exhaustion. As my shell sprang to life, I gave a sigh of relief.
“Guess that means we’re close.” Joel watched my obvious change in demeanor, understanding my habits well enough to read the meaning behind them. He had relaxed significantly as we traveled, but he still habitually checked behind us to ensure we weren’t being tailed. Joel was never the type of person who turned off until we were well and truly safe, and even then, he always felt at least a little bit on edge. It was probably a soldier thing. “Everything okay on board?”
I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the data stream, happy to have returned from the desert of technology between the compound and my ship. My constructed map of Theseus filled my internal vision, and I spirited my way through the digital copy of my ship, activating each of the sensors in quick succession as I scanned the interior for the rest of the crew. Like I thought, it was mostly barren. Only Doc and Lily remained on board. Even Ray had stepped out to take place in the rescue operation, despite being a threat to our cover if anyone saw her. That put a smile on my face. I was touched she would put herself at risk for me, even if I’d rather she hadn’t.
“Yeah, nothing exciting going on while we were gone.” I smiled. I was glad nothing happened while I was causing problems out on the frontier. “Seems we’re the first home.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, all the equipment the others had with them.” Joel began climbing up the side of the crater we’d hidden the ship in, and I followed along his footholds. A geographic relic of debris smashing into the moon eons ago made for good cover. It kept Theseus completely out of sight except from the sky, and had been a useful base of operations for us in the area.
I couldn’t wait to get back to the colony proper, though. We’d found a series of jobs and a new contact in the region, so we’d been out here for a couple of weeks now. I wasn’t exactly the type to go out on the town often, but I was starting to miss the conveniences of living in the middle of civilization.
I also just wanted to fly.
As I peaked the lip of the crater, I looked down at the rest of myself with a proud smile.
A massive black-painted metal scout starship sat at the center of the crater, its various modular components making it look like a stitched together blocky monster of a ship that didn’t subscribe to any modern convention of ship design. It was a one of a kind relic, and a bastion of chaos no one could possibly guess at the origin of. And it was me. I flexed my wing flaps, released a small burst of gas from the propulsion system to clear my vents, and let out a satisfied sigh as I flexed the psychic connection, stretching my hydraulic parts and asserting my connection as best as I could without immersing myself in the heart of the ship directly.
The brand new cargo bay door opened downward slowly as we slid down the inside of the crater toward our home, the outer panel bending to my thought. I watched my internal sensors as I approached, immediately seeing Lily’s wheelchair start moving slowly down the hall as soon as the sound of the large bay door groaning open filled the ship. I hurried inside, leaving Joel to unpack some of his gear onto the shelves we passed. With one last burst of effort, I climbed the stairs up to the second floor and threw the hallway door open to greet my sister before she could manage to get to the catwalk.
“Lily!” I called as I leaned down and hugged my identical sister around her chair. She let out a quiet chuckle at my enthusiasm, and she leaned into my chest as I held her, feeling like I might just lie down on her chair with her.
“Don’t do that again,” she warned me with a half-hearted sigh. “Seriously, it doesn’t end well for you next time.”
My eyes went wide as those words struck me. Okay. No more ‘simple’ solo espionage for me, then. I took my sister's warnings seriously, and I know she’d had to endure a vision of some potential future where awful things happened to me or someone I loved, so I definitely didn’t want to put her through that in reality as well. “Got it,” I nodded. “Sorry if I wor...worried you.”
I reluctantly let her go and shakily returned to standing on my own, and she smiled up at me. “I saw you trying it another time. That meant you survived this time, right?” She shrugged her shoulders. She already knew I would make it home safe, this time. The perks of precognition, I supposed. Since she’d been freed of Foundation’s grip, she’d gotten much better at finding the silver linings in her visions, reading between the lines of what they showed her, and working out truths she could infer rather than focusing solely on what she saw directly, even if the meaning of the visions themselves weren’t always so obvious. “Come on. Sit down. You must be tired.”
I shook my head. “Gonna need to stay st-standing so Aisling can yell at me in debrief.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, trying to look tough. “Not that t-tired, anyway.”
“Liar.” Lily rolled her eyes at me, turning her chair to face me. I saw her give a small grimace as she inspected my clothes, a worried expression crossing her face as she spotted the dried blood soaked into my outfit.
“Yeah, liar.” Doc called from the other end of the hall, his neatly-trimmed blond hair peeking through the open door to my heart. “Think I can’t see your biometrics? You’re exhausted. Get in here. I’m looking you over.”
They were both, of course, completely right. They knew me too well. I was barely standing by this point. My head still hurt, and I still felt a little disoriented and consciously distant after Mouse’s shelling, even though now it was harder to tell if the dissociation was from that or Theseus’s mere presence.
“Fine,” I conceded with a shrug, walking past Lily. Her chair’s motor whirred as she followed behind me. Her body had never fully recovered from the psychosomatic trauma she’d undergone in her short stint as a machine core half a year ago. She had regained enough control of her upper body to make use of her arms with some effort, but she had no strength behind her limbs, and I was beginning to worry that she wouldn’t regain control of her legs at all. It made me feel guilty looking at her sometimes, since I’d been the one to put her in that chair. She kept insisting that she was getting better, though, and Doc was beginning to set her on to the next stage of physical therapy, trying to get her to stand again. I just hoped it wasn’t for nothing.
“You are right, though. Aisling’s going to be very mad.” She said it with the kind of certainty that made me unsure if she had for some reason had a vision of my debrief or if she was just that certain she understood the captain by now.
Stepping into my heart, I stared past the infirmary with a smile at the massive metal sphere that took up the entire back half of the room. Oh, how I longed to step inside and truly relax.
“Nope. Table.” Doc drew my attention from the core module and motioned toward one of the examination tables. The room wasn’t as barren as it was when we arrived on Io, anymore. Considering how often I spent in sensitive medical states, we’d upgraded from one to three tables, along with a longer term hospital bed that was currently occupied in one corner by a frail figure hooked up to an IV and various medical monitors.
The former captain of the starship Demitrius had been through quite a lot, and had still not awoken from the coma we’d found her in when we extracted her from the core module she’d hidden in when her ship was destroyed. The woman had thin, mostly-grey hair with a few shocks of blonde, and she’d been staring blankly up at the ceiling for the past several months, but it was critical we keep her alive so that she might one day soon wake up and be able to pass ownership of her ship’s machine core onto me.
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Isabelle, the salvaged machine core of the Demitrius, was almost a normal core like any other. Sure, she was heavily modified to operate as a pirate starship core, freed from many of the built-in ‘safety’ protocols that mass-manufactured cores had programmed into them, but she was still just a biological computer. She hadn’t been awakened to become sapient like I had. I’d gotten to know her over the past few months, and though she could only offer limited information and control of her systems without permission from her owner, I felt like I was closer to understanding the gap between people and machine cores thanks to her. Part of me still wondered if I could wake her up.
Doc snapped his fingers in front of my face and I came to attention again, realizing I’d zoned out once more. “Something’s wrong?” He asked.
“Mmn...” I nodded slowly, holding a hand up to my head. “Headache. Mouse might have had to blow something up... maybe a meter away from me.”
“Whoa. Is that... safe?” Lily asked uncertainly.
“No, it’s not. Could have caused a concussion. Because you don’t have enough brain trauma already.” Doc grumbled as he guided me toward one of the examination tables, gently forcing me to sit on the edge of it.
“Not again...” Lily clicked her tongue. “Meryll, you need to be more careful. Please.”
“Sorry...” I mumbled. I did have quite a tendency to put myself in harm’s way, didn’t I? Well, it was already done now. Best not to dwell on it. I closed my eyes and turned off the empowering music that had still been playing inside my brain. I needed to calm my senses. “C-Core module would help.”
“Not convinced it would.” Doc gave a dramatic sigh and tapped my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I saw him holding his hand toward me with a pill in it. “Come on. I can tell you need some painkillers.” I snatched the pill from him, swallowed it without hesitation, then settled down to rest my back against the table without a word. “Where’s it hurt?” He asked next.
I groaned. “Back of my head? I th-think?” It was hard to place exactly where the aching was coming from, and it was fading fast from the pill he gave me anyway. “I’ll be fine. Not like my implant got hacked again.”
“Even if it’s not bad, small injuries build up in our line of work. No head injury risks for a while, okay?” He rifled around in a drawer full of tools for a moment before he returned to my side and forced my eyelid open, shining a light directly into it. “Pupils dilating...” he mumbled to himself.
“Ow. Can we not do that?” I grunted, pushing him away after a moment.
“Any dizziness? Blurred vision? Nausea?”
“Yes and yes. A little nauseous before, but it’s passed.” I answered in order, too tired to object to the questioning. “Couldn’t aim st-straight when I needed to... Lucky Joel was there. He says I was real dis...oriented for a while after the blast, too.”
“You had to shoot at someone...?” Lily asked with more than a little concern and disappointment in her tone as she looked over my bloodstained clothes again. Despite taking that fateful step over the threshold into this world of violence herself, she hadn’t taken to it quite like I had. She was still skittish about the idea of taking a life, and held fast to the sensibility that we shouldn’t have to kill people, and that it would be painful to have to endure the burden of taking a life. Which was probably normal and how sensible people should think. She especially worried that I’d taken so well to it after my initial apprehension half a year ago.
She wasn’t wrong, either. I hadn’t hesitated for a second to fire on that woman. Explosion-addled aim or not, I had intended to kill her, and I hadn’t even given it a second thought. I’d even put it out of my mind entirely before I got back. It wasn’t until now that I was starting to feel a little uneasy about the whole thing. “Sh-She was going to shoot at me. Seemed like a good i...dea at the time,” I rationalized to Lily while I pulled the gun from my waistband and set it down on the stand next to the bed. Lily sighed quietly. She knew it had to be done, but it didn’t make her feel any better about it.
Doc cleared his throat and continued with his questions. “Feel like you’re going to pass out?”
“Feel like I wanna sleep... don’t f-feel like I’m going to just slip into it, though. Is that the sa...same thing?”
“I’m calling it a mild concussion,” Doc concluded. “You have enough of the symptoms; you need to rest.”
I felt movement further out in my shell. Zooming out, I saw a ragged crew hauling gear into the cargo bay. I accounted for everyone quickly: Aisling led the way, standing strong and confidently striding right to the stairs with a hardened grimace on her face. I knew she was coming for me.
Mouse immediately sat down to rest on the cargo bay floor. The scrawny teenager started taking stock of the contents of the enormous bright yellow carrying case he strode in with, his resting bitter expression oddly neutral now that I understood him a lot better. He was more interested in the state of his gun than what had just happened. He’d probably give me a piece of his mind later, though.
Shaw sauntered in, looking as tired as I was, carrying only a backpack of his own supplies and some cabling with him. I still couldn’t say I liked the man, but he at least did his part and came up with the wildest strategies in a pinch. I’m sure the illusion of a distracting imaginary assault on that compound was his doing.
And Ray was last, carrying an array of sound equipment, large batteries, and firearms on her massive back, her monstrous black fur-covered arms and legs holding everything with ease.. She hardly seemed tired, and had a smile on her face of a job well done. The Mammon was probably satisfied that things had worked out rather than angry at me for my misstep. She was sometimes a little too forgiving. With everyone accounted for, I started the script to close the cargo bay door behind her as she walked in.
If only everyone was so easy-going. Aisling walked through the hall, directly to my heart. She didn’t even stop at my quarters to check there. She knew exactly where I would have gone. “Oh good, you haven’t gone for a swim yet,” she hissed as soon as she walked into my heart, her boots stomping hard enough to display her displeasure.
“Concussion, captain. No giving her head injuries,” Doc said in an almost bored tone of voice.
“I’m not gonna hit her.” Aisling shook her head and folded her arms as she approached me. “That’s just what I do to Joel when he fucks up. Meryll, what the fuck?”
“Yep, I s-screwed it,” I admitted without hesitation. I’d really fucked this one up, and I was about to get an earful about it.
“Fucking right, you did.” She shook her head and let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll admit your reckless, gung-ho bullshit works in a pinch when things have already gone to shit, Meryll. But the operational level is not where you should be taking these kinds of risks.”
“I know.” I refused to open my eyes to look back at her, but Aisling knew by now where to direct herself when she was speaking and stared directly up into the sensor array in the room.
“Bullshit, you know,” she growled. “I thought maybe you were ready to take charge of a contract or two. That’s why I let you handle this, but you should have talked this one over before you acted. You should’ve brought someone with you. Someone armed.”
“Everyone else was busy,” I tried to reason my way out of her ire, but she just scoffed.
“So you do it some other time! You don’t just walk into some unknown fucker’s house like you own the place!” She threw her arms out. “You’re not taking charge on anything again, got it? And the stuff we needed to pull off that rescue operation is coming out of your share on the next gig.”
“Why not take it out of this one?” I smiled as I reached down and pulled the ledger terminal out of the pocket of my cargo pants, holding it toward her with my eyes still closed.
She silently snatched the handheld from me and inspected it for a moment before looking back at me. “You actually got it?”
I shrugged, still smirking like the dumbass I was. “I wasn’t gonna fuck it up and not finish the job. Joel wanted to leave before I got it, too.”
There was a short silence before Aisling asked Doc, “You sure I can’t hit her, just a little?”
Doc shrugged. “Not on the head,” he looked away, suggesting he wanted no part in whatever happened next.
Before I could object, I felt a sharp strike to the side of my stomach and I let out a seething gasp as my eyes opened and I doubled over on my side in pain. “Fucking idiot,” Aisling clicked her tongue as she pulled her fist back away from me. “No wonder it took you so fucking long to evacuate! Lucky bitch! That wasn’t a risk worth taking! Next time you get an order to get out of there, you get the fuck out of there, got it?!”
“Got it.” I whimpered. I could tell I wasn’t seriously injured, she’d just hit a sensitive spot. But it still hurt like hell. Aisling had never hit me like that before, so I knew I must have really fucked up on this one. Was I really in that much danger when I demanded we stick to the objective like that?
“You’re more valuable than this job, and you aren’t built to be at the heart of the danger like that, Meryll. Hell, I wouldn’t have put Joel in that position. You got lucky today. And I get you haven’t flexed your frankly absurd good fortune recently, but you shouldn’t be testing it. Luck is something we hope we have as a last resort, not something we rely on.” Aisling continued scolding me while I writhed on the bed, the lingering pain of the jab she gave me rippling through my torso before finally settling. Her tone was less angry and more frustrated now.
“That’s what I told her,” Lily sighed, wheeling herself up to me and putting a hand on my side, gently holding me where I’d just been hit. “You kinda deserved that, sis. Told you she was pissed.”
Ah, so she had seen that. I should’ve known when she didn’t seem at all surprised by the blow. “Yeah, I know.” I groaned through gritted teeth. “Okay. No more go...ing off on my own. N-No more risky shit. Promise.”
Aisling let out a long drawn-out sigh and turned away from me, her voice going quiet and somber. “I mean it. You’re not taking lead on anything for a long time. This was serious. You follow my lead from now on. Or anyone else’s lead. You’re the last person making the calls from here on. There’s a time and place for this stuff, and you don’t have a good head for when and where that is. No more wildcard bullshit when we’re not already in serious trouble.”
She turned away and started walking toward the door, but stopped before stepping out into the hall. “Thought you figured this out after you two fought.” I managed to turn my head to Lily, and she looked at me, guilt on her face. “You’re too valuable, Meryll. Quit acting like you’re some kind of disposable... cannon fodder.” She looked over her shoulder at my sensor again, suddenly looking exhausted. Was that regret? “I almost just wanna break this thing to make my point, but no use throwing away good money. You’re explaining what went down to our employer, though. I’m sure he didn’t want us to cause that kind of a scene.”
My muscles started to relax again and I laid back straight, catching my breath as I nodded to her “Yeah... that’s f-fair.” I felt like maybe I’d pushed things too far with her this time. Had I just seen Aisling lose her temper? I didn’t even think that was possible.
I wasn’t looking forward to explaining the imaginary firefight to the man who hired us, but we got his thing, so it wouldn’t be that much of a problem, would it?