Aisling stood over her desk, her eyes gently closed as she gathered her thoughts. It hadn’t been over twenty minutes since Skygraves took his leave, and the stress she was under was obvious in her expression. She’d rallied the entire crew at the helm, and we had all dutifully gathered into the small space. Even Shaw was present.
I had seriously hoped that he would end up getting arrested for something completely unrelated by now, or find some other excuse to stay on Venus willingly, but it seemed that we were stuck with him for the time being.
It was his idea to gather up here, rather than in the roomier mess hall. He figured that Skygraves could have surreptitiously bugged the room while he had his meeting with Aisling. I hadn’t been able to ping any small electronics down there, but I was still reeling from my seizure, so I could have been wrong. We decided to play it safe.
This was a war room now.
“Alright.” Aisling started, putting her hands down on the desk and letting out a sigh as she leaned forward to address us. “Since we’ve got everyone here now, this is a strategy meeting. We’ve got to get everyone on the same page if we’re going to get off of this colony.”
Shaw made a cringing frown. “That bad, huh?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” I shot at him. He held up his hands in that defensive stance that showed he was already prepared to play the victim and pretend he wasn’t the one intruding onto our business.
“Enough of that.” Aisling sounded like he was already tired of hearing us argue, snapping at the tension between us pre-emptively. “Shaw’s coming with us. I’ll explain that in a bit, but we need to focus on the matter at hand, not in-fighting.”
I clicked my tongue, but Aisling was right. My personal issues with Shaw could wait.
“The situation is untenable right now. It won’t be long until Skygraves tries to batter us into submission with either bureaucracy or force, and sufficiently cornered, he has the resources to outlast us.” She started, standing up straight again and folding her arms in front of her. “I’d wanted to at least get to tomorrow before the ruse was up, but it seems Skygraves is more clever than I anticipated. I’ve been keeping him tame so far by offering a false pretense that I intended to sell Meryll to him under the table. He stopped buying it today, so we’re about to face the wrath of a head of state.”
“He’ll certainly be putting something into action himself right now.” Doc looked just as irate and focused as Aisling did in that moment. Skygraves was his nemesis, and he was taking this seriously. “If we’re going to survive this, we have to stay a step ahead of him. How fast can we get Theseus space-worthy again?”
“If I work through the night, I can get the hole patched by tomorrow afternoon.” Mouse spoke up. He already sounded exhausted, his body already showing the weight of the workload. Bloodshot eyes were ringed with dark circles unbecoming of his youth. He’d been spending a minimal amount of time resting this week. “And by that I do mean patched. It won’t be pretty, it won’t be terribly functional, but it’ll be spaceworthy. If someone else can help, I can get to it sooner.”
“Doc, you’re Mouse’s assistant.” Aisling commanded. Doc looked a bit taken aback, but he slowly nodded in agreement. “I know it’s not your typical fare, but everyone else is going to be busy tomorrow, and you weren’t going to leave the ship, anyway.”
“I’ll do what I can.” Doc nodded again.
“What do we do about Skygraves himself?” I interrupted. The man’s resources were our biggest worry, yes, but he also had a potentially powerful weapon on his person.
“Yes, about that.” Aisling cleared her throat. “Were you able to glean anything from the broken sensor array, Mouse?”
“Magnetic electrical interference. It made my skin crawl when it went off.” Mouse swallowed, disturbed by the innate unease that the doctor’s mere presence instilled in him, amplified by the retaliation to my probing psionic network. “I’m not sure how, but Skygraves is walking around with a targetable EMP implant.”
“So, what, he could just ground the ship with a thought, then?” Joel muttered indignantly “That’s not even fair.”
“Not likely.” Mouse continued, regaining enough of his nerve to interrupt his explanation with a gaping yawn. He regained some of usual brooding seriousness as he spoke of technical details. “Starship EMP bombs are necessarily huge physical objects to bypass the shielding all of our critical systems have. A reusable EMP device… reliable enough to be implanted? That can’t have the kind of power you’d need to get through a starship’s shielding. It could do a lot of damage to personal electronics… it… might be able to destroy implant circuitry. I don’t know for sure without being able to look it over myself. I’m more alarmed at the control. He was able to specifically target the sensor array, automatically, when Meryll tried to access it from that node. He probably didn’t even have to think about it. It’s something custom, and very advanced, at that.”
“And what about what he did to me?” I frowned, still not entirely sure if I was right in the head again yet. I hadn’t even had the chance to acknowledge that I’d been attacked before I was on the ground trying to figure out how my body worked again as if I’d been disconnected from it and plugged back in.
“Sympathetic damage.” Doc concluded. “You psionically tethered yourself to that sensor array. When it was destroyed, the feedback made your body go haywire. It was a function of your psionic resonance, not anything Skygraves did himself. It was probably worse than usual because you weren’t in the core module while you were diving.”
Aisling spoke up. “Regardless, that implant is a problem. Half of us are augmented, and he could easily use that to disable any of you with ease. Doc, Joel, and I will have to make sure we’re able to protect everyone else in case he shows up.”
With that settled for the moment, the conversation moved on to other duties for the next day. Ray spoke up next. “Alright, so Mouse and Doc are on repair duty, what about the rest of us?”
“Splitting up. We need a few things if we’re going to be able to make our planned route. Joel already has orders tonight. I got word that the port authority’s holding onto a shipment of Mammon stabilizer in storage. They can produce it here, and they keep it on hand to sell to Earth colonies when they come searching for an extra source.”
“A whole shipment…?” Ray started, eyebrows raised “We’re swiping that much?”
Aisling nodded. “We’re going to need it. That heist is going to have to be stealthy. Tomorrow, Ray and Joel, you’re going to be doing a more overt heist. Rations. I know everyone’s going to bitch about it, but we need a lot of food, and we’ll need it to keep. Protein rations, the densely packed stuff. We’re going to need to steal some. As much as you can carry, Ray. And don’t worry about being seen, just swipe it.”
“Captain, other than a few notable examples, the people here have treated us good.” Ray was clearly irritated. “It’s not a great idea to show our gratitude by swiping everything they have…” She was looking for a reason. I kinda wanted one too now.
“If we don’t do it, we starve. We’re not landing for a month, at least.” Aisling declared, eliciting a low murmur among everyone else. We were going to be in space for that long? Why? How? The only one who didn’t seem surprised was Shaw, who looked more intrigued at everyone’s reaction. She slammed her hands down on the desk to get everyone’s attention again. “I’m sorry I hadn’t mentioned it sooner, but I wanted to be sure no one let it slip to anyone outside the crew. Earth and Luna are under occupation. Mars is currently a staging ground for Foundation’s operation in the inner colonies. We’re heading to Io.”
“The fuck’s on Io?” Joel whined.
“Not much.” Shaw chipped in. “That makes it an ideal place to hide in the outer colonies. It’s a mining outpost.”
“And that’s really our best option?” Ray asked. “Alright… fine then. I’ll help swipe supplies. They’ll probably be able to synthesize enough food to get by here.” She looked disheartened, but she understood. We were desperate, and this was the only answer we had. “At least we’re not attacking anyone directly this time.”
“Not like they were going to use it anyway, it’s more surplus, just like your medication.” Shaw offered. He was likely an expert on rationalizing illegal acts. “They might miss out on a payday or two, but they won’t miss it. It’s just good business to hoard more than you need when you can produce it.”
“And just what is his role in all this, anyway?” I glared at Shaw. I knew that we needed to work together if this was going to happen, I just didn’t like how much he was talking.
“Shaw has connections all over the solar system. He’s…” Aisling rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “He’s an invaluable asset. He’s been feeding me information about Foundation’s actions so I could plan this route, and he’s introduced me to someone who could help us lay low on Io. And yes, I’ve checked his sources, he’s legit.”
“I think I’ve made up my debt to you for our less than amicable first impressions.” Shaw gave that slimy smile that made it clear that he was trying to grift as much from us as he could. “I really am so very sorry that we had to meet under such unfortunate circumstances. And you did shoot me, after all. Remember when you shot me? I’ve still got a bit of a limp.”
“You also held my crew hostage. Twice.” Aisling hissed.
“That’s what I mean! Such an unfortunate way to meet new associates! I’m so glad that we can get past such petty misunderstandings.” Shaw smiled wide, that smug expression of his made me want to punch him. “But I believe we can all let bygones be bygones and come to a very fruitful partnership.”
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“I don’t buy that for a moment.” I hissed quietly at him.
“Regardless of his motives, his connections have been genuinely very helpful.” Aisling spoke through gritted teeth. “So despite personal feelings, Shaw is right. We can make use of him. And I’m going to be making use of him tomorrow as well. I need him to pull one last theft in coordination with the rest of us.”
Shaw raised both his eyebrows, the smile disappearing from his face quickly. “I’m doing what now?”
“Nothing as material as the others. You’re swiping us liftoff access from the port authority.” Aisling recovered her posture when she saw Shaw flounder. She took control back from him. “Skygraves will likely tell them not to open the door or let us use the rail without his permission. I trust Meryll to lift off without rail assistance by now, but she can’t fly us straight through a hangar bay airlock. I need you to get us codes. Gathering information is your whole thing, isn’t it? I don’t care if you worm your way into their system remotely for it or if you physically sneak onto their consoles. I just need that door open.”
Shaw blinked a few times at Aisling, his hands coming together slowly as he fought an instinct to put himself into a defensive posture. “Well… it… can’t be that hard, can it?” He gave a nervous, twitchy shrug. “I will have to ask for compensation. After all, I’m not a member of your crew, Miss Barrowin. And if your only leverage on me is violence, then why would I not just report this to the authority rather than follow through on this theft?”
Aisling narrowed her eyes at him, a dissatisfied frown growing slowly over her face. “You know I have nothing to work with right now, Shaw. We’re broke. Are you asking me to owe you a favor?”
“I suppose that future services rendered will have to do, given the circumstances.” Shaw’s smile grew back slowly. “I know that you’re a woman of your word, so I accept. One set of launch codes in exchange for… suitable compensation in the future.” he gave a small theatrical bow, punctuating the deal.
Aisling rolled her eyes, turning her attention away from the info broker. “That leaves you and I, Meryll.”
I stood at attention. “Are we… stealing something ourselves?”
“We’re stealing attention. By doing the one thing Skygraves won’t ever expect. We’re going to be acting like nothing’s wrong.” She walked toward me slowly as she spoke “He’s going to expect us to hole up in Theseus; to go on the defensive. He won’t expect that we’ll be spread out all over his colony, and he definitely won’t expect that you’ll be out there honoring your contract with the scientists.” She put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a devious smile. “Whatever he’s planning to do, he’s especially not going to expect that I’ll be playing your bodyguard out on the colony tomorrow. You and I are going to be our wildcard.”
—
It was a crazy plan. It was barely a plan at all, just a half-baked gambit. But apparently that was the kind of thing that you need when you’re facing overwhelming odds. There was value in being unpredictable. In being crazy. In doing something entirely unexpected by your opponent. When I thought about it, it wasn’t that different from how I outmaneuvered trained core logic in my simulations. I did things that no ship core would expect another ship core to do in my sims. And often that meant doing something reckless and defying convention.
However, that principle stood because standard ship cores were not creative. I hadn’t thought to do the same to a thinking opponent. If your opponent was also inventive, they might be able to compensate and turn that cleverness into foolishness. That was what scared me about what Aisling had planned for me that next day.
I was nervous. No, nervous was an understatement. I was terrified. And I had nothing else productive to do for the rest of the night. So I retired to the ship’s heart once our meeting had adjourned. I stared up at the ceiling from the medical bed that I’d claimed as my own, thinking to myself how strange my life was.
Doc came in not long after, and I decided to strike up a conversation. “Are you ready to fight your nemesis?” I asked, only half joking. After all, that’s what this was, right? We were about to face the personification of Doc’s sordid past. I wouldn’t blame him if he wanted to take Skygraves out himself if he gave us the opportunity.
“I’d hardly be in the position to do anything.” Doc said as he walked to his personal bag next to his terminal. He reached inside and pulled his pistol out, the same one that he’d had to wrestle Shaw for. “But Aisling told me to stay armed, anyway. Mouse and I are the ones most likely to get jumped here at the hangar, after all.”
“Gonna have to get my own gun at some point.” I mumbled. Not that I’d have the nerve to use it. It was one thing to throw lubricant at an armed man to distract him, it was a whole other to shoot and possibly kill them. I’d already accepted that when I spoke with Joel. But it was the principle of the matter. I’d at least have something dangerous to wave at someone to unnerve them. “For now, I’ll have to settle with prepping my own way. Make some scripts. I have a feeling I’m going to end up on the wrong end of an EMP tomorrow, and I have no idea what that’s going to do to me. Gotta prep for takeoff ahead of time, at least, and then maybe see if I can figure out a way around that implant’s defenses and disable it.”
“And sleep. Don’t forget you need sleep.” Doc reminded, packing the pistol into the back hem of his pants “Impending fights to the death need rest.”
I shook my head “Spending the night in the core module. I slept yesterday, my nerves are shot, I haven’t been trancing out in the void enough lately to stave off the headaches, and you know that’s just as important to me as sleep. No way in hell I’m getting to sleep tonight, anyway. Too much adrenaline after that sympathetic seizure thing. Besides, you know it’s like… half-sleep, anyway.”
Doc looked away from me and pursed his lips as he let out a sigh, shrugging his shoulders and conceding to my prepared logic. “Yeah. That… makes sense,” he admitted. “Just be sure to spend some time in torpor instead of working in cyberspace all night.”
“Torpor?”
He looked amused. “I read about it recently. I noticed that when you’re in your ‘void’, you enter a low energy state. Your vitals calm, and you dissociate. I guess you could say it’s a sort of half-sleep, like you said, where you can remain alert to stimulus while resting. That’s similar to a state certain animals exhibit called torpor. I figured, if there’s already a name for it…”
Huh. It felt odd to think that I shared a trait with animals when I’m someone who’s very being seemed tied inextricably to technology. It felt like they should be opposites. “Should I expect to go into hibernation next?” I gave a dry chuckle as further evidence of my inhumanity piled on.
“Maybe. Ray does. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did again for a trip this long, even if her medication will supposedly be plentiful. Maybe in more peaceful times, we can experiment, but for now, the daily checkups continue. Speaking of, take your shirt off, I need to see how the bruise is doing.”
Ah, right. The bruise I’d had since the cargo bay had exploded. I’d nearly forgotten about it. It was in such a convenient spot on my back that it rarely interfered with movement, and it usually escaped my notice unless something pressed up directly onto it.
I nodded my consent and started to unbutton my shirt. I needed to get naked again to get in the module anyway, why not?
I sat down on the examination table and leaned forward. When he walked around me, however, I saw his eyebrows shoot up and I frowned “What? Is it worse or something?”
“It’s healing nicely, actually. Tiny new, smaller splotch above it is all. I think it might prove a theory I had about it.” He mumbled, walking back around to his terminal and letting me stand. I did so, beginning to remove my leggings as well. He hadn’t expressly forbidden me from the core module, so I figured, mysterious bruising or not, that I was clear to have my planned night in a deep dive.
I briefly considered how easy casual nudity had become between Doc and I, but it didn’t feel unusual at all anymore. I didn’t even think twice about stripping in his presence, comfortable with the fact that it was purely clinical, and that he had no personal physical interest in my scrawny body.
“I think that your brain might interpret sympathetic psionic damage as either spinal or dermatological damage.” He continued to muse on his theories. “I’ll have to see if the bruises show up anywhere else in the future.”
“So psychic feedback is going to screw up my back?” I whined.
“It’s not going to physically do anything to your body, but your mind can interpret that it has and cause physiological responses like that bruising. That’s normal for core modules. It’s why it can cause things like sudden cardiac arrest. It’s just presenting in a strange way because… well…”
“Because I’m me.” I rolled my eyes, and he gave me a shrugging nod. Yet another edge case I was a part of to add to my list. “I suppose that means you aren’t going to be able to predict what happens to me when Theseus takes damage?”
“You would be correct. Nothing that typically happens from sympathetic wounds is particularly good for anyone’s body, though, so I wouldn’t say you’re in especially greater danger than a normal core would be.” He jotted down a few notes on his tablet. “It’s of more academic interest than a problem with your care, really. I don’t think I need to warn you at this point to avoid letting major damage happen to Theseus.”
“Alright. I’ll try not to get any more sensors EMPed.” I mumbled, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to keep that promise while Skygraves was a threat. I certainly hope he wouldn’t be able to do any more damage to Theseus. At least Mouse seemed convinced that he couldn’t wipe the whole thing out. We’d just have to keep him from getting on board again.
I climbed up to the entrance of the core module, signaling it to open. “What about you? Shouldn’t you get your normal human sleep?” I smirked down at him as the core opened its jaws and revealed the inside of the oh so comforting sphere of technology.
“Not tonight. I’ve apparently got a starship to put back together.” He mumbled with frustrated unease. He clearly wasn’t happy with his post as an emergency engineer. “After your seizure, I’m going to make sure you’re stable in there, first, though.” He set his tablet down and began to scan through my vitals on the main terminal. He worried a lot about me. Part of me thought for a long time that it was just scientific curiosity, because I was kind of a freak that he had a very good excuse to closely examine on a regular basis, but I couldn’t deny that he was also concerned for my frankly callous disregard for my physical health. He was a good doctor.
“Thanks Doc.” I smiled down at him as I set foot down into the waist-deep pool of thick fluid, feeling it tingle slightly against my skin as it began to denature the light layer of sweat and grime of the day.
“For what?” He smiled back, a bewildered expression on his face.
I shrugged “For caring? For… not being like Skygraves.”
His smile lowered as he sat still and thought about that statement for a moment, staring off into the middle distance before he nodded and let out a delighted huff before the module closed around me.
As the chamber filled with fluid and I floated up into place, my lungs filling with the lubricant with practiced ease now, I thought about them both. Skygraves and Doc were both intensely interested in me as a scientific object. I knew Doc kept incredibly detailed notes on me because I was always in his tablet, watching him make little notations about every subtle change that could possibly be interpreted as important data later. But Doc was not obsessive, and he treated me like a person more than a curiously human-like computer. He wanted to find answers for the sake of finding answers, and so that he could help keep me in better health, not to chase some lofty pipedream at my expense.
The same went for Dr. Reese and Agatha. I was a curiosity to them as well, but they could empathize with me. I wondered if their note keeping would be just as intense as Doc’s if they had the kind of long-term access to me that he did.
“Torpor.” I heard over the sensor array, and I came to my senses. I realized that I’d been staring blankly into the void, deep in thought for over ten minutes. Closing my eyes, I saw Doc with a smug smile on his face in my heart. I rolled my eyes and grinned for a moment before I opened the intercom.
“Get to work, you voyeur,” I teased back at him over the intercom.
“I’m not the one with cameras all over the ship,” he shot back, standing up out of his chair and stretching out before walking out toward the cargo bay. I didn’t really have a rebuttal. He was right, I was the one who was going to be watching everyone else go to sleep tonight. Or not go to sleep tonight, as it were.
After making a few simple scripts to assist with liftoff, I decided I needed to blow off some steam, though. I shot a message to Agatha.
‘You up for a match?’