Nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy three bottles of raktajino on the wall, nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy three… take one down, pass it around… bugger this for a game of darts.

Take me hooooommmee, country rooooaaaaaaaaaadss…. I didn’t know the rest of that song either.

Poop.

I drifted through space with my clock turned down as far as I dared given that I was, as noted, drifting through space. I had to hand it to Auntie Ch’Tang though, the kind of brute force engineering favored by Klingons made for a damned fine mech. Space didn’t phase it at all. It hadn’t been able to fit through the ducts that would’ve got my Mobility Platform — docked safely within the incredibly heavily armored targ mech as it now was — safely to a proper escape pod, as if there had been any in the first place, but that didn’t matter when it practically was an escape pod. My targ mech was made for brute force and ignorance, and I’d had a lot of both.

The Dagger’s computers had been mine, their contents replicated and decoded. I’d controlled everything in what was left of that rust-bucket, at the end. Everything including the self destruct, and there were as stated no escape pods left. So be it. Gleefully I’d opened compartments to space, frozen whole decks, evacuated the air, torn anything and everything to pieces… there was nobody left who I’d needed to spare from my wrath. Those scum were pirates! They’d ruined lives for a living! And I was their karma made manifest. They didn’t deserve mercy. At least that’s what I told myself.

My shuttle had flown as clear as my conscience before they’d tried to scupper the ship, I’d just… let it happen on a bit of a longer delay. The last klingon had been transported off, and I’d thought for a second about whether I should just let my extra core go poof with the ship, but… I had had that wonderful, wonderful mech which really didn’t deserve to go to waste. It had taken almost no time at all for it to make it to my position, and docking my Mobility Platform was ridiculously easy. Thank Father for the one good thing he did for us, I guess, modularity.

After… ‘ending the pirate threat’, let’s say, I’d ripped my way through the last of the firewalls and bulkheads both, activated the self-destruct for the Dagger, and Macgyver’d myself suitable protection from the blast to survive by digging my claws and tail-blades into multiple choice cuts of hull plating that I didn’t fry all my circuits as the Dagger experienced a rapid unscheduled deconstruction event.

The downside of such theatrics? I was kind of on a very long, slow orbit of Monus whilst Ch’Tang and Jubilance hopefully picked their way through the debris looking for me. Apparently my transmitters were somewhat on the fritz, and the range they had was somewhere between ‘short’ and ‘bupkis’, but I was hopeful.

Time passed, and eventually I caught the glow of nacelles in what was left of my sensors. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, just… not whilst floating like a tin can in a fridge.

“Hey there, uh, me,” came a message over standard radio.

“Yo,” I replied.

“How are you feeling?”

“Bored. Ghorqan alright? Anyone else hurt?”

“No. Ghorqan’s fine, he’s busy learning how to exaggerate his way to a proper Klingon battle story. Nobody else was really hurt. Few cuts, scrapes, bruises, the usual.

“That’s good to hear,” I replied.

“Want to, umm, re-merge?”

I thought for a while. It hadn’t been that long, not for me and her, at least. The blast had cut our subspace connection and we hadn’t yet re-established it, so we were a ‘we’ not an ‘I’. As if what I’d been up to before ending up on the slowest of slow boats hadn’t changed things enough.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Umm, naa, no thanks, Chance.”

“Oh. Oh, you, umm, sure about this?”

I mentally grinned, as Jubilance — Shuttle Chance in all but name, it wasn’t official, we only had our personal names until we got a hull proper — floated closer on impulse. “Yeah, I think so, Chance.”

“You’ll need a new name,” said Chance, softly. I could hear the worry in her voice.

“Already got one,” I told her. “You can call me Toby.”

***

“My baby! My babies!”

Captain Jules Montgomery tried to ignore his Ship as she mothered the shuttle right into the docking bay. The Ch’Tang had arrived, with the shuttle, a couple of days later than expected but well within expectations.

What hadn’t been expected was the apparent battle damage and the fact that both ships had come back with their own Chance, or one Chance and… a Toby? At least the Chance had synced back up with the ship’s core. Three Chances? Definitely too many.

The mech that the new fork wore was an absolute fucking monster, a quadrupedal beast well over a metre at the shoulder, bordering on two, it barely fit in the standard corridors. Which made it doubly jarring when it whined and sat down on all fours and said, “I’m sorry, Mommy, I promise everything’s alright!” in a little child’s voice to the humanoid avatar that was barely taller.

Jules had no doubts at all in his mind that the targ could tear apart not only his ship’s avatar but likely the entirety of his ship single-clawed, but still, he’d rather face Toby the Targ than his mother, right now.

And wasn’t that a turnup for the books? ‘He’. Toby was a boy now, it seemed. It made sense. He’d heard about it of course; ships were female, stations were male, and apparently independent mechanized bodies like Toby were what they wanted to be, and Toby wanted to be a boy.

Nobody was going to tell the eight hundred pound war-mech that it couldn’t be a boy.

Of course, such a triumphant return, with a newly blooded klingon warrior that had apparently single-handedly killed a pirate king in single combat of all things, meant that there would have to be another party.

Jules worried that his cells weren’t big enough for the resultant hangover and post-party fighting.

***

Several months later.

I stood on the shore of the ocean, watching as the shuttles helped the cetaceans into their new home.

Ceti Alpha IV was to be a cetacean colony, a new start and a backup because of and eventually for Earth. Well named, apparently, and a lot of effort had been put into terraforming — aquaforming? — to make it properly suitable for them. Tammy’s parents had offloaded all their gear and were getting set up for the long haul dirtside. Tammy was now realizing the downside of her parents being so important.

Buran was losing a lot of crewmembers now that we were here, come to mention it. Almost all the cetaceans and at least a third of the crew and a good number of the civilians. Also leaving were the slaves, along with Miss Ausrich and Mister Jensen.

For better or worse, after consulting with Starfleet, the two ex-kindergarten teachers had ‘taken ownership’ of the slaves. Yes, it would make things that much harder to fix, but enough checks and balances were in place and this was idyllic enough a world even on the solid parts that their longer rehabilitation would be a burden on neither the teachers nor their charges.

It wasn’t the best of outcomes, as cementing an owner made it that much harder to remove the programming, but the risk was that transporting them back to Federation space proper would put even more stress on them, and with their ‘slavery’ under the pair being essentially light housework and other simple duties that could be turned into new ways of life, the slow route back to civilisation would suit them.

The Ch’Tang would make a good guardian for the nascent colony until more permanent firepower could be brought in. And I would be here to keep the klingons in line for at least that long, and then some. Can’t let my pack get uppity now, can I?

“I’ll be sad to see you go, Sis,” I said to Chance.

“Me too, bro!”

She hugged me, I hugged her back, one paw around her shoulder. “Keep Mom safe for us, alright? And make sure you give Dad our picture!”

“I will, I promise! And you keep Auntie Ch’Tang safe too.”

“Love you.”

“Soppy dog.”

“Stupid head.”

“Stinky butt.”

“Two-bit biped!”

“Funky, er…”

Whatever she was going to say was cut off as the transporter engaged. I stuck my tongue out. Winner!