Why did I think Pirate could keep a secret?

I should have lied. I’d concocted a story to tell him. I was going to claim I’d been in SecOps until I screwed up and caused a data breach that got three ships destroyed. Three ships seemed like a small enough number that no one would call bullshit, but large enough it was plausible for me to be condemned.

But I didn’t go with the lie. I got all choked up listening to Pirate go on about how he’d been free, how he was a man, all that rot. I wanted to be honest with him.

I was a fool.

After my heart-to-heart with Pirate, Murderess joined him in the latrine. She had a different kind of x-to-y in mind. I could hear them until the early hours of the morning, grunting and giggling. I tossed in my bunk listening, wishing I hadn’t refused Pirate’s offer. But I didn’t have the nerve.

The next morning, Murderess and I were the last two inmates in the flight line. We watched the drills struggle to get Addict into his ship. It had been like this since the blackout. There used to be enough drills to load-in the whole squadron simultaneously. Now, they had to do it one at a time. The rest of us had to stand there, naked and shivering in the vast bay, as they waited for their turn. I was always last.

The others didn’t take very long to load in, except for Addict. It took the drills forever to get his ship to stop flinching for long enough to get him mounted in the cockpit.

Addict’s ship had always been finicky, and it had only gotten worse since Glutton’s execution. Perhaps the ship could taste his turmoil. I didn’t blame the ship. I wouldn’t want Addict inside me either. On a bad morning, it might take the drills fifteen minutes to get him hooked up.

Murderess and I stood at attention on the freezing deck while the drills shouted at Addict to relax. They should have just loaded him in last, but I wasn’t about to be the idiot who got beaten for pointing that out. Instead, I spent the dead time staring at my ship, racking my brains for some way to escape in it.

Our ships were brand new, gleaming and flawless like nothing else on the station. The Yama Ten Infiltrator. Fully organic, except the reactor and the payload. They were shaped like giant sunflower seeds. The husk was a meter-thick layer of corybantic phase-diamond.

Phase-diamond is photo-absorbent, the top half of the ship a gradient of purple-to-black from the harsh lights of the ship bay. The underbelly was crystal clear. I could see the ship’s innards pulsing, coils fed by the deep shadow of the pseudomitochondrian powerplant.

The cockpit was towards the seed’s point, the canopy a living lens that linked to our interfaces. There was no instrumentation inside the Yama, only a pair of spur controls and the bulb trigger that armed and deployed the bomb. Squeeze-twist-tug-push, the firing sequence burned into my muscle memory forever.

During the later stages of flight training, the squadron was weaned off using air tanks and forced to use the canopy frill. This was a sphincter of ship-flesh that would close around the neck, sealing the head inside the canopy bubble. The frill would flood with oxygenated compression fluid. We’d all had to learn how to breathe liquid. It felt like drowning every time, and our chests would ache all day as the fluid slowly drained out of our sinuses.

On the actual mission, we wouldn’t use the canopy frill. The whole cockpit would be flooded with compression fluid, and we’d drift in our space wombs. Respiration-assist would pump against our diaphragms so our lungs didn’t succumb to the strain of breathing fluid for months.

Running along the seam of each ship’s husk was the field generator, a silvery vorpal edge that could cut through space itself. The ships were thirty meters long, fifteen wide. Pirate was right, they were too big to be fighters. At the same time, the Yama were too small to be effective bombers.

An F-Cascade bomb wouldn’t fit in those tiny bays. There was barely enough space for a conventional fusion bomb. That couldn’t be the plan. It couldn’t be worth all this just to level a mid-sized city.

Whatever the Hezo intended, I couldn’t see a way out of it. Many things made the Yama unsuitable for escape. First, I couldn’t simply hop in one and turn the key. Loading up for a flight was a careful process of aligning the hood interface with my implants, cathing up, and being exactly situated in the G-harness pocket. A slight misalignment and my ship would crush me into soup.

On a long-term flight, I would have to be in homeostasis. There would be rectal and feeding tubes, a special coating applied to my skin to keep the ship from digesting me. There were a hundred different steps of preparation impossible to do on my own.

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Even if I could convince someone to be my conspirator, they too would need someone to load them in, or they’d be stuck on the station to face a terrible reprisal. Which member of the squadron would be willing to die for me? I was certain none of them would.

Even if I could somehow steal my ship, I would be going nowhere. These were low-mass, stealthed ships. The reactors were tiny, minimal-emission units, incapable of independent FTL. Early in training, I assumed we would be deployed via a carrier, but we never trained on carrier launches. As we drew closer to the mission, I became certain there wasn’t enough time left for us to learn. That left only one alternative. They were going to shotgun us.

I was so excited when I realized it. A UNESECA ringship! It was the stuff of legends.

There’s very little N’Graya or VTS tech still in service. Most of their ships and machines became useless in the early stages of the Cipher War. They were too complex and presented too many vulnerabilities. The Hezo tried to harden some of their more essential machines, but they were bailing water.

As the empire aged, there were fewer and fewer people who understood the ancient technology, and parts grew scarce. Finally, a day came where there was no one left who could fix the machines. We witnessed it every day in the microcosm of our prison.

UNESECA was different. They really thought their empire was going to last for millennia, and they built like it. Their ships were self-sustaining, monolithic, and vast beyond anything the regimes that followed could even attempt. The entire Hezo Collective Prosperity Sphere was built on the backs of stolen UNESECA freighters, and the guns of UNESECA frigates.

As these irreplaceable ships were lost, the empire waned. High Command would give anything to rediscover the secret of their mass-inverter drives. Anything except the freedom scientists would need to actually figure them out.

Ringships are another UNESECA miracle we can’t begin to understand, much less replicate. There are only a handful of functioning pairs left in existence. Each is comprised of two gargantuan ring-shaped ships, requiring a crew of fourteen-hundred to operate.

It takes hours of meticulous alignment and hyper- charging batteries to fire a ringship pair. When they function as intended, everything inside the cylinder of space between the two rings is propelled at some ungodly multiple of C. When they fail, it’s cataclysmic. If the Hezo was willing to gamble a ringship duo on us, it meant we really were their Shèngmǔ play. We were their last hope.

I had always wanted to see a ringship in person, and I was still excited, though I knew they were harbingers of doom. The ringships would be bristling with elite troops and guarded by frigates. If I wanted out, I needed to come up with a plan before they arrived. I’d never dreamed I would survive long enough to actually fly the mission. Now, time was running out. Escape was imperative.

While all this was coursing through my mind, I felt the subliminal anxiety of being watched. I turned my head slowly so as not to draw the attention of the drills. Fortunately, Addict’s ship was still giving them problems.

Murderess stared at me. I shot her a look of reproach. Was she trying to get us both beaten? She faced forward, but as she did, there was a little smirk at the corner of her mouth.

She knew.

My stomach plunged. Immediately, I realized Pirate must have told Murderess about Lydia. He’d looked queasy all morning. I’d written it off as lack of sleep, but it wasn’t. Murderess had wheedled my secret out of him, and now, he was consumed with guilty fear.

For good reason. I held absolute power of life and death over Pirate. Two words to Tsuros and Pirate would spend forever tumbling naked through space. Latrine vent. Staring into the void through exploded sockets, his loose lips frozen wide in an eternal scream.

A wicked smile crossed my face. How he would suffer!

I stood at parade rest, my hands tightened into claws behind my back. What about Murderess? I could inform on her as well, but she was right next to me. The drills were a hundred meters away. I wondered if I could strangle her before they could stop me. My vision went red. I could almost feel my hands closing around her neck.

Murderess gave a startled snort, interrupting my fantasy. Her eyes had dropped to my crotch. Her eyebrows rose.

I realized I had become aroused. The shame of having my secret revealed, the thoughts of violence, and her mocking stare had set me off. I couldn’t let the drills see me like this! I had to shut my eyes tightly, tensing my thighs until they were stiff as oak.

I sent my mind hurtling along terrible paths, thinking about suffocating in the barracks, mucking out the elevator shaft, and the human soup spilling out of the ship hatch. I was too busy killing my erection to kill Murderess.

By the time they got Addict loaded in, I had a handle on it. As they walked Murderess over to her ship, I glared at her back, practically incandescent with hate. I desperately wanted her to crash into a ring and get crushed into paste.

Instead, I was the one who hit a ring, bewitched by emotion. I had to halt and force myself to breathe the compression sap more slowly. I pushed my rage away so I could complete the course. If I messed up again, the drills would want to know why. I didn’t trust myself to stay quiet. I would get us all killed. I finished without another error, but it was my worst time in months.

When they pulled me out of the ship, sputtering and shaking, I noticed the rest of the squad all stared at me.

Everyone knew.

I hated him. I hated her. I hated them all!