Eli entered the ship’s galley. He fixed himself a bowl of food and grabbed a boxed drink. The human settled down, watching the weird effect of hyperspace as the ship traveled down a ne.

  At some point, the weird table thing with the bulb on top of it that he had seen in the cargo hold had been moved to the galley, where it sat beside the dining table.

  One of Tarl’s bodies darted into the room. Eli watched as he bounded across the room and jumped up onto the table. He held a colorfully adorned container. For some reason, he pced the package on the table and moved to the object with the bulb. Then he climbed up into one of the recesses and settled into pce, appearing to go to sleep. So, it was a piece of furniture.

  One of the cables that was connected to this weird piece of furniture rose, moved over to the dining table. Smaller wires snaked out of the end of the cable, opened the container. Then the cable removed a piece of food from the container and moved it to somewhere near one end of the thing with the bulb on it. A long tongue or proboscis scooped it up.

  “So, we managed to get out of that one,” the table thing said, the voice the same as Tarl’s, the sound coming from the same pce where the food had gone.

  “Ya,” Eli said in a weary tone, he pointed at the critter that slept in the cubby, “Those little guys are symbiotic?”

  “More like limbs. Limbs and sense organs which operate separately from my main body. A lot better than the way all of you do it.”

  “That is…strange. How do you keep track of it all?”

  “I have several brains. My awareness is a lot more expansive than most species. I can keep track of a lot of stuff at once.”

  “I bet that really helps when you are piloting.”

  “Damn straight. The one here is a butar. I also have flying ones called hakan. My primary body is called a kurtaran.”

  “Helpers and scouts, interesting. And this,” he pointed at the thing with the bulb, “is your main body, where your consciousness is located?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you had that ‘bor dispute’ why didn’t they go for your real body, your primary body where your consciousness is located?”

  “They didn’t know about it.”

  “I can’t even begin to comprehend something like you,” Eli commented before taking another bite.

  “I understand. I never really sleep. A butar sleeps, my awareness of them softens, blurs, but I remain conscious. The brain that runs that body sleeps, the mind that processes that body’s sensations and movement sleeps, but the rest of me is fully awake. One of the brains that coordinates everything sleeps, while another takes over. I just can’t quite deal with the idea of being completely unconscious every day for hours and hours.”

  “It is kind of scary, when you think about it,” Eli acknowledged.

  “And the dreams! They tell me about dreams. I could only compare it to a drug trip, or maybe some kind of spiritual vision.”

  “Some people see it as a spiritual thing. Usually, it’s just the mind trying to process what happened that day. Your minds probably do the same, you just aren’t aware of it.”

  “True. Strange how it all works. When we get a chance, you will have to tell me about the faiths that exist on your pnet.”

  “Really? You are interested in that?”

  “That is my quest. I am a schor of religion. I seek the universal truth of God,” he quickly added, “God being a loose term. And what do you believe in? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I believe that there is something, some higher thing,” the human stared into hyperspace, “This journey just keeps getting stranger and stranger.”

  “It’s only the beginning.”

  ***

  One of Tarl’s butar relieved the body that was piloting the ship. That butar went to the galley and ate a meal, before heading to the cabin that he had picked out. There, it returned to the main body to rest.

  In the cabin, another butar worked to hang scrolls and tapestries over the wood panel walls. A little shrine had already been set up against one wall. It contained those items which had affected him the most.

  The butar that he had grown to repce the one he had lost y on the bed, wrapped in the sheets. When it woke up, it would feed again. The next few weeks would be spent in this cycle of sleeping and eating as it grew.

  A hakan flew around the ship, giving each area a brief check. Another swooped around the cargo hold, dive bombing empty crates and barnstorming through bare shelves. One went about its task with cold efficiency, using hard won experience to make judgement calls on whether or not the ship was truly space worthy. The other sent him sensations of pure joy.

  The cold, silent void. Nothing on the coms, not even an errant transmission or an ancient telecom signal. He knew that if you tuned to the right frequencies, you could hear the songs of the stars. But these always put him on edge.

  A silent sector of space. Just the sound of one’s own thoughts or whatever you used to try to distract from or even drown out those thoughts.

  Gami was sitting in the galley, meditating under the watch of the stars. She was deep into the mystique of Bayhi. Tarl was unable to tell if this was true devotion or if it was just a fa?ade. He would have certainly liked for it to be genuine, but all of the years he had been through had thought him to err on the side of caution. Expect the worst, hope for the best. It wouldn’t be the first time he had encountered someone that dabbled in that art.

  But she knew other styles as well. None meant as much to her as Bayhi, though the others certainly had a pce in her heart. It was a good thing. It was good to have friends that could handle themselves in a fight.

  Of course, there was more to her than that. Tarl could tell that she had a strong sense of morality. Just how flexible, for good or ill, this sense of morality could be was yet to be seen. Again, he caught himself being cynical. And again, he told himself that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  The ship’s captain was in his room again. When the hakan flew past the door he heard music, something deep and drawn out. The man loved music. Tarl had never cared for it; he wondered why that was. Perhaps it was the terrible shit that his teachers had made him listen to.

  Eli was ex-military. The bearing and muscle memory couldn’t be fully escaped, even though he had tried. Other things had left their mark. He had lost people, it was clear. The Sad’Daki invasion of his world had no doubt been devastating.

  There was that brand on his neck, and the tattoos under it. He hadn’t gotten rid of it, despite the bounty on escaped Sad’Daki sves. Why keep it? Was it a twisted source of pride? Was it out of belligerence? They considered him to be among their most dangerous foes. Maybe that was why. He wanted people to know that fact.

  Tarl decided that pride wasn’t the reason why he kept the markings. Eli just didn’t seem like the type. He wanted people to know that he was a threat, just not to stoke a sense of arrogance. The real reason was tactical. He wanted to present a hard target. The human was, after all, ex-military.

  Gami had Bayhi. What did Eli have? Something drove him, that was certain. Perhaps the mark was kept as a reminder of those that had wronged him? Did he pn on getting revenge?

  The body in the cockpit saw the endless void. The little points of light and the spectacur dispys of color, all of them were nothing compared to the bck infinity.

  There was that strange feeling again. Tarl could no longer tell himself that it was just his imagination. There was something on the ship, something giving off a bad vibe.

  These things existed. He had witnessed them before. Perhaps they were true magic. Or perhaps these phenomena were expinable but were simply as of yet unknown to science.

  That one symbol on Eli’s neck. It meant that he was susceptible to conversion. The Sad’Daki saw potential in him, the potential to bring him into the fold. This meant that the true danger wasn’t from the bounty that they had put on his head, but to his soul.