Very little time. Gaz flowed off the bed with the speed of molten metal. On her feet and changed into a suitable form in less than two seconds, and at the door in even less time. Alaya had sent an intruder alert and wasn’t responding to Gaz’s return pings. Neither was the ship nor the redundant systems Gaz has set in place in the event her drones and probes were destroyed. Someone or something blocked all of them.

  It implied a large-scale attack, perhaps even by the Root clergy themselves. No one came to stop her or resist her charge through the wood and leaf tunnels. This did not fell like an all-out assault. From what she’d gleaned during her meeting with Ester, Gaz did not believe the clergy would stage such an assault themselves.

  Proxies perhaps? Gaz’s brain tore over the possibilities while her frame pushed her onwards. She was further away from the ship than she would have preferred and the paths more twisting than she’d recalled.

  Halfway there and beginning to feel desperate, Gaz received a comm from Alaya. “All clear. Janice sent us a gift. I’ll fill you in if you come here or the next time we meet in person.”

  The message contained the correct code phrases and past bonafides which confirmed for Gaz that Alaya was safe. Go meet this gift or return to her room and resume work on examining the damage to her cyberbrain? As urgent as the latter might have been, Gaz wanted something else to focus on for a few minutes. Nothing she did would resolve her problem right now. Escaping that problem might have been exactly the right move.

  “Headed there.” Gaz resumed her journey to the hangar, this time at a more reasonable pace. Processes which had been put on hold for the emergency were allowed to resume their tasks and she shifted around the resources of her brain to realign with her present needs. Panic mode shut off a bunch of useful otherwise constant daemons which made Gaz’s life easier. Especially since she’d detected the memory loss. With those back in place, her mental balance found equipoise and she could relax.

  The path felt less twisting now, more direct. As if the very roots themselves had been trying to impede her mad dash to the hangar. Perhaps Gaz would have done something rash or unfortunate there? Impossible to know for certain. How magic, especially theurgy, worked was beyond the kin of anyone incapable of using it.

  Then again, these plants couldn’t be just magic. Major feats of engineering enabled this kudzu to thrive in the black. Those gravity fields that shaped the room weren’t the product of theurgical or arcane magic. At least Gaz did not think so.

  When she stepped into the area around their ship, further relief coursed through Gaz. The visual evidence of Alaya’s safety was the last thing she needed to be at ease. It happened directly, as Alaya had been waiting for Gaz and greeted her from the top of the side ramp up to the ship’s airlock. “Gaz! Good to see you!”

  She looked better than yesterday. The changes were sharp and hopeful. Gaz knew as well as any the dangers of flesh-based neural damage. Eventually even she would go full digital, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that entailed. Maintaining flesh for now gave her more in common with Alaya. Besides, Gaz only noticed the problems with her neural implants because of the flesh in her brain. It was useful for something other than catching the odd pathogen and dying.

  Next to Alaya at the top of the ramp stood a lovely looking… person. After her experience with Jaree, Gaz didn’t assume from appearance. Whoever this was had intended their non-binary presentation and Gaz wasn’t the kind to deny or ignore it.

  “And you are?”

  “Evan.” The newcomer gave Gaz a thorough examination. She could feel it in her nanites, how deeply was Evan looking at her. “Fascinating.” Their voice floated exactly in the neutral range. “Your chassis is simply divine.”

  Could they work on Gaz? Find out what was wrong and fix it before it grew worse? Here and now was not the place to ask. “Thank you.” It took her a second to catch up with the missed social nicety. “Oh, my name is Gaz.”

  “It is a pleasure, Gaz.”

  One of Kirk’s drones floated up. “We found a Technomancer, but the only one in the galaxy who isn’t an actual techwiz.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Gaz was stunned, and briefly panicked. That “fascinating body” remark went far deeper than Gaz had imagined.

  Evan opened their hands like an armature presenting its solar collectors to the sun. “I am a battle-trained Technomancer. My abilities are more in line with tactical and field support. In short, your companion is entirely correct. I am not a cybersurgeon of any renown and I am not especially skilled as a technician.”

  An actual Technomancer? Gaz couldn’t help but freeze her chassis in place. What would they think of her? Was this is a repeat of the Ms Feng disaster? “I’ve never met a Technomancer before.”

  Mal the pirate admiral had wanted to capture someone like Evan for most of his career. Corps could afford them legit, as could sufficiently large Loop nations. But a pirate? Unlikely unless they offered a sweet deal or figured out a way to kidnap a Technomancer. Not a good idea, in Gaz’s opinion.

  “We’re rare enough, I suppose.” They glanced at Alaya and at Kirk. “Janice sent me to help you folks. I think you need it?”

  Janice sent them? Alaya had mentioned it, but she’d assumed the “gift” was a thing and not a person. Gaz’s processors vented heat through her chassis as they spun into action. So many implications. “This is related to Bahl-Mau.” It wasn’t a question. More like Gaz had posed her own theory and wanted it disproven.

  “In part. No one’s happy with what happened with the station. But I am here to keep the two of you safe.”

  Gaz knew that last part to be partially false. Janice would toss Gaz into a gravity well if she thought it would keep Alaya safe. And wouldn’t immediately turn Alaya against Janice or her people. “Good.”

  “Speaking of which, there are few… problems coming we should discuss.” Evan nodded toward the ship’s interior. “Maybe over a meal. The food here is some of the best in the system, not just the sector.”

  The Root Clergy’s provender far exceeded Gaz’s expectations. Not only did they maintain locally grown and produced staples: fresh grain, fruit, and veggies, but they also included an exotic spread of rare varieties. Gaz had never sampled a lychee or a cherimoya before. While texturally distinct, both fruits had succulent flesh. Lychee had a pleasant bite to the flavor, an acidity which cut the sweetness nicely. The cherimoya had a subtle flavor Gaz struggled to categorize. It approached vanilla or even clove, without quite reaching either of them fully. The fruit would make a lovely replacement for vanilla, if their meal hadn’t already been overflowing with the spice.

  “This was incredible.” Alaya shook her head and popped a morsel of dark fruit into her mouth. She purred as she chewed and spat out the pit. “Cherries. Fresher than I imagined. Okay we can live here forever now.”

  Gaz knew she wasn’t serious, but Gaz could almost agree.

  Evan would not. “Nelissan Arms has launched a fleet against you. The Timbourgais, Yelling Men, Void Thunder, The Cayman, and the Argent Aurum have all black bodied you.” They lowered their voice, leaning toward Gaz as if to emphasize their point. “Rumor is, MilCas is sending an Auditor Team. Here.”

  “Oh fuck me.” Alaya whispered the words.

  “What’s an Auditor Team?” Kirk’s presence meant they couldn’t openly discuss everything they might want to. Then again, it was better not to bring certain dark secrets up in the first place.

  “An Auditor Team is part of the MilCas special actions group. They investigate corporate espionage, IP theft, and illegal arms productions.” Gaz said the words without inflection. Of the four people at the table, she was most directly threatened by a MilCas patrol, much less an Auditor Team. Someone like that would be able to pin down exactly what Gaz was and destroy her with little effort.

  “Whew, shit. Good thing we’re not doing any of that stuff.” Kirk’s drone bobbed as it jammed a probe into a piece of fruit on its plate.

  Alaya cleared her throat. “That’s not strictly speaking true.”

  The little hovering drone angled up to point its optics at Alaya. “What do you mean?”

  “I have some pats MilCas would be really interested and perhaps unhappy to discover I possess.”

  “Please say you didn’t steal from MilCas, did you ‘Laya?”

  Everyone at the table save Kirk knew the score. But no one was going to correct Kirk. “I didn’t steal from them, but I did end up with some stuff. That’s all I really should say about this. You don’t want to know more.”

  “You’re right I don’t.” Kirk’s drone swiveled to face the door and turned back to Alaya. “You saved my life. I’m on your side all the way. But if there’s something you got that you can give back to MilCas… can you just give it back?”

  “Can’t Kirk. Sorry man. That’s why the plan is to bug out before they get here.”

  “The fleet from Nelissan Arms will arrive in a week. We’re all lucky in that regard. They were unwilling to cop to their real purpose so they couldn’t use the translation gates.” Evan continued to deliver bad news. “I expect cast-in assassins are already in-cluster. Same with gated in assassins or retrieval teams for the groups who might want to capture you. The black body offer is content with atomizing you. So they may send suicide drones. It’s what I would do.”

  “Ugh.” Alaya let out a long breath. “The thought of someone playing sim games to my death depresses me.”

  Evan nodded, but no one else responded.

  After a sufficient pause and a cogitation pass, Gaz said. “Let’s decide how we’re going to react. What’s our plan of action?”

  “Kowal.” Alaya said the word with a kind of ritualistic finality.

  “Who the fuck is Kowal?” Kirk asked the question any outsider would have.

  “He killed my mom and dad.” Alaya’s voice came out thin. “Technically he led the team who killed them. He’s my ticket to the actual triggermen.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Gaz didn’t lockup. She checked to see who watched her as Alaya spoke. Any of them could have spare optics turned on her. Any of them could be recording her somatic responses right that instant and gauging her guilt projection.

  “Fuck.” Kirk’s exclamation summed it up for everyone. “How do we get to him while he’s here?”

  “We do not.” Evan made the pronouncement a final one. “The Root Clergy will turn their full resources against us if we kill someone aboard their Root ship.”

  “What do we do then?” Alaya scowled. She didn’t want to kill Kowal, not at first. She would want to hurt him and to get the information she craved out of it. Not the best arrangement for the interrogator, a subject who had no hope of surviving after providing the answer the interrogator wanted.

  “We could wait for him to leave.” Gaz had already been planning along these lines anyway. Evan nodded in agreement, but let Gaz continue. “I doubt Kowal intends to live the rest of his days here, once he’s gone we can intercept him and take back the ship.”

  “What’s the deal with that ship?”

  Alaya shrugged. “It’s mine. I want it back and I want Kowal.” She tapped the table next to her empty plate. “How do we find out when he’s leaving and where? Based on… there’s millions of square kilometers from which he could leave and we’d have to be ready to capture his trajectory or risk losing him.”

  Part of that was for Kirk’s benefit. Unless it was destroyed, Alaya would never lose track of her flagship. But with the impracticality of her using a travel-gate or a teleport, if Kowal and her ship built up a big enough lead, he would effectively be in the wind. The worst case scenario was Kowal caught on to their pursuit, fled back to the Mal-wares, and warned them Alaya was coming. “Perhaps the clergy can’t help us find or hurt Kowal. But rather they could help us determine when and where he’s departing. Or they could arrange for us to leave shortly before and in the same place?”

  Alaya snapped her fingers at Gaz. “I like it. They’re not even giving us information, just a subtle advantage.”

  Evan said, “how do we know they are not offering the same arrangement to Kowal? He has to know he’s being pursued by now.”

  Again, silence. Alaya spoke first. “All we can do is ask. And maybe check in with Marcus?”

  Medical kept Alaya confined to the ship despite the time she’d had to recover. Gaz wasn’t risking her brain, even aware of the hypocrisy. Two combat drones accompanied Gaz and Evan to the rooms Ester had provided.

  The console in the center, the wooden altar-like piece of furniture, had an option for contacting the hosts. Gaz activated it and waited.

  Neither she nor Evan chattered to fill the emptiness. In her experience, baseline organic humans were far more likely to chat idly than cyborgs. Idle chatter was a waste of cycles. At the moment Gaz was running intensive self-diagnostic simulations. So far, her investigations had been fruitless. A random, but generally harmless error had entered into her I/O pathways. It was ubiquitous, but not even a thousandth of a percentage outside of spec. Normal error checking caught it and corrected, but it had begun to slowly add a cost to her processes. And based on her analysis, that cost was projected to compound.

  Two minutes thirty-seven seconds. It took a member of the Root clergy that long to respond to their inquiry. Not medical rates, but faster than some luxury accommodations bragged. “How may I help you?”

  A man’s voice spoke to them through the leaf doorway. “Actually, could we speak to someone about departure times and some plans?”

  “May I come in?” For some reason this little island of propriety amused Gaz. It always had. Though the priest outside owned this place, as completely and truly as any human could own anything, and yet he begged Gaz and Evan’s leave to enter. Bizarre and amusing.

  “Please.”

  The leaves parted soundlessly and a red-robed man with a shaved head stepped into the room. Freshly tonsured, Gaz could still make out the line of the man’s hair where he’d cut it off. No lasers or nanite treatments here, he’d almost certainly used a straight razor. Like Ester and Marcus, he was 100% baseline human. Cosmetically, he was in his twenties, but it was impossible to assess his real age. According to infoNet his name was Lodrun and his rep was 87. He bowed to all four of them, two drones and two cyborgs. “I am called Lodrun and I speak for the Root. How may I be of service?”

  Tables and chairs rose from the floor in response to their group’s need. Lodrun remained standing, in a traditional servant’s position. It was also a power move, a way to separate himself from their group symbolically. Such a choice was not lost on Gaz.

  “I am sorry, but we cannot provide information regarding one guest to another.”

  “No, we’re not asking to be given the information. We’d just like to be warned and get the chance to leave at the same time as him.” Alaya was adamant, in part because though Lodrun refused, his refusal was hardly absolute. “Please just, I don’t know, do you have superiors or whatever you could ask?”

  “I will check with the synod, but I do not believe they will accede to your wishes.” None of Gaz’s scans revealed irritation at Alaya’s insistence. This priest maintained an envious equipoise as he spoke. Unlike Marcus, whose serenity bore a kind of humor in his stance, Ludron’s thin smile held no mirth. Only emptiness. Whether good or bad, it was hard for Gaz to say. It didn’t make her inclined to trust the priest. Except that he had just given them the closest thing to a potential chance yet. And he’d made Alaya’s drone bounce, which suggested she was doing something similar in her room back aboard their ship.

  If he disappointed Alaya, Gaz would be cross with Ludron, even knowing he answered to some kind of ecclesiarchy.

  “Is there any other service I might render?”

  Alaya drone twisted in midair, mimicking the shaking of a head. “Thank you again, but that’s all we need. Please.”

  Lodrun bowed and turned to leave, but Gaz stopped him. “We’re going back to our ship. Do you mind meeting us there?”

  “Of course.”

  Over their private band, Alaya said, “this is a way to get us…”

  A shrill internal alarm sounded in Gaz’s subsystems. When she’d planted the algorithms which produced this alarm, she’d come closer to prayer than she’d ever been in her entire life. More than anything else, she’d prayed these alarms would never sound. Alaya’s cyberware had registered critical fault with her biologics.

  Kirk and their ship was already in the process of treating her and Gaz was hooked into the data streams of Alaya’s vitals as her legs spun up and she left Evan far behind.

  Stroke. In the cusp of human history, right at the short burst of growth which preceded humanity’s explosion into the stars, stroke and organ failure had been some of the biggest causes of death among humans. Thanks to space travel, misadventure and violence soon took over. With the advent of cyberware, stroke and organ failure became an artifact of extreme poverty.

  Massive chunks of data supported Gaz’s paranoia and concern when she’d insisted Alaya install the first few cyber implants in her head. One of them was a resus and triage implant which had thrown Alaya into a neural protective coma at the first sign of stroke and almost certainly saved her life.

  If not for Evan’s appearance, that implant might not have functioned correctly. They’d needed a technician other than Alaya. Fate’s delivery had been flawed, a little off the mark for what they needed. But Gaz couldn’t find much reason to complain as she looked over Alaya’s body floating in the tank.

  Provided energy, the stasis tank would keep Alaya alive and healthy indefinitely. The longer she remained within, the higher the chance of lethal shock upon being removed. That chance remained negligible for up to a year. On human scales, that was nothing. For Gaz though, she’d had two hundred years pass in the literal blink of an eye.

  Proximity alerts warned Gaz of Lodrun’s approach. She hit the door only after securing Alaya’s crèche and making sure she had a continuous line to her friend’s vitals. “Hello.”

  “It’s just you.” Lodrun wrinkled his nose. “I would have thought your companion keen to hear the Synod’s answer.”

  He didn’t look as though he was about to toss a refusal in Gaz’s face. “You can tell me.”

  “The Synod has agreed to your request, provided you assist the Synod with a delicate matter.”

  This was the one thing Gaz had not considered. Naive in retrospect, but also sensible: as with all of the rest of humanity, the Root Clergy required their pound of flesh as payment for a debt. “What matter?”

  “I would love to discuss this matter with you privately, if I may?”

  Gaz checked Alaya’s condition, stable and as well as could be hoped. “Fine.’ Then she contacted Evan and had them meet her in the mess hall. At the same time, she had the maintenance drones clean the space up and prep it for guests. Not knowing how to deal with the potential magical abilities at Ludron’s command, Gaz locked their ship’s information network down and set it to good child mode, residents as parents, everyone else as strangers.

  Little about the ship suggested her residential payload now. The Dhingri’s had agreed to remain in their quarters again, which helped address a part of Gaz’s own concerns. From the airlock to the mess, the halls were spotless and a little less suggestive of a horny bachelor than when they commandeered the vessel.

  Evan was already at the table. He didn’t move or react to their appearance. This time Ludron sat down when Gaz offered him a seat. The sense of horse-trading grew stronger as he leaned forward with his hands still in his lap. But when Gaz took the seat opposite him, Ludron said nothing.

  If this came down to a matter of patience, Gaz knew she would lose. She could close her eyes and blink away any amount of time. But not while Alaya lay in that tank dying. “What kind of assistance can we offer?”

  “Please understand that… aiding you in the way you ask carries a degree of risk for the Root and our order. For all theurgists in the galaxy.”

  This was the dress up phase of the bargain. There was no need to butter Gaz and Evan up. There was no need for the Root Clergy to sweeten the deal. But they put tassels on it and made sure Gaz knew how much this deal would cost the Root.

  In other words, this was going to cost Gaz even more. “Can you just tell us what you want?”

  “Not yet, I require assurance of your discretion.”

  “We’re more than discrete.” Gaz was ready to pour it on thick, but the priest shook his head.

  “No. I do not think you understand.” He opened his hand and a leaf unfolded from his palm an rose into a large green fan shape between them. The little veins bulging as if filled with liquid which was giving the leaf its rigid shape. Then those veins burst into viridian light and it poured over Gaz and Evan. “You must give your word to tell no one of what I intend to share with you.”

  There was at least a fraction of the cost: swear a magically binding oath or don’t even learn what they’ve turned down. “I so swear.” The choice wasn’t a meaningful one for Gaz. This was what Alaya wanted, as long as it did not threaten Alaya, Gaz would do anything to get her Kowal. An oath was a tiny expense.

  “I so swear.” Evan didn’t seem bothered by the oath-taking either, just waiting to see if Gaz agreed before he did.

  “Very good, and thank you both.” Lodrun looked relieved. “My order cannot allow the knowledge of what I am going to tell you to leave the branches without some kind of bindings.” He swept his arms around him as if to point to encompass everything. “This whole great massive structure is the result of a tiny little tasks, each undertaken with singular focus. We are each cells of the great tree.” Okay, get on with it please. Lodrun nodded as if he’d heard Gaz’s thoughts. “One of the most important such cells has gone missing… or rather I suppose I should say it was stolen.”

  “A cell?”

  Lodrun’s voice lowered, a mixture of religious awe and reverence filled it. “Indeed, the most precious of all cells: a seed.”

  Evan leaned forward. “You lost a seed to the Tree of Heaven?”

  “You know of our Order.” The priest blinked at Evan’s words. “And yes. One of our seeds has gone missing. We must retrieve it.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Evan leaned back and nodded subtly to Gaz. The message was clear. “We need you or someone in your order to vouch for us with a cyber surgeon before we do the job.”

  “How much?”

  Gaz let Evan speak. “No more than ten points. Maybe half that.”

  “As well as the arrangement regarding your vessel and the one you seek?” Lodrun spoke carefully, trying to outline the limits of their transaction.

  Looking to Gaz, Evan left the rest to her. “If you could track Kowal’s communications and see those records get sent to us, that would be great too.”

  Lodrun agreed at once and confirmed Gaz’s initial suspicions. They were being severely underpaid. But she didn’t know how far reputation went in the Clusters or what she could ask for. “I accept all of your terms.”

  “As do I. Shake on it?”

  “Of course not.” Lodrun snorted and shook his head. Another leaf rose up from his palm and bathed the three of them in its green light. “I accept the terms of the deal as specified.”

  “As do I.” Gaz spoke next and Evan finished.

  “Me too. Terms as agreed upon.”

  The light flared once more and the leaf vanished. “I have a data chip which will give you all of the information we have regarding the seed’s disappearance.”

  “And I want to use your reputation at Filaireale’s Emporium.” Evan opened a local map and pinpointed the location they’d discussed with Gaz after Alaya’s collapse. The proprietor, one Filia, was the finest Technomancer cybersurgeon in the whole solar sector.

  “I can and will… but Filaireale’s Emporium does not have appointments within the next solar decade.” Lodrun knew a good deal about his locale.

  “Sounds like they do good work.” Evan had an in though. “Still, please give the rep hit when they call in?”

  “As I so swore.” Lodrun bowed.

  “And like I said, the moment we’re done with this, we’ll get on your seed problem. Cool?”

  “Ah, implying we can speed this process along if necessary?” Lodrun raised an eyebrow.

  “I suppose. What do you have in mind?”

  “Teleportation, of course.”

  “Then I guess we just need to decide what exactly we’re doing for Alaya.”