Celestial trajectories had been something Alaya’s father had started drilling into her head at a young age. By eight she understood rate change and vector calculus almost as well as him. Today though, with those sweet cyberbrain enhancements, she had a whole series of processors to perform those calculations for her and to offload assimilating the sensory data. The first part, given time, she could have done. The second, not at all.

  Those first two hops off the station were critical, providing most of the momentum which would carry Evan, Alaya, and Kirk-Vora to the Rogue Clergy station. It’s official designation was little more than a series of letter and numbers. Militaries and corporate spies named their stations like that. While still under the cover of the PDP station’s EM shadow, Evan caught Alaya and she felt them tug her faster in the same direction. She’d cost them a little bit of momentum.

  Her systems recalculated the vectors and applied gentle force, along with Vora and Evan, to propel them along. They coordinated their AI and processor support carefully. Too fast and they wouldn’t be able to slow down in time to keep from splatting across the surface of the station and avoid being seen by the hidden patrols. Too slow and they would miss their target entirely and end up hurtling through the void. Likely caught by the same security force they’d been trying to avoid.

  Gaz… No. Keep your head here and now, Alaya. This was dangerous enough with out the distraction.

  Their last course correction and her computer showed yellow-green for their trajectory. They had a seven-second window in which to make contact. And they were going to hit harder than preferred.

  Light shone from behind the PDP station when they cleared its perimeter. Magic shimmered around the three of them. For a moment, the stars and PDP station nearby blurred. And then it returned to normal. Evan said, “I’ve rendered us invisible.

  Coasting on void currents, all sense of movement ceased. Gravity planes, inertial dampeners, and a host of other systems tickled them with parsec long splines. Microvibrations, the song of the cosmos rang through them. Apart from their three tiny lights, they were the only object for a thousand kilometers.

  Alaya had never been so far away from the universe and so oddly connected to two other people. I wish Gaz was here.

  She shut it off and enjoyed the sense of motionlessness her new systems provided. The fine ones could sense the particulars of her acceleration from any angle down to an incredibly small unit. But AI and intermediate controllers interacted with those and Alaya could ignore them for now.

  “It’s weirdly peaceful.” Neither Evan nor Alaya spoke, so of course Kirk did. “I like it.”

  Alaya chuckled and Evan soon joined her. The two of them were laughing at the irony of Kirk’s words. Either he realized it himself or he simply joined in for the fun of it, but soon all three were laughing. So much tension, it helped to release it.

  Proximity sensors went off in Alaya’s chassis at the same time they must have gone off in Evan and Kirk-Vora’s. It was a free-floating non-bound object; they might have been called comets or asteroids a long time ago. But it was also one of the things Gaz and Isham had tagged as a likely security ship for the station.

  All three fell silent and watched.

  The object had veered off of its usual path to turn toward theirs. Not something they’d seen before. It wasn’t intercepting, but if it was a ship with propulsion, it could turn to intercept on a dime compared to the three of them.

  None of them breathed in the first place, but Alaya had the sense of people holding their breath while crouched in a basement. The monster over the bed moved through the room, its shadow passing over the hiding place. Re-vectoring was impossible. Fire any mass and boom: target on their back, magic or no. Six meters. That was how close they came to the object.

  A giggle escaped Alaya’s throat as they moved away from the object. It made sense for them to use a shifting patrol pattern. And that looked like what it was. But holy fuck.

  None of them spoke the rest of the way. The second gauge ticked all the way down to five by the time they reached their green landing zone.

  Now the force came hard. No baseline would have survived the Gs they suffered as all three spun feet back to the normal and braced for impact as jets redlined and even burned themselves out slowing the three of them down before they hit the side of the station.

  The tap against the hull of their target station would have sounded like a medium sized void impact, a pebble striking a mountain. Unless someone was standing right there. Then they would shit themselves in fear from the sound of the massive horror about to break through. Alaya grinned at the image and held fast to her new gravity plane.

  She was already at work, shedding nanites and dragging the others along the ship’s plate exterior. They were off target and they’d had to burn earlier than ideal. Chances were very good someone out in the security cloud noticed something before Evan’s magical shimmer returned. So Alaya hauled ass.

  Kirk-Vora recovered first — he didn’t have magic to cast — pulled away from Alaya, and vanished along the side of the ship. They’d identified three acceptable entrances, and of course their late launch left them with only the C-tier available.

  This airlock came awfully close to a main concourse. After their first misadventure with out of place civilians, Alaya dreaded popping the lock here.

  But three of their near-station objects had veered off course to examine the vector Alaya and her team had used. She was right about their detection abilities: much better than they’d guessed or hoped. At least the security ships were following the trail and not headed straight for them. Moreover, EM traffic and the unchanged patrol patterns of the other security ships suggested the first three were “just looking.”

  It’s not too much to hope that stays the same. Alaya reached the airlock and began her infiltration sequence. Evan tapped the door lightly and the interior door sealed itself, vented air out the lock and the outer door opened.

  “Wow.” Her pleasure and surprise were short lived. All three of the ships investigating their trajectory turned when the door opened. “Get in get in get in!” Alaya shouted to the others and sprinted for the doorway. Evan was still holding onto her, so he reached the lock before it closed.

  Air began to flow back into the area. Not just air, but a powerful soporific chemical. If they’d been foolish enough to remove their suits and breathe the air, they would have shortly passed out.

  “Guys? I’m stuck outside.”

  Of course. “Kirk, hit Airlock 2 or find another way in. Stay out of sight and off comms unless it’s an emergency.” It was always possible the station could detect the casting signal Kirk and others like him might have employed. Supposedly the very elites who’d designed the system had wanted to make sure it was untraceable. Hopefully that claim was true.

  Alaya and Evan braced themselves. Venting knockout gas into the chamber meant the station knew or suspected someone was inside. Of course the door didn’t open when the pressure normalized. “I guess you can do something about this, right?”

  Evan didn’t say anything. He just laid a hand on the inner door and blew out a steady breath. It rolled open with a hiss. No line of guards stood on the other side waiting to murder the two of them. Instead it was just a lone priest. She looked like a member of the Root Clergy. Which meant she was one of the rogues.

  “The two of you do not belong upon this station. Please allow us to escort…” The woman took Evan’s palm strike to the chest. She gained a foot of altitude as her feet left the ground and she sailed back into the ornate wood floor behind her.

  “Baseline? I couldn’t sense a wire.”

  The priest didn’t move from the spot on the hall where she landed. “I think you broke her anyway.”

  I hope she’s not dead. Alaya kept her thought to herself as they trudged onward. By now, the whole place would be alerted. The plan was somewhere around C and they were running behind in more ways than one.

  A hand snaked out and grabbed Alaya’s ankle as she passed the woman. Lines of pink and lavender force, like electricity crawled up her leg as she tried to shake it off. “Friend, why must you bring such trouble upon yourself. Surrender or help me subdue your companion.”

  Right. There was no reason for Alaya to do this. The priests here were her friends. She could just ask them for the seed and they would give it to her. But she needed to stop Evan from attacking one of them. Otherwise they might be upset.

  His face had gone still, as if in the working of some kind of magic. Whatever it was put her new friend at risk. Alaya sprang toward Evan and hit him with a arm bar across the throat. It had nothing to do with trying to hurt his chassis. That took too much force, the kind which might hurt him. No, she needed to make contact with his skin so she could…

  “Oh how adorable.” Evan’s voice rolled through Alaya’s electronics.

  No, you’re going to ruin it all, Evan! Her digital systems surrendered to Evan’s influence and she stopped moved.

  “Sorry about that. Good to know what she did to you. Be right back.” It all happened at the microsecond scale, from the moment she’d touched him skin to skin, or rather chassis to chassis.

  He barked something, short and clipped. As he finished his shout, Evan jumped forward, trying to move down the hallway from the priestess.

  She’d cast something else in the meantime, something Alaya couldn’t identify as it had no obvious effect other than her bowed head and clasped hands. Her eyes tracked something other than Evan’s body, curling her finger in and giving a cry which sounded like “sophia” to Alaya.

  Branches, splinters and pieces of wood flew out of the floor, swirling into a spiked vortex as it tried to envelop Evan. A blue magical sphere hopped out the vortex and struck Alaya.

  At the exact same time, she regained control over her chassis. That priestess, the nameless one who’d turned that tornado on Evan, was not her friend.

  Alaya left divots in the wood floor between her and Evan’s attacker. With another gesture, a wooden platform rose up between them from the floor, but Alaya blew through that, hardly slowing her charge. Nanites and larger microswarms bled into the air and began feeding on the cellulose and nearby material.

  When she struck the woman, Alaya’s hands tore through her as if she were made from paper, The edges of her form crumpled and revealed a hollow interior. The woman’s cackles echoed, she’d done something similar to what Evan had done.

  But… she’d made a mistake in the process. Those nanites feeding on the material swarmed her along with the larger machines. Then the nanites initiated a spark which then ignited the larger microswarm.

  One millisecond Alaya could sense the woman’s outline from the location of her swarms. The next most of those swarms vanished as the woman grew an aura of flame. She screamed, a short gasp, before the intensity of the fires killed her.

  Alaya knew she’d died because the tornado holding Evan ended. He looked fine, though frustrated when he dropped to the ground.

  “That was an annoying spell.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  He snorted. “It didn’t even hurt me. Not a scratch. But it held me in place well enough. And kept me from calling out. Glad I managed to dispel you or we might have been screwed.”

  Magic went mostly over Alaya’s head. “Yay. Glad I’m not her slave anymore.”

  “That was just a… never mind. We need to find the conn. Quick, before more of them show.”

  Already running, already using the floor plan they’d scanned from a distance, Alaya and Evan ran. If they didn’t give the Mousehome a path into the station, they’d fail their mission.

  Two priests stood outside the entrance to the control area of the station. Unlike the woman Alaya had set ablaze, these guys looked like they’d been warriors for a long time. Baseline and ancient, they moved and talked like teenagers despite the wrinkles and liver spots.

  This is why we needed Vora. Kirk was out in the wind right now, hopefully safe. Much of the interior of the station was made from wood, dyed or stained in various ways, but none of it painted to obstruct the grain. It would have been an extravagant expense if not for the fact the priests probably had wood on demand. Where were they getting it?

  “They’ll probably see me on approach. Can you protect me from their mind shenanigans?” Alaya tapped Evan and spoke directly to him.

  “I can. We’ll do that now and then start the fight with surprise and magic. Okay?”

  “Ready.” They were around a corner, in what looked like a prayer alcove.

  Evan spoke softly in a language Alaya’s translation software couldn’t decode. A pale blue light covered her. “It’s not completely certain. Disable the one on the right. I will disable the other one.”

  Alaya prepped her weapons and bolted. Her stealth system engaged and she closed the gap between her and the priest on the right. He was utterly baseline, and didn’t react before she’d stabbed him. She didn’t have any ways to disable people non-lethally.

  Neither did Evan, who led with a spear of light which pierced the priest in the chest. He closed with the priest and drove his hand into the wound. At the same time, Evan struck him in the throat repeatedly, clearly stopping him from casting. The fifth hit made the made spasm and Evan dropped him.

  They’d barely made a sound as they dragged the corpses back into he same alcove and slid into the conn room.

  The two people within must have been technicians or junior priests because they hardly put up any resistance before Alaya and Evan killed them. With Evan’s help, they had control over the station in minutes. The rogue priests had a remarkably straightforward computing system, with segregated systems for data storage, environmental, and security.

  She’d pinpointed the security controls and taken them over as part of her first infiltration, but Alaya’s nanites began the process of taking over the other two systems, just slower than she did the first one. The instant security was under her control, she released her pre-set package into their systems.

  Outside things would get interesting as the disparate field of patrol ships started detecting each other as hostile targets. How many would fire on or disable each other before they stopped entirely? Alaya didn’t want to watch them kill each other, but she had to know whether it was working.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Scanners showed her something strange.

  The ships weren’t attacking each other the way she’d expected. Instead, they were involved in some kind of… conference. Pilots were reporting in all over the station’s security net, acknowledging the error and going manual on their patrols.

  That is weird. Alaya broke open security notices and found the load outs for the usual patrol ship. There was nothing lethal aboard those ships. With their size and class of vessel, the usual load could involve twin railguns or a single powerful and annoying weapon. Not necessarily enough to take a down MilCas fighter-intercepter, but with enough of them coordinating, they could do the job.

  Instead the rogue Root priests had stuck short range EM weapons on the hulls of their fliers which would have to be used in series with other patrol ships to have any effect. Most likely, with the upgrades Nathaniel had added, the Mousehome wouldn’t even be troubled by the attacks.

  “What are they doing?” They’re ignoring the signals from the station. Was this part of their training?

  No broadcasts left the station now, which gave their operation a timer. But also meant those patrol ships had not alerted a lurking kill team. Or if they had the team hadn’t showed up yet.

  “We’re not encountering the resistance we expected.” Evan spoke from where he stood watch a the door. Either we’ve underestimated their response capabilities or we’re missing something.

  “Oh shit oh shit.” Alaya pulled up the internal cameras and hunted through cargo areas and secure optics. It only took a few miliseconds, but she’d dumped her system with fear as she reached. There it was: the seed. “No, there it is. Huh.” She’d been sure it was a trick.

  Alaya had to wait until the last few bits of the station were under her control before she initiated phase two of their operation. While she waited for her nanosystems to catch up, she plotted an intercept course between their ship and the station. Another weird problem. None of the shafts she’d found would accommodate the seed. “What the crap?”

  Evan reached her side. “Show me?”’

  She pointed out what she’d found looking for her path. Explaining it brought her stumbling to a revelation: everything between the seed and the dock was wood. “The priests can control the wood. They move it out of the way to get the seed in.”

  “Or maybe they use their powers to move the seed in the first place.”

  Alaya grumbled. Parts of this job were frustrating. But a lesson from her father’s knee came back to her. At a certain point, something might just be junked. Better to take a saw to it and get the surviving parts out than let it rot. “I guess we use the hammer.”

  The specifications for the seed had been etched in her mind after hours upon hours of planning around this heist. It would survive the void, no problem. But it would not survive a fire. Fortunately, Alaya controlled the station security and could even override a few internal systems by pre-breaking them.

  “Hammer?” Alaya shot Evan a rough 3d schematic of her plan. “Wow… I do not want to know what you think a screwdriver does.”

  She snorted. “Kirk. If he’s on that side of the station.”

  “We can broadcast on short now, but we want to keep it min.”

  Their little section of this station, split from the others with metal bulkheads, was now sealed from the rest. Evan and Alaya had a solid, unbroken path between them and the seed. Now all they had to do was open a path to the outside of the station for the Mousehome. Fire aboard a station, or a ship for that matter, was a nightmare. Anyone who spaced it rough knew from personal experience how bad fire was. Starting one on purpose… dick move, but now officially part of their mission.

  When she’d set the priest on fire back in the hall, they hadn’t ignite much of the interior wood. This time Alaya intended to burn the whole thing and keep the seed safe.

  “I’ll try him.” They needed Kirk. “Kirk, report. Come back man.”

  It was an all-clear code, indicating comms were secure. It wasn’t completely true, but close enough for now. “‘Laya! Shit’s been real out here!”

  “Oh good, tell me where you are.”

  He described a part of the station not far from where they needed the hull blown.

  Back in the early days of void travel, people thought void ships came in “peaceful” or “disarmed” forms. No such thing. An object capable of escaping Earth’s gravity was generally capable of wiping out all life on it, just by nudging a big enough rock on an collision course. Or they could vent their engines and ignite their fuel. Once those ships ran atomic, venting fuel could virtually sterilize a planet without breaking so much as a pane of glass.

  Cyber bodies had been perceived the same way when they first landed on the scene. Sometimes clunky, sometimes utterly inhuman, often suited to some mundane purpose, nonetheless every single one of the machines was a weapon. Usually the most dangerous weapon in its theater of action. And like those spacecraft, cyborgs had a lot of different ways to kill their targets. Modern cyborgs like Vora were walking explosive devices.

  Between Alaya and Evan, they managed to get enough explosive charges out of Vora’s ballistic magazines chassis to crack the hull. In combination with Alaya’s microswarms going to work thermally, multiple AI passes gave them a high chance of blowing out the hull without damaging the seed.

  “Fuck it, that’s what we’re doing then.” Alaya’s secondary nanoswarms finished taking over the rest of the station’s computers systems. Kirk was already in motion setting charges and checking their calculations while Alaya set an AI to scan the new systems and generate an abstract. Simultaneously she sent a short “go” burst to the Mousehome, including an encoded message detailing the course and conditions. There was no way to get communication back from the ship, so Alaya had to wait for the scanners to pick up her movement.

  They’d expected this process to go down with the two of them under siege. Other than the small scale fights they’d had so far, Alaya and Evan had found this almost relaxing. Even those… the first priestess had been the hardest to deal with. But something bothered Alaya about that fight the same way something bothered her about the mission.

  Too late to worry about that now, the Mousehome blipped into the station’s security net. At once Alaya sent out the patrol routes and tracking information for the Root scouts. A few tried to intercept the ship, but those EM weapons did nothing compared to the defensive plating on the hull. None of the nearby ships objected to the initiation of conflict by those security patrols. Either the weapons they were using did not count or who’d initiated hostilities wasn’t clear. That proceeded according to plan as well.

  Alaya started the burn before Kirk cleared the blast zone. Alarms shrieked through the facility, announcing the impending flames and warning the residents. Until she’d stopped them, the security alerts had sent the bulk of the station’s personnel into their quarters. But the fire alarms sent them racing out to fight the danger. Only to find the metal bulkhead cutting them off.

  Igniting the wooden interior of the ship required more nano and micro drones than she’d anticipated. Even that didn’t really slow her down as once the wood did catch, it burned gloriously, without energy added. Soon she’d created a virtual cavern in the side of the station filled with smoke and ash. The wood didn’t all burn, but the essential supports had.

  A syncopated dance of fire and explosions followed. Brief bursts of air sent the tails of the flames bouncing and frolicking. Then the interior of the station took a breath, tanks reaching a phase change. In milliseconds, Alaya lost optics in that section of the ship. From outside the stream of fiery debris flooding from of the station. The whole thing shook as if rammed. In a way, it had been rammed, by itself.

  Alaya had visuals courtesy of standby drones, back in the seed’s storage room in moments. Her own drones had kept the seed unburnt and safe. They’d missing a single wall between the void and the seed, better than Alaya could have hoped for. Bad news for the station though: alarms blared in every section. They’d lost propulsion, O2 and water recyke, and critical systems had redlined. Written clear as day in the rhythms of the data from which she supped: this station had entered its eclipse phase. Like a viral load infecting its host, the moment Alaya and Evan touched down here, the ship had already died.

  They raced through the hallways toward the broken section. Crossing their own cordon, Alaya had a first-hand glimpse at what they’d wrought. Two people lay crushed beneath twisted metal, their arms severed and laying on the wood floor amidst a pool of blood and splintered wood. The third gasped not far from the other two, her chest pinned under a mass of rubble.

  Evan didn’t even pause. It looked as though he’d simply opened his hand in the woman’s direction from her gross senses. But in slow time with her enhancements, Alaya spotted a little black puff, a spell being cast, as the woman died. It was a mercy.

  All of these people were baseline, fully so.

  No one accosted them or even approached the two. All of them had the more pressing business of survival before them. Not so with Alaya and Evan.; they had a job. Where the bulkhead started, a long wall of warped metal, Alaya’s optics circled several different holes venting air to the void.

  Evan held his hand on the metal panel next to the door and it sparked and shook in a valiant attempt to respond to Evan’s commands. It did not succeed.

  One food braced behind her and the other loose, Alaya slammed her heel into the door with the full force of her lower cyborg frame. The door folded inward, but didn’t let go. Air howled out of the gaps, but not quite fast enough to make this harder.

  With a glance toward Evan, who nodded toward her, Alaya slammed her foot into the door and it flew off its hinges along with Alaya and Evan. She got a hand on his coat before they hit vacuums so the two of them tumbled out into space as a single inertial object. They smacked into the side of Mousehome rather unceremoniously.

  At least they weren’t hurt.

  Coordinates already with the crew, Gaz, Isham, and Kirk all witnessed Alaya and Evan’s graceless fall.

  “You two okay?” Of course it was Kirk who asked.

  Gaz and Kirk clearly laughed at them, Isham simply watched. “We’re fine. We getting this thing?”

  With a cheeky eyebrow raise, Gaz folded her arms and the ship flew back a few meters. She’d smashed her way into the seed storage area and exposed it to the void. Isham and Gaz kicked off the ship with Kirk-McRory in tow, all three headed for the newest hole in the rogue station. Meanwhile Alaya and Evan recovered and eventually fired their own impulse systems.

  Another reason for doing so much damage and breaking this section of the ship: it was easier to move the seed with the local grav field offline.

  McRory managed the heavy lifting while Gaz and Isham provided corrections. Kirk-Vora appeared next to Alaya, almost giving her a start. “Hey Kirk.”

  “Sorry, but it was funny.”

  It took Alaya a beat to catch his meaning. Funny how seeing Kirk in McRory’s body disassociated him from the Kirk in Vora’s body. All three, meat, breaker, and sneak, were the same person. But still inarguably different. “Yeah, we weren’t aiming for the side of the ship.”

  “And that makes it better.” Kirk grinned at her from Vora’s face, his screen changing to display Kirk’s own digital face. “I’m flipping the ship around to make loading easier.”

  No longer needed outside, Alaya and Evan pushed inside of their own ship and felt the return of gravity bite into the soles of their feet and trail up their legs. The action, if there was any, would occur back in the cargo section of the ship. Alaya arrived to find the bay already open and a suspension field in place to keep their precious air from leaking out.

  Gnarled bits of hard, wood-like carapace, knotted and twisted with what might have been words etched into its surface, the seed loomed large as it approached their dock. It looked somewhat like an image of an old Earth walnut or pecan.

  It probably wouldn’t taste very good.

  Suspensors caught the seed as it entered their ship’s gravity plane. The weight increased and Alaya kept her eye on the load on those systems. They could use them for a short time without overloading, but with over-spec masses like that the suspensor sucked down a logarithmically growing amount of power. When the full mass hit their ship, they had to modulate their suspensors or risk burning them out and dropping the seed entirely.

  Kirk played the various onboard systems like a pro-gamer. He’d been clearly practicing in slow time in sim. Good on him.

  The massive hunk of organic matter came to rest on the dock with barely a tremor through the deck. Once in place, they planned to lock it down with netting, small scale suspensors, and converted docking clamps.

  Alaya had been the one elected to put everything in place around the seed. Evan was their other option, but if the seed did something to her, Evan was the only person who could fix it. Kirk was out because there was a chance the effect could transit the casting system and affect someone hardwired into the ship. Isham and Gaz were out because no one relished the idea of fighting them if it came to that and they lacked enough organic matter anyway. Alaya didn’t understand why Evan thought that mattered, but she’d come to trust him.

  She grumbled to herself as she hupped the padding they’d printed out for the docking clamps to grab onto the seed. “If it was so important not to damage this thing, you could have sent the promised fucking assistance.” They were already underway, leaving the scene of the crime as the station was being evacuated. The station’s security black box wouldn’t contain a single image of their ship, or their crew. Their mission was a success. “Even if the fucking Root priests didn’t completely hold up their end.”

  After what ten points of reputation had been worth, Alaya considered them square. Not that she wouldn’t ask for a rep bonus to make up for the trouble. If they said no and apologized, she’d relent and still be happy.

  It’d be nice if my galactic creditors held the same view. “Will you ever settle your debt? No. Okay, we’ll call it a loss.”

  A personal suspensor lifted her up next to the mottled shell, here it shone with a thin, oily film. Alaya could almost see her chassis’s face in it. Mental commands to the dock arm made it rise exactly where Alaya had intended. These new systems had subtle, incredibly useful advantages.

  And if she’d been using slow time or paying more attention she wouldn’t have let her hand slip off the padding to touch the surface of the seed.

  Images filled her mind at once, as if memories were being injected into her cores. It was a… no it was many minds-full of data. Again, Nathaniel’s upgrades saved her from a complete cerebral crash and possible system damage. Storage intended to expand and adapt as she aged absorbed the gestalt mental echoes of several hundred minds.

  The force of the intrusion acted like a shock. In less time than it took electrons to bridge a potential, Alaya’s cores filled and she blew back into the side of the dock.

  Yellow alerts flew by, not one of them red. Organics were clean and safe, preserved behind walls and walls of protection. Her cognitive core was also green. But the load on her processors had knocked a few offline, including the ones supposed to be in charge of reviewing the data she’d taken from the Rogue station.

  “…okay?”

  External sensors were the most damaged, and those were already self-repairing. “I’m…” her voice was tinny and whined with a digital leak, “not… great.”

  Proprioception and positioning services came on second. Someone, based on the sound, Gaz, had picked Alaya and had carried her… somewhere.

  Everything flashed and Alaya stood a strange shadowed place. A warehouse lit overhead with fogged green lights, dotted with odd little creeping arms rising out toward the exterior of the ship. Air, blown by a powerful system, hissing and clicked over the warehouse. Muck clung to her feet, as if someone had left the floor here unmaintained for decades, like the ship where her parents had died. Maybe that was where she was? A cylinder ship intended to hold these weird…

  Fog swirled about her when Alaya reached out to the twisted pillars. Their surface was a streaked and pitted mess, like steel dribbled with acid down the surface. Darkened like soot, the exterior might have been burned too.

  Finally, the air here reminded Alaya distantly of that old moldering cylinder. It lacked the intensity of that rancid atmosphere but the reek of fungus and algae could not have been more clear to her nose. But something positively alluring hovered in the air, mixed with the stench of filth. What is that?

  “Do you know what these are called?”

  Alaya screamed and twisted away from the black-hooded figure who appeared next to her suddenly. None of her internal systems responded to the spike in her adrenaline. In fact… none of them responded at all. “What the fuck, what the fuck!”

  Again, he closed with her and clasped his hand around her wrist. When he did, his head and face came into view. Gnarled old features, not unlike the surface of the seed greeted her eyes. His sockets though, they were empty. Only white light shone there. She tried to scream again and pull away, but he held fast and shook her like an angry hound. “I asked you a question, girl.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the one who decides whether you leave this place alive or dead.”

  That was what Alaya needed to hear. Her right arm locked down, she pulled again on the man and he jerked at her. This time she rolled into the motion jumping at the man and driving her free elbow into the space between his chin and chest.

  She hit a soft target with the spear tip of her elbow, but the man laughed. Still holding her arm, he rolled and forced her over onto her side. Another shout and he ended up atop her, pinning her hips by sitting on her. “There. Will you answer my question now?”

  “I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about or where we are!”

  “She does not know the wood.” The twin white lights bobbed under the man’s hood. “And she does not know the ancient places.”

  “What are you… mrphm mrphm.” She bit the hand that covered her mouth, but the man didn’t react. He tasted funny, almost like coffee.

  Another voice spoke, this one female. “And she does not know to keep the silence.”

  Seconds passed as the hooded man kept his hand over Alaya’s mouth and held her on the weirdly mushy ground. This time a third voice interrupted. “The testing is not concluded. Proceed.”

  Deep sigh from the guy holding her and he said, “and what do you know of the old stories, the ways before Earth hatched? Do you know the hooded man or the song of the green?”

  This time Alaya quirked her head and nodded. It sounded like a story mother had told her. Besides, if she’d understood what was happening so far, they would kill her if she didn’t give them some kind of answer.

  “Tell me.” The man removed his hand.

  “I was eight… there was hooded man, Robert Hood…” Alaya had preferred the stories of exploration and adventure to the ones about injustice and money and stuff. “He had a band and I think he saved a bunch of people?”

  Mr two lights frowned at her, but looked up as if awaiting and answer from the green fog. Alaya opened her mouth to say something clever, but he jammed his palm over her mouth before she managed it.

  “We are reminded of the early days, the first to be touched. She is accepted among us, but her path will be one of thorns and blood, not flower and art. Release her and let her live. We have spoken.”

  “Fuck you guys!” Alaya came up from her seated position and almost rammed her head into Gaz’s. Emergency slowdown circuits fired and her AI assistant determined she didn’t really intend to smash her head. So she stopped short.

  Gaz blinked. “Sorry?”

  “No no, not you. What?” Alaya blinked through the confusion. A UI overlay had returned to her vision. Fewer yellow alerts flashed in the corner of her sight and all of her sensory systems had come back online. Her data banks were still chock full of memories she hadn’t made. The dock platform supported Alaya and someone had moved her away from the wall to where she could move freely.

  Evan stood by and Alaya could sense the vague passage of his touch. He was the reason so many of her systems had gone back to normal so quickly.