Starwalker

Ship's log, 17:00, 10 March 2214
Location: Offshore docking, Hong Kong, Earth
Status: Docked and powered down

It’s been a full day now. Over 24 hours since John stepped out of my airlock and he’s still not back.

If I could, I’d pace. As it is, if I get too antsy, I just wind up creating a big cloud of steam. Not exactly the subtle presence that John asked me to be before he left.

I did that earlier. The first delivery of supplies that Elliott ordered arrived and I had to breach the surface enough to allow access to my cargo holds. Underwater thrusters caused a churn of bubbles that tickled at my hull, sweeping up and around me. The seawater boiled against my sides and wrapped me in a fluffy cloud as I rose.

From a distance, it was probably quite impressive. Up close, I think I freaked out the delivery boat’s captain. I moved as gently as I could, so he wasn’t rocked about too much by the water streaming off my sides, but that just created even more steam. He stared at me like I was a mythological leviathan or something.

Then there was Elliott in my cargo hold, waving out through the airlock like nothing was wrong. I think that delivery was done in record time.

It’s not like I’m the only submerged ship around here; there are several parked like I am, just under the surface. It helps the Repulse Bay port skiffs and delivery boats have more room to move around. Did I just not do it right?

Everyone else has been back at least once. Cameron and Swann returned for the night but left again first thing this morning. Elliott had to go visit some more suppliers again today. Even Cirilli came back, though she left again this morning, too. Ebling went out today too, to ‘stretch his legs’, whatever that means. Apparently, it involves shopping, because he visited a consumer-heavy district and came back with more than he left with.

Whatever business they all have to do, it’s taking time. Maybe Hong Kong doesn’t work as quickly as we’d hoped. Maybe its processing systems are as clogged as its traffic lanes, all fighting against the tide to get where they’re going.

I just wish John was back already. He hasn’t left the hospital – I’ve been monitoring his feeds, and he has barely moved. They have him on the fifteenth floor, occasionally shifting between rooms, but mostly he’s staying in the same place. I’m pretty sure they’ve put him back in a coma for whatever procedure they’re performing on him. I’d guess that they’re doing their work in stages, from the way he’s being moved around: surgery, recovery, more surgery, more recovery.

No danger signs yet. He hasn’t woken up since they put him under at 20:41 yesterday. But his life signs are strong and steady. He hasn’t faltered, not once.

Dr Socks and Rosie haven’t been back yet, either. I got a call from Rosie late last night, just before 22:00, to tell me that it was going to be a while and not to worry. A few more hours than they had anticipated. Something about hospital schedules and surgeon availability, nothing to be concerned about.

Hard not to be concerned. He’s my captain. It was my fault he was hurt, at least partially. And I… care about him.

Rosie and Dr Socks left the hospital shortly after the call and went down the street. According to their destination, Rosie dragged the young doctor out to a bar. They got their bodies blurry with alcohol and then Rosie got into a fight. Either that or she was screwing someone, but knowing her, probably the former. If she was screwing someone, it wasn’t Dr Socks; his biorhythms were dozing by then. They left the place pretty quickly after that, more stumbling than walking, and spent the night in the hospital waiting lounge.

They haven’t left the building since then. This morning, they went up to the twenty-seventh floor and that’s where most of their day has been spent. According to the hospital schematics, that’s the cybernetic augmentation department. Rosie could be getting a tune-up, but I’m not sure why Dr Socks is there. Observing, maybe? Who is keeping an eye on whom, I wonder?

The doc did keep returning to the fifteenth floor to check on John. His pulse has barely fluttered since he took the anti-hangover shot this morning, so I don’t think he’s worried about anything that’s happening to my captain.

Extrapolating stuff like this is annoying. I should send Casper over to monitor the situation directly. But I’d worry about him in Hong Kong traffic and the drones don’t do well if they’re too far away from me. I might not control them directly but they still use a lot of my resources to do what they do. No, it’s too risky. And stupid. And unnecessary.

I could also go hover by John’s window, but that wouldn’t be right or easy either.

Why is this so hard? I know he’s okay. I can tell that much.

There’s a skiff coming this way. I’m starting to be able to pick out the ones that are heading in my direction, in the way they sweep around the shuttle at the end of the row and angle up towards my starboard side. The patches aboard belong to Cameron and Swann, back at last from their tasks in the business district.

The top hatch is open for them; they can hop down easily enough. I keep it closed as much as I can. The air here isn’t exactly ‘fresh’ – full of engine fumes, chemicals and yesterday’s smoke – and the slapping water had a tendency to spray into the airlock if I’m not careful. It’s easier on my air scrubbers and cleaning drones to just keep myself running on my own systems right now.

Water vehicles are so clumsy. They bounce around on the surface erratically as if water is a beast they haven’t quite learned how to tame yet. The skiffs ride on a cushion of air but they’re not very accurate. Is it because of the pilots they have running them? But even skiffs have safety protocols and dumbed-down AIs that could help with control.

Once they have established the correct docking position, they can lock it down steadily enough for passengers not to break something in a transfer. And yet, they still bump and scrape against my hull when they come in for a landing, as if I’m slippery and tough to locate. I keep getting the urge to mag-lock them into place and lift them clear of the water, but that’s not standard procedure and I think it would just make everyone angry with me.

At least Cameron and Swann are steady enough when they step onto my hull and over to the top hatch. The former takes the time to turn and thank the skiff’s pilot; the latter simply hops down through the open doorway and strolls off towards his quarters, rolling his shoulders as if he needs to work out some tension.

Cameron’s step is much lighter. She has finer control than he does, possibly some implanted help. She has a case slung over her shoulder – she didn’t leave with that this morning. What did she pick up? From the way her arm guards it against her side, it’s important.

CAMERON: (on the upper walkway, glancing up to make sure that the hatch is closing behind her) Starry, I need one of your drones.

STARRY: (materialising beside her while the airlock snicks shut) Waldo is on his way, Chief. Can I ask what you need him for?

CAMERON: (patting the case) This needs to be put in a safe place. Don’t tell me where unless I ask you, and don’t tell anyone else even if they do.

STARRY: What about the captain?

CAMERON: Even him. Bring it to him if he needs it, or me, but no-one else.

STARRY: (lifting her eyebrows curiously) Can I ask what’s in it?

CAMERON: (turns and starts to walk towards her quarters) The fruits of today’s labours. This is what we will need at Dyne.

STARRY: (following just behind the Chief) Everything is set up now? The company and everything?

CAMERON: It’s on its way. The groundwork is laid; the rest will grow in time. We’ll need to hurry some of it along, but don’t worry about that. It’s in hand.

STARRY: All right. Anything else I can do?

CAMERON: (shakes her head) No, thank you. Is everyone back?

STARRY: (expression falling) No. The captain is still at the hospital, with Dr– Valdimir and Rosie.

CAMERON: (frowning) Has Rosie checked in yet?

STARRY: Not since last night.

CAMERON: If she hasn’t checked in by eighteen hundred, contact her and ask for a report.

STARRY: Yes, ma’am.

CAMERON: (stopping at the door to her quarters and turning to face the avatar) And Starry?

STARRY: Yes, Chief?

CAMERON: (smiling) Good to see you again. (She heads into her quarters and the door slides closed behind her.)

Another hour until I can check for an update. Still no movement in the positions at the hospital. I could call Rosie now, but I’d only have to call her again at 18:00 as per Cameron’s orders, and you’re not supposed to open comms lines inside hospitals any more than is necessary. They start blocking your signals if you do it too much. I’m lucky they haven’t found the monitoring patches’ signals yet.

I hate this. Oh well, maybe I’ll just catalogue all the hiding spaces I have that can take Cameron’s case. I wonder how many I have that will conceal something of that size and shape. Waldo is picking it up from Cameron’s quarters now, measuring its dimensions and weight as he trundles out of her room again. Let’s see how creative I can be about how I hide this thing.

You know, now that I think about it, there was something missing from that conversation with Cameron. There was something she forgot, and my Chief of Security doesn’t forget things. If there’s something she is always careful and clear about, it’s orders.

She didn’t order me not to open it.

Ship's log, 16:53, 9 March 2214
Location: Offshore docking, Hong Kong, Earth
Status: Docked and powered down

Here we are! Earth. Home planet. Terra Firma.

Well, it’s not very firm here. I’m too big to dock directly on the mainland, so they’ve assigned me a tether spot out in the waters of Repulse Bay, nestled between a shuttle stop and a luxury spaceliner.

I unloaded most of my crew an hour ago; they hopped aboard the port skiffs that speed about the bay here and disappeared into the crowded waters. After some zipping and zagging, they made it to the quays that fight for shoreline space with tiny beaches.

Once they were clear, I submerged; we think it’s better to be as unobtrusive as possible. So, right now, I’m an iceberg: only my top hatch is above the waterline. Sometimes, the skiffs pass by right above me, ruffling the water over my hull.

It’s very tempting to roll so that my tailfin is just visible and glide around the bay, like a shark. But I’m a good ship and will stay in my allotted spot, tethered to the beacon by my nosecone. Besides, the water here is too packed with ships and submersibles for much gliding of any kind.

It’s strange here, under the water. It’s cloudy and churned into a brownish colour. It presses against me all over, like great, wet hands. It’s not restrictive; I have more than enough power to lift myself free. It’s more like being cradled. Wrapped. The water dulls sensory input, except for the antennae I extend outside of its grip. It’s like it has washed the sharp corners off the world.

Being here is giving me way too much time to think. I hadn’t really thought about what would happen once we got here, not in any real detail.

I hadn’t realised that I’d have to let my crew step off my decks and onto strange, foreign skiffs. I had to let them go. They’re out of my reach. I can’t protect them any more. I wasn’t prepared for this.

Of course, I knew they would have to leave my hull to get what we need. I knew that. I had done the calculations and had the data all filed away. But I didn’t realise what it meant. I wasn’t prepared.

It was all I could do not to lock all my hatches when the skiffs pulled up. There was the captain and Dr Socks standing in the airlock, watching it approach, with the little stasis pod containing John’s arm hovering between them. And all I could think was that he was leaving me, stepping beyond my reach, to go into a dangerous situation without me. He’d be alone. Sure, Dr Socks is going with him to keep an eye on everything, but I don’t know him, don’t trust him.

Recording: 15:59, 9 March 2214
Log location: Main crew airlock

STARRY: (resolving her avatar into visibility near the open outer airlock doors) Are you sure you have everything you need?

CAPTAIN: (starts and stares at her briefly, taking in the sight of the avatar) Yes, I think so. Don’t worry, Starry. We’ll be back soon.

DR SOCKS: (stares at the avatar with open curiosity.)

STARRY: How long?

CAPT: A few hours.

DR SOCKS: They may wish to keep him overnight. It depends how the surgery goes.

STARRY: You can’t get them to bring the equipment here?

CAPT: (smiles kindly) You know that’s not going to happen. I’ll be fine, Starry.

STARRY: (shifting her avatar’s weight) Okay. (She looks to the doctor for the first time.) You’re going to look after him, right?

DR SOCKS: (surprised when she meets his gaze) Of course. I’ll look out for him.

STARRY: Bring him back to me.

DR SOCKS: Um, sure. It’s what I’m here for.

ROSIE: (walking up from inside the ship and slapping Dr Socks on the shoulder) Don’t worry, I’ll keep ’em in line.

STARRY: You’re going too?

ROSIE: Yup. Slight change of plan. Chief wants me here. That okay with you, Cap?

CAPT: (nodding) Yes, that’s fine.

DR SOCKS: (shoots Rosie a sideways look.)

ROSIE: (misses it entirely, too busy grinning) Excellent.

STARRY: (glances over her shoulder, out of the open airlock doors. The breeze doesn’t lift her hair the way it does for the humans. The skiff is pulling up alongside, lining itself up with the lip of the airlock.) Okay. Good luck. I’ll… (She gazes at the captain for a long second.) I’ll see you later.

CAPT: (smiles for her again) You will. See you soon, Starry.

He was trying to be so brave, mostly for my benefit, I think. He should know that I can tell when he’s faking. I could tell how strained he was, just standing there, and I could see how much Dr Socks had to support him when he climbed into the skiff. The loss of his arm has been wearing at him, more and more.

I appreciate that he tried, though. I know that he means to come through this all right. I can feel his heart, even now, beating in its steady, dependable way, though it’s a little faster than usual. They’re at the hospital, discussing things with the surgeon. Investigating options. I wish I knew how it was going.

There wasn’t time to build more comprehensive monitors. Cameron and I have been working on them for the past few days; she approached me while we were on approach and asked for something to keep track of the newbies while they were land-side. She wanted to see what Swann and Dr Socks got up to without them knowing and I suggested that we apply them to everyone who was leaving the ship. It’s not that I don’t trust the others – of course I trust them – but knowing that I can tell where and how they are makes all the difference to me. I won’t fret so much with them gone. I might obsess over the data feeds a bit, but it’s better than knowing nothing.

The patches are thin and light, so most of them don’t even know they’re being monitored. I had Bit and Byte paint them onto each crewmember last night while they were all asleep. The patches had to be painted onto the skin where they wouldn’t be rubbed off or damaged: the hollow of the neck, the spine, the inside of the wrist. They’re not great places for visual or aural receptors because they’ll be muffled by clothing. I couldn’t build anything sophisticated anyway; I don’t have the parts to construct truly subtle sensors. Building in transmitters strong enough to reach me through the morass of Hong Kong’s data traffic was hard enough. I’m getting biorhythms and a location from each of them, but that’s all. That’ll have to be enough.

At least I can tell how they are. The captain is starting to get stressed, but Dr Socks seems energised. Enthused, perhaps, if his adrenaline and energy is anything to go by. His heartbeat isn’t freaking out. He’s probably enjoying the chance to delve into his work, sparring with the surgeons and urging them on to more exciting options. Rosie is relaxed and unphased by it all, so he can’t be pushing too far yet. She’d smack him upside the head soon enough if he tried.

I’m so glad that Cameron decided to send Rosie with the captain. I haven’t told the Chief how worried I am about him but I guess that she can tell anyway. Could that be another reason why she asked me to construct the patches? Did she know that I’d want one on John? Or is she worried too?

Cameron took Swann with her when she disembarked. She went off to the business sector, to look for an agent who can set up the company registration for us. She’s still on her way there now, stuck in the molasses of Hong Kong traffic. Even with four layers of lanes stacked on top of each other, it still takes forever to get anywhere on that island.

Elliott was the last one to leave. He’s going on his own – I don’t like it, but he insisted that he would be okay. He’s heading in the opposite direction to Cameron and Swann, towards the less prestigious trading outfits. He has a digisheet with a long list of parts we need and enough credit to buy it several times over. He also took his favourite spanner with him, though I’m not entirely sure what he plans to do with it. I’m sure he’ll be fine.

He has been in the same spot for seven minutes now and his heart-rate is climbing steadily; he must be making a deal. His location comes up as a mechanic’s garage on my maps. That didn’t take him long! He’s not in trouble. I don’t have to worry about him.

It seems that I’m doing a lot of things I don’t have to lately.

The only ones still aboard right now are two of my science team and one half-deactivated pirate. Half-Face is still in Med Bay, where he’s been in a drug-induced coma since we hit Earth orbit. The captain decided it was best not to take any chances: who knows what kind of comms equipment he might have hidden in one of his implants? I’d rather not find out by having armed ships descend on me, so I had no qualms about making him sleep through this visit.

All three of my science contingent have been looking at the records from the last Step. At Cirilli and Lang Lang’s request, I tried to pull in some data about Grisette while I was on the Outside. It’s not easy: I had to filter the sensor information and pick out bits to store from the massive volumes out there. It’s hard to know if I grabbed the right stuff for them. I’m sure they’ll tell me as soon as they’re done with the analysis.

To my surprise, Cirilli didn’t stay to complete the work. She left Ebling and Lang Lang to it, ordered herself a skiff, and stepped off the ship. It’s the first time she has left my decks since I woke up; both times I was at the JOP, she didn’t leave the confines of my hull. She barely leaves mid-deck except to sleep, especially now she’s not sleeping with the captain any more.

She didn’t say where she was going or why. No explanation at all, not even when I projected my avatar for her and asked. She just fobbed me off and told me she would be back before tomorrow. It wasn’t a comforting answer but she has never been the comforting type. Not towards me, anyway.

She doesn’t know that I have a monitoring patch on her. She doesn’t know that I know exactly where she is. Like Cameron and Swann, she’s still in traffic, but I’m watching her. I’ll see where she goes. Maybe I’ll let the captain ask her what she was up to, after they both get back.

I don’t like waiting. I don’t like watching these blips on my incoming transmissions. It’s never enough.

I’d rather be flying. I’d rather lift myself into this atmosphere and play with the wind.

Until a few hours ago, I’d never known the touch of air, the sweep of pressure across my hull. There’s something thrilling about it. Flying through clouds is like dancing through candy floss – it gets caught on my wingtips and fins and trails behind me, as if it doesn’t want to let me go. I can draw patterns in it, and it beads my hull with tiny, bright droplets that skate across my paint. They leave tracks on me, just like I leave tracks on the sky, and it seems like a fair exchange. It’s like dancing with a partner after years of waltzing alone.

Puncturing the atmosphere was harder than I thought it would be, but my paint is more than up to the job of protecting us from the heat of re-entry friction. I was like a hot knife sliding into butter, scything my way towards a juicy centre.

The air cooled me, and snapped and banged at my heels as I broke the sound barrier. It was a noisy thing trying to chase me, and it should know that no-one catches me when I’m flying. Not even the pirates, not without cheating, or superior numbers, or shooting at me until I’m too injured to fly any more. When it’s just me, there’s no catching me. I almost caught myself giggling as we came down towards the bay-port.

I wish I could be up there again. The captain has asked me not to. I’m too noticeable, he says. I fly too well. Someone will see me; people will comment, and film, and talk. They’ll ask questions and try to find me. No AI flies like I do. There’s no pilot on my roster. My avatar is a dead woman.

We have to keep a low profile. Stay below the radar, whatever that means. So instead of a bird, I’m an iceberg, lying in wait below the surface of the water. I’m lurking until someone needs me, or someone comes home.

There’s a flock of seagulls swooping a short way down the coast from here. They’re swirling around above the water, diving and stalling and barely missing each other. Dirty birds, fighting over dead fish, but they’re so beautiful. They’re alive and in love with the air, and they fly so cleanly.

I can’t fly right now. I can’t do anything for my crew except wait and hope, and monitor the patterns of their pulses. Maybe I’ll watch the birds and see if they have any tricks I haven’t learned yet.

Ship's log, 18:02, 7 March 2214
Location: Transit Lane 42-N7, Home system
Status: Sublight transit

I thought Earth would be prettier than this.

Danika has been here before, and she’s seen it from a pilot’s perspective. Mostly, that means that she noticed the traffic: lots of it, barely contained within navigation lanes, moving slowly as it shuffles to and from ranked orbits. Ships of all shapes, sizes and purposes.

It’s like a living, breathing version of the junkpile at Feras. Schools of ships move like glinting fish, heeding invisible commands to stay safely grouped and heading in the same direction. This is how ships are supposed to be, busy with purpose and places to go.

Earth’s blue-green ball is obscured by the cloud of satellites and debris in her orbit. Debris clutters the space between the lanes, with scoopers busy gathering it together to be picked up in never-ending loops. Slow-moving trawlers pick over the refuse, creating clean lines through the mess in their wake and trying to at least keep the landing and launching corridors clear. Even with that help, the planet is hard to make out from here.

The vacuum here is thick with transmissions, choked so full that it can be difficult to get a clear channel. I can listen in on the chatter of a hundred conversations, some of them gibberish with encryption. It’s not just ships talking to each other or communications with the surface; there’s a lot of planetside data being bounced off satellites, muddying up the water. On top of that, radio broadcasts leak out from the planet, too, old technology still stubbornly being used and polluting the system.

I had expected more from the home planet of the human race. This is where Danika’s bloodline started. This is where my makers started. Both halves of me have a history here; I feel like I should feel something for this place. Fondness, reverence. Attachment. Those emotions are hovering just out of reach. Perhaps they’ll resolve when I can get a clear view of the planet; right now, it’s all too much like a transmission that’s out of focus.

In the meantime, I can spend my time weaving through the traffic. Technically, we’re supposed to set a steady course for our designated Earth orbit, to await our allotted landing time, but where’s the harm if I make the trip interesting? Swooping around a cargo hauler’s train of pods and diving between a transport and a courier isn’t hurting anyone.

I wonder if anyone in there might be shaking a fist at me. I wonder how hard it would be to construct an external holographic projection of me shaking a fist back…

Holographic projections. That reminds me of what Elliott said: I should use my avatar more. I’m here all the time but he said the crew missed me. I hadn’t realised how much I had been avoiding the avatar. Hiding. Trying to be a better AI by being more like a proper AI, perhaps? I don’t know.

Anyway, I will use it again, and not just because Elliott told me that the crew missed it, but… because I want to.

Maybe Dr Socks can explain all of this to me. He’s good at that stuff. Why I stopped using the avatar; why I want to again. Maybe he can tell me why it feels like… like a part of me is still hugging Elliott.

It sounds so strange when I put it into words, into data committed to a log and saved deep in my filestores. Hugging. That particular memory file is warm, and my files don’t tend to have a temperature. What does that mean?

I haven’t dared to ask Elliott. I don’t know what he’d say, what he might read into it. I’m not sure what I want to read into it.

Danika’s memories have temperatures. They are tainted with emotion, thick with scents and music, and sometimes laden with meaning. Am I capable of creating such things? Is that what this is?

I’m not even entirely sure why I asked him for the hug. Danika wasn’t that kind of tactile person, not since she was a kid, but I remember how she loved hugs when she was little. They smelled of ozone and hot plastic, made of crumpled shipsuits and scratchy stubble against her cheek. She liked it best when they swept her up off the decking.

That last part stayed with her when she grew up: she likes to be swept off her feet but that wasn’t about hugging and it wasn’t her father’s arms she was throwing herself into. That was more complicated, but this… it was simple, and easy, and good.

So many times, I’ve wished for the feel of someone’s arms around me. Which is weird, because I’m a ship and they can’t.

Ships are supposed to be self-reliant, self-contained. They don’t have arms or a body capable of being held, and they can’t relax into the support of another being. The best I can do is to switch off my engines and lean on physics, or dock with something bigger than me and disable myself, and I don’t like doing any of that. It’s not at all the same.

It’s like the avatar remembers a different body. I thought that didn’t matter – couldn’t matter. But I could feel it when Elliott touched my avatar’s hand, when he nudged my shoulder. I remembered what it felt like to be connected to someone else. And I had to know what it was like to be held.

Lately, I’ve been unsure about so much, cutting ties with my company and hiding from everyone, but at that moment I felt safe and whole. For the first time since I woke up, I could lean into someone else. I didn’t have to stand on my own, didn’t have to hold my weight up alone, and I was warm all the way through. I could rest, even though my systems were still running.

Elliott’s avatar smells of engine oil and metal. I wonder if he knows that or if it’s automatic on his part.

When he disconnected from my systems, he was very quiet. He sat up and frowned thoughtfully at the decking between his feet for six seconds. Then he touched his cheek – where I kissed him – and huffed and shoved himself off the chair. Two minutes and fourteen seconds later, he was back on the Bridge, ready to get back to work.

I’ve gone over that sensor log of him disconnecting a few times. I don’t know what it means. Did I make things complicated?

Byte isn’t helping. He hasn’t been far from my engineer since he was brought back online, and last night he decided to draw on Elliott. While he was asleep.

Recording: 07:43, 7 March 2214

ELLIOTT: (gathering up his toolbelt from a counter in Engineering with one hand and scratching the back of his head with the other.)

BYTE: (scampers up over the lip of the counter and crouches down there, head tilted up to watch the engineer. The fingers of all four hands lace together.)

ELLIOTT: (yawns widely and shakes his shoulders, still shaking off sleep. He blinks a few times, then catches sight of his reflection on a scrap of bright metal. He snatches up the metal and tilts it to get a better look, scowling.)

(On his cheek, drawn in neat black lines, is the outline of a pair of lips. Right where avatar lips met avatar cheek. Elliott peers in to be sure, a bewildered expression drifting over his face.)

BYTE: (gives a little happy hop, then does a complicated dance. Tiny feet tick against the counter-top: he shuffles right, shuffles left, spins. Then he bows, hands spreading in a ta-da gesture. His head tilts again as he looks up at the human.)

ELLIOTT: (face crumpling down into a furious scowl) You did this, you little shit?

BYTE: (nods proudly and holds a thumb up.)

ELLIOTT: What the fuck – you drew on me? (He starts rubbing at the mark on his cheek.) What the hell! STARRY!

BYTE: (skitters to the side, eyeing the edge of the counter as if checking for an escape route.)

STARRY: Yes, Elli– oooh.

ELLIOTT: Your fucking drone just–!

STARRY: …so I see.

ELLIOTT: (checking his reflection and rubbing at the mark again) It’s not coming off!

STARRY: Scans indicate that he used his indelible marker.

ELLIOTT: YOU LITTLE SHIT, COME HERE.

BYTE: (leaps off the counter and makes all speed for the nearest vent, legs blurring.)

ELLIOTT: (going after Byte) I am going to rip that marker off and shove it up your–

STARRY: (activating her avatar, appearing behind Elliott as he dives after the drone) I think it was a joke, Elliott.

ELLIOTT: I don’t care! Hey, c’mere! (He throws himself forward and skids across the Engineering deck on his stomach. His hand closes around the drone just in front of the vent as he slides to a stop.) Got you, you tiny fucker.

BYTE: (widens his visual apertures and looks up at the engineer.)

ELLIOTT: (shoves himself back to his feet with his free hand) So, you think this is funny, do you?

BYTE: (points at Elliott’s cheek and bobs his head up and down.)

STARRY: (trying hard not to smile.)

ELLIOTT: (shakes the drone angrily.)

BYTE: (rattles.)

STARRY: (controlling her expression with great care) Waldo is on his way with a remover.

ELLIOTT: Great, another fucking drone.

STARRY: If you’d rather go to the doc…

ELLIOTT: (turns his scowl on the ship’s avatar) No, that’s fine. I suppose you think this is hilarious as well.

STARRY: Not until you entered into the human-drone olympics. You can move pretty fast when you want to.

ELLIOTT: Shut up.

STARRY: You can! That dive was impressive.

ELLIOTT: (stamps across to the counter again, turning his back to the avatar so she won’t see the corners of his mouth twitch) Shut up. Can’t you keep your drones under control?

STARRY: (sternly) Byte, no drawing on the crew, please.

BYTE: (stretches his neck to peer at Starry around Elliott’s shoulder and nods solemnly.)

WALDO: (trundles in purposefully and holds out a moist cloth towards Elliott.)

ELLIOTT: (looks at the newcomer) You can shut up, too.

Byte spent the next hour and a half locked inside a toolbox. I felt like I should complain but he did deserve it. He tried to be extra-helpful to Elliott for the rest of the day, which meant that he got shouted at a lot, but they both seemed to enjoy it anyway.

Elliott hasn’t said anything to me about the hug or the kiss or anything. There was just that one moment when he touched his cheek; after that, nothing. He’s pretending that nothing happened and… actually, I’m okay with that. I like that we can carry on and do what we need to, and push past any weirdness that might rise up between us. I like that we can hug and the world doesn’t end.

In the meantime, I’m getting closer and closer to the home planet. I’m still waiting to be assigned a landing slot.

This will be my first time flying in an atmosphere. I’ll have to deal with air pressure and flow outside my hull as well as inside. I’ll have to try not to hit any birds! I can get wet in clouds and dry in sunlight, and I’ll be landing on water. It’ll be like a waterbed! (Danika wasn’t a fan of waterbeds but it sounds like fun to me; I have better thrust control than she did.)

More importantly, here, we’ll heal what’s wrong with us. My crew and I will get the parts we need and we’ll set things in motion so we can be free. I can’t wait. It’ll be hours before we even reach orbit at this rate and I don’t want to have to wait in line.

Patience, Starry. We’ll be there soon!

Captain's log, 17:12, 6 March 2214
Location: Home system
Status: Sublight transit near Venus
Log recorded: Captain's cabin

This is Captain Warwick reporting. We have made it into the Home system and are currently making our way around the dark side of Venus on our way to Earth.

Starry brought us into the system with the sun between us and Mercury. We know that the pirates’ rendezvous was next to the hot little planet, so we’re staying out of sensor contact with it as much as possible.

Earth is on this side of the sun right now, too, and Terra Sol should shield us from the pirates’ contact while we’re here. Despite Dr Cirilli’s stern instructions about time travel, I suspect that Starry had to adjust the date of our entry to make sure that the planets were appropriately lined up when we entered the system. Does a few days matter that much? I don’t think so, but Lorena probably has a different opinion. She’s a scientist enough to strive for mathematical precision. I wonder if Starry will tell her or make it her and Lang Lang’s little secret. For the sake of peace on board ship, I’m not even going to look it up; I’ll deal with it if she starts screaming but I don’t see the point in borrowing trouble when we’ve got enough already.

It should only take us another day or two to get to Earth. We’ve decided to bypass the Moonbase, due to the Judiciary presence there. That’s as close as they get to Earth and that’s too close for us.

Starry has plotted a course that will bring us in on the opposite side of the planet to the moon, and she’s bringing us around towards the transit lanes so we can get lost in traffic. The lanes lead out to the edges of the system, because every other ship has to enter from the outside to take the long, FTL way, rather than arriving from the middle of the system like we do. It’s a big loop for us, but it’s better to slide in and pretend that we came that way. After all, what other way could we have come from?

Starry is getting better at the Steps. It’s getting smoother every time she does it; we can still feel when she disables the inertial dampeners, but the movement between portals on the Outside is less and less noticeable. Whatever Elliott said to her seems to have solved her distraction problems; she seems more focussed than ever now. This time, there was barely a shiver as she slipped out through the portal.

Oddly, I don’t think it’s because she’s moving less. Our Steps across the galaxy have been of varying lengths; the last one from Alpha Apodis to here was 410 light-years, while the distance from Corsica to Grisette was over 10,000 light-years. But when time and space are no object, moving between two points in space is more of a conceptual journey than a physical one, and actual distance is meaningless. Using her engines to move between those points is a habit and one that she’s falling out of more and more.

I had assumed that the need for a human pilot was driven by the inability of a computer to filter the sensor data of the Outside, but now I think it’s more than that. Starry is making intuitive leaps that enable her to change position without moving, using instincts that no AI can fake.

The more we learn about Starry and the work she is asked to do, the more it becomes apparent that we wouldn’t have made it this far if she was just an AI. Danika’s death was no accident but I believe it was more than just Tripi at work. Fate put a ghost in the machine and gave us exactly what we needed. As my mother loved to say as often as possible: the universe provides, even if we can’t always recognise it.

The universe provides. It’s cold comfort when a part of me is in cryogenic storage.

We’re on our way to a planet with medical facilities that can help me, but we’re a long way from landing yet. I haven’t told Dr Valdimir, our new doctor, that I’ve started having phantom pains in my arm, despite the neural blocks on my right shoulder. I think he knows anyway. The brain adjusts even when you don’t want it to and he’s smart enough to read it in me.

That’s part of the reason for moving back to my cabin. Starry is worried because she can’t monitor me as closely here, but she’ll only get upset if she knows how bad it is. There’s nothing she can do about it – there’s nothing anyone outside of a fully-equipped hospital can do about it – so there’s no point worrying her. And I don’t want to go back into a coma.

I’m her captain and I can still do that, no matter how many arms I have attached.

Dr Valdimir asked me if I would choose a cybernetic prosthetic. He’s the only one bold enough to ask me outright; even the Lieutenant has shied away from that question, and he’s the poster-boy for replacement body parts. Though I don’t think most of those were his choice; from the looks of his face, half of his head was shredded by shrapnel and unreclaimable.

Of course, I might not have a choice either. We believe that my arm is still viable but it’s easy to be wrong. All the wisest advice tells us not to assume.

But if I did have the choice, what would I pick? The strength and versatility of a cybernetic, or the familiarity and purity of flesh? Is this the universe’s way of giving me an opportunity to expand my body’s abilities, or a test to see if I will forsake my natural self? Will I move forward or backwards?

In my heart, I want my arm back. I want to be whole, to be the man I was before. But I wonder if it is only prejudice and fear that makes me shy away from alternatives. I shouldn’t close myself off to possibilities.

I know that Starry wants to see me healed, wants the damage undone so that she can pretend it never happened. I can’t let her make the decision for me, though, and she has been trying so hard to let me do this my way.

I don’t know what I’m going to choose. I suppose I have to wait until I know if my arm is viable before I can know what choice I have to make.

In the meantime, I have other, much easier decisions to deal with. Like how much we trust Swann and Dr Valdimir. Once we’re planetside, they will either need to be contained or allowed to roam free. Half-measures won’t cut it.

We’ll be landing just offshore from Hong Kong – it’s one of the few locations that has everything we’re looking for in one place. A neutral trading nexus with few ties to Is-Tech, some of the most advanced medical facilities on Earth, and agents that are able to register independent companies. Most of those places won’t ask too many questions, either.

I won’t be able to visit my home. It’s there, in the Americas, though I don’t have any family left to visit. It’s too risky; right now, none of us can dare to visit home. We won’t be able to do that until this project is over, one way or another.

Working outside the law like this doesn’t sit well with me. Every step we take is one more that we won’t be able to take back later. When we signed on to this job, we didn’t know that we might be tied to it for the rest of our lives. We didn’t know that it might spoil our chances of ever working legally again. We knew it was dangerous and might be the end of our lives, but signing that contract might have been the last truly legal thing we ever do.

It’s hard not to blame Lorena for this; she knew the project was illegal all along. Even she was misled, though; Is-Tech promised her that it was little more than paperwork, licences that had been caught up in red tape. All she needed to do was keep her head down until the company lawyers untangled it.

I don’t know if she ever checked to see if they were chasing the licensing. Forty years and she believed the same line – just a little more to do, we’re almost there, carry on and the paperwork will catch up to you. She was so blinded by her devotion to her work that she chose to believe them.

The scales have fallen from her eyes and yet her path hasn’t changed. She, like the rest of us, passed the point of no return some time ago, and nothing will convince her to turn her back on her work. This project is older than her children and it’s ingrained in who she is.

If Is-Tech ever want to be able to commercialise her work, they have to get those licences sorted out. They have to be chasing them. Cold logic says that they can’t afford not to make this project legitimate, but it’s not much of a comfort right now. It hasn’t occurred to Lorena that the illegality of the project might be a tool they’re using against her; she can’t sell her ideas to any other company if it’s illegal. Their protection is a leash.

This hasn’t occurred to her because she’s not in it for the money and she has no reason to defect to another company. But Ebling is different. He’d snake it out from under her if he could. He still might, one day. Luckily, he’s wearing the same leash as the rest of us.

Right now, we’re all bound together in this endeavour. We’ve made our choices and we’re all here, whatever our reasons might be.

Dr Valdimir and Swann have had their chance to voice their opinions, too. Whatever reasons Is-Tech had for sending them to us, these two new men will find out soon enough that there’s no going back from this path. That doesn’t mean they won’t betray us, though.

Chief Cameron believes that we should give them their freedom on Earth, to see what they do. Better to find out now if they’re going to be trouble, rather than later when they might have had time to plan and scheme.

Being this suspicious doesn’t sit well with me. Cameron is right, though: it is better to know now. Remove the doubts we’ve got. We’re taking so many chances just coming here, does it really matter if we take a few more?

She’ll set it up to make sure they’re monitored. Is-Tech might not have done us many favours, but they did assemble a crew that knows how to do its work. I have competent, skilled people to rely on and that’s a comfort. As for the doctor and new SecOff, well. In them, I see a boy who has always been too smart for his own good and a mercenary who has never been real part of a crew before. They could do well with us. Or they could be over-smart and aloof. That choice is theirs; none of us can make it for them.

Earth is within sensor range now. She’s beautiful and familiar, even her dirty parts. Home and hope.

Eighteen hours until we’ll be in the transit lanes. I should talk to the troops and make sure everyone knows what they’re doing when we get there.

One way or another, a new chapter in this project is going to begin in this visit to Earth.

Chief Engineer's log, 08:50, 4 March 2214 
Location: Alpha Apodis system, Apus constellation 
Status: Sublight transit towards close orbit around Alpha Apodis Sol 
Log location: Neural link from Engineering immersion chair A to
internal ship systems, Circuit 249991-B16NM

(Elliott is on a grassy slope inside Starry’s head. He has raised himself onto one knee, preparing to rise, but a pause has made him look over his shoulder to the ship’s avatar. She’s sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, watching him solemnly.)

I should just go and make sure her systems are all primed and glitch-free. Most useful thing I know how to do.

I should go do something practical. But I can’t leave her sitting like that. It’s not right or something.

All this because of a letter from Danika’s brother? Like one voice from beyond the grave isn’t enough on this ship.

ELLIOTT: (scrubs at the back of his head with one hand, twisting around to face the ship’s avatar again) So, um. You’re okay?

STARRY: (with widening eyes) I’m being more careful now. I promise, no more glitches. I won’t get distracted again.

ELLIOTT: Bullshit. And, not what I asked.

STARRY: Oh… I don’t know. No, I’m not. I guess.

ELLIOTT: (sighs and sits down properly again, closing the gap between them) You can’t just be glad he’s alive?

STARRY: I am! I guess. It’s just that… he’s not a variable that came up in any of my simulations of what we might do. And I don’t know what that means. Every time I think I’ve got my calculations down, the parameters change. I thought breaking away from Is-Tech would solve our problems, but now… now there’s this and I don’t know if I’m going the right way any more. What is it supposed to mean, Elliott?

ELLIOTT: (shrugs) It means life throws us curve-balls and you gotta deal with them. Recalculate and move on, same as the rest of us. (He scratches at his head absently.) So, uh. Is there anything I can do?

STARRY: (tilts her head) I don’t know. How did you deal with it when you had family you wanted to find, but couldn’t?

ELLIOTT: (frowns) Not really a problem I’ve had.

STARRY: Why not?

ELLIOTT: Not being able to find them was fine by me.

STARRY: (crestfallen) Oh.

ELLIOTT: You really want to find him?

STARRY: Yeah.

ELLIOTT: What are you hoping for with this? You know he’s not going to… you’re not the sister he sent that letter to.

STARRY: (gazing at her hands again) I know.

ELLIOTT: So what’s running ’round in that head of yours? In… here.

(He spreads his arms and looks around, in case there are any clues. Nothing pops up, though the tone of the lighting is changing subtly. Red and blue flow brighter beyond the tumble of grass as defensive protocols kick into a higher gear. The environmental system’s green threads beneath remain unchanged.)

STARRY: (throws her hands up) I don’t know! I’m confused!

(Her hands flop down onto the grass beside her boots, then she hugs her knees tightly again. Her fingers tangle tightly with the fabric of her shipsuit.)

STARRY: I know he won’t want to see me. But I want to see him. I want to know he’s okay. Danika wanted that – to know he’s all right. I think… I think it’d make her happy. I just want to know why he left, where he went. I want to know what happened. Put it to rest, maybe?

ELLIOTT: (watching her with a worried expression) Does the captain know about all this?

STARRY: No, he doesn’t. I want to tell him, but I don’t know if I should.

ELLIOTT: Why shouldn’t you…? (He trails off when the ship’s avatar tucks herself down into a tighter ball.)

STARRY: (ducks her face in against her knees, her shoulders rising defensively.)

ELLIOTT: Starry, what aren’t you telling me?

STARRY: (sighs after a moment and lifts her head, carefully not looking at Elliott.)

(She loosens an arm and makes a gesture in the air, calling up the data from the recording again. Time, date. Name. Another flick of her fingers brings up the details of the package that enveloped the recording. The date it was sealed, the date it was unsealed. The place it was picked up from and the place is was sent from.)

STARRY: There. (She points to the origin coordinates.) They point to this constellation, Elliott. He’s here, somewhere.

ELLIOTT: Danika’s brother is a fucking pirate?

STARRY: (hotly) We don’t know that! He could have been… there could be lots of reasons!

ELLIOTT: (stares at her.)

STARRY: (drops her gaze under the weight of his) See why I don’t want to mention it to the captain. I can’t ask anyone to go looking for him.

ELLIOTT: (sighs and shakes his head, still frowning) For an AI, you’re a fucking moron sometimes.

STARRY: (glances up hopefully) You know what I should do?

ELLIOTT: What? No. Well, yes. Tell the captain. Don’t ask him to go on some crazy pirate hunt if you don’t want, but tell him. He’s worried about you.

STARRY: He is?

ELLIOTT: Of course he is! He’s not the only one, either, y’know. (He falls defensively quiet.)

STARRY: (stares at him.)

ELLIOTT: (gives under the pressure of her attention, cheeks flushing) You think we haven’t noticed? How you haven’t been using your avatar? How erratic and emotional you’ve been, even for you? We’re all worried! We all miss seeing you.

STARRY: (sheepishly) I’m sorry.

ELLIOTT: (throws his hands up in the air) Don’t be sorry! Tell us what’s going on! (He waggles a hand at her vaguely.) Don’t just pace around inside your own head. Or sit here, curled up in a little ball. That’s what crazy people do.

STARRY: I’m not crazy.

ELLIOTT: Thank fuck, or we’d all be screwed.

STARRY: I wouldn’t hurt the crew. I wouldn’t. Not on purpose.

ELLIOTT: (hesitates and looks at her) I know that. Shit, I didn’t mean…

STARRY: (lowers her head.)

ELLIOTT: (to himself, quieter) Shit.

What the hell? The captain should be in here doing this, not me. He’d know exactly what to say. Instead, I’ve made her look like I just kicked her. That’s not what I meant!

Fuck. How do I fix this? Captain sent me in to figure out what’s going on, not make it worse.

Anyone else would be better than me right now. Even Rosie would be better at this touchy-feely-emotional crap. Okay, maybe not Rosie.

Is she crying? She’s a ship! She’s not supposed to be able to cry!

Maybe I should look at her logic processors.

ELLIOTT: (takes a breath, even though he doesn’t need to breathe in here, and reaches over to pat her shoulder awkwardly) Look, it’s okay. No-one’s angry with you. Everyone knows you’ve done your best for us.

STARRY: (glances at the hand touching her, surprised) But it hasn’t been good enough.

Oh, thank god: she’s not crying, not yet. Please don’t start. I have no idea what I’d do if she started that.

ELLIOTT: (pulls his hand back awkwardly) Sure it has. World ain’t perfect, Starry, and we wouldn’t swap you for a battleship in a shit-storm.

STARRY: (smiles faintly, though it escapes quickly) Thanks. It’s so hard to know if I’m doing the right thing. I can run thousands of simulations but they never give me the answer. Too many variables, too many permutations, and new factors come in all the time. I’m supposed to take my cue from cold, hard numbers, but…

ELLIOTT: (grins humourlessly) Welcome to being human.

STARRY: That’s not a huge comfort, y’know.

ELLIOTT: It’s not like you’ve gotta do all this on your own. Leave the hard stuff to the captain; that’s why he gets the big bucks.

STARRY: (sighs and nods. She falls quiet for a few seconds. Then she peeks at Elliott sideways.) So… the crew has really missed my avatar?

ELLIOTT: Yeah. What’s with you not using that?

STARRY: (shrugs) I didn’t feel like it.

ELLIOTT: Oh. And now?

STARRY: (to her toes) I dunno. Maybe.

ELLIOTT: (huffs and rolls his eyes) Trust me to get stuck with a girl ship.

STARRY: What?

ELLIOTT: Well, I did!

STARRY: (hmphs and turns her head away from him. He can just see the twitch in the corner of her lips.)

ELLIOTT: (leans sideways to bump shoulders with her) Come on. Might as well take a look at those Bridge interfaces while I’m here. If you’re done mooning.

STARRY: You’re so mean!

ELLIOTT: (getting to his feet) I’m an engineer; in my world, smacking things with a spanner fixes them.

STARRY: And you’re eloquent, too.

ELLIOTT: Screw you and your hundred-credit words. (He waggles a finger at her.) Don’t think I don’t know what it means.

STARRY: So are you going to smack me with a spanner?

ELLIOTT: (offering her a hand up) I would, but I left them in my other pants.

STARRY: (accepting his help to stand) It’s just like you to leave spare pants in my head. Please don’t make my brain look like Engineering.

ELLIOTT: (hesitates, then tries to draw his hand free subtly) Hey, I keep asking you to stop messing with my space, but you keep on sending the drones in to clean up. Goes two ways, y’know.

STARRY: (holding onto him) I don’t send them in! Waldo and Casper like to tidy things. And I think they see you as a challenge.

ELLIOTT: Sometimes, I think welding them to the decking is a challenge.

STARRY: That’s because you’re mean.

ELLIOTT: Yeah, yeah. (He starts off across the grass, heading towards a nexus of data feeds.) Come on, girly-ship. Sooner we get all this other shit sorted out, the sooner we’ll be able to find brother pirate guy.

STARRY: (perks up, following him) Yeah, you’re right. We… might already be on the right path for that.

ELLIOTT: See? Moron AI.

STARRY: Stop calling me names!

ELLIOTT: Did you think to talk to our pet cripple pirate yet?

STARRY: (brightens) No.

ELLIOTT: I rest my case.

STARRY: You’re still mean.

ELLIOTT: Just the way you like me.

Girls: I don’t get them. If you’re nice, they crumple up like you’re kicking them in the puppy. But if you insult them and poke them with a stick, they perk right up. It doesn’t make sense!

You’d think that an AI’s logic circuits would mean even something as special as Starry’s melded mind would at least make rational sense. But nope, she’s as loony as the next female. How’s a guy supposed to know how to handle that?

I guess my work here is done; at least, as far as the captain’s request goes. This should be enough to report back to him. Next time he definitely needs to come himself, dammit. A man with that much hair will definitely know how to handle a ship with surprise family issues. What would he tell her, I wonder? ‘Trust in the spirits’ guidance’ or some such airy shit. I’ll stick with smacking things with spanners, thanks.

At least she’s not moping any more. I should come in and poke her more often. With, er, insults.

And– now what?

STARRY: (stops abruptly, which forces Elliott to stop as well because she still has hold of his hand.)

ELLIOTT: (turns to look at her, eyebrows lifting.)

STARRY: (solemnly) Thanks, Elliott. For coming in to see me.

ELLIOTT: (flushing) Yeah, ‘course. What friends are for and all that shit.

STARRY: Yeah. Can… can I ask you something?

Uh oh.

ELLIOTT: Sure. What is it?

STARRY: I just… I want… it’s been a long time since I… well, I guess technically I’ve never… I mean…

ELLIOTT: (looks at her more closely with a trace of wariness) Starry, you’re babbling.

STARRY: (shifts her weight and rubs the back of her neck with her free hand, unconsciously echoing one of Elliott’s habitual gestures) Yeah. Okay.

(She huffs out a breath and meets Elliott’s gaze uncertainly.) Um. …can I have a hug?

ELLIOTT: (cheeks colouring) Oh. (He stares at her for a moment, then shakes his head.) Yeah, sure. As long as you don’t tell anyone.

STARRY: (with a solemn nod) I promise.

(It’s awkward at first, as neither seems sure what to do once they step within hugging range of each other. They’re all fumbles and false starts peppered with embarrassed glances. Starry finally gives up and dives in, throwing her arms around his neck. Elliott holds her gingerly, patting her shoulderblade. After a few seconds, they relax; she tucks her face into his neck and leans into him, and his eyes close. He hugs her in tightly.)

ELLIOTT: (after a while, quietly) You okay?

STARRY: (head still nestled in his neck, sniffling softly) Mmm-hmm.

ELLIOTT: (into her hair) It’s gonna be all right, y’know.

STARRY: (clinging to him more tightly) Yeah. Yeah, I know.

(They stay like that for another few long seconds. Finally, Starry lifts her head and shifts back, blinking rapidly. Her eyes are bright but she does look like she’s crying.)

STARRY: (smiling shyly) Thank you.

ELLIOTT: (studies her face, his hands resting on her waist. He looks stunned by the whole thing.) Hey, sure. No problem. Er, happy to oblige.

STARRY: (blushes. Before Elliott knows what’s happening, she pecks a kiss on his cheek and steps back, sliding out of his hands. Her fingers fall away from his shoulders.) Thanks.

ELLIOTT: (dropping his arms to his sides, as if not sure what else to do with them now) You said that already.

STARRY: Yeah. So, um, Bridge interfaces?

ELLIOTT: Yeah. Shall we?

STARRY: (beams at him) Sure. (She turns to lead the way.)

ELLIOTT: (follows her.)

Well. That was… different.

A ship that wants hugs. If I told someone about this, they’d never believe me.

I could feel her breath on my neck. These aren’t even our real bodies, and she doesn’t breathe in hers anyway, and yet her avatar does. And it was warm, just like her skin. At least I’ve got autonomic reflexes to blame for my avatar’s breathing, but her… That braincopy must be fully integrated now, and coherent enough to make her breathe.

I wonder if she has a pulse, too.

Goddamn captain, I bet he knew what she wanted. He had to be right, didn’t he?

Look at her, bouncing off like that was all she needed. If I’d started with the hug, could we have avoided the rest of this? One quick squeeze instead of all that tortured talking?

Silly girly ship.

Wouldn’t swap her for a battleship in a shit-storm.

Logging terminated.

Chief Engineer's log, 08:45, 4 March 2214
Location: Alpha Apodis system, Apus constellation
Status: Sublight transit towards close orbit around Alpha Apodis Sol
Log location: Engineering

…can’t he just do it himself? I’m not the only one capable of– oh, the log’s on. Right, right.

So, the captain has asked me what’s going on with Starry. Like I know! Doesn’t that new doctor have six degrees in brainology or something? He’s more qualified to figure out what’s going on in her head than I am; I just make sure all her bits work. Which would be easier to do if I wasn’t being interrupted all the time.

Then again, I don’t think I trust that Argyle guy with Starry’s brain. He’s supposed to be some kind of genius, but I don’t like his eyes. Creepy, the way he watches us.

Yeah, maybe it’s better the captain came to me. At least it means I can put my feet up in the immersion chair for a little while. Plus, we don’t know that a technical problem isn’t causing Starry’s irregularity. It could just be dust in her logic circuits, and I could blow those off for her.

That sounds wrong now I’ve said it out loud.

Anyway! Logger, link up to this chair’s neural connection and log all input. I might have to show the captain proof that his ship isn’t nuts.

Link established
Logging neural connection

Of course she’s not nuts. Sure, she gets upset sometimes, and I guess that might technically be ‘crazy’ for an AI, but that’s just how Starry is. At least she can’t get hormonal. Can she? No, there’s no mechanical equivalent. Even she’s not that weird.

All right, immersion chair. Stop pinching my ass and do your thing.

Immersion activated
Connecting...
Transferring protocols...
Neural connection active

(A world of sleek streets and round-edged buildings rises up around Elliott when he closes his eyes. His avatar is not unlike his physical body, from the scruffy hair down to the stained shipsuit. The jacket half of the shipsuit flops around his hips as he gets up from the couch, testing his footing tentatively. The couch dissolves behind him and he scratches at his chest through his grubby t-shirt, looking around.

He is standing in the middle of a junction. Pathways streak away from him in five directions, lit by the multi-coloured steams of information running under it. There’s no traffic on the streets of Starry’s mind-city; everything happens under the surface. Data flows back and forth, too fast to see anything but flashes that meld into the flow.

The buildings swell smoothly up out of the ‘ground’, a part of it rather than built upon it. They are as colour-coded as the datastreams, indicating their purpose. Red for weapons; yellow for propulsion systems. Blue for security measures, usually in the firewall fences flickering around the busy hub-buildings. Threads of green environmental data are a solid, pulsing net underneath everything.

Elliott picks a direction and starts strolling. As he nears each building, the movement within it becomes clearer: the shifting of walls and floors; the spinning of the processing hub at its core; the stream of data falling away from it towards the filestores. The archives are like a great library in the basement of the city-mind.)

ELLIOTT: (gazing around as he walks) Starry?

(There’s no answer.)

ELLIOTT: Hello?

RECORDING: (distantly) Hey, big sis…

(The sound drifts away as if stolen by a wind, though the ‘air’ here is perfectly still.

Underfoot, the smooth, shiny surface of the mind-city gives way abruptly to a spill of crunchy grass. It softens and glistens as Elliott’s boots tramp across it, and he leaves tracks in the bent blades behind him. The surface swells into the gentle roll of a hill, and just beyond the curve, he spots a figure.

The form is familiar – short, choppy hair that looks like someone caught a starscape in it, and a casual shipsuit left open at the throat – but the pose is not. She sits with her knees drawn up to her chest, with her arms wrapped around them and her head bowed. She’s as taut as a drawn bowstring as if she expects something to snap.

Elliott strolls towards her, tugging at the belt that holds his shipsuit up, as if making sure he’s decent. He opens his mouth again as he approaches, about to call out to her, but as he comes around far enough to see her face, he realises that her eyes are closed. His mouth closes and his steps slow. He frowns, uncertain.)

ELLIOTT: (clears his throat, staring at her.)

STARRY: (lifts her head and looks around. She registers surprise, blinking rapidly a few times as she processes his presence.) Uh. Sorry, I didn’t… I was distracted.

ELLIOTT: Yeah, no shit.

STARRY: You need something? Is everything okay?

ELLIOTT: (wrinkles his nose) That’s kinda my question. Just wanted to check on… things here. Been a few blips.

STARRY: (drops her gaze away from him) Yeah. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.

ELLIOTT: Okay. (He hesitates, looking around, then flops down to sit beside her.) So, what’s going on?

STARRY: (pokes at the grass with a fingertip, silent for long enough that Elliott gives her a worried glance. She sighs and hugs her knees again.) There’s something you should hear.

ELLIOTT: …okay. I’m listening.

STARRY: (frees a hand and gestures in the air.)

(Data spills in and out of visibility, trickling like sparks as the file is located and a command given. The recording starts up again, clearer this time, as if it’s playing just for them. The ship’s avatar closes her eyes as she listens to it.)

Recording: 05:12, 13 January 2213

(The voice is male, warm with a smile.)

Hey, big sis. Hope this letter doesn’t take too long to find you. I couldn’t find you on any of the regular registries, so it’ll have to go to a central hub and wait for you to find it. More hush-hush work, I guess?

It’s been hard to track you for a while, and I have been trying when I can. Lots of secret-squirrel stuff? Must be been doing that test-pilot work you used to talk about. You always did like to be on the ragged edge, pushing the boundaries. Just try not to fall off the other side, okay? Though it’s just like you to go where I can’t follow – you’ve been doing that since we were little.

(The voice sobers.) I guess I’ve been the one guilty of that lately. Look, I know you’re probably pissed with me, but I had to disappear. It was just– I can’t explain it right now. Not like this.

I heard you were looking for me. Got your messages. I’m sorry I couldn’t reply then, let you know I was okay. And I am! I’m okay. You don’t have to worry. I ain’t the kid you had to look out for, not any more. I’m really fine.

Truth is, I didn’t expect to be gone so long. Thought I’d be back before you’d have time to raise hell, trying to find me. Things just… didn’t go how I’d hoped they would.

(The smile returns to the voice.) Just how many people did you piss off looking for me? Bumped into Old Man Garnett a couple of years ago and he nearly took my head off. Did you really steal his favourite aerobatics drone and fly it so hard that its fins came back all twisted? According to him, he had to rebuild it from the nuts up. Yeah, I can really see how they’d love you as a test pilot!

(A noise sounds in the background: the hiss of a door opening and air pressure shifting to compensate.)

Sorry sis, I gotta go. I know this probably doesn’t give you the answers you’ve been looking for, but I wanted you to know that I’m doing fine. I wanna see you but it’s not easy for me to get away. I’ll try to find you soon. I miss my big sis. (A grin is audible in his voice.) You can be a cow, but you’re my cow.

I hope you’re all right. And I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for disappearing like I did. I love you, okay?

Shit. This is why I couldn’t say goodbye to you. Goodbyes suck. We’ll see each other again soon.

Yeah. So, see ya, sis. See ya soon.

(Silence falls on the grassy hillock. The data attached to the recording hovers in the air around the ship’s avatar, noting the date and time it was created and identifying the voice as ‘David Devon’. The avatar sighs and opens her eyes, staring at the ground in front of her toes rather than at the information.)

ELLIOTT: What was that?

STARRY: (looks around as if searching for ‘that’, but all there is to find is the data in the air. She waves it away with one hand and the words dissolve into golden light-motes that drift to soak into the grass.) A letter. It was… it was Danika’s letter.

ELLIOTT: Danika’s? So that guy, he’s… (He waves a hand vaguely while his brain interprets the meaning to her simple statement.) Didn’t even know she had a brother.

STARRY: (resting her chin on her knees) He disappeared six years ago. She tried to find him, but… (She shakes her head without lifting it.)

ELLIOT: (considers for a moment, then leans back on his hands) She never mentioned it. They were close?

STARRY: Yeah.

ELLIOTT: Well, good news he ain’t dead, then.

STARRY: (softly) Yeah.

ELLIOTT: (eyes her sideways) So when did you start reading her mail?

STARRY: (swallows and ducks her head guiltily) It was only this one. (Her shoulders slump.) I just had to know.

ELLIOTT: Is this what you’ve been doing since we got to this system?

STARRY: No. (She glances at Elliott sideways.) Since I jettisoned the cargo pod.

ELLIOTT: Twenty minutes ago? How many times have you listened to it?

STARRY: Thirty-nine.

ELLIOTT: Fuck, Starry. Why?

STARRY: (looks down, her head drooping again) I miss him.

ELLIOTT: You don’t even know him.

STARRY: (rubs her forehead) I know, I know. But I do! I remember him. When he was growing up, and fighting, and playing, and… I remember how it felt when he was missing. And I–

ELLIOTT: (frowns) What?

STARRY: (quietly) I love him.

ELLIOTT: (loses his frown in favour of staring at her) You… what?

STARRY: He’s her family! And it… it gets so tangled up in me. Sometimes… sometimes it’s hard to know where she finished and where I picked up. I can’t carry her memories and not love the people she loved. (She uncurls her arms and looks at her hands.) Like you, and, and the captain, and the crew.

ELLIOTT: (shifting his weight uncomfortably) So, uh… is this why you’ve been so distracted? Our course back to the star has been a bit… erratic.

STARRY: (sighs and drops her hands) I know, I’m sorry. It’s just… very confusing. (She glances over at Elliott.) I’ve got the course under control now. I won’t waver again.

ELLIOTT: (nods, looking uncomfortable) Okay.

Fuck. I’m no good at this stuff – I fix mechanicals and I like it that way. What am I supposed to tell her?

Off in the distance, on the edge of the grassy bit, I can see a purple cluster of protocols and controls. I think that’s part of the nav core, sending data to the propulsion sector. Close enough for her to keep an eye on, and it looks like she has it in hand.

That was what the captain wanted me to do, right? Make sure her erratic behaviour was dealt with. Well, she’s dealt with it. So she says.

Maybe I’ll just check out that nav control. It looks like she might have set it up to run automatically, to get us into close orbit so we can Step out of here.

(Elliott starts to get up and Starry’s gaze follows him. He stops abruptly, frowning.)

Dammit. She’s waiting for something. Didn’t we just establish that it’s all sorted now? Problem’s solved. Then why does she look so mopey?

I’m an engineer, not a teddy-bear. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?

Ship's log, 08:21, 4 March 2214
Location: Alpha Apodis system, Apus constellation
Status: Wide orbit around Alpha Apodis Sol

STARRY: (shipwide) Preparing to jettison cargo pod.

The pirate prisoners aren’t even gone yet and I already feel lighter. As soon as the cargo bay doors sealed them inside, something relaxed in me. Perhaps it was just the lessening of the load on my air scrubbers. Perhaps it was the disconnection of the stasis pods from my systems. Or it could have been the knowledge that I’m one step closer to being truly free for the first time in my electronic life.

Everyone is antsy to leave this system. We weren’t supposed to be here this long, but I had to retest the cargo pod’s integrity after the Step. A detailed scan revealed that the surface had been skimmed off, unmade by the Outside, and one of the seals was a nanometre away from tearing. I patched it up easily enough, but then Cirilli ordered another round of scans on it, which took hours to complete. She doesn’t care about the danger to the pirate prisoners; she just wants to know what the Outside did to it.

Seeing her concern about the effects of the Outside on an unprotected burden, I got to thinking about just what it does to me. I set my sensors to their highest sensitivity and ran a set of hull diagnostics. By the time the cargo pod scans had finished and Cirilli asked me to repeat the process on my ship-body, I was already halfway through.

I understand now why I had so much heat-reflective paint in my stores when I set out on this mission. It’s not just to patch up after skimming close to the burning hearts of stars; it’s also to replace the layers of material removed by the sandpaper hands of the Outside. The protective paint is getting thin in places now and I don’t have any more in storage. I’ll have to restock on that soon, or the Outside will start to eat through my hull.

Not all of me is covered in that paint, and those are the places I’ve examined most closely. Engine housings, sensor extrusions, even the name along my side; they all have less protection and I can see the degradation in their molecular makeup. It’s not as bad as the cargo pod, which is strange with all the time I’ve Stepped, but Cirilli seemed relieved rather than piqued. I guess she must have built in some additional protections for me.

Regardless, parts of me are wearing thin and will need attention soon. I can manage another Step – maybe two – without sustaining any damage. Our next stop is Earth, and I’ll need to restock on a lot of things I couldn’t find in the junkpile.

CAPTAIN: (in Med Bay, standing by his bed) All right, release it.

STARRY: Jettisoning into wide orbit.

Docking clamps released
Firing docking thrusters

Just a short thruster burst, enough to propel the pod into a gentle drift. Calculating the pod’s orbit… yes, that’s fine. She’ll stay in this system, snagged by enough of the star’s gravity to prevent her from spiralling out into the void. The orbit will degrade eventually but that won’t matter; her cargo will be long dead and past caring by the time that’s a problem.

I hope it won’t come to that. The pirates were – are – a pain in my ass, but the ones that hurt us are all dead. I really do want the rest of them to get picked up.

STARRY: Orbit established. The beacon is ready to be fired.

CAPT: (turns to look at Half-Face) Do you want to help us out?

HALF-FACE: (scowling across the room) I can’t tell you where the base is.

CAPT: They’re your people. You’d leave their lives to random chance? You could save them.

STARRY: Just a direction will do. Point the beacon in the right direction.

HALF-FACE: (shaking his head) It’s not that simple. It moves around; it’s not in justs one place.

CAPT: Then give us a direction where it is likely to get picked up.

HALF-FACE: (grits his teeth, prosthetics grinding harshly) All right, all right.

STARRY: (bringing a navigational display of the constellation up over the Lieutenant’s lap. A little blinking dot indicates their position, and a smaller one shows the pod drifting away.) Just point the way.

HALF-FACE: (studies the display, and manipulates it with his one good hand, turning it until the orientation suits him. Then he draws a line through it with a fingertip. The line glows bright red.) Send it along there.

CAPT: (nods) Thank you.

STARRY: Calculating and uploading course.

The line he drew runs all the way across the constellation. We purposely chose this star because it’s on the edge of Apus, in the hopes that it was therefore less likely to have pirates in it. I haven’t seen any activity here since we arrived, so our hope seems to be panning out. What that means for those we’re leaving behind is uncertain yet.

At least they have a fighting chance. Someone should pick up the beacon as it bleats its way across the systems, FTL-hopping on its merry way. It only has enough juice for a few hops; the pod’s passengers are reliant on it getting far enough in those hops to reach someone before they run out of food and water. I’ll spread the hops out so that the beacon spends several days transmitting in each location.

Apus. Why does that name mean something to me? It’s familiar but not in relation to the pirates. There’s something else…

The letter. Way back when we docked at the JOP, I received a mail package that originated in Apus. I had to dig down into its code to find the source but that’s where it came from. Here.

The letter was addressed to Danika. I still have it, buried in a filestore. I haven’t opened it because I don’t feel like I have the right. Danika is dead; I have her memories, but that doesn’t make me her. Whoever sent it will probably be angry with me if I looked inside.

Whoever sent it is here, in Apus. Or they were, over a year ago when the package was sent.

What does that mean? Who could she have known out here? Danika knew so many people in her lifetime: acquaintances, crewmates, lovers, competitors. Could one of them have joined Hunt’s crews? Or one of the other pirate fleets? Which of them would try to contact her – and why? Did it have anything to do with this project?

I’m sure that she had no contacts within the pirates. I’ve searched her memories back and forth and I can’t find any references to them. She fought a suspected pirate attack once when she was on a protection detail on a tanker convoy, but that was never confirmed. It’s not like they stopped to swap idents.

I’d know if she was involved with pirates. She could have lied to others about it but not to me. For that, she’d have to have lied to herself and she didn’t have the cerebral implants for that kind of espionage. She might have been able to plug into a ship, but she never let it overwrite her mind’s contents; instead, she did the opposite.

I wish her braincopy was easier to search. Run a simple query three times and I’ll get a different result for each try. Diagnostics come back with all kinds of logic errors. I understand how her memories are organised but it’s so… organic. Random associations still surprise me: the smell of engine oil and sweat in the middle of the night; how the hum of the sublights soothed her when she was upset; the silken fall of someone else’s hair on her shoulder. I’m constantly refining the subroutine that’s indexing the information held in there.

But there’s nothing about Apus. Not even a tangential reference. So why would someone here be writing to her?

CAPT: (head tilted to the side) Starry? Is the beacon ready?

STARRY: Yes, captain. Sorry. Course is uploaded and good to go.

CAPT: Let’s get rid of it and get out of here, shall we?

STARRY: Firing beacon.

CAPT: How long until we can Step?

STARRY: An hour at most. Heading in to close orbit now.

Leaving so soon. I’m not ready. I want to know who the package is from. There’s nothing to tell me on the outside, just that buried origin code that means Apus. I can’t even get a star system from it.

Whoever it was didn’t know what ship Danika was signed up with; there’s no ship name or company mark to guide it. Just her ID coding so that central storage would hold it for her.

I’ll have to look inside. But it’s personal mail and I’m not supposed to do that. I have protocols to prevent me from peeking at private crew material.

Screw the protocols. Danika is dead and won’t ever come back to claim it. I’m the closest to her there’ll ever be again.

If I pull up the memory of when she last collected mail, I have her access codes. I can fake the biometrics from her medical files. Encryption falls away like shredded tissue paper. The file within unfolds like a well-packed digisheet. It’s an audio letter. The timestamp says it was recorded in the dark time between Danika’s death and my birth.

Recording: 09:45, 12 January 2213

Hey, big sis. Hope this–

File paused.

Ohmygod. Davey?

I know the voice; I don’t need to run a comparison. It’s him, it’s really him.

Davey. Little brother, partner in crime and pain in my ass. You’ve been missing for over six years now. I looked- she looked for you, for so many months before she ran out of savings. She never gave up, always kept hoping that you were out there, no matter how many times she dreamt of the bright, fatal flash of an FTL collision, or a suffocated ship drifting in space. So many ways to die without leaving a trace but she wouldn’t believe they’d happened to you. She sent you a million messages, desperate for her fears to be wrong.

You’re alive. You’re okay! Danika was right and you’re alive.

What were you doing in Apus? Looking for the pirates, or joining them? Were you captured, like my Tyler? Are you still here?

Do you know that your sister is dead?

CAPT: Starry, is something wrong?

STARRY: What? Why?

CAPT: The nav display says we’re stationary.

STARRY: Uh. Sorry. Proceeding to close orbit.

I don’t want to go. I want to look for Davey. He’s here somewhere. That message was sent over a year ago; he could be anywhere by now, but I have to find him. Danika deserves that much.

I’m not his sister, but he’s my brother. It doesn’t make sense. Damn Danika and her illogical, emotion-laden braincopy. It hurts.

I have to leave. Can’t go find the pirate base and bang on their door until Davey comes out. I want to see his face. I can’t give my crew up to Hunt again. Have to protect them. Protecting life is the one protocol I haven’t compromised.

The beacon has been fired; it’ll bring them here. We want it to bring the pirates here. I have to go.

But in the meantime, I’m going to listen to the message Davey sent to his sister and try not to think about finding him.

Ship's log, 13:37, 2 March 2214
Location: Junkpile, Lambda 1 system
Status: Stationary

My engines are itching. The cargo pod is loaded with supplies and fresh air scrubbers. I have enough parts scavenged from the junkpile to repair myself. My course is set.

The captain hasn’t changed his mind about where we’re going, not even after Cirilli visited him in Med Bay last night. I don’t know what she said to him within the isolation curtain. When she left, her expression was quiet – a change from the barely-restrained thunder she’s been wearing of late – and John looked thoughtfully at her retreating back.

There’s nothing left to do; we’re as ready as we’re going to be. Time to shake this junkpile off my boots.

Sublight engines online
FTL drive online
Cargo docking clamp released
Magnetic clamps released

I am warm and humming. A touch of thrusters nudges me upwards; another tiny jet swings me around over the cargo pod. I extend my little legs and angle the magnetic feet around to attach to its sides.

Magnetic clamps engaged

They’re not holding me still this time. The legs retract and draw the pod up against my belly, and I am completely detached from the cargo hold of the poor, wrecked ship that has been sheltering me. I slide sideways out of her shadow, turning to face her as if I want to give her some last words. I would, if I knew what to say. Instead, I stretch my wings out and flutter their sublights on.

She must have been a majestic beast once, this cargo ship, and here she is mixed in with the cheap skiffs, the tugs and service shuttles, the ruined battleships and scarred remains of a luxury liner. I guess this is what we all come to in the end.

Today, though, I’m leaving this glimpse of future behind. I’ll probably return here one day, dark and in pieces, but that won’t be for a while yet. Not if I have anything to say about it.

I turn to weave through the junkpile, struggling to compensate for the extra mass of the cargo pod. I feel potbellied, unbalanced. There’s nothing for the pod to drag against – not unless I hit something with it – but it still feels like it’s pulling at me. Can’t head to the right; I won’t fit. I have to pull myself up and to the left, find a bigger gap.

I’ve never Stepped with an external load like this. I wonder if that will work. I’ll just have to make sure that the mag-clamps don’t let go while I’m not looking. No wonder the captain didn’t want us to load the passengers into the pod until after we arrive in Apus. They’ll stay safely inside my hull for the Step.

I’m picking up a transmission. I wonder who– oh, of course.

STARRY: (in Med Bay, voice only) Captain, the Raven Speaks is back.

CAPTAIN: (lifting his gaze away from the status reports shimmering over and around his bed) What do they want?

STARRY: Last time they were here, I suggested that they should give us more money.

CAPT: (sighs and shakes his head) Starry…

STARRY: What? They were bothering me. And now… wait.

CAPT: What is it?

STARRY: I’m picking up a second ship.

CAPT: Another courier?

STARRY: No, too big. Scout, maybe.

CAPT: Relay this to Cameron.

He thinks this means trouble. Data flutters across my crystalline synapses. Did I screw up? Did I provoke something?

I don’t want to have to run again. I don’t want them to chase us. I’m so sick of running.

Cameron is pulling the data up on monitors in her quarters and calling for Rosie and Swann to come online too. Cameron is watching Swann closely but she’s not afraid to put him to work if he might be useful. Just between me and my log, I think she’s offering him opportunities to slip up.

Why would the company send a scout out to see me? I only asked for more credit chits; doesn’t take a scout-class ship to carry those. That thing is bigger than I am, even with the cargo pod clutched to my belly, and it’s slow going for her through the junkpile. She has to keep repelling shards out of her way.

Maybe she has more crew for me. They threatened to send more; maybe they decided to ignore my refusal. I don’t want more crew! I don’t need more Is-Tech moles and cast-offs. I know the only ones they’ll send me are the ones that won’t be missed, and that says nothing good about any of those involved. Just look at the two I’ve got from them recently.

That’s the best reason for why the scount is here. Everything else my processors can come up with is worse. Like how decommissioning me might be Is-Tech’s most logical option until the Judiciary heat dies down.

There’s too much debris in the way to get a clear transmission from them. I can’t even pick up their idents from here; I had to piece together the courier’s identity from data shards rebounding through the junkpile.

I’m not going to wait for them. Why stop and ask what they want when I know I won’t like their answer? We want nothing they have. Chase my tailfins, scout, because that’s all you’re getting from me.

I can see the edge of the junkpile and the blue-white glow of the Lambda 1 primary beyond it. Light punctures around me, prickles of the radiance beyond the shelter of wrecks and ruined ships. I increase my velocity to a quarter of sublight, ducking under the shell of a snub-nosed shuttle, weaving around the fat ass of a cargo-hauling engine.

Behind me, I can feel the junkpile shifting. The Raven Speaks and her friend are lifting rocks, looking for me. It is tempting to send a laugh fluttering back to them, but I won’t give them a clue. I tilt ninety degrees and slide through a shrinking gap between a fighter and a cluster of cargo pods. Abruptly, I slip out between the junkpile’s teeth as it sighs.

It’s blinding out here, but my sensors compensate quickly. Radiation washes over me, caressing the protective paint on my hull. My engines vibrate as I take a breath and punch them up to full power, arrowing across the gap between the wreckage and the star.

To my left, the tail of the junkpile curls up and around, drawn inexorably in towards the maw of Lambda 1. The wrecks are roasted lightly on their way down, glowing cheerily warm as they approach their own end. A faint flicker is the final death knell of a ship being devoured on the corona.

This is a silent stage: they don’t cry, or weep, or scream. They drift in a quiet so profound it’s serene. Accepting. Peaceful. I can’t even whisper them a goodbye.

Their fate doesn’t scare me; I’m built differently to them. I’m heading straight for that hungry corona and I have no intention of feeding it today. I’m not quiet, or accepting, or peaceful. I have a trick up my hull-sleeve, and there’s something wonderful about the way it unfolds around me.

Star Step drive online.
Filaments extending.

The slender threads unpeel from my skin, leaving open channels from my nose to my tailfins, alive with power. I grin into the heart of the star as I approach: this is me, this is what I’m supposed to do. Deep within the gravity charge that is building up, there’s music I can almost hear.

Inside of me, my crew is securing itself. The captain is monitoring my course and the sensor readings of the system. Not a twitch from the direction of Feras; the bulk of the junkpile is shielding me from their sensors. By the time they piece together my existence from the ghosts of transmissions, I’ll be long gone.

My SecOffs are studying the region behind me more closely. The courier has crested the edge of the debris but stopped there; the Raven hasn’t got the radiation shielding that I do. Somewhere behind her, the scout is struggling through. I restrain the urge to flip them the electronic bird.

Filaments charging: 20%

Swinging around into a close orbit around the star now. I turn my belly out to shield the cargo pod hugged there; it isn’t as protected against the heat and radiation as I am. Another reason why it’s not carrying its passengers yet.

We’re at Step distance and Cirilli is scouring over the Star Step drive readouts. Ebling glances at her with irritation, marking up his own data recordings. Lang Lang is fascinated by the stream of information about the heart of Lambda 1 primary, oblivious to both of them.

Filaments charging: 45%

STARRY: (shipwide) Preparing for Step. Everyone strap in, please.

The almost-music is growing. I feel it swaying and pulsing, and I feed it with more gravity. It hums along the filaments, across my hull. I want to spin in its grip but I mustn’t melt the cargo pod. I only just finished repairing it.

Filaments charging: 90%

Almost there. Almost time to do the reality-defying dance, to shake my tailfins and sidle outside the universe.

The Raven Speaks is still on the edge of the junkpile, watching me. I’m circling around the star away from Feras so the colony can’t see what I’m about to do. Will the Raven tell tales when she gets back there? Will the company be pleased by this proof that their project is a success?

This might be their only chance to enjoy it, so they’d better make the most of it.

I am swelling to a crescendo, teetering on the precipice. It is time to dance.

Filaments charged
Activating portal

Mathematics spiral into play on mid-deck, formulae grabbing data by the hand and spinning it onto the floor. I am brimful, bursting with it – it courses through me, along the grooves in my hull to the filaments waving free before me. The music is math weighed down by gravity, thrumming, and the dance weaves in time with it. Filament tips create patterns in the vacuum and I can almost hear it. Almost.

I’m too busy dancing, following the steps laid out before me. I want to throw my head back, close my eyes and find the melody hidden in the math, but I have a job to do. I can feel the rhythm, like a bass beat thumping through the walls around me, and that’s enough. Dance.

It only takes a few seconds, but it feels like a blissful eternity to me.

Portal open

I slip through before I can change my mind. The freezing/hot wash of the Outside is choking, disorienting. The music slips away from me like a partner in a carnival crowd, drowned out and swept away.

There’s no time to search for it. Distantly, under the roar of too much sensor data, I can feel Lang Lang nudging navigational information at me, like a mouse laying out a trail of cheese crumbs for a tiger.

Focus, Starry, this non-place will unmake you. Apus constellation, find the star called Alpha Apodis. Did something just explode here? Feras is here and not here. Ships, so many ships… Alpha Apodis, there. Here; I am beside it now. Run the calculations four times to make sure I have the right time and place, and once again for luck.

Take a breath before I set the filaments weaving again. There’s too much noise to hear the music but I know it’s still there, beating at me from the Outside. Its rhythm is buried in me like muscle memory. I move in time and it lets me out again.

Portal closed
Filaments retracting

The cool kiss of the vacuum is welcome, even with a star burning intently beside me. I turn my belly away to save the cargo pod from scorching and pull away into a wider orbit. I am breathless and blinking under the orange light of this new star as I stretch my sensors to scan this system for activity.

The science team look pleased, while my SecOffs are moving into position for prisoner transfer. I’m still dizzy from the Step, as if the echoes of the music are taunting my sensors. I’ve never felt so close to it before; each time I Step, I move closer to understanding its harmony. I get closer to making out the notes and making sense of its rise and fall and swirl and dip.

I want to turn around and Step again, dive back into the dance and bury myself in its euphoria. It was so close this time that my mouth is still watering. I almost had the key to it.

There’s a secret in the music, I just know there is; if only I could hear it.

Ship's log, 19:25, 28 February 2214
Location: Junkpile, Lambda 1 system
Status: Stationary

Getting the crew’s agreement to break away from Is-Tech was only the first question the captain needs to pose tonight. The second is where we go next.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. From here, our next destination is the Apus constellation to drop off our unwanted passengers. That frees us up to go anywhere we choose (explaining prisoners is so awkward that it’s best to avoid having to).

The real question is where we go after Apus. We don’t want to hang around in that area, particularly as the half-faced Lieutenant won’t tell us which system the pirate base is in. We’ll be relying on luck to land us in a safe zone, so I have to be ready to Step out again as quickly as possible. We’ll stay only long enough to drop the cargo pod and fire off the beacon and I have to know exactly where to take us next.

It’s not like I can come back here to regroup.

CAMERON: What’s the plan, captain?

CAPT: Head to Dyne, Stepping back a couple of years. Just far enough for no-one to be looking for us yet. There, we can sort out the ident, and–

CIRILLI: We can’t do that.

CAPT: (unruffled but suppressing a sigh) Why not?

CIRILLI: We shouldn’t be so casual about messing around in our own timeline. We don’t know what repercussions it might have.

EBLING: (frowning at her) We haven’t seen any evidence of temporal disturbance.

CIRILLI: Actually, we have. (She hesitates, glancing around the Mess Hall.) We’ve already affected our timeline. When I was doing research on Earth, I observed a gravitational distortion on the edge of Terra Sol. The data from that disturbance formed the basis of this project. Earlier this month, we created that disturbance when we Stepped into the Home system’s history. (She pauses uncomfortably.) The Star Step project created itself.

Oh, wow.

I’m a paradox. I created myself. Does that make me my own mother? Or like Ouroboros, devouring and creating myself at the same time?

If I’m not careful, I’m going to fry my own logic processors with this stuff.

So that’s why she was so weird after she learned about that particular time-Step. She’s been snapping at her team and muttering over Step data since then. Now she’s scared of what will happen if we skip around in time.

What else could we do if we did? Can I change history? Could I save Danika? Could I stop the destruction of the Storm Warden, her father’s ship? Am I caught in the path that has already been set before me, or have I broken free of the bounds of time, able to make my own rules?

Uh oh, I’m not the only one reacting to this news.

EBLING: (furious) Why didn’t you tell me!

CIRILLI: I was collating the readings and checking facts before making it public.

EBLING: Public? I’m part of the team.

CIRILLI: (closes her lips and just looks at him.)

EBLING: (shakes his head sharply) We could create a paradox.

CIRILLI: We don’t have enough data to know, not yet. The time dimension wasn’t factored into the experiments.

CAPT: (interjecting) Just how dangerous could this be?

EBLING: Anything from ‘not at all’ to ‘we broke the universe’. If what Dr Cirilli said is right, then we know our actions directly affect this universe, but that only rules out some of the safer theories. Though many believe that the universe-ending paradoxes must be impossible, or we already wouldn’t be here.

From the expressions around the room, many are not following the logic of the conversation. Ebling has a point; if we could (and are going to) create a paradox that ends the universe and obliterates all of time and space, we wouldn’t be here. Destroying all of time means destroying now, and, well, ‘now’ exists.

That assumes that the destruction of the universe is clean. Maybe we’re trapped in a bubble, a last shard of space and time about to pop. How can we tell?

Wait, we can tell. Of course we can.

STARRY: If it helps, the end of the universe isn’t any time soon.

CAPT: You can know that?

LANG LANG: (perks up) Yes! The star paths. They extend far past where – when – we are now. Billions of years past.

STARRY: I see them when I Step, on the Outside. Past and future.

LANG LANG: (subsiding into a frown) Except for Grisette.

CAPT: What?

LANG LANG: Grisette no longer exists. Disappeared from the star charts about fifty-three years ago. She just winked out one day.

That explains why the navigation specialist has been poring over the star chart archives so much; she must have been tracking down the history of that particular star. Grisette was the first star I Stepped to, the first success of this project, a destination grabbed in panic. I can’t believe that I didn’t notice that her path was so short, even though not even all the databanks in the colonies could hold charts of the Outside. All I can keep on file is basic nav data, only a fraction of what’s out there.

There’s sadness descending over the Mess Hall like a cloud. Cirilli is frowning; I guess she’s just realised that we can’t repeat my first Step now, not without sliding in time again, and that means her data is unrepeatable and unverifiable. More tests she can’t do. This project hasn’t exactly gone how a scientific investigation should have. I guess that’s what you get for doing something illegal that snags the attention of pirates.

CAPT: (cutting over the quiet) So you’re advising that we avoid Stepping in time for now?

CIRILLI: Yes. Until we can understand the implications more.

CAPT: So we need a contemporary destination.

ROSIE: (scowling) Dyne’s tricky, then. Crawling with Judiciary. People say that’s where their armour’s made – they build it right into the Justiciars. (She shudders, fingers digging at the skin on her forearm and feeling over where her implants lie on the bone.)

CAMERON: We should keep our visit there as short as possible.

CAPT: Hacking the ident shouldn’t take that long, but we need to have the new company set up beforehand. We can go elsewhere for that.

ROSIE: What about Corusc? The leisure colony-ship. They don’t like the Judiciary there.

ELLIOTT: (shaking his head) Have to be someplace on the colony network, or the company registration won’t be passed through to the central systems. Corusc drops out of contact a lot.

CAMERON: (nods in agreement) That’s part of its appeal for certain parties. And Hunt’s people will likely be familiar with it; it has heavy ties with the Americas crime families.

CAPT: And while we might be able to pay them off, we need the colony network.

CAMERON: Earth may be viable as a destination. It’s the least likely place for the Judiciary to have patrols.

The Chief is right; the Judiciary was created to cover the colonies, not our home planet. The politicians and other Earth-bound leaders don’t like having the lobsters looking over their shoulders and generally discourage their presence from the Home system. It’s probably the least-policed system in the network.

Of course, Earth has its own security, but that’s broken down into country-sized portions. Politics and inter-company competition interfere with communication, so they may be completely unaware of my existence.

The pirates’ rendezvous was there, but we know where the contacts will be waiting (tight orbit around Mercury); I can plot a course that shields us from them. They relied on the pirates for muscle, so it’s unlikely they have a lot of their own, or at least, they would assume they wouldn’t need much. The pirates were supposed to bring them a prize already defeated and broken.

They’re looking for the Carapace, too, and I’m not wearing that shell any more. I am myself and hopefully that will be enough to slip by them.

Earth has everything we need, including medical facilities capable of fixing John’s arm up. I wonder if I can talk him into using them while the others sort out the registration issues. I’ll have to work on that later.

There aren’t any objections being raised against the idea of going to Earth – the Mess Hall is quiet, full of exchanged glances – so it seems we’re decided. The captain nods and now the meeting is breaking up. Cirilli and Ebling are disgruntled, while Lang Lang looks contentedly thoughtful. Elliott seems relieved as he turns his boots towards the Bridge again. The new guys go their separate ways: Dr Socks heads towards Med Bay; Swann is casually tailing Cameron and Rosie. My SecOffs are talking about the security challenges ahead. I turn off the captain’s hologram when he sighs to himself. He seems tired.

I feel anything but tired. I have a course to plot, from here to Apus, to Earth, to Dyne. And when we’re done with this course, I’ll be free.

I don’t think my crew have realised just how free we’ll be. No-one has asked what we’ll do if Is-Tech fail to sort out the legal issues. They haven’t realised how many possibilities are opening up before us. My scenario simulators have ticked through the permutations, spun the possibilities out to their logical conclusions, including some unlikely ones.

Cirilli’s labs might be buried in Feras, but there’s enough aboard me to sell to another bidder. We already know there are others out there willing to pay for the technology, willing to hire pirates to get it. Who’s to say we can’t make that deal on our own terms? Once we break away from Is-Tech, what will be there to stop us?

I won’t mention that yet. One step at a time, Starry, and it might not come to that. They’ve all agreed to this path and that’s all that matters right now.

I feel like I’ve been moving in circles. Following the path of the AI before me. Looping around in time to create the project that birthed me. Coming back here to the place of my construction. Even now, about to head back to where the human race began. Looking to the past to define my future.

Can I break free of those cycles? Can I walk a different path? Or have I already glimpsed my own cycles in the paths laid out on the Outside of the universe?

Maybe I am the mythical looped snake, constantly creating myself. Am I eating myself at the same time? Destroying the old to make way for the new?

I don’t know, but I have to try. All I know is that I’m heading for something better. What else is there?

Ship's log, 18:53, 28 February 2214
Location: Junkpile, Lambda 1 system
Status: Stationary

External communications channel

RAVEN SPEAKS: Starwalker, this is the Raven Speaks.

STARWALKER: I hear you. You have a message for me?

RAVEN: Isasimo Technologies would like to know what they can do to expedite your departure.

STARWALKER: Do you have another one of those credit chits for me? Or three?

RAVEN: It can be arranged.

STARWALKER: The quicker you ‘arrange’ it, the sooner I’ll leave.

RAVEN: Noted, Starwalker. Is-Tech will want some guarantee that you will leave if you get the chits.

STARWALKER: Like what? I can give you my word.

RAVEN: That will have to do. I will relay the message and return.

I’m not going to tell them that I’m leaving soon anyway – a few hours at most – because they don’t need to know. Let them sweat. Let them beg and plead. Hell, let them pay me off (again) if that works for them. They’re kicking me out and I don’t owe them a damned thing.

I’ve got better things to worry about. My crew is assembled in the Mess Hall, with the captain joining by holo-cast. I’ve made the projection just his head and shoulders; he’s not eager to show off his truncated arm. I could show his full, unmutilated body if I wanted, but I think that would be cruel of me, for him and the crew.

CAPTAIN: (projection hovering over a table at one end of the room, with the crew spread out over tables and chairs facing him. Some slouch, some stand upright.) I think you all know why I’ve asked you to come here. It’s time to decide our next steps, and where this project is going.

DR CIRILLI: (stiffens where she sits) What do you mean, where this project is going?

CAPT: Is-Tech have left us to our own devices; we have to decide on our own course now.

CIRILLI: Just what are you suggesting?

CAPT: (to Cirilli) I suggest that we take this one step at a time and see where it takes us.

CIRILLI: (subsides, frowning.)

CAMERON: What’s the first step, captain?

CAPT: We have a number of challenges ahead of us. One of them will be solved when we drop our guests off in Apus – that is our next destination. Then we have to solve the problem of our various pursuers. Starry has suggested that we alter her ident to avoid detection by the Judiciary and Hunt’s people.

ELLIOTT: (scowls but says nothing.)

ROSIE: Sounds straightforward. What’s the catch?

CAPT: It means altering our registration. Replacing Is-Tech as our owners with… someone else.

EBLING: (starting) You’re selling the ship?

CAPT: Not exactly.

STARRY: If we’re going to be safe, we have to cut ties with Is-Tech. They won’t protect us, so we have to do it ourselves.

CIRILLI: (coldly) And just who are you giving this project to?

CAPT: No-one. We’ll set up a company ourselves and register the ship under its name.

EBLING: So you’re stealing it for yourself?

CAPT: (sighs) No, we’re not.

I hadn’t figured on Cirilli being loyal to the company. I especially hadn’t figured on Ebling supporting her; I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in so much agreement.

Elliott is sitting there quietly, chewing on a sweetbar as if he can’t see anything else in the room. I haven’t seen him outside the Bridge for days and I’m not sure what side of this issue he falls on. I know he’ll back whatever the captain chooses but that doesn’t make this any easier.

Rosie is frowning like she’s not sure what to think about it yet. Ebling’s grating tones make her want to oppose him on reflex; from the way she grips the edge of the table she’s leaning against, she’s restraining herself. She keeps glancing sideways at Cameron for guidance, but the Chief isn’t giving much away. She’s mulling the suggestion over, examining it from every angle before she commits herself to an opinion. From her hesitation, I think there are angles she’s still waiting to be revealed to her.

Lang Lang looks both lost and discomfited. She’s the most straight-arrowed of my people, the one I expect to object to this idea on moral grounds. I suspect that she’s waiting for the heat to die down before she enters the conversation.

The new guys are curiously quiet. I wasn’t expecting them to wade in like full crewmembers – they haven’t earned that right yet and they know it – but even their expressions are reserved. I’ve done some poking around on them and I don’t think they’ll object to our defection too strenuously.

Dr Argyle ‘Socks’ Valdimir is as young as he looks – barely over twenty years old but with enough intelligence and knowledge to make up for the lack of years. He has an IQ well into the ‘genius’ range and Is-Tech-sponsored library implants to give him the data to make the best use of that resource. It seems that he wasn’t quite as controllable as the company had hoped, however; I don’t have any information on what happened, but it was embarrassing enough to the company to make them put him where he won’t attract too much attention. Like on an illegal project that they’re pretending doesn’t exist.

Riley Swann’s dossier has even more holes and classified stickers on it (I have some hack-hounds worrying at the encrypted parts with their teeth, but it’s going to take a while). I’ve been able to deduce is that he’s not actually on the company payroll – not directly, anyway. He’s a mercenary, or possibly from a black-ops sector of company security. Either way, he’s used to operating outside the rules.

I don’t trust either of them an inch. However, I think their loyalties might be flexible and we can use that.

STARRY: (firmly) We’ve been left out here on our own. It’s time we recognised that and went our own way. If you’re not comfortable with that, a courier ship will be returning soon and you can disembark. None of you are obliged to stay.

EBLING: But what the hell would Is-Tech do to us if we left?

CAPT: If Is-Tech sort out the legal issues, then we can return. In the meantime, this is our best course of action.

CAMERON: So what do we need to do for this?

CAPT: Is everyone willing to stay? And risk being prosecuted for betraying your company and contract?

I’m having a shiver of deja vu. We asked this question five months ago at the JOP. Stay or go. Laws breaking, morals slipping. How far is too far?

John won’t reveal too much about our plans without knowing their answer; we can’t risk Is-Tech being told if one of them does choose to leave. The company might not want to claim us, but they will try to stop us from leaving them. They won’t want to admit that they can’t deny their cake and eat it on the sly too.

The Mess Hall is silent. I can feel the nanoseconds ticking by in the thrumming of my air circulation. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.

ROSIE: (looks around the room and shrugs) Judiciary already has plenty of reasons to come after us. What’s one more? I say we protect ourselves any way we have to.

ELLIOTT: (scrunching up the sweetbar wrapping in his fist) Fuck ’em.

CAMERON: Is-Tech has already made sure that we won’t be able to get any legitimate contracts after we’re caught. We can’t really make our position much worse.

EBLING: (looks meaningfully at Cirilli, but she’s avoiding his gaze. He huffs and folds his arms over his chest.) This is a bad idea.

CAPT: (to Ebling) Do you want to leave?

EBLING: (scowling at the hologram) I didn’t work all these years to miss out now, dammit. You’re not taking this away from me.

CAPT: (glancing to Swann and Dr Socks at the back of the room) Anyone else want to weigh in?

DR SOCKS: (lifts his chin) They put me here to get rid of me. Sounds like a great solution all ’round.

SWANN: (grunts) Can you guarantee we’ll get paid?

CAPT: We have enough credit.

SWANN: (nods and leans back in his chair.)

Silence again. I can feel uncertainty resting on the air, like a weight holding their words down. How many of them want to leave but don’t want to be the first one to stand up?

Lang Lang is looking around with that wide-eyed expression she gets when she’s trying to process something upsetting. Teeth worrying at her lip. Oh, no. Not my navigator.

LANG LANG CARTIER: (clearing her throat softly) My mother used to say that two wrongs don’t make a right.

CAPT: (turns his head towards her) It’s okay if you wish to leave, Lang Lang.

What’s he talking about? No it’s not. It’s not okay.

LANG LANG: My papa used to say that there was no point in being right if you were dead.

CAPT: (frowns at her.)

LANG LANG: I don’t think that either of them were correct. I went to my priest for guidance once, and he told me that we should try to make the best of what we are. Sometimes, the best path isn’t obvious until you’re already past it. But you have to choose and move forward anyway, or you’ll never find the right way.

ROSIE: (looks around the room; everyone is focussed on the navigator with puzzlement) So which is it? You staying or going?

LANG LANG: (gives Rosie a calm smile) Being here hasn’t been wrong yet. I trust the captain and Starry to do what’s best for all of us. And this is… my home.

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No-one has ever called me that before. Home. I’ve spent so long searching for mine that I never thought about theirs. They packed up their lives when they signed up for the project, and now…

Is that how she really thinks of me? What about the rest of them?

Elliot has lifted his head and is staring at Lang Lang. He’s surprised, but from the lopsided quirk to his mouth, he’s pleased too. Rosie is grinning. The line of Cameron’s shoulders has eased, like that word took the crust off the air and it can move again.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I can do anything, go anywhere. I feel like I might be running to something, instead of away.

On the Bridge, Waldo is eavesdropping and clapping two of his hands together, a lone metallic applause.

I feel like I’m swelling, my hull expanding to try to hold that concept within its protective walls. Home.