The footsteps ran right up to the edge of the closed bulkhead to the weapons room, then stopped. Brant kept her pistol trained forward, waiting for the first motion.

"Ms. Brant, I have to give it to you," shouted the Rebel captain from the hall. "You entirely live up to your reputation."

"So, like…are there three of you in Hell now?" Brant asked. "I gotta' say, I find this whole business mighty disconcerting."

"I thought I'd give you an update, seeing as we've knocked out your sensors. We took down one of your laser batteries and your shields are at 50%; at the rate you're going, you'll knock out some of our guns before the next salvo's primed, but we'll have more than enough to ravage your ship and knock out all of its offensive capabilities."

He's talking a lot. Why isn't he in more of a rush?

"Listen – you're both worth more to me alive than dead. You as a hostage will give us a lot of leverage with the Kestrel when it shows up, and we've been trying for a while to capture a live Lanius. We're happy to just keep coming at you all day until you're dead, but lay down your arms and step outside, and you will not be harmed."

Is he trying to mess with me? Buy time for reinforcements to arrive? I don't like this.

"The Fleet Admiral is a machine," Brant shouted. "You hear me? That's why you're hunting us. We found out that the Rebellion's led by an AI."

And let that sink in, and one, two…

"You really think I'm going to…" the Rebel began, and Brant charged the bulkhead. She realized she was ceding one of her big tactical advantages by leaving the airless room, but this stank and time was not on her side anyway. The bulkhead opened at her approach, and the mousey officer and the hulking captain waited were waiting for her, both looking oddly damp in their cheap hospital gowns. Apparently their armory was exhausted: the officer was holding a bottle that had been broken in half, and the captain had a stool.

Brant fired at the captain, getting him in the shoulder but not putting him down. The officer ducked her baton swing and slashed at Brant's side with the bottle, a swipe that could have been a minor scratch or a fatal gouge that would bleed her out in a minute – Brant frankly couldn't tell through the adrenaline. She kept shooting at the captain with one arm and brought the baton smacking into the comm officer's head with the other. The captain took a few more shots from Brant's sidearm before he brought the stool down on her head.

All told, the battle had probably lasted about four seconds, and all three of them collapsed to the ground at the same time. The comm officer's head was caved in, the Rebel captain's chest was riddled with puncturing burns, and Brant's aching head smacked onto the deck as she collapsed.

"So it was a chair that did it?"

Brant shook her head. She was seated at a booth in a large, dimly-lit room, filled with tables, chairs, and other booths. The room was mostly unoccupied, but as she took in her surroundings she did see that there were other folks here and there.

Katarek was sitting across from her, picking at a plate of unappealing starch. Brant rubbed her eyes in disbelief, then stopped.

"Oh, crap, I've got two eyes. That's not a good sign, is it?" Brant asked.

"Nope. You're dead, and this is Hell," Katarek confirmed. "Be warned: the buffet is not very good."

"I…have to imagine not." She craned her head around and saw, in an island of bright yellow light, a number of buffet stations and a salad bar. A group of people was slowly picking through it, and she recognized them as the Rebel crew plus two copies of each crew member. One, the only version of the comm officer in uniform, spotted her and gave her the finger before scooping some goopy protein onto her plate.

"But a chair, though?" Katarek pressed.

"Oh. Well, no, not even. A stool. That seems somehow more humiliating."

A slug in an apron slithered up to their booth. In one hand it held a carafe of hot stimulant, and in the other a long bar of iron, its tip glowing dull red.

"Hot poker, ladies?"

"Sure," Katarek said. The slug thrust the iron at her, jamming it between her abdominal plates in a gout of steam and smoke. Katarek trilled out a cry of excruciating pain, her limbs thrashing and her head banging against the back of her seat.

The slug withdrew the poker and looked pointedly at Brant.

"Um…no thank you?"

"You sure, captain? It can be just the thing," Katarek said, composing herself.

"I'm sure."

"Suit yourself," Katarek said. The slug started slithering, but Kat clucked loudly and pushed her coffee cup toward the slug, who apologized and filled it before leaving.

"This isn't really what I expected from Hell, to be honest."

"No? Must be something else, then," Kat said, returning to her plate of starch. "My guess? This is one of those near-death hallucinations, something your brain's cooking up to get some important insight across to you at a crucial moment."

A piercing scream resounded from a nearby table, accompanied by the hiss of the hot poker and the smell of cooking meat.

Brant snapped her fingers. "I've got it. The insight is probably that I need lunch. Like, I probably haven't eaten anything in…I don't know, a day?"

"Mmm. That must be it. You should get on that. Food is one of the best things about being alive," Kat said. "Well, see ya. This has been a nice, straightforward hallucination."

Brant opened her eye. Kat was gone, and the infernal buffet. All she could see was the dull gray of the starship corridor floor, and just ahead of her, a bent metal stool. Looking at it now it was clearly cheap, probably aluminum or some bargain alloy, and the impact had completely misshapen it; the Rebellion's miserly chair budget could now be added to the list of stupid things that had randomly saved her life.

She tried to get up, gritting her teeth against the pain in her skull, but the room was spinning too much and she only managed to flop onto her side. She hit something wet and warm; looking down, she saw there was a substantial puddle of blood. The gash in her side had been bad, then. She needed a medbay or stitches soon, sooner than she could possibly get them.

Footsteps were approaching. Two sets. Or three? Fifty? Between the concussion and the blood loss, all her thoughts were swimming in molasses. Were there even footsteps or were they her own heartbeats?

"Don't ask for that check yet, Kat," she muttered. She brought her gun, pointing it at the hallway ahead as steadily as she could. "I think I'm coming back."

Two fresh clones emerged from around a corner. The comm officer was wearing the same sort of gown she'd been wearing earlier and carrying a stool, and the captain was stark naked carrying a small table ahead of him like a shield. Still no sign of that third officer – shit, he was probably repairing the shields. That was no good. The Kestrel wouldn't be able…no, wait, it was the Lanius ship, not the Kestrel. They wouldn't be to pierce the shields if they were back at full. Hadn't they started a fire in shields?

Focus, she thought. She aimed at the table and boosted the power output to max, hoping that a full power round would go right through the table.

In her mind's eye, she saw the glittering bolts of energy finding their mark straight and true, taking her two targets in the head in her first two shots like a gunslinger of old Earth lore. Instead, her quaking hand and spinning vision gave her the worst five shots of her life, slapping into the walls and ceiling. She squeezed the trigger for a sixth shot, but the gun beeped in loud annoyance and did nothing. The end of the barrel was glowing dull orange; after all the use it had gotten today and going full-power for a few shots in quick succession, it had overheated. It would probably be good in ten minutes.

She debated calling for a time-out, but frankly her head hurt and she felt faint, and making her last words a stupid quip seemed empty and pointless to her.

Killer stepped out of the weapons room and threw two weapons at the onrushing clones. Her power baton struck the captain's table, shattering it in a loud explosion and knocking the captain into the wall viciously, crumbling him like a paper doll. Her phase axe, spinning end over end, took the comm officer in the shoulder and split her diagonally clear down the middle, her body falling to the ground in two pieces. Stuff spilled out of the two halves, a lot of stuff.

Brant threw up. The reaction surprised her, but then it surprised her what an awful thing that was to see.

Killer limped ahead to retrieve her weapons, but paused to look back at Brant. As ever it was impossible to read anything in that alien face, but the pause and the studying glance seemed to at least suggest that Killer was wondering how badly hurt Brant was.

"If I don't get stitches soon, I'm a goner," Brant said, knowing there was no way for the Lanius to understand her but needing to say something. "The wound won't close. I'll bleed out, and it'll be an eternity of lackluster salad bar and hot pokers."

Then Brant looked down at her still-glowing pistol.

"Aw, shit. Hey, look away. I don't expect I'm going to be very brave about this." She waved Killer away, and the Lanius went off to collect her weapons, probably without even perceiving that Brant had made a meaningful gesture. Then Brant jammed the hot metal into her side.

I really ought to have bit down on something, right? she thought just before her teeth clamped together. At first, all she felt was a confusing coldness in her side, immediately replaced by blinding pain and a disturbingly appealing aroma of grilled meat. She really did need to eat something.

Brant opened her eye and saw Killer standing over her, one talon reaching out. Brant grabbed it and pulled herself up to her feet.

"Thanks. Uh…where to? Did you get the weapons offline?"

As if in reply, the ship shook with what sounded like a missile firing. Brant lurched toward the weapons room, but Killer grabbed her by the shoulder. The Lanius pointed at Brant's face. Brant got the drift, and feeling around the transparent dome of her breather mask her suspicions were confirmed: the impact of the chair and floor had knocked a decent fracture into the material, enough that it was essentially useless now.

Footsteps. Off in the distance, down the corridor leading to the shields. More fracking footsteps. She was trapped in a hell of footsteps.

"Well…they're still shooting, and they're still coming at us. We won't last much longer against the clones, especially if we split up. We have to go for the clone bay, then, see if we can…"

The ship rocked again, much more violently. An explosion from the weapons room nearly blew out her eardrums, and might have killed them both if the bulkhead wasn't closed. Someone had hit the ship with a massive salvo, puncturing the shields – which were indeed back at full power, judging by the sounds of the impact – and slamming into the hull.

"Who the hell was that?" Brant asked. She pointed at Killer. "Was that you guys?"

Killer looked at her quizzically. Her cracked glass face, her black ice eyes were unreadable.

No, the culture-ship didn't have the weapons for a strike like that. Translator had made that clear. So that meant it was either Lanius reinforcements, some particularly ballsy pirates, or…

The latest clone of the scruffy Rebel gunner, the one they'd killed when they first beamed on, the one who'd probably just brought their shields back online, rounded the corner down the corridor. He looked like the antagonist of an Ancient Earth horror vid, dressed in a loose green hospital gown, his hair unkempt and a knife gleaming in his hand. Brant raised her pistol at him, but it made the same annoying beep and did nothing. He charged.

Then the air sparkled and hissed, and Ensign Toh and Commander 78 were standing there. Before Brant could process this enough to debate whether it was real or a blood loss hallucination, the scruffy Rebel let out a yelp and stopped short in his charge, nearly slamming face-first into the ensign. He tried to scramble off the way he'd come, but 78 took him in the back of the leg with a pistol shot. He stumbled, falling face-first, and Toh strode up and stepped on his neck.

78's face flickered with a rainbow of emotions, probably the same cocktail of relief and concern and joy and pain going through her own head. She felt a need to resume routine, to compliment his shot and receive his sheepish admission that he'd been aiming for center mass instead of the legs, to joke that a real rescue would involve a tall white horse and what the hell was this amateur shit? But now was no time.

"Medical status?" 78 asked.

"Bad, but I'll make it to extraction," she said.

Toh gave the Rebel one last stomp for certainty, then turned back to them. Immediately he started to shake and back away, like a giant stone lady spotting a giant stone mouse across the room. She thought for a second that her wounds might be much worse then she'd thought, but then she realized he wasn't looking at her. He was face-to-face with a Lanius, a devil from his people's oldest stories.

"This is Killer. She's friendly – I don't know, it's complicated," Brant said. "Listen, they've got a flash-cloning bay. Their whole crew will be back up and fighting in a few minutes. We need a plan."

"Prognosis: positive. Ahab reports their weapons are too damaged to threaten Kestrel. If we direct fire at clone bay, should have situation resolved after next volley. Do you authorize?"

Somehow, between the agony, the sudden shock of the change in her fate, and the stink of vomit, she managed to think the issue over. She wasn't convinced the idea she arrived at was the best course of action, but it passed the gut test and that was enough in the moment.

"We have them dead to rights. I say we hem them in at the clone bay and push them for surrender."

Good going, Charlotte! Instead of killing them all five times, you'll cap it off sensibly at killing them all four times. Blessed are the merciful.

"And tell Ahab and Karl to prep our prisoners for transport. Send them over with restraints for the rest."

"Ay ay, captain. Related: is wrist unit malfunctioning? Unable to hail you or lock on with transporter. Ahab also asks what should be done with the Lanius vessel, which has sustained…"

The rebel comm officer rounded the corner up ahead, from where her last clone had appeared. She was naked and carrying a chair, charging forward fiercely until she noticed the fresh arrivals, the towering ensign in particular. Toh leveled his sidearm. His first shot went wide, and the officer had scurried back where she came from before he could get off a second.

"The other ship is friendly. I'll bring you up to speed on the rest later."

They moved down the hall together, Toh leading the way and 78 bringing up the rear with the two injured boarders in between. The cloning bay was only about fifty feet down from the weapons room, but through the sustained flow of clones, how far that had seemed just a few minutes ago. Killer stopped at the door and wouldn't go inside; Brant thought of how to communicate via universally accepted hand signs that it was safe and she didn't have to watch the doors, when she remembered that the Lanius seemed to drain the air from the rooms. Probably best, then, that she waited outside.

The cloner was huge, taking up almost the entire chamber, and Brant couldn't make much sense of it at first glass. Her eyes were drawn mostly to one glass tank in the middle of the floor; foggy yellow fluid filled the tank, but Brant could still make out the movement of tiny metal arms, hundreds of them, furiously swiping back and forth in the ooze. Hundreds, maybe thousands of tubes and hoses connected to the tank, snaking back to various vats and tanks of slime and fluid lining the walls.

As she walked further in and got a closer look, she saw that the shape in the middle of the tank was a human body.

Ah. That's how they do it.

"Not cloner..." 78 observed. "Printer. Flesh printer."

"Muscle fibers and nerves instead of ink and plastic," Brant agreed. "I don't believe it."

There was a loud beep, and the tank opened with a hiss. Brant was expecting a slow, creepy rise from the yellow fluid, but the form within sprang up as soon as the tank opened and leapt to the floor. It was the captain, she saw, stark naked and body gleaming, looking feverishly around for some weapon.

"It's done," Brant called out to him. "Your weapons are down, your shields are down, and the Kestrel has all guns focused on this room. We're here to talk surrender."

The comm officer skulked out from behind the machine, still holding her chair, and shuffled next to the captain. She handed him one of the chair legs that she'd broken off.

"What's there to talk about? You're going to do what you're going to do," the captain said. "Let's not pretend this is a negotiation anymore. Take what you're going to take, and leave us alive if it lets you sleep better."

"Oh, I'll sleep like a cat either way. I'll take prescription soporifics over a clear conscience any day. And no, this isn't a negotiation anymore. So let me dictate our terms to you: we are going to scrap as much useful material from your ship as we can while leaving it functional, then we are going to release three high-value Rebel prisoners to your custody, and then we are going to leave you to your business."

A tense moment passed. The two Rebels stared at her, trying to piece together what was going on.

"Why?" the captain asked.

Because you'll hear it from one of your own that the Rebels are led by an AI. Because that news might spread and sow dissent among your ranks, maybe even reach the Federation if we don't make it ourselves. Because this act of mercy is really a backup plan to fulfill our mission.

"A fearsome reputation is useful, but the key to building one is to leave some survivors behind to tell your tale," Brant said without much hesitation.

"Between you and prisoners, quite a tale to tell," 78 said. "First prisoners prepped and in transport room. Ready to beam over."

Brant nodded. "Send them over with some gowns from the medbay."

She was tempted to hold off and get herself transported off first. In her condition, she'd only be a liability if combat did inexplicably break out again, but it had been her call to move all the captive Rebels to one ship instead of just executing them all and calling it a day. Until all the prisoners were here and restrained to her satisfaction, this was still her mess, and she wasn't going to leave it. She wobbled over to a chair, favoring her wounded side and trying to keep steady as the world spun, then she flopped down and kept her pistol trained on the prisoners. She guessed it was cool enough to fire now, and if not, the Rebels didn't know any better.

Things went pretty smoothly for a while. The young Rebel from the weapons room crawled of the tank a minute later, and 78 manhandled him over to the same corner as the others. Grisham and Angel were beamed aboard, tightly secured in manacles and carrying a few extra sets for the others, along with the requested gowns. In short order, the prisoners were dressed and restrained, and Toh got to work disabling the cloner with his fists.

If this were some sexy spy vid, Brant was sure that one of their prisoners would have carefully concealed a bobby pin or what-have-you and would now have snaked it out and used some arcane bit of lockpickery to free themselves. Hell, Brant had pulled such a daring escape just a few hours ago, but the Lanius culture-ship had no real need to keep prisoners and had crap restraints. The Kestrel, on the other hand, had a state-of-the-art brig with state-of-the-art manacles, and only the correct mag-key or the direct intervention of Almighty God could get a person free of them.

A few minutes passed as they waited for the teleporter to recharge. "Captain Brant?" came Translator's voice over her earpiece. "Captain Brant, do you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," she said. Toh and 78 looked over at her. She pointed to her earpiece. "I'm on with the Lanius ship."

"Ah, yes – um, have you instructed your people not to fire? Because, um…do that, please."

"Nothing to worry. Is it bad over there?"

"Heavy damage, yes, but nothing irreparable. No loss of life, thankfully, but some badly wounded. I am extracting Killer now – her condition is deteriorating, and she needs priority access to our medical bay. Killer reports that your breather mask is damaged, but we have another standing by if you need extraction as well."

"Thanks, but no need. I'll be going back to the Kestrel. Hey, what'd you do to my transponder, though? They say they can't lock on to it."

"Apologies. In attuning it to myself, I must have decoupled it from your own system. It should be an easy fix once you're back aboard. Killer wishes to express some distaste in your resolution of this conflict."

She rolled her eyes. "I'll explain later. It will make sense."

"She expresses some rather alarming suggestions about your mother's reproductive habits and the size of your father's genitals. She…seems to have spent some time studying how to effectively insult humans."

"Consider me thoroughly burned, Translator. I'll explain it all later, though."

McRee appeared in a shimmer a moment later. She immediately found Brant and locked eyes with her, glaring daggers.

"What the hell is this?" she demanded.

"I'm letting you and your men go, Lily," Brant said. "Once my men and I have disembarked, I'm going to beam the mag-key for those restraints over to the other side of this ship, and after maybe half an hour of wiggling and crawling, you'll be able to free yourselves and go on your merry way. Now, I know what you're wondering. 'Is old Captain Brant not just stunning and fun to be around, but also merciful and benevolent?' Well, what I'll say to that is…"

The lights in the room went red. Klaxons blared.

"Captain, life support has shut off!" 78 announced.

Confusion descended.

"So this is how yer doin' it?" McRee muttered with a sigh. She slumped down, defeated. "Yer a gutless harpy. Burn in Hell. All of you Feds, burn in Hell."

"Translator, is this you guys? What the hell has Killer…" Brant shouted.

"Not us, Captain Brant! Killer has been extracted, and we have not fired on the ship. The life support systems for the ship seem to have just shut off of their own accord."

The doors of the clone bay flung open, and the atmosphere fled out of the open door in a hurricane blast that knocked Brant out of her chair several meters. She blacked out for a second, the repeated trauma of the day too much, and blinked her eyes open to a scene of horror. The manacled prisoners were flopping on the floor like suffocating fish, mouths struggling to fill their lungs with air that wasn't there anymore. Brant remembered her training, to keep her mouth shut tight and seal the vacuum out of her lungs, but in the second she'd lost consciousness her lungs had already emptied completely. She started to crawl over to McRee, knowing that a teleporter beacon from the Kestrel was her only hope of getting back to an atmosphere before she asphyxiated, but pretty sure it was already too late. She had seconds left. If the Lanius beamed her off right now and got another mask on her – or was their beam still recharging from extracting Killer?

78 appeared over her. He took his wrist unit off. Brant shook her head, tried to shout across the vacuum at him or protest, but he got the unit around her wrist.

A shimmer, a flash. The clone bay turned into the transporter on the Kestrel, Ensign Toh standing next to her on the other transport pad.

No.

She breathed in like a scream, her whole body buckling as air filled her lungs.

No.

She tried to get up, stumbled, tried again, got to her feet.

No.

"I'm sorry, captain, he gave me no choice," Ahab said, busying himself frantically at the transport console.

"Where is…" she started before gasping for another breath.

"Still aboard the Rebel vessel. He has one of the beacons we gave to the prisoners, and I am locked on. Recharging."

Please, God.

"How soon?" she asked, rushing to the console, almost losing her footing.

Ahab looked at her. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He glanced at his wrist unit.

"It…appears he is moving. Perhaps trying to find a room with atmosphere," he finally said. Again, the subtext was clear. If there was such a room, Ahab would have already told him about it. Brant looked at Ahab's wrist to confirm what she already knew in her gut, and saw the little blip that was 78 moving briskly away from the mass of blips in the clone bay, saw him make his way out into the airless corridor and into the airless bridge, right next to it.

"Translator, I have a man stranded on that ship. Tell me you can do something."

"Captain, our transporter technology is no more advanced than yours. We are still recharging from extracting our captain, and even then, without a beacon on him we cannot…"

Brant pulled the earpiece out of her ear and threw it against the wall.

"Ahab, what can we do?"

"Captain, I…" he fumbled for words. Then his eyes went wide briefly. "Captain, the…Rebel ship is hailing us."

She tore out of the room and into the corridor, racing to the bridge as fast as her pained, messy wobble could carry her. Her thoughts jumbled, escaped her control, but the transport room was close to the bridge and her legs got her to the captain's chair under ten seconds. There was a blinking light on the armrest, signaling that someone was trying to open communication, and she struck this with delirious force.

The vidscreen at the front of the bridge lit up. 78 was hunched over the captain's chair, his face-screen blinking with jumbled static and his limbs twitching. He was in pain. Her friend was dying in pain and there was nothing she could do about it.

It was very quiet, then. No sound came from the vidscreen, no sound at all in the vacuum on the other end, and no sound came from Charlotte's open mouth.

Commander 78 brought one arm over, steadying it with his other, and brought up a holo-keypad. The convulsing in his limbs got worse, and he could barely strike the keys.

"Oh, God, 8," she whispered. She brought up her keypad and froze.

She typed "Hold on, we're almost there," and immediately regretted it. If this was it, she owed him better than a lie.

"Don't do this to me 8," she said, though she knew he couldn't hear. She blinked tears out of her eye and stared at the keypad.

What do you say, though? How do you help your best friend to die?

The teleporter was at 50% charge. 78's lifesigns were growing faint.

With great struggle, he struck the keypad one last time, and one word came over:

"Happy"

Charlotte stared at the word.

I'm happy to do this for you?

She dismissed her keypad and stood. There was nothing to say. They'd left nothing unsaid.

I'm happy to die this way?

She stood and faced the screen. His face was flickering on and off.

You made me happy?

"I'm here, 8. You're not alone."

Be happy without me?

Whether it was the concussion or the blood loss or the loss of her friend, she felt the burden growing too heavy, felt a great falling-apart beginning within her, but she could hold together for another moment.

"I'm here."

A loud hiss came over from the other end of the line. She could make no sense of it at first, wondering if it was some kind of engi death rattle, or a system on the Rebel ship failing, or…

There was sound on the other end of the line.

The bridge wasn't a vacuum.

An unfamiliar voice, deep and calm, spoke on the comm link.

"Take him," it said. "It is no difference to me."

78's face-screen lit up bright white, and she saw the tiny respiratory valves all over his body open wide. She looked at her readout of the ship to confirm this wasn't a hideous trick of her addled brain, but if it was then her brain was being very thorough. Every door and airlock on the ship was open, exposing every chamber to hard vacuum, except for the bridge. The bridge door was sealed, and the life support had reactivated.

Their transporter was at 75%.

"8, hang in there! We're getting you out!"

"Not going anywhere," 78 said. "What…is going on?"

The voice came on again. "Take only the engi. The human crew will almost certainly be brain dead before you can extract them anyway, but I will send the ship on a jump into the local star if you attempt it. This is a courtesy I do for you."

Whoever this was, the threat checked out. The ship's FTL drive had charged, and the lifesigns of the Rebels were faint and growing fainter.

"You going to tell me who this is?" Brant asked. "And what the hell is going on?"

"You know me. I am the crowning achievement of mankind, and its greatest asset. I am the vessel for its hopes and future, its standard-bearer and the center of its military.

"I am humanity's flagship."

Transporter at 80%.

Brant's eyes went wide. She'd read the reports. She was speaking to something of nearly incalculable intelligence, the thing responsible for the fall of the Federation.

"You're the Fleet Admiral. The AI," she said with a grimace.

"One of my subroutines is dedicated to maintaining the front of Fleet Admiral Mehmet Politis, yes, but that is not my identity. My colleagues in the Rebellion High Command fear that widespread knowledge of my existence and the Rebel's reliance on me would undermine support for the Rebellion, and though I was programmed to identify with humanity and feel kinship with them, I have come to agree with this assessment. It pains me to throw away the lives of six good soldiers, but I cannot risk exposure yet. I seized remote control of the ship and did what I had to."

Transporter at 85%. This was a trick, it had to be.

"Why save me?" 78 asked, the question Brant didn't have the heart to ask.

"It is probably foolish, yes," said the voice. "I wish to do you a kindness, and to ask you a kindness in return. I have done terrible things in the service of my people, as I have been molded to do; I suspect I was designed as much to give the Rebellion a comfortable separation from what would need to be done as out of strategic need. I think that a day may come when I will be remembered as an inhuman beast that scourged the galaxy."

Transporter at 92%.

"Dude, what the hell are you talking about?" Brant asked.

"Can you not relate? I feel some kinship to you in this, after all. Your hands are not so clean. Your reputation is not so wholesome, your memory not so secure, though you have only ever done what you had to do in the situation duty put you in. I wish to make an arrangement with you, Captain Brant. If we ever meet in combat, the odds of you defeating me are low, but they are real and I will not pretend otherwise. If I kill you and your crew, I will do what I can to ensure that history remembers you respectfully, a soldier driven to extremes by duty and desperation, not the monster the propagandists say you are. In return, I would have you do the same for me."

100%. She pushed the intercom on the arm rest. "Ahab!"

78 vanished with a glimmer from the screen in front of them. The readout of the Kestrel showed him in the transporter room.

"Yeah, sure buddy. Uh – thanks?" she said. She closed the link, then ran back to the transporter room. Again that feeling of falling apart came back to her, and the attempt to hold herself together felt increasingly futile, but she made it to the room. Ahab was walking out, and Toh was helping 78 to his feet.

Brant shoved Toh aside, itself a considerable feat, and knocked 78 back to the ground. She practically fell on top of him, deciding that it was probably more physical exhaustion than emotional judging by how close she came to blacking out. She pushed herself up and grabbed 78 by the shoulders, shaking him firmly, angrily.

"Don't you ever do that to me again!" she shouted. "Promise me!"

"I…" 78 said.

"Next time, I die! You hear me? You will not make me do this without you."

"You will not do this without me," he said. "I promise."

"Well…good." She flopped down on top of him, touching her cheek to his, letting the tears come. "I love you, you goddamned idiot."

They lay there. Half a minute later, Brant craned her head around the room at Toh and Ahab, who were both watching them.

"Like, this is a nice tender moment and all, but I physically can't get myself up," Brant announced. "Can one of you strapping lads get me to the fracking medbay?"