Looking at her was worse than glimpsing the clawed hand of an Axiom protruding from an improperly sealed pod on the Dream. That, at least, was fully alien. This was more like seeing Elena’s old crewmate Sebastien with metal Axiom implants in his skull and his eyes glowing red, but worse.

  Once she’d done everything that needed doing, Callie sat down on the floor – the pilot’s chair was covered in blood and less identifiable fluids – and told her friends what she’d found. “The pilot is a human female. About my age, I’d guess.”

  “Human?” Lantern said.

  “Does she have implants?” Ashok said. Axiom mind-control technology typically involved a lot of hardware sticking out of the skull. The tech they’d encountered didn’t work very well on humans because it was designed for Liar physiology, but the Axiom in the Vanir system could have perfected their technique in the long decades since the system sealed itself off. They’d gone in another direction, though.

  “I don’t see any visible technological implants, no. It’s… her arms are gone. Her human arms, I mean. She has limbs, and they’re attached to her shoulders, but they look more like the pseudopods of your people, Lantern – grafted on, or something. She died from the explosion when I breached the door, a piece of shrapnel put a hole in her torso, and I can see her guts…”

  “Oh, Callie,” Elena said softly.

  The pity in her voice put some steel in Callie’s: “No, that’s not what bothers me. I mean, it bothers me, but I’ve seen people with holes in them before. What’s bothering me is that her guts are all wrong. No pink coils of intestine… instead, there are all these bright yellow strands, as thick as my pinkie fingers. This isn’t just a case of strange prosthetics. These changes go deeper, fully internal. But her face, her head, her legs, everything else, looks human. Someone did this to her, changed her, put her on an Axiom ship, and sent her to murder or capture other humans.” Callie shuddered. “We’re going to find out who did this, and we’re going to make sure they never do it again. Ashok, you and Lantern get over here and start pillaging the data banks, and then disable the ship. One less operational scourge-ship in the galaxy is a net good. Shall, send a drone… one big enough to carry this body back to our ship.”

  Once Ashok and Lantern had looted everything of use from the scourge-ship, Callie ordered Drake to get under thrust in a random direction away from their point of arrival – just in case more scourge-ships came to check on the one they’d so thoroughly disabled. Ashok couldn’t remove the scourge-ship’s bridge generator because it was rigged to destroy itself in the event of tampering, but that was fine for their purposes – he tampered with it anyway, and reduced the greasy black cube to a ruin with concave sides. They pulled all the ship’s data they could access and brought it home. Once they translated and analyzed that they’d have a sense of where to go from here… if they could go anywhere at all.

  They had plenty to occupy them in the meantime. Callie joined Elena in the infirmary, looking down at the dead scourge-ship pilot on the exam table, her body-cavities open to the air. Callie had made a good start on that with the explosion, and Elena had finished it more deliberately with bone saws and rib-spreaders.

  Elena wore a white plastic apron, diagnostic lenses, and a baffled expression. A rack beside her held specimen jars where various disgusting things floated in equally disgusting cloudy fluids. “Have you figured anything out yet?” Callie said.

  Elena shrugged. “I’m not quite a doctor – even with the neural enhancers and access to the medical database, I need another six months of intensive work in the Hypnos residency suite before I can even try to get certified – but I am a biologist, functionally even a xenobiologist, and this is a lot more like dissecting an unknown animal than autopsying a human. I do think this pilot started as a baseline human, and the changes were made later, probably in her adulthood. The brain is intact, and the original sense organs, but almost everything else has been altered to one degree or another.”

  “Altered how?”

  Elena began to point, though Callie didn’t recognize much of what she pointed at. “She still has lungs, but she doesn’t have a heart, a liver, kidneys, or a reproductive system… She has blood, but it’s not just blood. Most of the tests I can do here just say her new fluids are ‘unknown contaminants.’ She has other organs, new organs, like nothing I’ve seen before. I think this one does the job of the heart.” She prodded a gray shape in the woman’s chest cavity, like a flower made of valves. “She must have other systems for processing waste, too, assuming there is any waste. She doesn’t have a stomach or a bowel! At first I thought her digestive system had just been damaged in the explosion, but that’s not it. The system has been replaced. I don’t know where she gets her energy, but it’s not from food, or at least, not the same way we get it from food.”

  Callie gazed down, trying to keep her face impassive, but somehow seeing a person so profoundly changed was worse than seeing one merely dead. “Why would anyone do this to a human?”

  “I think they’re improvements,” Elena said. “Why else go to all this trouble? Maybe this faux-heart is more efficient than her old one. Maybe food that’s edible for humans is scarce in the Vanir system now, and they had to make alterations to use calories more efficiently. It could just be adaptation, altering their bodies to better fit their environments. Instead of terraforming a world to make it more hospitable to humans, you change the human to suit the environment.”

  “That doesn’t fit what we know about the Vanir system – the planets there are supposed to be perfectly habitable, and one was supposedly a verdant paradise.”

  Elena nodded. “That’s not the only inconsistency. I’ve checked the database, and the alterations made to this woman are way beyond any technology humans have now. By my ancient 22nd-century standards, modern surgeons are basically wizards – we were still struggling with reliable organ replacement back in my day, and someone with implants and augmentations like Ashok was the stuff of science fiction – but what I’m seeing here? Whoever did this makes your best doctors look like children poking roadkill with a stick.”

  “Axiom biotech, then.”

  Elena nodded. “It must be. We’ve seen their biological drones before. This is… some horrible extension of the same science.”

  Callie turned away from the body on the table. She’d killed humans before. She’d killed aliens before. She’d never killed someone who was both. “I can think of another reason to change her digestive system, besides increasing efficiency or whatever.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I was a kid, there was this fad for home-grown pets, and you got to tinker with their genes during incubation, adding certain traits, suppressing others. You could make, say, blue mice with vestigial wings, or glow-in-the-dark ferrets, or miniature potbellied stegosauruses, or whatever. The company that made the kits, being composed of rapacious assholes like most companies, made sure you couldn’t feed your winged mice regular cheap-ass mouse food. You had to use the company’s special food, which included some custom-made enzyme or protein or something… or else the creatures you made would die. While making very pitiful and pathetic noises, naturally.” She gestured in the direction of the body. “If you changed a person for your own purposes, in horrible ways, and you wanted to make sure they obeyed your orders, making it so they couldn’t even eat if they tried to escape would be pretty effective, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would.” Elena started to strip off her gloves and apron. “You think she was forced to pilot that ship and attack us?”

  “I think she’s my age, or thereabouts, which means she was born something like sixty years after the gates to the Vanir system closed permanently. She grew up under circumstances we can’t even imagine, in a world that would have seemed absolutely normal and ordinary to her, no matter how horrible and twisted it looks to us.” Callie sighed. “I think I can’t even begin to guess at her motivation, but it makes me feel a lot better to think they had to force her to hunt us.”

  “Since when do you have faith in humanity?”

  “It’s individual humans I don’t have faith in. If I didn’t have faith in humanity as a whole, would I go to all this trouble to save the galaxy for them? I’ve even expanded my concept of humanity to include AI like Shall and aliens like Lantern, who just want to live their lives without the threat of the Axiom looming over them. Whether the definition of humanity stretches to include people who’ve been changed like our pilot here… I sure hope so. Killing Axiom is very uncomplicated for me, emotionally. But this…” A torn-open torso full of alien organs, beneath a human face. “This is a little rough.”

  Elena silently took Callie in her arms and held her for a moment. Elena knew when to talk, and when not to, and that was part of why Callie loved and counted on her so much.

  After a moment, Elena released her. “I think I’ve learned all I can from the body. We’ve got scans and diagnostics and samples if I want to go deeper. What should I… do with her?”

  “Cremate her, and we’ll hold onto her ashes. Maybe she has people in the Vanir system. I’m going to see if Ashok and Lantern have found anything useful in the data they took from the scourge-ship. Maybe they even found her name.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Ashok’s machine shop was simultaneously neat and jumbled. The walls were covered in tools, coils of cable, random lengths of metal, spools of wire, jars of bolts and screws and rivets, but everything had its place, even if the system of organization was mysterious to anyone else. He sat on a stool at his workstation, cords running from the base of his skull into a terminal, and he was humming a horrible Luna-Pop song that had been aggressively popular when Callie was a teenager. “Hey, cap.” He didn’t turn around. “Just finishing up.”

  She floated closer and hooked her toes under his worktable. “How’s it look? Can we get to the Vanir system?”

  “In theory. That scourge-ship sure did. It’s gone back and forth from this position to the Vanir system dozens of times. It looks like there’s one very specific set of coordinates we can use as our destination – every other possible position is blocked off, and if we tried, we’d just pop out of the wormhole in the wrong place again… Probably right back in this place. I have no idea how their multidimensional electric fence works, and there’s zero information about the force field or caltrops or whatever in the scourge-ship’s system, so I don’t have any hope of circumventing it.”

  “There’s just a single point of entry and exit into the system? So it’s functionally like the big wormhole bridges. So much for the amazing advantage of our forbidden technology that allows us to go anywhere at any time and appear without warning. How long would it take us to get to the Vanir system with our Tanzer drive? Forget wormholes – how about good old hard-burning space travel?”

  “We’d die of old age four or five times before we got there, cap, sorry. Whoever’s running things over there put up a big fence. On the plus side, that means they’re not exactly in regular communication with the scourge-ship, so our dead pilot isn’t missing a check-in or anything. There’s no way they’re talking via conventional communication at this distance.”

  “So it’s wormhole or nothing. And if it’s wormhole, we have to stroll through their front door.”

  “Well… one of their many front doors, I suspect. The set of coordinates I found is probably specific to that scourge-ship. You wouldn’t give all the ships in your fleet the same position for coming and going. They’d open wormholes right on top of each other, and there would be breakage.” They’d seen wormholes open in the middle of ships before. There wasn’t much left of the ships afterward.

  “Hmm. So there are probably lots of safe coordinates. Can we extrapolate other potential safe landing sites?”

  Ashok pulled a cable out of his skull and grimaced. “When you’re extrapolating from a single point of data, cap, it’s not really extrapolation. We call that ‘making a wild-ass guess’ instead. I could assume all the scourge-ships come and go from roughly the same region – some kind of alien shipyard or mustering area or whatever. That’s assuming there’s more than one scourge-ship, so we’re two asses deep already – keep up. After that, I could calculate the dimensions of a reasonable safe zone around each ship, since you don’t want to open and close wormholes too close to your neighbors. From that point, I could come up with a list of likely coordinates that maybe probably aren’t blocked… but I can’t guarantee there’s not already a ship sitting at that spot, and it wouldn’t be good for us to appear on top of them. There’s only one set of viable coordinates that we know is currently unoccupied by another ship, because we disabled the ship that belongs there and left it floating over there.” He waved his hand.

  “Ugh. If we hadn’t wrecked that ship, we could use it to go back, flying under false colors, space pirate style.” She cocked her head. “I don’t suppose you could… unscuttle it?”

  Ashok sniffed. “You wound me, cap. You tell me to break something, and it stays broken. Which is to say, sure, I could fix the ship, if you gave me a hundred repair drones and a week, but we’d have to hook our bridge generator up to its navigation and propulsion system, since I scuttled theirs.”

  Callie groaned. “The ship was an abomination, but I wish I hadn’t wrecked it. Why do I have to destroy every abomination I see?”

  “Hindsight is a bastard,” Ashok said cheerfully. “I did loot the transponder from the scourge-ship, though. We can use it to make any control systems on the other side perceive the White Raven as the scourge-ship instead. We can even configure our stealth technology to make us look like the ship to scanners.”

  Callie blinked. “We can do that?”

  “We’ll be able to do it in a couple of hours, when I finish fiddling with the program,” Ashok said. “Our Liar stealth tech can already hide us from sensors while projecting an image of our ship off in the distance to draw fire to the wrong place. It occurred to me recently that if the system could generate a convincing image of the White Raven, maybe it could generate a convincing image of something like a Jovian Imperative Depredation-Class dreadnought? That could be useful for scaring people off – puff us up to look bigger than we are, like cats or lizards – so I started tinkering in my free time. I am now tinkering much more diligently so we can look like a scourge-ship instead.”

  “Ashok.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to make me say it?”

  “Nah, that’s okay. I know you love me. Now, if someone actually looks out a window with their biological eyes, or, Kurzweil forbid, tries to board us, they’ll realize we’re not what their computers claim we are.”

  “Even so, we just went from one hundred percent doomed to maybe, what, eighteen percent doomed? I’ll take it. Before I go – what’s the word on Kaustikos?”

  “He’s just hovering around. Seems to be behaving. No attempts to hack into our systems, no attempts to send messages – not surprising at this point, since we’re a billion kilometers from anywhere, but it’s weird he didn’t try to chat with his boss before we wormholed here. I’m thinking of the guy as cargo, pretty much.”

  “Suspicious cargo, Ashok. Always be suspicious.”

  “I learned that from the best, cap.”

  Callie clapped him on the shoulder and started for the door, then paused. “Where’s Lantern?”

  “She’s in her cabin, going over all the data I didn’t. We kept distracting each other with our cries of horrified horror as we dug into the information, so we decided to work separately. She took the really distressing stuff and let me focus on the navigational issues. I owe her.”

  Callie toggled to a private channel and said, “Lantern? Up for a visit and a preliminary report?” Callie would barge in without hesitation on Ashok, Drake and Janice, and Elena, because they were her crew, and Kaustikos was an interloper with no expectation of privacy, but Lantern was different – she ran her own station, with her own crew of truth-tellers, and she was here helping out as a kindness, and at great personal risk. She got to stand apart from the usual chain of command.

  “Of course, Callie. Please come at your convenience.”

  Now was convenient, so Callie scaled up to the crew quarters and rapped her knuckles on the cabin door. It was the XO’s cabin, technically, the second-best on the ship, but Elena shared the captain’s quarters with Callie, so they let Lantern have it. Drake and Janice’s cabin had special accommodations, and Ashok slept in the machine shop half the time anyway, so nobody’s feelings were hurt.

  The door slid open, and Callie stepped in to find Lantern tethered to the floor, pseudopods manipulating half a dozen terminals at once, leaving one tentacle free to flutter in a gesture that Callie was pretty sure meant ‘anxiety’. Elena had been trying to teach Callie the body language of the Free – and it really was a component of their language – for months, with minimal success. Callie had never been great with languages, though she was fluent in rude gestures.

  “Ashok said you were going through the non-navigational data?”

  “Yes. I was hoping to find out what’s happening in the Vanir system. News, memos, even entertainment would give me some idea… but there’s nothing like that. The data is extremely sparse, and very mission-focused. It seems this scourge-ship is one of several that take turns patrolling this region of space – or else they leave this space unpatrolled for long intervals, which seems unlikely. There are patrol guidelines from an entity designated ‘Command,’ but nothing personal or non-mission-oriented at all. As far as I can tell, the pilot just… sits there, when there’s nothing to chase. Like a motion sensor that hasn’t been tripped.”

  “Ugh. Do you know when this ship is expected back?”

  “It looks like they go on patrol for roughly a month at a time, and there’s another week or so to go on this one’s shift.”

  “Hmm. Coming back early could trigger alarms, but it can’t be helped. We’ll just have to move fast. Anything else?”