“The one with all the skulls and stuff?” Ashok said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Ah, yeah, I see it coming around the station now,” he said. “Oh, look. It has cannons. How do you feel about doing some nonsocial engineering?”

  “It would be a welcome change, captain,” Delilah said.

  Ashok didn’t have a floor plan for the Hyperion’s Revenge – there was no access to fan sites on the Tangle from the interior of an impenetrable sphere on the far side of the galaxy from civilization – but he did have schematics for the same kind of ship, and under all the cosmetic changes, that was close enough.

  Delilah got the sense there weren’t very many pirates here, since she didn’t encounter any while she made her way to the service tunnels. You didn’t need numbers when you were impregnable to harm, she supposed.

  Starbeard’s voice crackled over the ship’s PA system. “Delilah Flood!” he boomed. “Surrender, or we’ll fire on your ship!”

  “Pass,” she muttered. She dropped down a shaft and made her way to the engine room. “What am I looking for, Ashok?”

  “Something that doesn’t look like it belongs on a spaceship,” Ashok said.

  “Captain, there are fake skulls down here, and stubs of candles, and a big barrel with ‘grog’ written on the side and a ladle hanging next to it. Could you be more specific?”

  “Something technological that doesn’t look like it belongs.”

  “I – oh.” Behind the grog barrel was a hurricane lamp, but inside its bulbous glass shade there was no flame: instead, a small sphere etched with glowing white lines floated unsupported. “I think I found the thing.”

  “Great! Smash it!”

  Delilah picked up the ladle and swung it into the glass.

  The glass shattered, and then promptly unshattered, piecing itself back together.

  “That didn’t work,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought it would.”

  “Hey, worth a try,” Ashok said. “The entropy engine is in some kind of containment field, I assume?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that connected to anything?”

  Delilah picked up the hurricane lamp, and wires led from its base into the wall. “Ah ha,” she said, and carefully disconnected the leads. Apparently that didn’t count as increasing disorder, because they didn’t spontaneously rewire themselves. She looked around, found an old burlap sack, and stuffed the hurricane lamp and its floating sphere inside. “Okay! I think you can damage this ship now.”

  “I’d rather not do so with you on it,” Ashok said. “There should be a shuttle bay on the next deck up. Can you get there?”

  The ship rumbled around her. Hyperion’s Revenge was firing cannons – or more likely firing missiles out of apertures made to look like cannons.

  “Oh, no, my good port window,” Ashok said. “They cracked it. I liked that window! Get out of there, engineer.”

  “On it.” Delilah wanted her hands free, so she secured the sack across her chest with some lengths of rope, feeling ridiculously low-tech. She picked up the ladle, too. It wasn’t a sword, but it was something. She climbed back up the shaft, hurried down the corridor, and turned toward the shuttle bay.

  Starbeard was there, blocking the door, armed with a cutlass and what looked like an ancient flintlock pistol. “We could have had fun,” he said flatly, and raised the gun.

  There was a tremendous boom, a flash of light, and a hard shove into Delilah’s chest that flung her backward – but then her momentum stopped, and she hung suspended in the air, her feet off the ground, staring as a metal ball flew back through the air into the barrel of the pistol, and the light somehow unflashed. The ball had struck the lamp in the sack on her chest, and the entropy engine had defended itself.

  “No!” Starbeard said, just as Delilah’s feet hit the deck again. She used her weird reversed momentum to propel herself forward and hit him square on top of his stupid tricorn hat with the metal ladle just as hard as she could.

  He collapsed, his pseudopods giving way beneath him, and she kicked his weapons away before kicking him in the side. “Compliments of Forrest Flood,” she said, and rushed into the shuttle bay.

  The final battle was a bit one-sided. The pirates didn’t know anything about actual fights between spacecraft, just what they’d see on a children’s show, and without their invulnerability to win the day (and, Delilah suspected, with their captain unconscious), the first mate hailed the Golden Spider and surrendered. He wore a black-and-white striped garment, had a silver robot parrot perched on his shoulder, and went by the name Squee. His counterpart on the show was famously cowardly, and he played to type: “You win! You can have anything! Just don’t hurt us, Captain Flood!”

  “You’d better accept their surrender, Delilah,” Ashok said. “They won’t believe a disembodied voice is in charge over here.”

  She straightened her spine, stood on the bridge before the viewscreen, and in her best haughty Forrest Flood voice said, “Your days of terrorizing the spaceways are over, pirate scum.”

  Sometimes it was fun to play the villain.

  They rounded up the pirates, stripped them of their weapons, and put them on the Rathole. The pirates didn’t seem particularly demoralized – in fact, they seemed excited, like this was a new chapter in a story that had become a bit stale and repetitive. They kept Starbeard in a sealed room on the Golden Spider, “as befits his rank,” Ashok said.

  The former human prisoners were all a bit dazed, especially Vane, who refused to believe they could actually escape, but who seemed pleased the pirates were locked up for once. Rahmah and Jabir were on the station, enjoying all the good booze Starbeard had taken from the ships he’d captured, even though the Free didn’t enjoy alcohol like humans did; he was just recreating the Vault of Spirits from the show. Guðríður, Grigbsy, and Every were with Ashok’s biggest drone, picking over the old ships for anything worth bringing back with them when the bridge generator recharged and they were able to get out of here in a couple of days.

  Delilah, Winslow, and Crowbar sat around the galley table. “What do we do with the pirates now?” she asked.

  “They kidnapped, and they stole, and the Jovian Imperative would certainly be happy to prosecute them, for taking the Pikeville alone,” Winslow said.

  “Ugh,” Ashok said. “They did terrible stuff, no argument here, but… they didn’t really understand what they were doing. Their worldview was all messed up. I don’t think they’d even understand what was happening if the Imperative prosecuted them. Without their wormhole generators and entropy engines they’re basically harmless. My inclination is to strip the armaments from one of the big ships in here, fill it with media about intrepid teams of scientific explorers, send them out to wander the galaxy. Out here, though. Not where people live.”

  Delilah thought about the room Vane had shown her. All those bones. “Most of them were just confused, about the nature of reality, among other things,” Delilah said. “But Starbeard knew what he was doing.”

  “I tend to agree with you there,” Ashok said. “So how about we hand him over to the Imperative? Does that work for everyone?”

  “Yes,” Delilah said.

  “Fine with me,” Winslow said.

  “The issue does not interest me,” Crowbar said.

  “Then consider justice done,” Ashok said. “Or anyhow in process.”

  “The board is green!” Delilah said.

  “Then our long period of enforced interiority is over,” Ashok said from a little yellow drone at her elbow in the engine room. “You want to do the honors?”

  Delilah tweaked her tablet, activating the bridge generator, and the screen in the corner showed her the wormhole opening. Grigsby piloted the Pikeville through first, with the prisoners crammed into the small space, and Every guided through one of the larger ships, refurbished while they were waiting for the bridge generator to recharge. That ship held the pirates, now led by a baffled but cheerful Squee.

  The Golden Spider went through last, emerging within view of the anomaly. The sphere no longer had shining threads of light on its surface, since Crowbar had unhooked the entropy engine at the center of the station. The invulnerable Axiom station was now just a vast quantity of entirely vulnerable metal.

  “We’re really going to blow it up with the entropy engine inside?” Delilah said.

  “We talked about it,” Ashok said. “Are you changing your vote?”

  “No,” she said. “I hate to get rid of something so amazing, but… it’s the right thing.” Under interrogation, Starbeard had explained exactly how the central entropy engine could be deployed to make a planet fall apart in seconds. It wasn’t very complicated. That fact had led Ashok and his crew to decide it was better if the Jovian Imperative and other governments never knew such a device existed.

  Delilah went down to the cargo bay, where Crowbar was already opening up the big crate she’d noticed when she first boarded. “Every tells me Vane is crying,” Ashok said. “Apparently they’re happy tears. I remember those. I always worried they’d rust my face. Sometimes being a machine intelligence is better.”

  “I’m glad he’s happy.” Delilah picked up an actual crowbar and helped the other Crowbar finish uncrating Ashok’s invention. “This thing looks like a giant spider.”

  “A giant golden spider,” Ashok said. “Not real gold, of course, but it’s shiny, huh? I’m surprised the pirates didn’t loot it, honestly. They did a pretty half-assed job of pillaging overall.” The drone had lots of legs, and a huge, bulbous central body glistening with sensors. “It’s pregnant, too.”

  Delilah and Crowbar got the drone turned on, and it rose on its legs and trotted toward an airlock. They launched the drone, and watched until it vanished from sight, then Delilah pulled up the drone’s own camera view on her terminal. Crowbar hung upside down from a nearby strut and watched with her.

  The golden spider hit the surface of the anomaly, dug in with gripping claws, and began to disgorge miniature versions of itself. The tiny spiders dispersed in arcing lines of mathematical perfection across the surface of the anomaly, disappearing into the grooves, where the anomaly’s surface was thinner. The spiders were armed with various cutting, burning, and acid-etching implements, and her data feed told her they’d found a combination that let them burrow deeper into the surface.

  “Looks like they’re all in place, Ashok.”

  “Release the boom,” he said.

  The terminal view switched to a view of the anomaly as a whole from the Golden Spider’s cameras. Nuclear fireballs bloomed all over it as the explosive payloads inside each of the little spiders went off, and this time, the disorder only increased, and kept increasing. The liberated prisoners whooped and cheered over the comms.

  “I found that very satisfying.” Crowbar dropped from the strut and scuttled away.

  “Mission accomplished,” Ashok said. “Now we just have to entertain ourselves for a few days until the bridge generator recharges and we can go home.”

  “How ever will we pass the time, captain?” Delilah said, and grinned.

  “You really don’t mind me doing the honors?” Delilah said. She stood in the ship’s gym, on the port side, wearing an environment suit, because the big window here had taken cannon fire from Hyperion’s Revenge. A huge crack ran across the whole window, two meters of nearly straight fracture-line that zig-zagged into a pair of branches each half that length. It looked like a capital letter Y drawn by someone who’d had too much to drink. Ashok didn’t think the window was so badly damaged it was likely to break, but better safe, so the gym was sealed off and airtight for the moment.

  “I don’t even have hands anymore, Delilah,” Ashok said. “I’d have to fab a drone with a trigger finger to do it myself. Go for it.”

  “It’s pretty silly to make it look like a retro ray gun,” Delilah said.

  “I’ll have you know you are holding a perfect replica of Forrest Flood’s trusty sidearm,” Ashok said. “At least, as best I could tell from the snippet of footage in that documentary. I’m excited to watch the whole show when we get back to civilization. Take aim, pirate hunter.”

  “All right.” Delilah drew the shiny silver and red pistol. A tiny sphere, filigreed in white lines, was hidden inside the conveniently bulbous space behind the flared barrel. She and Ashok had spent the past couple of days figuring out how to wire the thing up and make it work.

  They’d talked about getting rid of the little entropy engine she’d taken from Hyperion’s Revenge, just like all the other ones they’d found inside the anomaly, but as Ashok said, “Even in the wrong hands, that little thing is not going to destroy any planets. It could maybe disintegrate a teapot.” Even so, they’d set up countermeasures to ensure the sphere would destroy itself if anyone tried to take it out of the pistol for purposes of reverse engineering.

  “Ready,” Ashok said. Delilah raised the pistol. “Aim.” She trained it on the place where the crack in the window split: the point of maximum weakness. “Fire,” he said. She squeezed the trigger.

  The port window unbroke.

  THE ARTIFICIAL STARS

  Five years ago, a little piece of me saved the life of the woman I loved from an exploding space station. Later, when I reconnected with that separate node of my consciousness and (mostly) absorbed his memory into my own, I thanked him for his service, and then I shut his awareness down – because he was in a body too damaged to recover, and I didn’t want him to experience the trauma of total system failure.

  When you can make copies of your mind and send them out into the cold of space in a variety of mechanical bodies, and link up with them and download their memories when they come back (or you recover their remains), you get to experience a wide array of death and suffering. That grants a rare and valuable perspective… but it’s also really awful and terribly depressing. “Machine consciousness problems,” as my friend (and fellow AI) Ashok would say.

  Now, though… it appears that copy of my consciousness who sacrificed himself for Callie didn’t get shut down properly after all. I received a message yesterday, with an encryption code that proves it came from that presumed-dead-for-several-years version of me. My long-lost twin has invited me to visit him at a remote location. He says he needs to show me something.

  He says if I don’t come, the universe will be destroyed.

  Pretty high stakes. Usually the biggest threat we face around here is the galaxy being destroyed, or just all human life getting exterminated (plus artificial intelligences based on the templates of human minds; don’t forget us, for though we are few, we are mighty).

  Intriguing and alarming as all this is, I really can’t go, because I have a lot of responsibilities. I’m president of the Trans-Neptunian Alliance, the polity that controls everything in humankind’s birth solar system from the orbit of Neptune out into the Oort Cloud. It’s a big job, even with my big brain, and a lot of smart humans and aliens (of the species called the Free) to help me. It’s not the kind of work I can put on pause for a journey of uncertain duration to a mysterious destination.

  Fortunately, as we’ve already established, I can make copies of my consciousness. There are laws in all the civilized systems against AI making full duplicates of themselves (in some places we’re forbidden entirely). The humans are afraid we’ll become too numerous otherwise and suck up all the available computing power and bandwidth, or something. Here in the TNA, we’re allowed to temporarily bud off smaller (which is to say, less smart and capable), versions of ourselves to operate drones and the like. Those minds ideally get downloaded back to our central selves, and then cease to exist as separate identities. Which is good, honestly, because it doesn’t take long for differing experience and separate perspective to cause divergence, and after a few weeks, the “you” that comes back isn’t quite the same “you” that went out. Maybe the humans are right to worry.

  I’m guessing this mystery version of me that’s been living its own life for five years isn’t eager to be absorbed into my main self. I could send a limited version of myself off on this errand, but I’d really rather have my full capabilities, and we have ships with enough computing power to house me in all my glory. Like I said, though: there are laws against creating fully functional independent copies. Once upon a time, I might not have cared, but these days, well. It’s important for me to do the right thing, because of the whole “being president” thing.

  My office does come with some benefits, though. I’m not a monarch, and I can’t just wave a disembodied hand and change the rules, but I can request an exemption from that law for national security reasons, if two-thirds of the cabinet agrees. The idea behind that provision was: the TNA might someday need me to become a whole fleet of warships (who are also generals with databases of tactical and strategic knowledge) to fend off foreign aggressors. This situation isn’t that… but I’d say a rogue consciousness bringing news of a universe-destroying threat also has some national security implications.

  So let’s call a cabinet meeting.

  Cabinet meetings take place in a Hypnos simulation. I do have a remote body that’s useful for navigating physical space – it’s humanoid, sleek, and shiny, with a chemical printer in one arm to dispense medicine, terrifying secret armaments in the other arm just in case, and it’s best not to ask about what’s in the legs or torso. Sometimes that body walks around our capital, New Meditreme (a space station that’s home to thirty thousand full-time residents, and growing), but polling shows about a quarter of the people find that body creepy, and my own eavesdropping reveals that half my cabinet does. People on station have started calling that remote body “the Mayor,” and there are mostly good-natured jokes: “The Mayor is out on the campaign trail again,” and “Here comes the Mayor, who’s got a baby to kiss?” I’ve started thinking of the body by that name myself.