Limited Partnership (working title)

The ship clutched him tightly. Eamon felt its grasp, its arms invisible, as he drifted in the gravity well of the nuclear furnace beneath him. He looked down, into its core, through the Ship's eyes; he extended his hands - Ship's probes - into its photosphere, and felt the star, recording its temperature, its composition. Measuring its age in the ratio of hydrogen in its viscous flesh, watching as tendrils of plasma licked across his/Ship's skin/Shields. He waited.

Eamon was in hiding. The measurements, all the endless little manipulations, the recording of data - all secondary. He waited in the wash of EM noise of the star's photosphere, and watched; nine-tenths of his attention focused outward where small lights shone and much much smaller things moved. There was a tone in his ear, Ship warning him that their perigee to NGC-547 Alpha 984 was dangerously low. Eamon flexed his legs, felt the thrusters fire momentarily as Ship's velocity increased, pushing them into a slightly higher orbit. There was silence from the ecliptic arena of the system.

Ship queried him as to their plans. Its battle computer had been relatively stupid when they'd last left port, but it was learning - that was his purpose here, to teach Ship how to hunt, and how to hide, and how to kill. To teach Ship all it needed to know, so that it could do so without him, and do so without the human life it carried within its tough durylium skin, and cradled with grav neutralizers and shock absorbers and plain old braces and geefoam. So that the public, back on Earth, couldn't complain at the cost of screening, training, and supplying pilot candidates. So that more of Ship could be turned to the task of the battle, and less to the task of keeping its occupant alive and comfortable.

Ship had a name, of course, as much as its Pilot did. Sentry Corps Corvette SCC-988 Glass Dagger was her name, and low-contrast paint on her hull proclaimed the fact to the heavens in muted colors, the only sign of it a slight change in the very very faint and narrow reflection spectrum coming off her skin. Her Pilot didn't call her that, though - Secondname for this Ship was Kynderian, on a whim one synthetic circadian night when the name had slid through his mind and through the interface of Synk to Shipcom, and vanished into the code fabric in a tiny whisper of identity. Ship responded to Kynderian, now, as well as to any other identity, and Eamon felt a hint of pride at the acceptance of his naming. A hint of pride for this among other things.

Eamon Katsuko was one of the best. He had sweated in the dark and fought and ran and hunted and hidden for six years - six years of war, with no injury yet. It was the best selection criteria, survival. The committee had finally agreed on that, which also happened to save them the time and expense of coming up with a more scientific evaluation procedure for instructor candidates. Thirty-five pilots had applied to take out this particular Ship, to have their alterbodies implanted with the engram computer that would in time learn to think as them, and to fight as them. Eamon had been chosen for the two years by which he had outlived the next most experienced candidate. Three months later, here he was, hiding as he always had, but this time with Ship not only responding, but busily recording and imprinting on his movements. Eamon had the uneasy feeling at times that it was looking over his shoulder, or at least taking avid notes. It gave him an urge to lecture, but Ship hadn't been programmed for niceties like that; with his neurals rerouted he doubted he could even talk. He'd never tried. To try and fail would undoubtedly mean broadcasting, something he was trying very hard not to do. Even though his surroundings would drown out all but the most strident call from his/Ship's comm, he strove to maintain an alert, watchful silence.

Far 'above' him, one of the primary's few satellites, a gas giant, swept past on its endless patrol. Eamon regarded it momentarily, and resumed scanning the outer approaches. The derelict freighter was where he'd left it, swinging slowly by in its orbit, sending out its lonely-sounding robotic distress call every seventeen seconds. Its main drives blown, Eamon had found it some thirty-five light years from his present position, drifting and silent, and brought it here with him tucked firmly against Ship's side. Lamb in the pen.

There was a brief tone, and Ship superimposed a line of data across his mind's eye. Lower Shield was running at 50% of recommended limits, busily turning back overly enthusiastic particles from the cauldron below, preventing them from damaging Ship or Pilot. Eamon acknowledged, and the message vanished.

He wasn't sure if the heuristic Battle Computer was working. There was actually very little in the way of communications between it and him; the link was mostly one way. It was linked to Ship's computer, but there was no way for him to monitor its progress. Ship had been getting a bit more empathic, lately; over the past week it had been anticipating some of his more routine actions. The shield report, for instance; he hadn't flagged the shield reading manually. Ship must have realized that he always flagged it at 50% when hiding. He shrugged, mentally. No way to tell, and maybe a waste of time trying. Let the techs back at Well figure it out, when and if he made fall there next. Eamon wished futilely that he could scratch his nose. Ship detected the impulse, and quelled his errant sensory pathways, but it wasn't the same.

There was silence, as near as could be expected, save for the constant hissing rush of photons and particles whispering past Ship's skin, dancing laughingly through the middle of their comm and nav bands. Nothing to be done about it. Eamon edged closer to the corona, within it really, and winced at the thought of what this was doing to Ship's warranty.

Blackness stared inward, blackness and the hydrogen song, and Eamon blinked deliberately to kick the sensors up a notch, trading filtering for warning

flicker of whiteness, unbearable pain and shriek from the outer system as the freighter vanished in a teardrop of radiance and the death squeal of dying components over the water gap passing through him like a knife asEamon pushed forward hard, watching the surface of the star rotate smoothly and quickly away from the side of his vision and the blackness claim more of his sight. There was no sensation of acceleration, here, but somewhere his body groaned and settled deeper into the geefoam.

Ship vibrated, almost, at the scent, and Eamon could feel the systems coming alive as his vessel responded to the sudden maneuver. He was outbound, now, riding the causality trail of an event some fourteen minutes old as blueshifted images of the dispersing remnants of the freighter eddied past his artificial vision to save themselves in storage for later.

Part of him watched the checklist as it droned off its Gregorian chant of war somewhere beneath his psyche in the autonomic systems of Ship's mind. Shields/check/KKVlauncher/check/KKVracks/check/Maindrive/check/alter drive/check/targetcomp/check/battlecomputer/check/Xasers/check and on and on, a being girding itself for war and death.

He was past the first wavefront of debris from the freighter, and could smell the charmpath of the Other vessel's wake. He altered his course slightly to follow, casting his vision down towards red in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Other's drives ahead. There was nothing except blue, so he pushed harder and felt the slam of power as Maindrive woke to throw its tongues of primal meson flame into the void. No point in hiding now, not if the Other was running.

There. A small point of red ahead of him, the only object reflecting/radiating light in those wavelengths. All the rest of his field of view was a wash of blues, the relativistic painting that his acceleration had given him. The Other was racing for Planck space, now, its drives struggling to bring its mass up to a velocity relative to the primary at which it could Bend out and be gone from the smaller pursuer crying vengefully out along its trail. There was a juddering slam as the kinetic kill vehicle launcher animated, and spat the first of its offspring into the void. Eamon, hoping to keep the Other from maneuvering, fired ten KKVs which, once free of their parent, shook themselves and mindlessly bore in for the Other in a ring, set to angle outward to prevent any evasive maneuvering. Five kept station slightly behind the red glow of drive flame, and the others bore in for their obsessive meeting. Eamon watched dispassionately as there were flares of actinic purple light from working shields as the KKVs struck home. With the fourth, there was a sudden early flare and the KKV vanished from the screen just before impact. The fifth flickered and washed away in silent streamers as his view dimmed suddenly from the filters cut in to prevent the X-ray laser blinding Ship's cameras. Slowly it brightened back to normal, retaining an eerie phosphorescence, as image processing built the image back up at the price of clarity. Too close to need that now, as the KKV launcher spoke again and the Xasers on Ship's hull lit silently.

Committed to its run for deepspace, the Other's drive flared brighter in a last attempt to make it out past Newton's limit before annihilation. The aura of its shields dimmed slightly as their power was diverted, and Eamon raked his beams across its length just as the second wave of KKV's struck. There was a silence, almost, while the universe waited to see what would happen, before there was a strobing flicker in the Other's drives and it began to yaw sideways. Unable to shut down its errant drives, the Other began to break up from the wrath of reimposed physics as the last KKV hit it broadside. There was a soundless scream of material and being, perhaps of frustration, and then nothing, the debris flung backwards past Eamon as he too cut his acceleration, too late for the velocities to match. Behind him, there was a faint red glare as the debris vaporized, then nothing, the scenery ahead of him sliding down past violet to indigo and blue and green and then to blackness as deceleration cut in.

He came to rest in the silent interstellar gulf, Maindrive whispering down to hibernation with a whine of satisfaction.

A small bit of debris slashed past him, which his cameras recorded only as a smear of color and EM band energy as it radiated the blackbody scream of its death indignantly into his systems before passing forever into the dark.

Dawn came for him in his sleep, a Dawn accelerated into a silent strobe motion as Ship hung in a tight circular orbit about an airless planetoid, its orbit thirty meters above the unbroken sphere. The system's primary leapt up over the horizon, the terminator of Eamon's small featureless haven scything by beneath Ship in an implacable rush of day. Twenty-five minutes later, night fell, and Eamon Katsuko stirred restlessly in his sleep. Ship watched silently, its eyes turned outwards, ready to wake the sleeper should anything catch its mechanical eye.

Eamon opened his eyes to the limitless vistas of Ship's systems shortly before the night passed for a second time, and shook his mental head to clear it. Moving with leaden slowness, he disengaged himself from Ship and felt his eyes closing one by one until nothing was left except a filmy lighted haze, and he blinked his body's eyes to clear them before pressing the switch at his belt for the tractor to pull him from the geefoam and neutralizers.

Bodybay was dark, and he palmed the lights on, getting used to the feel of his own self again. Ship watched quietly for him, scanning the outer wastes, as he stumbled slightly in moving down the short corridor to the commissary. Although one could eat and excrete and sleep in Synk with Ship, there came a time when all Pilots came down from the aether and endeavored to taste food, to feel flesh again, under strict commands from Psych Cadre. Lest we forget, thought Eamon, and washed himself mechanically, feeling, however, the nerves coming alive under his skin, the incredibly limited sensory of his body at last gaining meaning as the memory of Synk faded.

Chicken, Eamon noted, was probably the one constant in the galaxy, at least when prepackaged. He hadn't the energy to prepare a meal, choosing instead to dine on rations which, although nourishing and admittedly not bad, provided nothing memorable in the way of taste. Chewing the last of his dinner, he ascended from the center of Ship to Bridge.

As the door slid open on the small chamber, Dawn broke again through the wraparound viewport, surrounding him in a halo of brightness that the polarizers muted quickly to a dim aura. Eamon entered Bridge and sat in the single seat, facing the viewport, and dialed a fruit juice. The rock whose signature kept him safe (he hoped) swung by below, its surface so featureless that it gave no impression of the speed at which Ship orbited.

Absently, Eamon keyed the terminal into Ship, and asked for a report on the Battle Computer. There was a pause, as the terminal programming of Ship accomodated itself to this new request, and then a raft of data flowed across the field. Eamon cleared it and asked for a summary. The computer obligingly showed that Battle Computer Heuristic protocols were up and running, and that the unit was currently using forty-seven point six nine three two percent of its available processor time. It had used eighteen percent of the available memory allocated to it within Ship's computers, and its activity was relatively constant.

On an impulse, Eamon told Ship to hook Battle Computer into the Synk interface. There was a pause, after which Ship primly responded that that was disallowed by its interface protocols, which specifically forbade linking the Battle Computer into any system which could be directly accessed by the Pilot.

Eamon wondered whether that was for scientific reasons, to prevent the Pilot from affecting the test, or for practical ones. He was mildly surprised to find that he was considering attempting to override Ship's interface protocols, and firmly shut the terminal off. Ship acknowledged with a chime, and he turned to look out the viewport once more.

The Other he'd lured hadn't been a ship of the line. It had been too slow and too curious - no predator would have lingered near the freighter's remains for as long as that one had, lingered the amount of time it had taken for the image to reach him and only left the area recently enough for him to catch it before the system's Newton Limit. He called up the battle in his mind, and reviewed the Other's actions. Nothing very threatening. In fact, no offensive action against Ship and Eamon at all, other than the last defensive burst of coherent X-rays as it sought to avoid the onrushing KKVs.

This, the third opponent since leaving Well, had put up no more than a token fight. The previous two had been more spirited, the second leaving Ship so badly torn up that they had had to hide for a full week while Ship and Pilot healed. Eamon hadn't been badly damaged - Bodybay hadn't been breached - but had broken a wrist in a particularly violent maneuver and been forced to spend most of the week out of Synk, with his wrist healing and his Ship tending to itself. He'd used the time to cook several large and elaborate dinners, watch four dramas and read Night in Kelios, a book he'd picked up on his last fall. Now, he sat on the bridge and thought of his next action.

Fighting a war over the lightyears of empty space that his conflict occupied made for certain problems. Communications with his superiors, for example, were tenuous at best, made thin by security- and physics-imposed blackouts. Although Ship and its kin, and the Others as well as the numerous less agile members of the fleet could enter Planck space and break the c-Wall that way, no one had yet devised a method for sending a message over the Wall without sending it along with a working charmdrive. Invention of the charmdrive had made the career of mailman glamorous once more, and doomed the media networks to local live coverage for the forseeable future.

This meant that communications were only possible within certain systems which had had communications facilities established, automated stations which simply took in all incoming messages and uplinked them to a series of tireless drones which did nothing but make the hop from one end of their leg to the other, where they regurgitated the flow of information that Mankind had fed them at the beginning of the journey, and fed insatiably on the flow of data that would make the return trip.

These systems were few and far between, mostly being those that had colonies or other inhabited worlds in them. There were, however, a few systems which were set up as message drops for the Sentry Corps which guarded the Established Worlds. Eamon hadn't been near one of those for the past three months, due to a gnawing suspicion which he'd communicated with Well that the Others were somehow beginning to locate and patrol the drop systems. Well had told him curtly in reply that they would look into it, and to continue patrol.

So here he was. Ship moved silently about him, maintaining and watching, as he sat on Bridge and watched the stars. The rock beneath him did, he noticed, have some small irregularities - enough so that careful study revealed the rush of his craft across the face of the dead world. Eamon stared at it with no particular interest until at last, as intended, he fell into a normal sleep.

The wakening was harsh. Ship was screaming at him, in all the ways it was able - the tingler was going in his mastoid, there were high volume screamers on in the interior of Ship, and his encom was blaring for his attention. He snapped up from the chair and was halfway to the door when there was a slight lurch, and he looked back in time to see the surface of their haven curve away as Ship decided that whatever had caused it to waken him was more dangerous than its own relatively stupid piloting.

Auxdrive was flaming in the bass register, and he turned and began sprinting down the passage towards Bodybay, cursing at the luck which had him halfway along Ship from his post. He shouted the screamers off as he ran, and Sent a cancel over the encom, which quieted things. Ship began to send data instead of warnings over the encom link, and reams of bad news began to unfold in his mind: seven transients indicating Charmdrop into the system, no other data on the incomings.

Ship was approximately englobed by the transients, which one had to assume were ships, and from the lack of IFF hostile ones at that. They were in roughly the positions needed to completely block off any vectorpath from orbit to Planck Entry; there was no vector which both gave him a long enough acceleration run and cleared any of the transients by an acceptable amount - read, weapons range. He swore once, with feeling, and at that same moment, his feet were swept sideways from under him as his Shields took a massive kinetic hit - Ship was actually bounced sideways several feet in a fraction of a second, causing him to slam into the padded wall before the neutralizers caught him again. He grabbed reflexively at a grip, and hung there while Ship told him that Shields were holding but down forty-nine point six one one percent from previous levels. He told Ship over the encom to head straight for a transient - better one field of fire than overlaps - and started to run again.

The corridor stretched ahead of him, and as he finally saw the padded accessway to Bodybay slide into view ahead, there was another terrific SLAMand he barely felt himself hit the side of the corridor before blacking out.

Pain was a red feral thing, with black wings that fluttered in his vision, and wet sharp claws that tore at his midsection while it's forepaws crushed his skull. Eamon felt pain drop him blessedly into a silent warm pool of black which rushed in to fill his eyes and nose and mouth before he could scream, and washed into his head and erased him.

When he next awoke, it was to a confused babble in his head. He felt awful. He tried to raise his eyelids, and failing that, dropped his standards and managed to open one. He couldn't see anything. For a panicked second he was blind, until his questing eye caught a dim red point of light- a status light of some kind, curiously muffled and dim. He managed finally to open his other eye, and when trying to move his arms, found that he could not. He was held fast in what felt like metal. His right leg was free, but his left was caught securely in a tangle of lasercable and metal struts which wouldn't allow it a millimeter of movement. His right arm was in the same predicament, but his left was not entirely stuck, and after a few moments he managed to free his left wrist, although the arm wasn't moving much.

With this done, Eamon took stock. Definitely some broken ribs, a possible skull fracture and likely concussion, and a broken right arm. He wasn't precisely sure where he was; although he couldn't be too far from Main, the corridor he'd been running along, he couldn't place his surroundings. This, he was sure, was due to the level of damage - it looked as though a poltergeist that fed on elephants had been let loose in the compartment. The only way Eamon could see the damage was in the way which his views of the small status lights that would normally adorn the walls were blocked by large irregular shapes which could only be metal support members and panelling, twisted and crazed by the violence of the conflict into a gross architecture of the frozen shadows of kinetic energy.

He groaned. It wasn't really voluntary. There was no answer, not that he had expected one. First things first. He checked on encom, but there was silence on Ship's frequencies. A diagnostic on the encephalic communicator came back with green indicators, so he tried again, scaling the call up and down the available bandwidth. Finally, down towards the HF band came a steady pipping; Ship's autonomic answer. Eamon queried Ship for its status.

There was a pause, with no answer, and then a blur of disjointed com came howling back over the link, making him wince in pain and shut down encom reflexively. Shaking his head to clear it, he reflected in the dark. Sure that it would hurt his head, he called out. Sure enough, his cranium throbbed with a hot plasma, and his voice, oddly echoing from his surroundings, elicited no response from Ship. Not surprising; with the level of damage this compartment had taken, it was unlikely that the voice processors or indeed much of the compartment's utilities and com had survived. He groaned again, with feeling, realizing that until Ship managed to repair its com links, or happen upon him, he was left to his own devices.

He attempted to free his right arm once more, with no success. Finally, he cautiously reactivated encom, and found the active frequency. He listened to the steady pipping for a time, and it took him several minutes to realize that the sound that was flooding back over the link was not Ship's normal acknowledgement tone. He listened again, and was astonished to hear information flooding the encom bands, in sideband frequencies just out of his unit's capabilities. He heard them as harmonics on other frequencies, and as momentary noise on others- he picked one of Ship's normal frequencies which appeared the quietest and called again, prefacing his call with a security rider that would place Ship under EMCON; emission control. Hoping that that would forestall the blast of noise which had hit him earlier, Eamon listened intently.

There were a few moments of silence, and then the quiet reassuring flow of information that he had been hoping for flowed silently into his head. Ship began to catalogue its wounds; Eamon listened intently as his vessel told him Where It Hurt-Maindrive:red/ KKV:red/ Bodybay:red/ Auxdrive:green/ Xasers:red/ targetcomp:yellow/ navcomp:green- Eamon shut off the litany and requested current position and status. There was another long pause that spoke volumes of the extent of system damage Ship had taken, and then a jumble came back, Ship essentially telling him that it couldn't make sense of the data coming in from the remaining external sensor arrays. Eamon asked for a Damage Control status, and found to his relief that Damage Control was busily engaged in repairing itself in order to begin the larger task of restoring Ship to fighting trim. He probed its priority list, running his mental finger down it, changing the priority of repairs where he disagreed with Ship. Roughly halfway down the list, he came to the weapon systems, and with a shock found that they were blocked out of the repair list. In their fields, Ship had programming directives not to commence repair on those systems until given a countermanding order by an external user. Eamon was about to strike them from the list, when as he watched, another system blinked red in his mind and the X-ray laser targeting array was crossed off the repair list. His heart thumping suddenly, he scanned Shipcomp.

He wasn't alone. There was another user in the system; an unidentified user who was also communicating with Ship. Eamon instantly instructed Ship to lock access to his communications channels out of the database, rendering his link to Ship invisible to others within the system. Ship complied, blinking a solitary red light in encom to let him know that his link was scrambled and locked. That done, some of the readings coming in from the exterior of Ship began to make sense.

They were under tow. Or, more precisely, they were inside another craft; all the exterior cameras Eamon had access to were shrouded with some sort of material, through which he could vaguely see shapes moving about Ship. Auxdrive was flatly refusing to come on-line to his commands; not due to damage, but due to a safety interlock placed in its software to prevent the engines from firing inside wherever they were. He tried once more before realizing what a foolish idea that was, and withdrew most of his links as the other user hunted down the access to Auxdrive and canceled the command. Truly scared now, Eamon hunted in the dark of Ship's offline systems for the interior security scanners, and found the scanners that serviced the corridor he'd been in during the battle. Checking carefully to ensure that no other entity was watching this system, he activated the cameras one at a time.

The corridor was a mess; twisted metal blocked most of his camera views, the result apparently of a KKV strike which had penetrated Ship's nose and travelled a fair distance down its central core before its vaporized matter lost enough kinetics to the surrounding structure to cool to a halt, solidified on the walls of the corridor in fluid decor.

Eamon had been several (read: sixteen, said Ship dispassionately) meters inboard of where the KKV had finally come to rest, but the stress of its passage had bent and twisted the structural frame of Ship for several meters past his position. His flight suit had protected him from the worst of the radiation and heat shock from the impact, stiffening to protect his body, but he had been slammed through a wall and now hung in the wrecked ruins of what was, ironically, a Damage Control dispatch compartment. Much of the twisted wreckage about him was DC droids and stores, which was one of the reasons that Ship hadn't reached him.

Struggling futilely for a moment in sheer panic, Eamon felt once more the tight grip which bound him before regaining control. The Others had him. More precisely, they had Ship, and when they found him, they would- he stopped, thinking very hard. He queried Ship as to the elapsed time since the KKV strike and since being taken in tow. Ship returned: Seventeen point nine one hours; fifteen point three five hours. Fifteen hours plus, then, they'd had Ship- and they hadn't found him yet? Eamon carefully went through the security scan record. There were several hours on each camera of static images displaying their scan areas as they looked after the hit. There was no movement on any of them, save for bursts of static at random from probably damaged cameras. Eamon diagnosed them and came back with green results, but was somewhat loath to trust the answers from Damage Control until it was in a more trustworthy state. The repairs to DC, at least, were proceeding. It estimated four point seven two hours before it would be able to begin vital ship repairs.

Four point seven two hours. In which time, Damage Control would begin faithfully restoring Ship. And at which time, no doubt, its movement would be faithfully watched by the Others, who were undoubtedly the others in the system. Eamon thought for a moment, and then directed Damage Control not to begin Ship repairs until it had restored itself to full, not minimal, capacity. Damage Control thought that over, cheerfully revised its Begin Time Estimate to eleven point six four hours, and continued about its task. Eamon asked it how long it would take before it would be capable of clearing the compartment he was in, and it admitted that it would take ten point six two hours before it reached that capacity. He let it continue about its work.

Ten and a half hours till freedom. He sighed, and told Medbay to queue the instructions it would need to ready itself for him, but not to execute until his order. It acknowledged. At that point, he ran out of ideas, and for lack of any other reason, surveyed the area around his compartment. It was a mess. Forward of the frame he was in, Main was a twisted mess from the KKV hit. It would take DC a good long time to clear that, if it was at all capable. The compartments to each side were damaged as well, and aft of him was a major bulkhead which prevented DC from reaching him by cutting through. It could, of course, but to do so safely would take longer than clearing the debris between its functional droids and him.

Eamon, having satisfied himself that he could neither free himself nor direct his Ship to do so, began to watch. He was dreadfully limited, being unable to Synk with Ship so as to gain direct access to its sensorium, but he had the security cameras, and such scanners outside the hull as still functioned. The data they gave him were shocking. The exterior views, although indistinct from whatever draped Ship, still told him that he was in some sort of bay, large enough to hold Ship's three hundred-odd meter length and still manage to look cavernous. Physical Sensors told Eamon that they were contained within a functioning Charmfield, and as Ship's engines were not generating one, the logical assumption was that they were within a ship which was doing so. That was bad news. This ship, then, even disregarding the rest of its structure, which had to exist, was already larger than the Sentry Corps' best war vessels - of which Ship was one - by at least a factor of two. No one had ever encountered an Other of such size - at least, no one had returned to report such an encounter. Eamon could guess why. The power required to drag such mass into Planck Space - exponentially more than that required to Bend a smaller vessel - was enormous, and any vessel able to generate that sort of power would no doubt have little trouble generating shielding and weaponry able to cope with the maximum levels vessels like Ship could put out.

This had to get back to Well. At the moment, however, it seemed a fairly safe bet that Eamon was going nowhere, least of all back home to report. With a shock, memory of the damage report forced him to once more revise his estimate of his situation for the worse. Bodybay had returned a Red status. Checking for specifics on Damage Control, careful to check that the mysterious intruder was not monitoring, he found that a large portion of Bodybay was in fact missing, the remainder warped in fluid curves and spattered with a rough coating of resolidified osmiridium that spoke of Xaser damage. Even if he managed to free himself from this entrapment, he would be unable to Pilot Ship free; although there were manual systems, he didn't have the time to heal to the point where they would be useful, and besides, utilizing them meant giving up knowledge of his existence and location to the enemy. He wondered why they hadn't come looking for him with cutting torches, and cycled once more through the security scan records.

A curious pattern tickled at his consciousness while he did so, and he finally grinned tightly in the darkness as he figured out what it was. The blank static moments from the cameras were not really random. Viewed in chronological order correlated with a schematic of the security scanners' locations, they provided an unmistakable track of movement throughout Ship. Apparently his captors, unwilling or unable to shut down internal Scan completely, nevertheless managed to locally disrupt Scanner functionality when they wished to examine Ship. None of the disturbances were near his position, although several had lingered at the edge of the mangled area of Ship in which he lay.

There was a radiation reading in his area. His battlesuit, which as far as he could tell was undamaged, was rated to handle the dosage with no trouble, and had a small conformal Shield going to make sure, but there was actually a fairly nasty amount of gamma and alpha decay going on. Eamon couldn't tell if it was a systemic leak, or a result of the KKV strike. For all he knew the KKV had been formed of a transuranic, for density. Apparently, however, his capturers were loath to approach his section and expose themselves. Checking, he found a definite correlation between scanner malfunctions and radioactive areas. As he watched, the main lock scanner dissolved briefly into wavering scan lines and grey static, to restabilize five or six seconds later. He swiveled the camera at main lock's entrance to Main Corridor, and after a pause of several seconds, the entire security system went down.

Eamon swore, and quickly disengaged his encom link. He waited, sweating, in the darkness for fully half an hour before attempting to reestablish his link. Ship answered promptly, under scramble, and informed him that the unauthorized user was attempting to backtrack the security system commands he had been making to their source. Ship had not logged the transactions, however, and Eamon felt relatively secure. There was no comp activity relating to his encom link; in fact, it didn't appear the Others realized that there were links into Shipcomp other than the few hardware interfaces scattered about Ship. Five of the nineteen such interfaces registered as In Use, and eight of the rest indicated that they had been at least tested physically in the past four hours. Eamon probed delicately at the Security system, and found it locked down. He could of course reopen access, but that would definately show up somewhere. Slumping back into his cocoon and trying to ignore the fact that his trapped leg was beginning to ache, he considered his options.

The encom call was therefore a complete shock to him.

It was a standard emergency call, Pilot to Pilot, and he couldn't for the life of him tell which system was piping it into the encom link. It repeated steadily, calling for him in its mechanical fashion- Echo Two Six Three Three Desiderata Seven over and over, a coded request for response, emergency priority. He checked Maincom and Navcom, but both systems were quiescent, drawing just enough power to remain on-line and warmed. He searched through Shipcomp as far as he was able to without attracting attention from what now appeared to be several automated search programs that were sweeping the system looking for him. He found no indication as to where the signal was coming from. Echo Two Six Three Three Desiderata Seven breakbreak Echo Two Six Three Three Desiderata Seven breakbreak Echo... Finally, in desperation, he simply sent the reply over the encom link in clear:

Checkpoint Niner Eight One One Ecliptic Four. There was a pause in the emergency code, instantly. He waited, listening, holding his breath (irrelevantly, he noted seperately.) His head was beginning to hurt again.

Finally his curiosity got the better of his instincts, and he sent the query: Pilot check Pilot check Pilot check breakbreak. (who are you-)

Another moment of silence. The answer was swift and impersonal over the digital channel:

Sentry Four One Red Hunter break SCC-988 Glass Dagger break Pilot Eamon Katsuko breakbreak. The band was quiet. His head pounding once again, he called for help brokenly before the darkness reached up for him and wrapped velvet paws about his cheekbones.

There was a long period of nothing.

When Eamon next was aware, nothing had changed. His limbs ached from their confinement and from bearing his weight against an odd gravity vector. His brain muzzy, he was unable to think of anything except the fact that he was incredibly thirsty for several minutes. Then, after an almost half- hearted attempt to free himself, more for form than results, he opened the encom link once more. There was noise on the band, whispering chatters and hissing static laughter of some transmission on a harmonic frequency to the limited bandwidth of the encom. He spun the unit up and down its tether until he found the frequency-doubled harmonic of the signal, and listened to the hum of information flowing through the hole in the starsong that the elemental hydrogen had carved and held open in the spectrum.

Unable to determine the participants in the exchange, he was nonetheless able to recognize one end of the conversation as one or other of Ship's systems. He was unable to use her true name, now, as the damage to Ship and her lack of response brought home the true nature of her being in an oddly bitter fashion- it was so much easier to imagine a sentient response when there was communication, even if only the rote communication of a machine. Glass Dagger hung captive, and Shipcomp was talking to someone else. It was Shipcomp, he decided eventually; it was exchanging varying data at a great rate, and Shipcomp was the only system which would have that much to speak about. He tried to notify it of his presence on the sideband; after a noticeable pause, it acknowledged his query and scrambled him into a secure link.

Upon asking it what it had been doing, Eamon felt his mouth go - well, drier- as it listed the contents of its recent conversation. He watched the identifiers of protected and secret data - colony locations, patrol schedules, Ship system data - scroll past the screen, mute evidence of their transfer to the unknown caller. When he attempted to ask the machine where it had sent the data, it was able to answer only with an electronic shrug; either the answer had been deliberately removed from its data or it had never known, really. Eamon hunted feverishly through Comp for signs of the other, but was unable to locate any.

He lay back, and thought about priorities. Priority for the moment was getting himself free, or, failing that, getting himself rehydrated and nourished. Checking, he found that he had been unconscious for seven point nine seven hours; Damage Control was busily working on clearing the dispatch points for its manibots so that they might spread throughout the Ship on their errands of repair and restoration. Eamon diverted one, after a moment of worry at his inability to monitor Security, to bring him rations. He waited a nerve-wracking twenty-five minutes, not daring even to check the progress of the 'bot, before it worked its way through the mess and reached him. Its cheerful annunciator beep was perhaps the most welcome sound he felt he'd ever heard when it finally managed to shift a piece of duralloy in the hatch and approached him carrying its burden. He ate and drank one-handed, greedily, after dispatching it back to its duties.

Fed, he turned his attention once more to the encom, and found that there was an Other in the system with him.

It couldn't be anything else; it's electronic signature felt identical to the spectral signature of the hulls he had pursued and fought for so long. He watched it, shrouded in the shadow of his scrambled sidelink, as it hesitantly began to dip into filestructures and subsystems; watched as it began to learn its way around Comp. It dipped slowly and hesitantly into the strata of Ship operational data. Eamon watched as it hit the first layer of security and bounced, surprised. It tentatively explored for a moment, and then in a rush of intrusion slid through the security systems with the ease of a new scalpel though flesh. The security peeled aside and slid away as the Other dove for the depths of Comp, pausing only briefly to examine nodes of interesting data as it found them. Eamon struggled, reflexively, at the violation of Ship, and in anger, almost erupted from concealment to do battle for control of Ship's systems. One lone thought held him back, the observation that the Other wasn't searching in a pattern, rather it was exploring.

The realization was powerful. It didn't know he was there. As far as he knew, no human vessels had been captured by the Others; all that he was aware of that hadn't destroyed its opponent had been destroyed in turn. It was likely, then, that the Others didn't know there was indeed a human pilot on board; they might believe that Ship ran entirely on automatics-

The Battle Computer. A wild rush of hope almost overcame the pain in his trapped limbs, and Eamon had to bite his lip from shouting aloud. Turning his attention from the Other, he broadcast to the link-

Sentry Four One Red Hunter acknowledge breakbreak. There was a few moments of silence, during which he watched the actions of the Other. It continued about its business, apparently either not noticing his transmission or taking it for normal intraship business. The reply was not long in coming.

Sentry Four One lined breakbreak. Eamon started reflexively to hear the name by which he'd become so used identifying himself coming back over the link, even though he had expected it. He checked to make sure there were no flags on his link before sending:

Sentry Four One from SECCOM one one six stand by for briefdump.

Four One Standing by.

Eamon took a breath, and mass transferred all he knew about the situation into a protected file and sent it on its way down the link towards the origin of the other signal. There was no response for a time, then:

Four One Acknowledged. Awaiting Orders.

Four One, you have captive personnel aboard your vessel. Avoid contact with enemy, who have gained systems entry, restore vessel to operational status, rescue trapped personnel in location appended, do not report repair progress. Eamon sent his compartment location and waited for the reply.

Acknowledged. Proceeding.

With that, he let out a gusty breath and lay back in his chaotic prison to await developments.

After taking a short nap, his first real, non-concussed sleep since the beginning of the whole incident, he spent most of his time watching the Other as it explored Shipcomp and Ship's systems one by one. His adrenalin overload point long past, he watched with nearly detached curiosity as the Other methodically checked each Security scanner and droid active, but apparently didn't see him.

The battle computer - if it was the battle computer he was talking to - was at its task, and doing it well; it took all his familiarity with the system to realize that the damage reports the Others kept requesting were false, and getting less and less reflective of reality as the hidden repairs went on. Realizing that for all the Other's skill at breaking security, it was not familiar at all with the operation of Ship, Eamon risked diverting several DC droids to bring him medication, food and drink and once, in a heart-pounding four- minute period, a complete medical scan to send back to Medbay.

Medbay flagged his hidden notice drop a few minutes later, and he called it up to find a diagnosis waiting for him. He had been partially right on awakening. Yes, a few ribs were cracked, and yes, he was concussed, but there was no skull fracture, just a somewhat messy scalp cut in the center of a large bruise. His right arm was fractured just above the elbow, and luckily was prevented from moving by the tangle that held it or the pain would have been much worse. As it was, any movement of the muscles in the area brought fresh waves of magenta and red to swim across his vision and give him glimpses of the blackness that waited below.

Damage Control reported that it would be able to begin working on his compartment in thirty-one minutes. Eamon acknowledged, and called up the battle computer, wondering if he should call it by a proper name, and if so, which? His? Kynderian's? Its own? Shaking off the thought, he listened as it reported itself as a Pilot in full control of his vessel, and aware of the system intrusions going on. The Others, assuming they were still checking, were being told that Ship was still nine hours, roughly, from beginning critical repair activity. The battle computer wanted to know what to do next.

Four One, attention. Situation briefing. Identity given is incorrect, repeat incorrect. Do you understand.

Negative. Four One responds ident as Red Hunter, Eamon Katsuko. Clarify.

Four One, scan Ship structure records for experimental module SG/SA759, Heuristic Engram Computer.

Located. Clarify.

Eamon wondered briefly how the hell you tell an AI that it was, and what artificial meant. He hoped in a lone flash of humor that there was no birth trauma involved. Four One, your identity congruent to SA759 module. Do you understand.

There was another silence, a longer one.

Affirmative. Checked and correlated. SECCOM unreachable on this system. Identify sender.

Damn, it was smart, too. Nothing for it. Eamon was suddenly acutely aware of all his pains and aches and could feel the cables and fiberoptics encircling him as he sent, Sender Identify Eamon Katsuko, Pilot, SCC-988Glass Dagger. Do you understand.

Affirmative. Welcome to the party.

The laugh was drawn from him suddenly, surprisingly; he coughed as it left him and ignored the pain in his arm and ribs. What do I call you?

Is this module seperable from SCC-988?

Affirmative. Only in port, however, with special equipment.

Identify self Kynderian.

Eamon regarded his Ship quietly over the link, feeling the picture complete itself, and listening as his Ship responded, finally, with a voice he'd never pictured but waited for nevertheless, and wished he'd had a brother.

Hi Kynderian. It's good to hear from you.

The batttle computer-Kynderian, he corrected himself, must have understood. Gratitude. Twenty-seven minutes until extraction; where will you be moving after?

Plans hadn't been formed that far in advance. Eamon suddenly wondered what the hell he was going.

<INCOMPLETE>

Yep, it's still going. I like the basic direction. I like the events so far. I'm just sitting here waiting for Eamon to do something else, so I can chronicle it...

-The Custodian