In Pursuit of Bark's Finest (Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera)

[We Just Write]

Avast ye Gravlubbers!​

At the Red Star Union's premier Non-Orientable Wormhole factory in the Stonebeach system a shipment was being prepared for export. The Conjoined Church of Scensia (Transcendence branch) had decided that they would be making a new group of missionary Voidskippers, and since their closest Monastery System still hadn't developed a domestic wormhole industry, they had placed an order to the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative for eight of the crucial power plant components.

As for making those Non-Orientable Wormholes in the first place, that was a difficult and time consuming job. There were two ways to make a Non-Orientable Wormhole, both of them not exactly straightforward. The first option was to run apocalyptically energetic particle colliders in hopes of randomly deforming spacetime in the correct way, using a wormhole pair to attain effectively infinite length for acceleration. This was not preferred due to large amounts of waste products and energy expenditure for each Non-Orientable Wormhole produced, and was therefore seldom used outside attempts to bootstrap a wormhole industry from nothing.

Vastly more common was to make a communications wormhole and ship one end through an already existing Non-Orientable Wormhole, which was vastly more reliable and predictable, though still expensive. After all, even a communications wormhole required creating a pair of artificial black holes, each one made by crushing fifty four million metric tons of mass into a singularity using a modified warp drive. These proton-sized black holes were then brought as close as possible without allowing them to merge and quantum entangled, with the distance at this step determining the length of the wormhole throat. Then the entangled black holes received an injection of exotic matter, converting them into microscopic traversable wormholes suitable for transferring vast amounts of data between their ends.

Even once either of these methods produced a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair, the process of making a useful product from them was just beginning. Such Non-Orientable Wormholes started out outright sub-microscopic, and since the entire reason Non-Orientable Wormholes were useful was their property of converting matter that went in one end to antimatter at the other, that meant they needed to be inflated to macroscopic sizes at immense expense in terms of energy.

Ironically one of the best ways to get that amount of energy was by using a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair to run a set of massive antimatter reactors of the same sort as Voidskippers used, with the only semi-practical alternative being solar energy collection on a scale you didn't often see outside Megasystems. Even then, inflating wormholes was still expensive and slow; the total amounts of exotic matter and mass energy that went into any given Non-Orientable Wormhole pair were generally comparable to a decently sizable asteroid when everything was totaled up.

Still, it was for exactly this reason that the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative kept a significant number of completed Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs in inventory; customers usually preferred their wormholes to be delivered promptly, rather than waiting months for them to go from particle collision to finished product.

As such, when the order from the Church came in, the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative simply selected suitable NOW pairs from their inventory, and scheduled a pair of ships to carry them. The separate ends for each Non-Orientable Wormhole pair were always shipped one at a time, so that if one end got stolen, the authorized holder of the other end could simply aim a high-pressure hose through their end and blast the unfortunate thief with literal tons of antimatter. This is where the pirates' inside men made their first move.

Unbeknownst to the workers of the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, their proprietary custom security brainware had a very obscure exploit that would permit unauthorized insertion of a pared down mindcast into their cortices. One of the hacker teams in the pirates' crew had discovered it, and they'd been wondering how to go about using or selling it for a while now. Eventually, they had decided to steal a few Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs, and had set about covertly subverting a few workers in relevant positions.

As such, once the final wormhole connectivity checks were done, the tracking chips on the Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs due for the Church were tampered with, and the shipping manifests surreptitiously edited. As a result, instead of eight halves of a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair being loaded onto the first ship, four complete pairs were loaded aboard. That task done, the delta forks manipulating the workers acting as their hosts deleted themselves to avoid capture.

The only other part of their task that the pirates needed to complete their setup was sabotaging the freighter. After all, if the freighter arrived at its planned mid-skip fully functional then her captain might choose to fight, risking the precious cargo of Non-Orientable Wormholes, not to mention that it would make the freighter escaping all too plausible an outcome. In addition, any and all comms holes aboard the freighter would need to be sabotaged, to prevent her from calling for help and getting immediate support from the Red Star Union's military.

So the pirates also planted or turned a few conspirators in the dockyards. No fancy mind control gambit this time; instead they simply forged their backgrounds, used some memory suppression brainware whenever they were under scrutiny, found employment, and waited for their opportunity. When that opportunity arrived, the moles in the dockyards grabbed their bags of shaped charges and edited the documentation to say that the freighter Nebula Plow (Registry Code #6cef-1370-3234-32e8-7579-29ca-70a6-580f) was due for an inspection, which the moles of course agreed to perform.

This level of deception was necessary in order to successfully infiltrate a Voidskipper. Such vessels were kept under constant, comprehensive surveillance run by a specially designed mind. If they had been aboard without authorization, the saboteurs would have been detected almost immediately, and the entire plan would have been sunk. Still, the saboteurs did have authorization, and conveniently it was authorization that provided a valid reason for them to access critical components for the ship's safe function.

There were five major power conduits aboard the Nebula Plow that needed to be disabled in order to render the ship properly stricken. Three of these power conduits were used to supply the warp drive with energy, and the other two each supplied power to one of the communications lasers attached to the comm holes that would have allowed those aboard to call for help with precise co-ordinates when their warp drive was disabled. If all five of these were rendered inoperable, then the Nebula Plow would be helpless until these components were repaired.

The falsified inspection went like clockwork, with all ten charges being successfully planted. Within 1.5 kiloseconds the saboteurs were all back at the dockyards and beginning their exit strategy. Then, and only then did the Nebula Plow depart from her berth.

At this point in time, Captain Jurgen was still completely unaware that his ship had been tampered with. He was still rather annoyed at the "surprise inspection" causing a holdup, but he was willing to tolerate it. He passed the time in the Nebula Plow's command lounge, idly stirring a cup of hot Geffanzh with his lower limbs, even as he used his upper pair to do some recreational circuit board soldering.

Still, after a few kiloseconds of waiting, Stonebeach Orbital Control sent a transmission saying "Nebula Plow, your inspection is complete, and you are now free to depart to Palemission."

Captain Jurgen acknowledged this and sent back via his morph's integrated interface "Affirmative. We are now vectoring towards Palemission. Is the timewall clear for egress?"

The Nebula Plow's nose slowly aligned towards the white dwarf known as Palemission, even as Orbital Control replied "We are opening a port in the timewall for your use. Co-ordinates have been sent to your astrogation systems."

Jurgen felt the hum of the ship as her warp drive engaged at sub light power, Skimming through spacetime towards her designated egress port. A few kiloseconds later, the Nebula Plow had passed the tightly spaced swarm of time-dilated comm hole buoys used to defend Stonebeach from unauthorized FTL entry. While the freighter in question wasn't moving FTL during egress, her comm holes could have been broken if she passed through without waiting. They'd still be there of course, but they would have wound up connecting to branch timelines if a closed timelike curve had been produced, and that would have been much less useful.

Either way, the Nebula Plow made it through the timewall without incident. Stonebeach Orbital Control transmitted "Nebula Plow, you are clear for FTL. I repeat, Nebula Plow, you are clear for FTL."

Jurgen smiled as he felt the Nebula Plow start pushing her power plant to Skip Power, the previous low-level hum rising to a low roar as her power plant reached 150 Exawatts of output, storing the immense amounts of energy needed to exceed the speed of light in spacetime itself as the warp drive entered charging mode. From the outside, the massive freighter's radiator fins increased in luminosity to a white hot intensity from their previous dull red glow. To dump even more heat from the 150 Exawatt power plant, massive plumes of waste plasma from the reaction were vented directly into space, shedding light comparable to the heart of a continuous nuclear fireball. A few moments later, just before the skip happened, the captain transmitted back "Affirmative. See you again soon, Stonebeach."

Then the warp drive fired, wrapping Nebula Plow in a field of distorted spacetime that catapulted it forwards through the interstellar medium. In a mere fraction of a microsecond, the Voidskipper moved a light year and a half, massive amounts of interstellar gas accumulating in the Event Horizon formed by her warp bubble. Then that Event Horizon disappeared as the warp drive was briefly fired in reverse to prevent the formation of a black hole, and all that mass was re-emitted as Hawking Radiation in a single instant, a diffuse pulse of energy equivalent to billions of tons of TNT washing off the Nebula Plow's armored hull.

Then the charges went off. Instantly alarms both audible and digital started blaring in Nebula Plow's command lounge, Captain Jurgen spilling his drink everywhere as he jumped out of his seat and called out "What happened!?". Immediately the chief engineer replied over the ship's intranet "Looks like sabotage, captain! The instant our warp field collapsed the power conduits for our warp drive and comm holes all got blasted simultaneously; it looks to have been RDX-based shaped charges with a thermite follow-up. The power conduits have been completely severed and the ends coated in heat-forming material; it'll take at least ten kiloseconds to cut out the wrecked sections and manufacture replacement superconducting cable."

Jurgen barely had time to growl in frustration before a notification of an incoming call appeared on the ship's systems, along with an alert that another Voidskipper had just appeared out of a skip ten thousand kilometers away with both her panel and hull-flush radiators glowing brightly and her weapon turrets extending from below her armor layers. When he accepted the call, Jurgen's suspicions and fears were nigh-instantly proven right.

The video component of the call was showing a figure that could only be a pirate. A tall, imposing robot, with thick, overbuilt limbs and a copious amount of weaponry was standing in what was obviously a combat information center. The robot grinned menacingly using the video screen making up the bottom half of their face, before declaring "Hello. I am Captain Fuller of the… shall we say... free trader Bark's Finest. You have certain high-value items in your cargo hold that we want. Your options are as follows. You can either let us transfer those goods to our own vessel without resistance, or we'll slag your warp drive and power plant before boarding and taking them anyway. You have thirty seconds to decide."

Jurgen waited all of ten seconds before he made his reply, angrily tugging on his long, floppy ears as he replied "Fine. You can have our cargo, you infuriatingly smug pirate. Any chance of some assistance getting back underway in exchange?"

Captain Fuller laughed, before replying "Of course not! We do need to make good on our escape afterwards after all, and every second you lot are busy fixing your ship is another second we can use to put distance between us and you. Now open up that cargo bay door nice and wide. We'll have Skimmers ready to blow your ship if you try anything while we're aboard."

Putting action to those words, kilometer-long doors on the Bark's Finest opened and five smaller ships were released into the vacuum of space, each about a kilometer in length. The Skimmers quickly took up positions around the Nebula Plow, even as Bark's Finest opened her cargo bay and pulled up alongside. Cables quickly secured the cargo bays to each other, and the pirates began to come aboard.

From the command lounge, Jurgen watched powerlessly through the surveillance system as the pirates EVA'd aboard the Nebula Plow. Then he spotted the special, extremely heavy-duty load moving equipment used to shift wormholes, and he blanched. Still, he didn't dare do anything while the pirates were aboard.

All in all, it took the pirates half a kilosecond to get the hole-movers into position. With an immense whine of linear motors running at maximum power, the incredibly massive Non-Orientable Wormholes began moving towards the pirate ship's cargo hold, the specially-built handling pods containing each one not even buckling as well over a billion metric tons of mass were transferred with each end.

Two kiloseconds later the pirates had stolen every single Non-Orientable Wormhole aboard the Nebula Plow, even as the vast majority of her other cargo was also transferred to Bark's Finest. Not everything admittedly; Bark's Finest had a smaller cargo capacity, but the pirates certainly absconded with most of the high-value cargo.

True to their word, as soon as the pirates got what they came for, Bark's Finest disengaged from Nebula Plow, and her Skimmers returned to their hangars. As the pirate ship cleared some distance between her and the hapless freighter and started vectoring to FTL, Captain Fuller took the opportunity to remark "Pleasure doing business with you! We make a point of maintaining good customer satisfaction here on Bark's Finest. On a scale of zero to seven, how would you rate your experience?"

Captain Jurgen's face contorted into a rictus of fury, but he barely had time to send "Cork your antimatter injectors you-!" before Bark's Finest vanished into the distorted spacetime of a superluminal skip.

The instant that the pirates left, Captain Jurgen used the intranet to call engineering and digitally shout "I don't care what you have to do, get one of our comm holes able to send again ASAP!"

The engineering crews worked diligently in the bowels of the Nebula Plow, directing the swarms of maintenance drones to repair the damaged section of power conduit. To their credit, with all efforts focused on repairing only a single area, they managed to reduce the time required to only three kiloseconds. The communications laser went through its boot sequence smoothly and rapidly, and then signaled the Command Lounge that it could now contact the receiver on the other side of the spacetime discontinuity it was attached to.

Immediately, Captain Jurgen sent a distress message to the freighter's home port in the Whirlpool system, not only including Nebula Plow's precise galactic co-ordinates, but also the exact nature of the sabotage she had suffered and the cargo that had been stolen. This message was immediately received in the capitol system of the Red Star Union, prompting several actions.

First and foremost, the message was immediately relayed through the Red Star Union's extremely comprehensive comm hole network between the eight dwarf stars under their jurisdiction to the Stonebeach system. There, under the glare of a red dwarf sun the message was passed on again, both to the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence, and to the RSU Starforce fleet base in-system.

At the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, there were three maximum-priority actions that they needed to take. First and foremost, they needed to notify the customer that the delivery had been hijacked by pirates, and the order would therefore be delayed. This was readily achieved using a standardized form transmitted via comm hole link to Palemission.

A few seconds later, the Conjoined Church of Scensia sent a reply, reading:

"Dear Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative,

We appreciate your honesty in regards to the delays in our ordered Non-Orientable Wormholes. We understand that there are at times factors beyond your control, and wish you well. Please ensure that you investigate the cause of this disruption very thoroughly to make sure that it does not happen again. Our order for the wormhole pairs still stands, and we are willing to wait for them to arrive on their delayed schedule.

Sincerely, Scensia."

It was formal and old-fashioned, as communications went. Still, it served its purpose well enough.

The second maximum-priority task for the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative was activating the anti-theft features on the wormhole pairs they had shipped, so as to kill off the pirates before they could get much further. The wormhole ends in need of a good hosing down were quickly identified. They were then isolated from the rest of the storage facility using the heavy-duty inductive motor trams used for moving such things until they were half a Megameter clear at the Emergency Demolition Facility. Only once the wormhole ends and their containment units were there, their fuel input ports were hooked up to the high-pressure hoses used for anti-theft wormhole pumping, using remote controlled drones.

The pumps activated, and well over a cubic meter per second of water was sent blasting through each wormhole end. The hoses and pumps were well engineered for this rate of flow, taking the water directly to where it was supposed to go. Due to some interesting quirks of distorted spacetime, the streams of water missed each other as they flowed through the throat of the wormhole. Then they exited, now having been inverted to antimatter by their passage through the Non-Orientable Wormholes.

The Emergency Demolition Facility, in short, exploded. Fortunately for the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative it had been designed with this sort of event in mind, and the damage was sufficiently directed and distant that no personnel or actually important infrastructure were harmed. Only now did they realize that the third maximum-priority action was needed: identifying the security holes that had allowed this to happen and closing them to prevent a repeat occurrence.

It took them five kiloseconds of ripping through every single infosystem they had to identify that there was a security exploit in their defensive brainware, then another twenty kiloseconds to find and patch it. During this time frame they also uncovered the tampering with the shipping manifests, as well as every other act of sabotage that the pirates had performed. By the end of thirty kiloseconds from the start of their security review, that particular exploit would never work again.

Happening in parallel with this, the fleet was mobilizing. While the pirates had almost certainly made their escape by now, chasing them down wasn't their only goal; there was a stricken Voidskipper out there, and Nebula Plow would need protecting until she could repair the sabotage that had been done to her. To ensure this came to pass, two Cruisers and an Escort Carrier were deployed to the co-ordinates where Nebula Plow had been waylaid, taking up a defensive formation around the freighter.

As for the rest of the fleet? Of the almost two million military Voidskippers stationed in the vicinity of Stonebeach, around twelve thousand of them were deployed to scour the space within two light years of the system for any trace of the pirates. As expected they didn't find anything, but at the very least they could truthfully claim an attempt was made, and that all the nearby rogue planets not already claimed by the Red Star Union had been checked for signs of pirate bases.

Twenty kiloseconds later, Nebula Plow had traveled to the Whirlpool system for an actual inspection, as the entire ship was now considered to be unsafe until it had been gone over very thoroughly for any further sabotage. On his part, Captain Jurgen was greatly relieved by this state of affairs, as it meant there hopefully wouldn't be any further nasty surprises for him when he came back off leave.

Even aside from the events at the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative and the movements of the Red Star Union's space fleet, the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence had its own high-priority tasks to undertake. First on the agenda was figuring out exactly how the Nebula Plow had been sabotaged in the first place, and capturing the perpetrators for interrogation afterwards.

The first part was incredibly easy to spot in retrospect; the doctored documentation that the saboteurs had used to board the freighter carrying the now-missing wormhole pairs stuck out like a sore thumb once actual serious scrutiny was applied to it. It admittedly was much harder to figure out who'd been eating the chemical precursors for the bombs they used, but investigating the finances of the restaurant scene in the habitats attached to the dockyards provided the answer after some careful analysis.

After all, while practically everyone ate the relevant elements in sufficient quantities, eating enough to make a stockpile of explosives was still a notable irregularity. After all, the biologically integrated 3D printers that everyone had couldn't violate conservation of mass, meaning all that feedstock matter had to come from somewhere. Spotting who had been eating extra meals and in a position to assist in performing the sabotage narrowed down the leads considerably, and refining the criteria brought the matter down to a handful of absolutely guilty suspects.

Now the investigators knew exactly who was to blame for sabotaging the Nebula Plow, and it was only a matter of chasing them down to capture for interrogation before they could escape. Unfortunately, the saboteurs had already used the period of time between disembarking the Nebula Plow and her report of getting waylaid by pirates to escape. To be more specific, they had visited the premises of Far Star Ventures, a struggling Mindcasting travel agency of mixed repute. Indeed, their mixed repute was the exact reason they were struggling.

Once there, they had requested that their mindstates be transferred to a very specific address, and that their sending selves be permanently deleted. To ensure immediate service, they paid far more than the asking rate for Mindcast travel, and given Far Star Ventures' tight financial state they had accepted without a second thought. By the time the investigation team served their search warrant for the premises, the saboteurs had already been safely shuffled through the comms hole network to who knew where for well over two kiloseconds. Far Star Ventures was subsequently placed under far tighter regulation than previous given their unwitting role in the plot, but the damage was already done.

The other major project of the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence was to identify the pirate crew now running around with several additional Non-Orientable Wormholes, collect information on their modus operandi and general disposition, and ultimately track them down. These pirates had already proven themselves a disturbingly cunning and competent threat to pull this sort of heist off in the first place, and now that they had four additional Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs they could plausibly leverage their position into becoming a persistent menace to the Red Star Union's internal and external trade arrangements, especially if they started making their own.

This was considered an intolerable possibility by the entirety of the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence, the Starforce in general, the Economic Ministry, every legislative body that heard of the occurrence, and the general public. Because of course the news media got a hold of the story and blasted it all over the comms net; the heist of Non-Orientable wormholes was the sort of sensational article that journalists and news editors drooled over.

The net effect of this is that a massive intelligence-gathering effort was launched to track down these pirates and crush them before they could leverage their windfall into becoming a serious threat.

And that's how I entered the picture. Madeline Zargosty, Field Intelligence Agent and Analyst, BoSI, at your service.

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
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[NightshadeSystem]

This looks promising (and interesting). The time being given in <metric prefix> seconds makes it slightly harder to understand, although it is ambigiuosly far in the future sci-fi, that kind of thing is par for the course.
Right, what I was trying to say is very nice work.

 

[We Just Write]

The briefing happened in a virtual space for time efficiency reasons. The processing speed of the modern brain was orders of magnitude faster than the data transfer rate of spoken speech, and using physical gestures would be completely impractical. To get around this problem for in-depth conversations, it was fairly typical for the participants to hold them in virtual spaces where communication could keep up with people's thoughts.

In the case of today's particular example, we were in what looked like a hardwood office with windows providing a simulated view from outside the galactic plane. I was standing across the desk from Dispatcher Shen, the cybernetic spider-person reading a data feed even as they replied "Agents Zargosty and Hadrian, we have a mission for you."

I nodded, asking "This is about the pirates who made off with a shipment of Non-Orientable Wormholes, correct?", even as my partner Maximus Hadrian stood silently next to me, scrolling through data feeds like he always did.

A glass of some drink or other appeared on the table, and Dispatcher Shen took a long pull from the drink glass before saying "Yes. Do you have any idea just how much more dangerous excess Non-Orientable Wormholes make a pirate operation? The answer is massively so. Space combat is often decided by who has the biggest fleet of actual warships and the best understanding of maneuver. And while a pirate ship can't stand up to a Battleship or Cruiser due to the compromises inherent in being pirates, that same trend of bigger fleets being exponentially more useful definitely holds true."

All eights of Shen's eyes stared directly into my two and his carapace shifted from blue to gold, as he continued "As it stands, the Bark's Finest pirates are in the position to make the jump from a single ship to a fully armed and operational fleet, possibly of indefinite size if they leverage their new windfall into making their own wormhole industry. If they do so, they will be doing so with pirate ships engineered with the explicit purpose of piracy, rather than the up-gunned civilian craft they are almost certainly currently using. They could go from a minor nuisance to a significant menace to our shipping with such an increase in resources. As such, you are among the roughly two hundred million agents we have assigned to the task of tracking down these pirates and making sure they get thoroughly crushed."

This is when Hadrian asked "Sir, what are the limitations on our rules of engagement?"

The spider glanced over at Hadrian, before replying "The official limits on Rules of Engagement are as follows: Any and all actions with a reasonable chance of advancing mission completion are authorized, aside from antagonizing any factions not already hostile to the Red Star Union. We don't want to blow all our goodwill crushing these pirates only to find ourselves surrounded my newly made enemies."

I nodded, asking "What resources do we have available, and what intelligence do we already have on the Bark's Finest pirates?"

Director Shen chittered in pleased acknowledgement "Ah, always asking the smart questions. First with regards to resources, we can get you whatever personal scale equipment and bodies you want, as well as a significant discretionary budget. Voidskippers will be available for transport if Mindcasting is infeasible for whatever reason, but will not be placed under your command."

Then Shen's mood soured, as he noted "As for the pirates, we have almost nothing on them that the news hasn't reported already, which isn't all that useful. Yes we know the ship's name but without her authcode and transponder frequency there's no way to identify her in a galaxy where quadrillions of Voidskippers ply the interstellar trade routes at a conservative estimate. The same goes for the elusive Captain Fuller; do you have any idea just how common a surname Fuller is out there? And that's assuming it's even their real name, which is the exact opposite of guaranteed. And as for their apparently frightening levels of infiltration expertise, that was already annoyingly obvious from the moment we heard about Nebula Plow being sabotaged."

We nodded in understanding, before I noted "In that case, I know exactly where we'll be going first; the Conjoined Church of Scensia. They're one of the biggest and most coherent hive minds around, so if anyone would know about who these pirates were, it would be her. That said, we'll get the best results if we go to a place where the Church has loads of extra bandwidth, which means one of their Monastery Systems. Ironically, we're headed for Palemission."

There were a few more subjective minutes of chatter, before we ended the briefing and our sensory feeds came back to our biomorph. I swished my tail behind me as I began making our way out of our personal quarters, making sure our Raster Blaster pistol was in its concealed holster and properly safed. As I walked, I heard Hadrian reply from his back seat driver position in our shared brain "Are we going to be traveling via Mindcast, or via ship?"

I immediately replied "Mindcast of course, It's faster and safer if the people on the other end can be trusted, and the Scensciists view preservation of identity as sacred, so they're among the least likely groups to cause problems in that regard." as I walked our shared body down the hallway to the BoSI office's mindcast hub. The hallways were as pretty as ever; whoever had programmed the holographic wallpaper for this rest cycle had done a great job, animated images of stylized meadows gently flowing in a simulated breeze on the walls of the corridor. Apparently it had even been integrated into one of the recreational virtual spaces for off-duty agents, as we could easily pick out what seemed to be a picnic happening in the distance.

As soon as we got to the Mindcast hub, the system admin in charge of it greeted us from the mini-morph she was currently occupying "Ah, agents Zargosty and Hadrian? Where are you planning on going today, and will you be archiving or splitting?"

We both replied over the biomorph's integrated Wi-Fi "Hello, Bud. We're going to Palemission for an overt assignment, no additional identity obfuscation needed. Please include full details on our preferred morph setup in the cast. And we'll be archiving our sending-selves, thanks."

Bud immediately performed the standard RSU salute of clapping once then standing to attention, then said "Well, what are you waiting for? Into the morph recycler with you!"

We nodded in affirmation, then hopped into one of the full-body reclined pods. The utilitarian gray upholstery squashed under us, and idly I noted the presence of the hatch at the bottom where Maximus and I's body would be dumped for reprocessing into feedstock once we were no longer using it. Then the glass cover over the pod closed, turning opaque as the polarized smart filters activated. A few moments later the scanning probe came down and we felt a slight tingle as it interfaced with the integrated access points of the brain both Maximus and I were living in.

There was no gap in our continuity, feeling of transition, or any sensation of slipping away into the void. There wasn't even the pomp and circumstance of a countdown before Casting. One moment we were in the rounded utilitarian recycler pod at the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence, the next we were in a much more ornate pod, wearing a freshly-printed body. It was still the same exact specification of feline combat bioroid we'd been wearing before, though.

I took a brief moment to admire the decoration of the pod before the door opened. The general shape was hexagonal with a comfortably upholstered back, the paneling was gold plated, and there were insets of multi-colored corundum in the shape of dozens of different religious symbols. The front panel (itself an ornate stained-glass masterpiece) began opening after a second or so, allowing the fresh air of the mindcast travel room to enter, even as we climbed out and stood up.

As we exited the recycling and printing pod, a few more details immediately caught our attention about the room. First, it was a veritable garden, with planters full of lush greenery artfully spaced between the rows of mindcast pods. Second, the pod had in fact been set to provide us with clothes matching what we had specified, namely a utilitarian one-piece jumpsuit with dozens of pockets in unobtrusive places. Third, the roof was glass, showing a blue sky characteristic of a decently large habitat. Fourth, there was an overly cheery four-armed priest wearing a purple robe greeting us.

We turned and took a good look at the priest in question. The morph they were wearing was fairly slim, slightly taller than us, had no hair, charcoal black skin, and long pointed ears. They also immediately greeted us "Hello travelers, and welcome to Palemission. What brings you to a monastery system of the Conjoined Church of Scensia? Are you perhaps interested in joining?"

From the back of our brain, Maximus commented "Madeline, I've got the file on this guy. His name is Andie Mont; he's been a priest with the Conjoined Church for about three hundred years now, and has repeatedly passed up promotions to keep performing services to the rank-and-file members, as well as avoiding any serious administrative duties. He has hosted headmates before, but is currently a singlet assuming you don't count Scensia."

I idly remarked back "Remind me what a hive mind needs priests for again? It seems like most of the reasons for having them are things Scensia could take care of herself."

I got the immediate impression of a grin from Maximus as he remarked "You'd think that, but there's all sorts of reasons for a hive mind like Scensia to want priests around. One of the big ones is to make sure all doctrinal shifts are unified across her membership to limit schisms. Another is emotional support when things go wrong. There's more, if you want me to go on."

Mentally, I replied "No thanks, I think I get the point now. Anyway, we do need to answer Andie's question."

In response, Maximus shot me a mental grin as acknowledgement.

Physically, I shook our head as I replied "No Andie, we're not interested in joining the church of Scensia. That said, we are interested in some services that the church is uniquely equipped to provide. I presume that you're aware of the Non-Orientable Wormhole shipment bound for this system that got hijacked?"

Andie chuffed, before he noted "Ah I see you read my name tag then; it's to be expected. And yes, everyone's aware of the shipment being hijacked. Scensia's local aspects were very upset about it.

I nodded in understanding, before saying "Putting it bluntly, we're looking for the pirates that did it on behalf of the Red Star Union's BoSI, and we figured that you might be some of the best people to talk to if we want to track these pirates down. There's hundreds of millions of inhabited systems, and it's almost intractably hard to collate a useful amount of information about even a significant fraction of them. We were hoping that the church would be able to help with this."

Andie startled, before saying "You are requesting that Scensia assist with tracking down the pirates who hijacked our shipment? One moment." He then lead us out of the Mindcasting room and down the hall to an office space. As we walked between rooms, I noted a slight difference in Andie's demeanor as he stood up slightly straighter, and the fidgeting ceased. More dramatically, their skin suddenly turned a bright blue-green color (probably due to chromatophores), and when the body spoke again it was with a distinctly feminine voice.

The last piece of evidence that we were talking to Scensia now was when she greeted us with "Hello, I am Scensia. You wished to speak with me about tracking down the pirate ship Bark's Finest? Sadly my abilities in that regard are fairly limited. I have tracked down several additional reports of that particular pirate ship operating in this general region of space, but my limited reach makes discovering much more than that difficult. For example, I have not been able to determine what systems they are operating out of, nor where they were going, or their motive for taking the Non-Orientable Wormholes. I also haven't been able to determine the true identity of the elusive Captain Fuller."

I was taken aback at this, and found myself trying to figure out what to say. Still, before I could, Max asked "Hey Madeline, can I take front for a bit? I want to ask Scensia about something that's been bugging me."

I mentally shrugged and replied "Sure thing, just give me a moment to switch out."

With that I felt myself receding towards the back of our shared mind, kicking back and relaxing in the mindspace replica of a lounge room we used when we didn't need to use the body. It was a very comfortable place for me, being in the back of a mindscape like this; after all, it's the sort of situation I first came into existence in.

Musings aside, I was still aware of the sensory feeds from the body Maximus and I shared. Therefore I was still very aware as Max crossed our arms together and asked "Scensia, can I ask what you mean by limited reach, exactly? From what we were aware the Conjoined Church has a presence in well over a million star systems, and several full-fledged Megasystems further towards the Old Core. If anyone should be able to pull together enough information to help us with this, it should be you."

Scensia sighed, before saying "None of what you said is wrong exactly, but is very misleading. Even leaving aside the fact that whenever the Church schisms I schism with it, bandwidth limits mean that the I that is here, is not the I comprising the entirety of Scensia. In order to fully unify my local consciousness with the whole of my being, I would need to commandeer every single scrap of data coming in and out of Palemission, and even then it would be a very shaky union. While the pirates are regrettable, there is not much more I can actually do to help without performing such a drastic action."

There was a brief pause, before Maximus asked "Would you have to fully unify? It seems like the sort of thing where you could simply query the larger network and wait for a reply. Simply ask her for information on the matter, then let her do all the hard work before sending you a reply."

Scensia groaned, as she muttered "Not this fallacy again… One of the crucial parts of my network architecture for maintaining cognitive coherence is that direct communications between my immense number of nodes are only in the form of fully integrated thought streams. While this does prevent cognitive drift, it also means that I can't just 'send a query', nor can I just 'receive a report'."

Scensia continued to speak, one of the floor tiles projecting a highly detailed infographic of her network architecture even as she said "I'd have to fully unify with the entirety of my being to properly bring this matter to my attention as more than a tiny tangent at the edge of my awareness, and I am not sure that doing so would be worth the massive disruption to everything else happening in Palemission it would require. If the system had been settled even a few years longer I'd unquestionably have the bandwidth required, but as it stands it would only barely be possible."

I felt Maximus gently nudging me back into the front of our mind, even as he noted "Well, Scensia's made her position on the matter clear. We're past the technical side of things now; it's up to you to actually convince our not-so-omniscient goddess to go through with unifying, otherwise this lead is going nowhere."

I replied "Right, I'll see what I can do in that regard." even as my awareness fully returned to driving the body. The very first angle I tried was "Scensia, if the pirates who stole the Non-Orientable Wormholes are allowed to continue operating, do you actually know just how much damage they might do? How many people they could kill while destroying their black boxes? Especially now that they have four additional Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs."

Immediately, Scensia replied "Yes, I am fully aware of exactly how much damage the Bark's Finest can do using their newly acquired Non-Orientable Wormholes. Best available estimates indicate that even accounting for such, dropping everything to unify with my entire being would still cause more souls to be lost than what the pirates are likely to account for in the longer term."

Not even blinking, I uncrossed our arms and asked "Why? I know about your role in reconstructing the mind-states of your followers, but couldn't it be arranged for everyone to get to a safe spot for a few moments so that there wouldn't be any deaths while you were unified? There's every possibility that the pirates could establish a pirate port system if they're left unmolested, thus establishing a persistent menace to settlement and shipping in the region that will ultimately be responsible for tens of trillions of deaths."

Scensia sighed, before saying "I know that, but I'm worried that if I distract myself from my followers here I will lose someone permanently. Each and every one of my followers has a deeply intimate connection to me, and when one of them dies in a way that they can't be revived it hurts in a way that I find it difficult to recover from. That's really one of the biggest reasons I have such a large priesthood; I need them for emotional support. I'm sorry, but I just don't feel comfortable doing this."

Internally I groaned "Ugh, I hate having to be a manipulative bitch, but I can't see any other way around it right now. Thinking that I'll have to hammer away at that obvious guilt complex to get much of anywhere with Scensia."

Hadrian sent a wordless pulse of reassurance, before I asked "And what if the pirates start raiding the local systems, including Palemission? They've already proven themselves incredibly bold for pirates, given that they just stole some of the most carefully monitored goods around. Attacking populated systems wouldn't be out of character for a crew like that. And they've already proven that they have a disturbing ability to exploit security holes and plan things out ahead of time. Are you sure you want to risk them killing billions of your followers?"

Scensia screwed up her face in an expression of discomfort, but said nothing for a few moments. Then her borrowed body returned to its charcoal-black coloration, and Andie was staring back at us with a look of disapproval on his face. Immediately the priest stormed right up to us and very quietly shouted "I am very upset with you, miss Zargosty, and you too Hadrian, for allowing her to do that. Keeping our goddess in good mental health is a constant challenge, and your little stunt there nearly jeopardized that. I am extremely tempted to have the both of you shoved face-first into the mindcast tanks and sent back to where you came from, but Scensia is currently re-evaluating her decision, and has requested that you be allowed to stay while she finalizes things."

I nodded solemnly, before saying "Understood. While we wait for Scensia to finalize things, what can we actually do around here?"

Andie scowled, before saying "I'd say stay here and wait, but this room is needed for other purposes. So guess what, you get to be our honored guests during today's service! Right this way you two!"

And with that we were practically frog-marched outside the building we had arrived in, and directly towards another, much larger structure. Said building was vaguely teardrop-shaped, with massive stained glass windows and baroque faux-stone architecture. As we got closer, the massive sliding stained glass doors opened, and into the church we went.

I looked up as we entered the Sanctuary room, and the first thing I noticed was the truly enormous pipe organ behind the pulpit. At a glance I could count well over two thousand pipes, and the instrument was fitted with massive corundum decorations in every conceivable color that sent light scattering off it to other points in the room, with one particular pattern of reflected light projecting the four-tailed comet symbol of the Church onto the Cathedral's ceiling. It was beautiful.

The service was only moderately interesting, as it was a mix of a call for calm in trying times and a minor call for action. It would probably have been a lot more engaging if we'd been members of the church, but we weren't. The organ music on the other hand was both beautiful, and VERY loud. I could actually feel our ears having to regenerate damaged hearing capacity in between each song from the sheer volume level that the organ was outputting. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to have learned it could be heard on the complete other side of the habitat with no further amplification, and this was a big habitat.

It was as we were getting up to leave that Andie popped up and said "Miss Zargosty and mister Hadrian? Scensia has made a decision and wishes to speak with you. In private. Please follow me."

Only slightly surprisingly, we were lead towards the back rooms of the cathedral, instead of the exit. We'd barely started moving before Max noted "Ah, we're being lead to the back rooms of the cathedral. Pretty sure that we're heading towards the location marked on the map as the Avatar Audience Room."

Sure enough we soon arrived in a small sitting room, where a youthful-looking feminine biomorph was sitting. As soon, as Max and I entered, she stood up and greeted us "Hello you two! I've had a lot of time to think about what you said, and after a lot of weighing the possibilities I've decided that I need to get over my hangups and just get on with it. Tracking down those pirates is important."

Suddenly, the room warmed up slightly; quickly switching our eyes to infrared revealed that truly absurd amounts of data were flowing through the optical cables in the wall, the tiny amounts of waste causing them to warm significantly. Then Scensia's avatar began to rise into the air unsupported, even as a brightly lit elaborate rainbow tracery started glowing under her skin.

Scensia looked down at us from her standing perch in the air, even as a big friendly smile spread across her face. Then she spoke, a resonant chorus of voices issuing forth from a single body as she said "Greetings to both my priest and the brilliantly entwined souls before me. I have now fully unified my local aspects with the entirety of my being. You are now speaking to the goddess Scensia in my entirety. It is not often that I am fully pulled together across the boundaries set by schisms and denominational breakups, so I will treasure this brief moment of unity. That said, let's get down to business about our mutual pirate problem, shall we?"

In the back of our mind I could hear Hadrian snark in response to Scensia's obvious theatrics "Well, nice to know that our host is good at putting on a show at least!"

"I heard that. I get so few opportunities to fully unify that I like to commemorate the occasion."

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
ebook: Amazon | Smashwords
Paperback: Normal Text | Large Text Edition

 

[We Just Write]

In the back of my mind, I could hear Max freaking out "What, how did you do that!? I know for a fact that I didn't broadcast that thought!"

Andie had crossed all four arms and was looking incredibly smug from his position on a comfortably upholstered chair in the corner, even as Scensia was rolling her eyes. A moment later, she replied in the multi-tone reverberating voice she had started using as of late "Your brain and blackbox implants emit EM noise in operation, and your current morph may have had the electromagnetic isolation cage for it omitted. While rather hard to detect and even harder to decipher, I have the computational resources available to solve that particular series of equations, and this current conversation is rather interesting. If you wish for cognitive privacy, you should probably correct this oversight."

There was a brief pause as I nervously twirled our hair around one finger and Scensia waited for a moment, then said "Enough procrastination. You came here to find out any possible leads on the pirate ship Bark's Finest, and while I don't have everything you might want quite yet, I am making excellent progress on uncovering such. As such, I will go over items as I uncover them, and we can discuss what exactly they mean."

I nodded and replied "That sounds acceptable. So, what have you discovered so far?"

Scensia's avatar nodded, then she noted "First and foremost, this region of space is not the normal area of operations for Bark's Finest. While we have been able to identify several thousand reports of a pirate ship that is almost certainly them operating for the last thirty years or so, their normal operating region is nearly six hundred light years widdershins - corewards from here. While the theft of Non-Orientable Wormholes is new, ambushing ships immediately after they leave FTL between star systems fits with their normal methods of operation."

As Scensia spoke, a prompt for an augmented reality overlay popped up. Max noted "Let me check that over real quick. It's highly unlikely, but it pays to be careful."

A couple internal moments passed as my headmate picked over the prompt, before he pronounced "Yeah, it's safe. Open it up."

I accepted the invite, and suddenly the room was overlaid by a scale representation of the galactic disk that came up to our waist, leaving it almost looking like we were wading through a pool filled with stars. Idly I noted that the overlay included a projected avatar for Max, standing a bit to my right.

Scensia nodded, noting "I am very glad that you accepted the invitation, as it will make the following explanations much easier. Anyway, as mentioned the normal operating area for Bark's Finest is roughly here, compared to the locations of both Palemission and the Red Star Union." as she highlighted a region of space approximately thirty light years across, while also marking our current location in relation to it.

Looking at that, I quickly ran through all the possible reasons that a ship like Barks' Finest could have opted to relocate six hundred light years. After thinking on it, I noted "Well, that's quite a long distance for a pirate ship to travel. The only real reasons I can think of for them to travel that far are to dodge heat. Either because their old stomping grounds were becoming inhospitable, or because they knew everyone would be gunning for them after stealing a bunch of Non-Orientable Wormholes and didn't want to get kicked out of whatever pirate haven was supporting them. After all, without a port willing to look the other way when frequented by pirates, they tend to get stomped all over really fast."

Scensia hummed in agreement, before she noted "Your assessment is largely correct, if they didn't have tacit support from some system or other, Bark's Finest would not have been able to operate for such a long time. Anyway, while their typical region of operation contains around 70 star systems, there are only four that I would consider as being reasonably likely to be pirate havens."

With that, the four systems in question were highlighted on the map, with infographics pointing to each system in question, listing details about demographics, economics, culture, whether their trade fleets tended to be preyed on by pirates, and a multitude of other factors. Almost immediately, I was able to rule out one of the systems, noting "Not this one, Scensia. I've studied what sorts of systems tend to host pirates, and this particular system doesn't fit the bill. Looking at the historical records, while that place is definitely a belligerent autocracy, they're not the sort of system that would subcontract all their dirty work out to pirates. No, they'd be handling everything in-house."

Scensia nodded hesitantly. The system I'd pointed out as not being a pirate port was immediately de-highlighted, even as the artificial goddess replied "You have a point there. I will admit to intelligence analysis like this being a bit outside my normal duties; while I can correlate truly vast amounts of information, there are still a few areas I'm just not as good as a proper specialist at. Are any of the remaining three able to be ruled out, or are they all pirate ports?"

Max and I pored over the data for a few moments, taking note every relevant detail about the systems in question. After several moments of inspection, we were absolutely certain of two things. First, all three remaining star systems definitely played host to pirates as a significant portion of their economic and defensive policy. They showed all the signs of being pirate ports; a suspiciously high degree of "imports" entering the system that couldn't be accounted for any other way, a culture of not asking uncomfortable questions of travelers, and much more extensive ship servicing industries than a system at their level of industrial development would normally have. And that was just the tip of the metaphorical Jolly Roger-waving iceberg.

The other thing we were absolutely certain of was that wringing any useful information out of those systems was going to be an absolute nightmare; each was home to hundreds of billions of people, meaning that to get anywhere we'd need to deploy entire regiments of intelligence-gathering personnel. However, hiding that we were doing that would be an immensely difficult task, and with how closed off such places were about people asking awkward questions, there was every chance that they'd close ranks to lock us out of everything they could possibly could.

Max was the one to mention our evaluation of the situation to Scensia, then noted "It would be very convenient if we could narrow down which of these three systems Bark's Finest called in at most often. That system would be far more likely to have useful amounts of information if we were to investigate, and if we only need to investigate a single one we can focus our efforts much more effectively."

Scensia made a show of inspecting the infographics for each of the highlighted systems for a few moments, before she replied "I can probably determine that for you, though it will take a few moments of analysis and some light cyberwarfare to discover the information you are seeking. Please wait."

And so wait we did. A couple minutes later, Scensia spoke again "I have determined that Bark's Finest was most likely based out of the system named Bouccan; while the records were fragmented and very difficult to access, there are the most reports of them frequenting that system between raids. While there they claimed that their ship was the freighter Bertram's Folly, using the authcode 381e-ea24-85d7-9d77-4fdf-2765-769a-1bfc."

Max and I both nodded in recognition. A bit afterwards, Max asked "Could you please give us the exact co-ordinates and the report as a file? There's almost certainly multiple systems named Bouccan, and getting them mixed up would be a major inconvenience."

Scensia smiled and replied "Certainly. Is there anything else that is needed?" even as a data packet was transmitted to our brain for storage.

I shook our head and noted "No we've got the information we came for, Scensia. Thank you."

The goddess sighed contentedly before noting "In that case, I suppose I must decohere." even as the augmented reality overlay vanished and Scensia stopped floating.

I performed the standard RSU salute, before saying "We can find our way back to the mindcast place from here."

Scensia's avatar shrugged, noting "I don't do too much with this body anyway, so I might as well follow you at least that far. Come, walk with me."

I gladly did so, my tail swishing behind us as we walked, and my catlike ears perked up with excitement. We soon passed back into the sanctuary of the church, now empty of worshipers as the service was long since over. As we walked, Max noted "I wonder if Scensia can still do that mind reading trick now that she's not fully integrated?"

Immediately, Scensia remarked "No, Maximus Hadrian. I cannot in fact still do the mind reading trick. I especially can't do it in this body, specifically designed for instilling awe in the faithful." in an extremely sarcastic tone of voice, a completely deadpan expression on her face as she did so.

I couldn't help it, I laughed loud and hard, and didn't quite finish laughing until we got back to the Mindcast room. As we climbed into the recycler pod, Scensia said "While your mortal coil shall remain here, I know that your souls shall safely reach their destination."

And with that, the Mindcast pod closed, the scanning probe descended, and just like that we were back in the round utilitarian pod at the BoSI office. Bud greeted us before the scanning probe had even fully retracted "Hello Madeline and Max! How did your trip to Palemission go? Also, what do you want to have done with your archived selves from when you departed?"

I immediately smiled and replied "Nice to see you, Bud! Our trip went very well indeed. Anyway, please overwrite our previous selves with up to date backups."

Bud did the standard clapping stand-to-attention salute as she replied "Done!" then the scanning probe retracted, and the pod's door opened. I climbed out of the pod, and even as the body walked through the hallways I was already ringing up a virtual reality meeting with Shen. He accepted almost immediately, before greeting us "Agents Zargosty and Hadrian, welcome back. Please transfer your experience recordings of the visit to Palemission, as well as any pertinent intelligence."

Max immediately nodded and replied "Affirmative." as he transferred the files. Even with the massive acceleration of this sort of virtual conversation, it was still much faster and less error prone to directly transfer information like this instead of manually explaining it.

Shen took a few moments to mull over what we'd sent him, before noting "Ah, the Bouccan system. We probably can in fact investigate that system. However, it's considerably farther out than our effective force projection range. We won't be able to subjugate the system to pick through everything even temporarily. Even if we did such a thing, the mere attempt would simply result in the people there hiding everything until we left. It's going to have to be a covert investigation."

I nodded, saying "We'd figured as much; pirate ports tend to be incredibly closed off affairs. Probably one of the only ways we'll be able to investigate the port without raising too much suspicion is by pretending to be pirates ourselves."

Shen's virtual mandibles clicked together in a distinctly smug expression, the spider rubbing four of his limbs together with glee as he noted "That can be arranged. Our liaisons with the Starforce can get us access to an Irregular without too much waiting. Load it up with spies and falsified plunder, give everyone suitably piratical cover identities, forge some transponder codes, blast a few superficial craters in the hull, and soon enough we'll have a seemingly bona fide pirate ship ready to visit the Bouccan system."

Max hummed in agreement, noting "Travel via Voidskipper is probably the better option for this anyway; I wouldn't trust Mindcast travel to or from a pirate port under any circumstances. In addition, the travel time for a ship means we'll have plenty of time for everyone to assimilate into their cover identities."

Shen's carapace shifted colors to a brilliant emerald green "Indeed. Report to the Mindcasting bay to be archived; we'll get you properly sleeved aboard our impromptu pirate ship in very short order."

I couldn't help but resist the urge to roll our body's physical eyes, even as I commanded the autonav brainware to bring us right back to the Mindcasting room. As we arrived, bud asked "Back so soon? Didn't I just see you two?"

I just shrugged and noted "We're supposed to be archived, apparently. Shen wants to put us on his latest project, and apparently it'll be easier if both Max and I are inert data while things are getting set up."

Bud just shrugged, and said "Well then, you two know the drill. Into the morph recycler."

We did so without complaint. The upholstery compressed as we clambered in, the glass door slid shut before blacking out, and the scanning probe descended. The next thing we knew, the glass was opening to reveal another mindcast receiving room, this time with a distinctly piratical decor. The Jolly Roger over the exit to the room was a nice touch, especially with the loop of an exploding Voidskipper it played.

As we climbed out of the pod, Max noted "I've got the details on our cover identity and current morph. We are going to be impersonating a singlet for this mission by the name of Ress Yottan, age 51 and relatively new to piracy. Likes include intoxicants, explosions, and tinkering with machinery. Dislikes include bland food. Strong predilection against expletive usage. As for our morph, we've got an isolation cage for all our processors, as well as some combat optimizations our normal hardware isn't equipped with. Anyway, I've got Ress' personality overlay ready if you want to try being her before we get to Bouccan."

I sent back a mental shrug to Max as I answered "I can't think of a single reason for us not to try on our cover identity ahead of time. In fact, I think getting some practice using her would be an excellent idea. That said I really hope they used a cognitive weighting filter for this, rather than a constrained headmate system; I can deal with being someone else, I can't deal with sharing headspace with an obedient slave."

Max sent back a brief pulse of approval before he activated the personality overlay. Then suddenly I was Ress Yottan, and I realized that I was missing my turn to pick out my share of the plunder. Quickly I started scurrying for the Loan Shark's hold.

Fortunately I was still also Madeline Zargosty; whoever did the work on this personality overlay had done a truly amazing job. Max and I were still able to think as ourselves, but our thought stream was hidden inside the cognitive mask that was Ress; we were still the only actual people in this brain, yet every last bit of output was getting filtered through Ress' simulated worldview and personality.

So while I-As-Ress made my way to the cargo hold, I-as-Madeline was reviewing the mission briefing. The flight plan for Loan Shark called for us to use one of the major spokes on the Lane network to travel almost a hundred light years perpendicular to our destination before taking the most efficient route to Bouccan. This was estimated to take about 150 skips, including the five planned Lane skips; the interstellar medium was a bit denser than average between the Red Star Union and Bouccan, and that meant shorter skips in general. This meant that Loan Shark would be making 145 full-shock skips; given that it took her about 4 kiloseconds to cool her hull down between skips, that meant the total trip time would be roughly half a Megasecond.

I-as-Ress of course also knew this, though not about the espionage parts of the mission. So I knew there was plenty of time to lounge around the ship while we waited. On the other hand, I really didn't want to miss out on my share of the plunder from that shipment we'd just hijacked; there were cubic kilometers of luxury goods in that haul, and I'd never live it down if I missed out on my pick of the plunder.

As for actually getting to the cargo hold, it was quite fortunate that the Loan Shark had a comprehensive internal transport network. As such, it only took a few minutes to get to the cargo hold. By happenstance I wound up sharing the tram with a few of my crewmates, and struck up a conversation, asking "So, what are you looking forwards to in terms of loot? I heard there were loads of fancy designer brand small arms aboard, and I want some."

One of my buddies (currently wearing a cephalopod-shaped synthmorph) remarked "Yes, that certainly sounds quite enticing, but it's not the highest priority for me. Personally, I'm more interested in looking for artistic knicknacks that take my fancy; things like handcrafted mechanical chronometers, or similar widgets."

We didn't get to talk for too much longer, before the tram arrived at the cargo hold, and I-as-Ress squealed with glee at the sight of rows upon rows upon stacks of cargo pods. I-as-Madeline was also excited, but mostly because things were going so well, and I'd get to try out the new body's mobility. Max sent another brief pulse of approval, and I-as-Ress dashed off through the cargo pods, gleefully climbing all over them and kicking around as I looked for a cargo pod holding what I was looking for.

I hadn't truly enjoyed kicking myself around in micro-gravity in way too long, and I was having an absolute blast with it, flipping through the cargo bay in acrobatic spirals as I went deeper and deeper into the stacks of our haul. After a little bit, I grabbed onto a pod and remarked aloud to no-one in particular "Let's see what's in this one, shall we?"

I quickly pried the lock open with the tools I'd been printed with, and the cargo pod's door opened to reveal pallets of sealed drink bottles. I took a closer look to identify what was in them, and within a few moments, I realized exactly what it was. Genuine aged Alpha Cola? Sweet, literally! I quickly swiped a few bottles of the Electric Tang and Fireball Punch flavors that I put in my carry bag, popping open the top on a bottle of the Fireball Punch and sticking in the included straw before taking a swig.

The bubbles of Helium in the drink rolled off my tongue with a pleasant tingling sensation, even as the pellet of radioactive Curium in the bottle that had provided those bubbles rattled around in the drink with a faint clacking noise. Delicious drinks aside, there were other things I wanted to find, like those designer brand weapons I'd heard so much about.

So I clambered out of the cargo pod, shouting "Hey, I found a bunch of aged Alpha Cola here! I'm claiming it all as part of my share!" before I continued on through the stacks, using my tail for anchorage while I kept sucking away at my soda. Soon the drink was done, and I stashed the empty bottle in my bag before doing anything else; the Quartermaster would be furious with me if I littered in the cargo bay, and I had better things to do than get yelled at.

Case in point I opened this cargo pod, finding a whole lot of snazzy dresses. Checking the label revealed they were all designed by Oxide Fashions, and they were pretty darn expensive. I marked them down on the "To Fence" list before moving on; not that I didn't like them, but there were plenty of other options for clothing that I liked more.

I happened upon three more cargo pods full of disappointments before I found what I was looking for: the weapons. I-as-Ress felt immense glee as I looked inside the various packages to discover beautifully designed personal-scale weaponry, and even I-as-Madeline felt happy at seeing all this equipment. Quickly I started digging through the cargo pod to decide what I wanted, only to find that I was absolutely spoiled for choice.

There were chem guns, mag guns, lasers, even a few edged weapons in this pod, all of which were available in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and aesthetic styles. They didn't even seem to have anything in common until I realized that every last one of them was from the Punkverse Personal Armaments group. Ah, just sorted by manufacturer then.

After some thinking, I grabbed a pair of mag pistols and a raster carbine, all in their "tubepunk" catalog section. I familiarized myself with the carbine first; it had a matte nickel finish forwards of the pistol grip, aside from the carbon black top part placed to act as a radiator. There were synthwood handholds both at the pistol grip and on the underside of the beam generator, and the two and a half centimeter optical aperture was beautifully clear.

It had a receiver for power cells just in front of the pistol grip, of which it came with five in the shape of box magazines, as well as a charger with slots for four cells. One cell was marked with an ionizing radiation symbol, and judging by the fact that particular cell was ever so slightly warmer than the rest, it probably had a radioisotope unit in it for recharging while not in use.

The last notable feature was the informational readout of the weapon, with two rows of nixie tubes; the top was just a single row of four neon red tubes, and displayed the energy content of the current cell in sixteens of kilojoules. The bottom had three krypton blue tubes to display the current temperature of the weapon in Kelvin, as well as a separate green tube showing a simple graphic of the current firing mode.

In a word, it was beautiful, and now it was mine.

As for the matched pair of mag pistols, they were styled similarly, with beautifully ergonomic synthwood grips below a matte nickel finish for the parts that weren't carbon black to radiate waste heat. Even there the weapons were beautifully designed, with shallow grooves etched into the curved top as if to accentuate the presence of the acceleration coils inside the weapon. The information displays were very similar to the one on the raster carbine, with a temperature readout, an ammunition counter, and a firing mode indicator; however, the three-tube temperature display was on its own row, while the two-tube ammunition counter was above, adjacent to the firing mode indicator.

Speaking of ammunition, these mag pistols were chambered for 6.5 x 30 millimeter fin stabilized projectiles, operating on the Integrated Energy Cartridge model; this meant each bullet contained its own energy cell to provide the power accelerating it out of the gun, with the gun's coils actually being passive elements. Each magazine held 32 bullets in a double-stack configuration, slotting into the receiver in the handhold with a satisfying click. Between the two pistols, I had a total of eight pistol magazines that held 256 rounds of ammunition, and an additional thousand rounds or so in cans for later.

Looking over my new loadout, I-as-Ress couldn't help but smile at the new heat I was packing; not only would it let me fight as well as I could possibly ask for, but it would let me look incredibly fashionable while doing so. I-as-Madeline was satisfied too.

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
ebook: Amazon | Smashwords
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[We Just Write]

Exactly on schedule, Loan Shark arrived at the Bouccan system. We-as-pirates were all extremely excited for a chance to spend our ill-gotten gains and live a life of luxury beyond what our ship's quarters and virtualities could provide. Yes the ship had twenty entire cubic kilometers of space devoted to our accommodations – not counting transport corridors and such – but that still only amounted to twenty cubic meters of space per crew member given there were ten million of us aboard.

We-as-agents were also excited about reaching Bouccan, though for very different reasons. This was the single biggest lead about the whereabouts and modus operandi of Bark's Finest that we were likely to find for a while, and we wanted to make sure we acquired every single scrap of information that could possibly be useful.

Musings aside, I was currently enjoying some wind-down snuggles with Grom, that person wearing the squid-like synthmorph; turns out that they were very skilled at using those tentacles in more intimate contexts. As we felt the slight jerk under us from the last skip Loan Shark would be undertaking, an announcement came over her intranet. "Attention crew! We have arrived at Bouccan, and are currently negotiating passage through the timewall. Prepare to disembark."

I met Grom's gaze, noting "It's been fun, but I guess we have to get ready to go. Mind untangling me?"

Grom simply replied "Sure, Ress." as they withdrew their tentacles. Sitting up, I-as-Madeline couldn't help but feel good; while the names we were using were fake, I'd talked to Grom-as-Agent, and our unexpected romance was entirely genuine. Plus there weren't even any conflicts of rank or interest that could trip the fraternization rules.

Still, I needed to get ready for our time on the town, and that meant getting dressed and armed. So I hauled myself out of Grom's hammock, and made my way past the racks of handcrafted timepieces decorating the room to reach the corridor. I grabbed a passing handle on the tram cable, and after a few minutes of travel I had reached my personal quarters.

I entered to find my stash of nicely chilled Alpha Cola, a wardrobe with a few of those Oxide Fashions dresses that I'd decided I wanted to keep after all, my beautiful tubepunk raster carbine and mag pistols, and a bunch of other items that I'd decided were awesome enough to claim as part of my share.

After thinking for a few moments, I chose a half-length sleeveless blue dress with emerald tracery; as I pulled it on, the fabric contracted to fit my figure, and the second pair of arm holes sealed seamlessly like they were never there. Looking in the baroquely-framed mirror I'd found somewhere in the haul, I was very happy with my appearance. Now I just needed to figure out a good way to holster my arsenal without ruining the aesthetic.

Then I found the pockets, and everything got much easier. All the energy cells easily fit in the front two pockets, while the mag pistols and their ammo almost perfectly matched the available space in the side pockets. Plus, since the pockets were anchored to my thighs instead of the skirt and their openings seamlessly closed when not being accessed, they were effectively imperceptible from the outside.

I opted not to conceal the raster carbine; not only was it big enough to render that rather impractical, but I wanted to be visibly armed. I-as-Ress was a pirate after all, and it would pay to emphasize that point by not hiding the fact that I was carrying a really quite deadly weapon. Also when properly slung the tubepunk weapon really accentuated my look.

For the rest of my loadout, I grabbed a gemstone-studded courier bag that complemented my dress. Inside I put a twelve pack of Alpha Cola, the charger for my Raster Carbine, a comms booster tablet with an integrated volumetric image projector, a couple spare dresses (neatly folded) and a few assorted grenades.

My preparations complete, I swished my tail with happiness even as I started making my way to the docking bay. This was going to be great!

It took a few kiloseconds for Loan Shark to get approval to pass the system's timewall, then Skim the remaining distance to enter orbit of Tortuga, the system's largest gas giant. Once we arrived, a service armature docked to Loan Shark to provide refueling and hull repair, while we all piled into the surface-to-orbit shuttles for the flight to Tide, the second major moon of Tortuga, and the most heavily populated body in the system.

I was sitting right next to Grom for the entire flight. Still, just before we arrived, Max had a message for I-as-Madeline. "Unless you need me, I'm going dormant for the duration of this infiltration; pirates generally don't let headmates stay because of the way shares are divided up, so if I'm discovered it will immediately arouse suspicion."

I-as-Madeline replied "Understood. Talk to you later."

Then the airlock indicator turned blue, and the shuttle said over his sound system "Attention passengers, we have now landed at High Tide Spaceport. The cabin will be evacuated for disembarking via staircase, please retrieve all luggage from the overhead and under-seat compartments."

I hummed to myself while I retrieved my bag, even as the air pressure in the cabin was reduced to zero. The flawlessly clear nictating membranes over my eyes reflexively activated to prevent my tears from boiling away, as did the sphincter in my airway. According to my biofeedback I had about thirty kiloseconds worth of molecular Oxygen held in reserve before I'd need to switch to my anaerobic metabolism, but that was plenty, since I didn't expect to be in vacuum for more than a few minutes.

I remarked over my internal transceiver "Hey Grom. Nice to be portside, yes?"

In response, Grom replied over radio "Yes, yes it is. Want to stick together this trip, Ress?"

I nodded appreciatively, even as we walked down the staircase to the pavement of the spaceport. The terminal ahead of us was a low, flat building with hundreds of landing pads for shuttles, and just as many airlocks. Grom and I shuffled into one of these airlocks, and with a distinct foomph the lock pressurized. Then the inner door opened, and our group was inside.

The terminal was much more decorated inside, featuring volumeteric projectors displaying advertisements for all sorts of hardcore recreation establishments in a riot of colors, as well as a few "Spacefarer's Clubs" and a bunch of other places. I mentioned to Grom "Personally, I'm thinking that I'll want to hit a few bars, maybe a brothel or a casino. Then we chat some people up at the spacefarer's clubs."

Grom rubbed a tentacle under his face as he noted "Personally, I think that the Roger's Ashes would be the best club to visit. Shall we stay together, or should we simply meet up there?"

I gently stroked Grom on the side of his hull, even as I reminded him "We're sticking together, like we planned."

And so we made our way through the spaceport terminal, passing the shops reselling what was doubtless mostly plunder from other pirate ships, as well as several spaceport food courts. As we walked, I-as-Madeline couldn't help but notice something a bit odd: While I'd seen plenty of places offering resleeving services, there didn't seem to be any Mindcast travel firms around. After a bit of thinking, I-as-Madeline determined that the most likely reason was due to the community wanting to make it harder for those interested in investigating.

Eventually after a few minutes, Grom and I reached the train station for transit between the spaceport and the populated regions of Tide. We all piled in, with me receiving compliments about my dress, raster carbine, and hairstyle from various strangers we wound up happening to share a train car with. I allowed myself to blush slightly from the flattery, even as my ears pivoted into a low, horizontal position. This prompted a burst of chuckles all around, even as I repeatedly thanked those people who complimented me.

Anyway, as we traveled I made a point of downloading a map of the city we were headed to. Not directly into my brain of course; I didn't trust the local networks since I wasn't an idiot. No, I downloaded the map into my tablet, then disconnected said tablet from the network. Only after picking over that map with every single security tool available to me did I directly synch with my tablet and internalize the map, while also passing a similarly sanitized copy to Grom.

Admittedly this was a bit less convenient than directly downloading the map, but it was also a lot safer. As an added bonus, the locals in the train car with me had seen the precautions I took, and their expressions (for the people who bothered with expressive faces at least) were displaying a newfound level of respect. I had, after all, proven that I had more assets than just good looks and a fancy gun.

When we got off the train, both Grom and I knew our way around the city like we'd been exploring the place for decades. As such, we knew exactly where we were going first: the Blue Jovian Bar and Grill.

As such, Grom and I immediately made our way to the nearest Pod Lift station, which was very convenient, since the train station had one built into it. As we approached the platform, I called out "We're headed for North Circle's third level station! Is anyone else coming with us?" as we both climbed into the cylindrical pod's flat side and took our seats.

No-one else got in, and soon enough our pod was rotated out of the station. There was a clunk as the grippers changed from the station cable to the acceleration cable followed by a feeling of acceleration, then the pod shifted cables to the main line. I couldn't help but admire the view as our pod traveled through the more scenic parts of the cableways, changing between vertical and horizontal lines as necessary. While I'd been in plenty of arcologies before, there was still something special about riding a cableway.

A few minutes later, we arrived at the station we'd selected. From there it was just a short walk to the Blue Jovian, and when we entered we were immediately treated to a raucous scene of music, intoxicants, and a bunch of volumetric display games that the crowds were cheering on the players of. After a few moments, I decided to wander over to the bar, where a bunch of drones were currently mixing up drinks.

Quickly I checked my balance with the local currency, discovering that we had quite a lot to spend indeed. Apparently the Quartermaster had already been quite busy arranging buyers for our haul, and that meant I had absolutely no qualms about ordering "The most expensive hard drink you have that's actually good!"

Immediately the drones blinked in recognition, and started swirling around the drink mixing area, brewing up a tall glass of something I sincerely hoped would be severely intoxicating. Off to my right, I heard a faint hum, and turned to see a person wearing a dark-skinned morph that blended features of a male baseline and some variety of extremely colorful bird, given the slight beak shape of his mouth and the brilliant feathered plumage he sported.

I asked "Curiously, what was the hum for?"

The man chuckled and asked "Just come in off a voyage, I take it? The regulars know what they like around these parts, rather than just asking for the most expensive thing worth drinking."

To this I gestured towards Grom as I replied "Yes! Grom and I actually just got in a few kiloseconds ago. I'm Ress by the way."

The man grinned, before saying "Gator Andrews. Nice to meet you, Ress. By the way, you really know what you're doing when it comes to your appearance; the dress really accentuates your morph, and the gun contrasts nicely."

I smiled slightly, thanking Gator for the compliment even as my drink was served, and the drones notified me "This is a genuine Cassiopeiaen Swirl, made with well-aged ingredients. Please do enjoy."

I did so, bringing the glass up to my lips and taking a swig. It was wonderful, with a rich savory flavor and a distinctive kick of something spicy in the background. As I drank, I got alerts from my biofeedback that I was having to rely more and more on my anaerobic metabolism due to cyanide ingestion, but I wasn't too worried; everyone knew that to get well and drunk took some serious molecular havoc for any proper biomorph.

Events around me seemed to speed up due to needing to rely more on my slower metabolism, but that was fine; I was also getting a nice fuzzy feeling around the edges of my thoughts. And so I only slurred slightly when I stood up and told Gator "Hey, if you wanna go do a dance off in the projector stage, let's freaking do it!"

Gator took one look at me, before noting "You know what, not like this. I'd have an unfair advantage with you being intoxicated and me not. Bartenders, bring me two shots of Deep Freeze!"

Immediately the drones replied "Yes sir, Mr. Andrews!" and quickly poured out a pair of shot glasses, the low gravity of Tide meaning it took longer than I was used to for the liquor to go from bottle to glass.

Still, Mr. Andrews slammed the shots back with admirable speed, and we both made our way to the projector stage. I idly shoved someone much drunker than me out of the way, only half-noticing the red-headed biomorph-wearer grumbling furiously as they stumbled off to elsewhere.

What followed was several minutes of embarrassing clumsy dancing as the two of us drunkenly competed at a whole-body rhythm game. After a couple kiloseconds of the crowd laughing at our poor performance, and me barely managing a win in a majority of songs, we both stumbled off the projection stage, laughing all the way back to the bar.

I ordered a couple more drinks, exploring different parts of the menu before I staggered my way to a booth, thoroughly sloshed as I went. When I got there I was greeted by Grom, who seemed to be mildly intoxicated himself, remarking "That dance battle you did was funny, Ress, you've got to show me that again sometime."

I was puzzling about how to reply when one of the establishment's drones hovered over and asked "Can I take your orders, please?"

All that could come to mind for me was "Barbecue, with crunchy stuff."

The drone apparently took a few moments to figure out a suitable dish, before turning to Grom and asking "Your order, sir?"

Grom almost immediately replied "A recharger and self-repair feedstock."

If anything, the waiter drone seemed almost insulted by the simplicity of this order, and I couldn't help but imagine it grumbling as it hovered away about how this was a high-class establishment and if he wanted stuff that simple he should have just gone to a maintenance supplies shop.

After a few moments of this, Grom asked "Ress, what are you laughing about?"

I replied "Nothing, nothing, just a funny thought I had!"

Grom begrudgingly accepted this, and we sat there in silence for the kilosecond it took to prepare our meals. My meal was a plate with a square cut of meat with ribs – doubtless printed in sterile conditions to avoid infecting any of the customers with feral nanoweapons – alongside fried chips made from some local vegetable I didn't recognize.

As for Grom's plate, he got a Toroidal Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage unit in the middle of a bunch of artfully arranged sticks of polymers, metal granules, and other synthmorph repair feedstocks, with more in the bowl-shaped depression formed by the recharger's toroidal shape. Apparently the chef had rebelled against the sheer drab-ness of Grom's request with artful presentation.

Either way, we each dug into our respective meals; the first thing I checked on my ribs was if I could cut through the bones with my table knife, to which the answer turned out to be yes; apparently they had omitted the carbon nanotubes that would be found in an actual skeletal system. The first bite was absolutely delightful, sending a riot of taste sensations across my tongue and palette that I was hooked on right at the start.

As for Grom, I caught a glimpse of him connecting the adapter cable between the charger unit he'd been served and the charging port of his morph, with only a few moments of fiddling to get things in operation. He also opened up the port to his feedstock grinder, and was dropping sticks of it in one at a time.

Still, the meal did eventually end, the serving drones hauling away our dishes and the bill being subtracted from our balance. I was already starting to sober up by the time we were leaving the establishment as my system had time to purge the cyanide I'd ingested and get my aerobic metabolism back up and running.

As we left, Grom asked "So, do you want to go to the Roger's Ashes club now, or is there anything else that you want to do first?" even as he gently supported my still slightly unsteady gait with a few tentacles.

It took me a bit to formulate a response, but eventually I managed to say "Can we just ride the pods around for a while first? The view from them is amazing, and I really need to sober up before we do much else around here." As I spoke, I sent a brief hint from I-as-Madeline to Grom-as-Agent about what exactly I meant by 'doing much else'.

Grom dipped his hull in a nod, before saying "That makes sense; I'll walk you to a pod, and we can sober up."

Sure enough, soon we were on a pod looking out at the city's skyline, the sunlight refracting off the polarized windows enclosing the arcology's atmosphere to produce a brilliant rainbow display as we rotated towards day.

As we were zipping around, my body was gradually purging itself of the cyanide I'd ingested, and my thoughts were returning to their normal speed and clarity as my cells started being able to process Oxygen again. After a few minutes of this, my biofeedback informed me that I was back to full sobreity.

I nodded, saying "Grom, I'm sober now. Pod, take us to the Roger's Ashes Spacefarer's Club."

Immediately, the pod acknowledged the request with a simple "Destination selected: Roger's Ashes Spacefarer's Club."

Within a few minutes we arrived at the station, and disembarked. I idly noted a very faint high-pitched whirring noise as the two of us walked away. At first I figured it was just some badly tuned equipment, but when that noise followed us I immediately whirled around and got a look at a spy drone desperately trying to conceal itself with active camouflage.

Yeah, no. I immediately brought my carbine up even as I set the selector switch to raster blaster mode in the same motion. The beautiful Nixie tube readout showed a full charge on the energy cell in neon red, weapon temperature of 299 Kelvin in Krypton blue, and the distinctive tight zigzag pattern of a raster blaster in bright green.

The drone didn't have any time to react at all, as my carbine started firing countless nanosecond pulses of light in a scan pattern reminiscent of ancient analog video, each pulse producing a tiny explosion when it hit the drone's casing. Combined, the total effect was that the drone's surface immediately exploded into a plume of plasma that shattered the rest of its structure, sending the attempted spy clattering to the ground, even as a ragingly hot fire ignited within its circuits.

As I lowered my weapon and switched it back to 'safe', the crowd that had turned to watch the brief light show gradually went back to what they had been doing. As for Grom, he went to investigate the wreckage. After a few moments, he replied "Whoever made this was sure to put in a very thorough self-destruct; I won't be able to trace anything from it."

I nodded solemnly, saying "Then I guess we had best just get on with what we were doing, but bearing in mind that we stand a good chance of being jumped."

And so, we made our way the half a kilometer from the pod station to the Roger's Ashes club. Along the way we passed dozens of street stalls selling everything from standard tourist kitsch to fine deep fried examples of the local cuisine. I wasn't hungry thanks to my earlier meal at the Blue Jovian, so the street food wasn't too interesting.

On the other hand, the building the size of an entire district block with a giant animated sign reading "Roger's Ashes Spacefarer's Club" was of very much interest indeed. It was vaguely pyramidal, with four terrace levels each playing host to massive gardens, with ivy climbing down over the edges. There was a near-constant throng of people entering and leaving the club, and it looked an awful lot like there was a guest list that those entering were being checked against.

On the edge of my awareness I noticed a large group approaching Grom and my position from behind. I counted at least thirty sets of footsteps, making a beeline straight towards us without even the pretension of subtlety. I-as-Madeline spared an aside glance to Grom and asked "Have you called for backup?" over the encypted channel.

Grom-as-Agent replied "Yes. We have reinforcements on the way; they should be here in about five minutes."

I nodded in acknowledgement, then replied "Let's keep walking; it'll delay them entering engagement range for a bit longer, meaning there won't be as much time when we're forced to deal with them without backup."

Grom simply grumbled in vague approval of the idea, even as he upped his speed slightly. I followed suit, taking extra care to avoid seeming like I was in a hurry, my tail gently swishing behind me.

Still, eventually the group caught up with us, and shouted "Hey you!" I turned around to take in the view of our incredibly unsubtle stalkers, even as I made an extremely innocent-seeming "who, me?" gesture. Off to the side, Grom was undertaking a similar course of action.

The group was thirty strong, rallied behind a very broad-shouldered heavily muscled biomorph. While the rest of the group was a varied mix of biomorphs and synthmorphs in all shapes and sizes, they all had a couple unifying features. First of all, every last member of the group had red on top of their head; for some it was hair, feathers, scales, or even paint for some of the synthmorphs. The other unifying feature is that they were all very stockily built, doubtless optimized for sheer physical power, more than anything else.

The thugs were also none too subtle about brandishing a wide variety of assorted weaponry as their leader announced "Yeah, you in the fancy dress. The boss wants to talk to you. Personally."

At the same time, I received an encrypted message in my capacity of I-as-Madeline, saying "I found a possible opportunity to get the information we came for, but to make it happen I need a big flashy distraction."

Inside my bag, I readied one of my concussive grenades, even as I surreptitiously set my carbine to linear pulse mode. A distraction? Such as a running street battle, perhaps? Yes, I could certainly do that.

My decision made, I replied "Fine then, let's talk". Simultaneously I brought my carbine up in one smooth motion, blasting a massive hole through the lead thug's upper torso even as Grom and I both ducked into cover and I lobbed the grenade I'd primed.

---

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[We Just Write]

The reaction to me opening fire on the group of thugs was immediate; I'd mission killed their leader (or maybe spokesman? Important either way.) with my first shot, while also chucking a grenade right into their midst.

That said, while the reaction was immediate, it also wasn't very coordinated; I'd successfully achieved a brief moment of shock and awe, as the grenade exploded on the other side of the heavily built food carts we'd ducked behind. Immediately, both Grom and I popped up again, taking in the scene in a few milliseconds as we picked targets.

Of the thirty thugs who'd come after us, five were already down; namely the leader I'd blasted a massive hole in, and the four who were closest to the grenade when it went off. I opened up with my laser and drilled two more while they were still recovering from the blast. Meanwhile Grom made use of his morph's integrated micro-missiles and fired a salvo that would have taken out the rest, if it weren't for some of the thugs being really fast on their raster blasters to shoot them down; even still, Grom's missiles dropped another thug who was unlucky enough to be particularly close.

Still, as we ducked back into cover behind the food cart, we were now in a pretty undesirable position. We were pinned behind cover, and we were outnumbered eleven to one; the instant we poked out of cover we were going to take way more fire than we could realistically dodge. There was only one redeeming feature of this situation, and that's the fact that our cover had wheels.

As such, I told Grom over encrypted chat "I'll shove the cart towards our reinforcements, you're on potshot duty!"

On his part, Grom replied "Head towards the Roger's Ashes and take a left at the first opportunity, that's where our biggest group of reinforcements are coming from!" before opening the iris for the laser emitter in one of his tentacles, poking it just above the level of the food cart's opening. Several cracks of ionized air along with the occasional scream of pain could be heard, even as I leaned hard into the food cart.

With a thought I activated the traction coating on my boots, adhering to the floor with enough force that I could have walked straight up a wall in much heavier gravity than we currently occupied. At the moment, that coating simply meant I could push the food cart with far more force than normal gravitational traction would have allowed.

The cart began to shift almost immediately, my strength easily overwhelming whatever puny motor it had for autonomous movement. Within moments we had gotten up to a speed that could almost be called a decent run, carefully keeping the cart between us and the redhead gang as we headed towards our nearest group of allies.

Then I spotted a major issue, namely more redhead gangsters coming around the corner we wanted to turn at. Grom was still busy suppressing the group pursuing us, meaning that dealing with the flanking group was my problem. In a mere fraction of a second, I drew one of my mag pistols and drew a bead on the first of them to round the corner.

The gun kicked back in my hand, sending a bullet downrange with a distinct supersonic crack; the shot dumped all the remaining energy left in its internal SMES after penetrating the thug I was targeting, thus exploding and splattering everything much above their pelvis across the entrance to the alleyway. Said pair of legs staggered to their feet and started running away as best they were able, but they were very thoroughly mission-killed and no longer a priority.

That snap shot dissuaded the flanking group for just long enough that I could prime a hand grenade in place of my pistol, setting its fuse for exactly the correct time as I tossed it ahead. The grenade exploded a second or so before we rounded the corner, meaning that what thugs remained in the flanking group were still recovering when Grom and I got line of sight, lasers set to raster.

What followed was half a second of hosing down the six remaining thugs in the flanking group with raster blaster fire, the rapidly scanned pulses of light causing massive surface damage to our targets and quickly immobilizing them due to destruction of their musculature, with what remained being still technically alive, but very badly wounded. They probably wouldn't actually die from it, but they were no longer a significant threat.

Still, now that we were no longer pinned behind a food cart, we started sprinting down the alley we'd turned onto. We didn't get very far before we encountered a group of fifty armed people heading our way, and I immediately asked "Are you from the Loan Shark?"

The group's bulky humanoid synthmorph leader replied "Yes we are! We heard you two needed the help, and came right over. What's the situation?"

"I don't know how, but I somehow angered a local mob boss and they sent goons after me. If they're armed and the top of their head is red, shoot on sight."

The group leader replied "Right." even as he raised his mag rifle, which kicked three times with the distinctive crack crack crack of supersonic projectiles. I heard the explosions behind us, even as I turned with raster carbine at the ready in linear pulse mode to join the barrage.

After the pursuing group had clearly lost interest in continuing to advance into our withering hail of suppressive fire, the leader of our impromptu platoon thought for a moment, before saying "Alright, advance and flush them out!"

And so we marched back towards that same intersection we'd just turned around. There was a brief debate about how to go around the corner, before we settled on half of our forces jumping out around the corner and immediately opening fire to force our enemies into cover, while the other half would navigate down another nearby alleyway to perform a flanking maneuver.

I was quickly assigned to the group that would be providing suppressive fire, along with Grom. I set my raster carbine to linear pulse, squatted down, and darted out from behind the corner while opening fire. Immediately the remaining twenty-ish thugs that had originally threatened me started running for cover, but as they did so, several of them returned fire in a scattered and disorganized manner.

I saw a brief flash of searingly bright light from one of the laser pistols the thugs were using, there was a short moment of pain, and then I suddenly lost feeling from the neck up as my visual perspective shifted down about ten centimeters or so. My biofeedback confirmed that I was now thinking using my black boxes instead of my primary brain, and that I was seeing using the backup photo-receptors in my skin. For a brief moment I felt inordinately grateful that my dress had a very low neckline.

I ducked behind the fruit cart for a few moments to confirm what I was pretty sure just happened, effortlessly waving my hand through the space my head normally occupied. Lowering my hand a bit, I soon encountered a ragged slightly squishy stump with a hard nub where my spine terminated. There were a few rivulets of blood, but the emergency valves in my circulatory system had done their job and stopped me from losing more than a few cosmetic spatters.

Now that I knew I was just headless instead of something more serious, I immediately got back into the fight. I had to take a bit more risk to see where I was shooting now due to needing to expose my upper torso, but we were putting enough suppressive fire downrange to keep the rest of the redheaded thugs firmly pinned behind their cover.

This carried on for about a minute, then laser and mag gun fire erupted from an alley to the thug's side, quickly downing the remaining red-headed thugs. I commented using my integrated radio "OK, let's see if any of them have an intact black box to interrogate." as I stood up to my full (somewhat reduced) height and started walking towards the downed thugs, feeling the airflow across my neck stump as I did so.

We quickly fell upon the mission-killed gangsters, and with a bit of knife work we quickly extracted several black box implants in pristine condition. Zhao, our current cyberwar specialist quickly hacked the black boxes and extracted their memory data, before immediately informing us "There are three thousand more members of this gang closing on our location. I recommend making a fighting retreat to the spaceport."

I'd already lost my head over this whole mess, so I was perfectly willing to just get out of here. On the other hand, I felt like I needed to ask "Aren't there millions more members of our crew around? Can't we just call for more reinforcements?"

There was general agreement, and a series of rendezvous points were set up along our route to the spaceport; we'd be collecting reinforcements as we went. We hit the first and second rendezvous points without being intercepted by any significant forces, but that luck didn't hold.

By now our group of ostensible pirates had ballooned in size to a few hundred, and we were passing under one of the pod cableways when suddenly several of pods had their doors kicked open and thugs aboard opened fire with crew-served particle beams in raster mode. I mercifully didn't get hit again, and with the amount of return fire we sent downrange the heavy weapons were only firing for a couple seconds before they were silenced.

Still, in that time we'd taken upwards of 30% casualties in degrees ranging from completely fried to simply immobilized, and our previous leader fell under "completely fried". So I stepped up and called over my internal radio "Everyone down with intact black boxes, highlight yourself! Everyone else, take a couple black boxes from each of our downed allies then slag the rest of their morph. We can't carry this many wounded the hard way, so we've got to do it the easy way!"

Recovering the black boxes from our downed comrades took only a few seconds, our knives getting slicked with blood in the process. The subsequent destruction of their previous bodies on the other hand took slightly longer; it paid to be thorough with this sort of thing. Still, in less than a minute we were ready to move again, reaching our third rendezvous point and swelling our ranks to a full battalion.

That's when the trouble started. I didn't actually have any hearing organs at the moment and I really wasn't used to that fact. That's the only reason I didn't notice the large group of thugs approaching from our left flank while everyone else was busy pumping weapons fire into a bunch of Crimsons – our nickname for the red-headed gang – that had gotten directly in front of us.

Ironically, my head having been shot off earlier is all that saved me from dying right then and there, as the heavy mag rifle bullet went whistling right through the volume where my cranium normally was. The shock wave from the explosion it produced on impact with the wall to my right was strong enough to let me know that if it had hit, I would have definitely been a problem for the janitors.

Still, we managed to divert enough firepower to force the flanking group back into their alleyways, greatly reducing the damage they could do. I and a bunch of other crewmates took the opportunity to prime grenades, quickly pulverizing everyone in the flanking group with a storm of explosive ordnance. That done, we recovered the black boxes from our latest batch of casualties and continued on our march towards the spaceport.

That said, we were definitely having problems with all these ambushes, so it was decided to send scouting elements ahead via the pod network in order to spot and deal with them before they could cause any more problems. Admittedly using public transport was a bit of a risk, but for a small group it was probably worth it. I'd stepped out of leadership after my short-lived assuming of command, meaning that I got assigned to be part of one of these scouting parties.

As such, I'd been sent ahead using the cable pod system; there had been some discussion of whether our entire contingent should go via pod, but that was shot down pretty quickly. Anyway, since I'd be separated from the main group and my black boxes wouldn't be easily recoverable, I had the one implanted in my left arm extracted and stored away for safekeeping. I still had nine more of the implanted computers I was using as backup brains, so I could spare one for an offsite backup.

And so, Grom and I climbed into a pod and started on our way ahead of our main group. I couldn't help but poke and prod at my neck stump while waiting; this was my first time being headless, and it really wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Admittedly learning this in the middle of combat wasn't exactly the greatest, but I'd have to try it again sometime when the stakes were lower.

Perhaps seeing my interest in the sudden alteration to my morph, Grom commented "If you're thinking of giving your next morph a detachable head, that is perfectly fine."

I thought about the idea for a few moments, before deciding that it was worth a try. As such, I replied "You know what? Let's actually do that. Adding it to my record that I want to give my next morph a detachable head."

Then the pod doors opened at our stop, and it was back to the mission in full. We'd decided on the way over that we would be searching for ambushers from the rooftops, and that of course meant climbing over. Fortunately, both of us had gecko pads that made climbing sheer vertical surfaces fairly straightforward, me on my boots, and Grom on his tentacles; the low gravity of Tide made the climb even easier.

Once we were in our elevated position, the process of hunting for ambushers was much, much easier. We quickly fell into a routine of sweeping the rooftops for threats, checking the alleys below for same, and then jumping to the next building to repeat the process.

It actually took a few minutes of this for us to find the first ambush point, a group of about twenty Crimsons setting up a heavy weapons nest in an alleyway. We quickly swept the area for more just so we wouldn't get blown away by any friends of theirs, and quickly found three other such deployment points.

Quickly, we hatched a plan. I would drop one of my grenades on the nest directly below us, then Grom and I would use the three lasers we had between us to simultaneously destroy the tripod-mounted heavy weapons that the Crimsons had set up on the other rooftops. If we hit the power boxes for those beam guns, the resulting explosions would be sufficient to paste the groups around them and negate much chance of retaliation.

And so we did just that; I primed a grenade with the exact time it would take to fall from our rooftop onto the weapons nest below, and as soon as it dropped Grom and I got into position and took aim at the power cells for the Crimsons' heavy weapons. We didn't even wait for the sound of the explosion; as soon as the timer expired we shot simultaneously; I drilled one boxlike energy cell with my raster carbine, while Grom got two with his tentacle-mounted lasers.

The resulting explosions were felt more than heard, especially in my case since I didn't have any ears at the moment. They were definitely seen however, putting serious craters in the roofs of the buildings they'd been on top of and blasting the ambushers to paste, though notably not breaking through all the way to the inside of the building. Apparently the locals built to last.

Either way, I quickly sent an encrypted message back to the main group saying "Found an ambush group along our route with four heavy weapons nests. Threat eliminated with no losses."

In response, I heard back "Understood. Please continue on scouting duty. We'll meet up with you at the next rendezvous point." along with a data packet detailing the route they were planning on taking. They'd burned a one-time pad code for that too, so I knew it was secure.

Well, that was clear enough. Without further delay, Grom and I went about looking for more ambushes. Only a minute or two into this, it was pretty clear that the Crimsons knew what we were doing, as Grom and I needed to start counter-sniping gang members before they could nail us with laser or mag gun fire. While we were pretty good at this and took out the first few would-be snipers without incident, neither Grom nor I wanted to risk this for any longer than actually necessary. I'd already lost one head tonight, and that was plenty.

So, we dropped down from the rooftops and started traveling through the alleyways, looking for any further groups of Crimsons who might want to cause trouble for our allies in the main group. In a strange twist of fate, we didn't encounter any more alley-bound ambush groups all the way to the rendezvous point.

For a moment we got our hopes up that this was due to the Crimsons having given up, but that hope was quickly dashed when we got close to the rendezvous site, and saw a heavily entrenched group of Crimsons exchanging fire with a similarly entrenched bunch of our crewmates.

Quickly Grom and I considered what to do with that, and we determined that our best course of action would be to try and flank around behind the Crimsons before they realized we were here and open fire on their relatively vulnerable behind.

And so we set about sneaking through the alleys, only to suddenly come face to neck stump with a group of a few Crimsons who apparently had the same basic idea we did of flanking around behind the impromptu trench lines. Fortunately I was able to react ever so slightly faster with my raster blaster, frying the oncoming group and disabling their weapons before they could do the same to me.

Still, the noise from that definitely blew my cover, and that meant Grom and I needed to relocate. We did so by climbing straight up the walls of the alleyway like we'd done previously, but we didn't go all the way up; ascending to roof level would just expose us to the snipers again. No, instead we walked sideways along the walls using our gecko pads, exploiting the low gravity to jump between buildings with ease, and firing down at any Crimson flanking groups we found en route.

We actually had to deal with quite a lot of those flanking groups; it was very obvious that the Crimsons had a rough idea where we were and were trying to flush us out. Still, they didn't succeed before we managed to get into position to pump some ordnance into their formation. Oh they knew we were coming; they just couldn't actually do much about it since our allies were still pinning them behind cover.

So we opened up with our lasers, wreaking complete and utter havoc on the entrenched Crimsons, driving them out of cover and into the withering hail of lasers and mag gun shots our allies were putting out. The power cell in my raster carbine actually finally depleted after a few seconds of continuous fire, and I quickly shoved it in one of my pockets even while I drew a fresh one and slammed it into the socket on my beautiful weapon.

Still, by the time I'd finished reloading my laser the mopping up was nearly done. I came out of the alleyway and noted "This is the rendezvous point where we're supposed to meet up with the main group, but they don't seem to have arrived yet. Guessing you're the planned reinforcements?"

The leader of the reinforcements noted "No shit. The main group is still about a minute out. Thanks for the save, though." even as her pink hair seemed to blow in a nonexistent wind, revealing the tips of her pointed ears.

I would have nodded but I didn't have a head right now, so I replied "Fair enough. Guess we'll be popping open some black boxes for intelligence while we wait."

That didn't reveal too much we didn't know already. The Crimsons were thoroughly out in force trying to match our escalation and they had a home field advantage. On the other hand we-as-agents had access to some slightly more optimized processing hardware allowing for reaction times ever-so-slightly closer to the limits imposed by physics, which is one of the major reasons we'd been so effective at getting the first shot off in tight situations where it really mattered.

Still when the main contingent of our force arrived, it was clear that they'd been having a rough time of things. I could count at least twenty more new members of the headless club, and more were missing limbs, had craters blasted open in their torsos, or were similarly heavily injured while still capable of fighting. There was a brief mutual acknowledgment of the situation, a few more scouting groups were sent ahead after each dropping off a black box just in case, and then it was back to the grim march towards the spaceport.

Less than a minute into the march, we were jumped by another bunch of heavy weapons teams that had apparently been missed by the scouting elements. I immediately opened up on one of the tripod-mounted weapons and managed to destroy it, but then my luck ran out as particle beam pulses ripped through my pelvis and right shoulder, reducing me to a one-armed mutilated torso.

I managed to send a few more laser shots downrange one-handed, but it was very clear that I was no longer combat effective. As soon as the current burst of fighting died down, I called over my internal radio "I'm done. Yank my black boxes, fry my morph, and get me out of here."

I was vaguely aware of Grom coming over and replying "Understood, Ress." before I felt him stabbing through my soft tissues. My biofeedback sent out an alert as each one of my remaining viable black boxes was ripped out of my body, then Grom reached the last one.

Again, there was no feeling of slipping away, nor any recognition of a transition taking place. One moment I was a mangled carcass in a pirate arcology, the next I was lying down in a Mindcast pod, holding my head in my hands.

As the Mindcast pod opened, we quickly spotted our arachnid-shaped handler. Shen noted cheerfully "Welcome back to the land of the living, agents Madeline Zargosty and Maximus Hadrian. All your black boxes were either recovered by allies or destroyed, so there's no need to worry about a version of you being held captive by pirates. While risky, the gang war you provoked was highly effective as a distraction. As such we have an experience recording of an interrogation from one of our other agents for you to watch, and once you're done with that, we have another assignment for you two."

Max almost immediately asked from the back of our mind "So you have a lead on where to look for Bark's Finest?"

Shen grinned.

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
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Paperback: Normal Text | Large Text Edition

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[We Just Write]

A/N: Apologies for the delay.

---

Almost immediately, Shen put me into a virtual reality recording of the interrogation. It was taking place very close to where I'd originally lost my head, and I was currently in the body of the agent who'd requested a distraction; albeit with no control, since this was a recording. Still, Max and I were so immersed in their decision-making process that it felt like we were living it right along with them. They apparently shared my preference for a slight variation on the baseline human form, though they apparently preferred vulpine traits instead of the feline ones I went for.

I kept shooting encrypted micro-communications to a person wearing a twin-rotor synthmorph, both of us using tight beam only and keeping things very brief with each burst to avoid detection. They were being very skittish about admitting to more than having heard of Bark's Finest, and hadn't even given out a pseudonym for identification. After several moments of circumspect back-and-forth, I asked "If I could arrange for everyone's attention to be diverted elsewhere for a few moments, would you be willing to tell me more?"

The potential informant waffled for a few moments, before agreeing "If you could make sure that no-one was paying attention to me, then yes I would tell you absolutely everything. But you have to promise me that you will get me out of here as soon as possible, once I've ensured the backups I've got stashed all over aren't a liability. I don't want to take chances."

I simply replied "Understood." before I broadcast over the encrypted channel to the rest of the agents "I found a possible opportunity to get the information we came for, but to make it happen I need a big flashy distraction."

I didn't have to wait, as I saw myself wearing that wonderful now destroyed dress suddenly whip out my raster carbine and open fire, the first grenade going off a moment later. Everyone in the street who wasn't involved in the fight immediately ran for it, and in the chaos it was easy for the both of us to duck into a nearby alley.

As soon as the both of us were out of sight, I extended a virtual reality invite to the prospective informant. They accepted like their life depended on it, which is to say very very quickly, but not before a thorough scan for malicious braincode. Then they connected over our internal radio systems, and both of us were primarily devoting our attention to the simulated negotiating table.

The informant immediately put their multi-jointed gripper appendages together and asked "Alright, my name is Viyad. What do you want to know about Bark's Finest?"

I nodded, before I replied "Nice to meet you, Viyad. To put it quite bluntly, we want to know where they might have decided to hide after stealing several Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs."

Viyad's avatar rocked back in shock, even as she exclaimed "My old crew did WHAT!? That's utterly insane with far too much risk for far too little reward, there's no way they'd do that…" There was a brief pause as Viyad considered things, and continued "… Well, not unless Fuller somehow talked them into it. That makes total sense, the charismatic bastard."

I couldn't help but ask "You dislike Captain Fuller?"

Viyad rolled her optic's cosmetic iris, "Of course I don't like the bastard. He's from the Rogues party, while I voted Pinstripe last election. When he got into office I knew right then that I needed to get off that ship before he convinced everyone to go along with some insane plan of his, and it looks like I was right."

It occurred to me that there could be a bit of a conflict of interest here, and I asked "To be clear, we're looking to hunt down your former crew and mercilessly crush them; are you actually going to tell us the truth, even with those factors?"

Viyad blinked, before noting "Very very clever of you to ask that, you obvious spook. The answer is still yes; this system is rapidly becoming less and less safe for a certain between-jobs pirate, and you're my best ticket out of here before someone decides to get rid of me. And if there's one code of honor that a pirate like me holds to, we don't cheat anyone on deals we make; we live or die on our word being trustworthy. It's just that our word tends to be something along the lines of 'hand over all your cargo and no-one gets hurt'."

I simply gestured for Viyad to continue, and she did so "If they're really going along with Fuller's plan, then they won't be doing the sane and logical thing of using quantum randomness to pick bolt holes. Fuller always was a sentimental fool in a lot of ways, and given his belief in his own weird form of astrology he'll have some arcane convoluted reason concocted for going to specific places."

Viyad's iris narrowed in barely concealed fury as she dwelled on the topic "He claimed to have worked out some sort of equation for how various celestial objects would change your future based on when you visited them, relative positioning, luminosity, mass, all sorts of things. If you can get your hands on that equation, you stand a pretty good chance of predicting the rough sorts of places he would go. If he gets removed from the captain's office that will almost certainly change, but Fuller's practically a cult leader on that ship so that's not terribly likely."

I nodded knowingly, then asked a very important question indeed "Viyad, do you have a copy of Captain Fuller's divination equation?"

Viyad shifted her iris from side to side, even as she replied "No, I don't. Fuller kept the codebase for that thing strictly proprietary and never let a copy out of his sight. That said, I do have a decently good idea of where you might go looking to find one: You'll need to go to Blackwood's moon Bark. It's where Alex Fuller grew up the old-fashioned way before he became a pirate, and also where he concocted that equation in the first place. There might be a few backup copies of his younger self archived there still."

I noted that down, asking "You wouldn't happen to have coordinates for which specific system? There's no planet named Blackwood in this system, so I know it's not here; similarly I would imagine that sort of name is very common indeed."

Viyad rolled her iris again, before noting "I'll tell you the rest once you get me to your ship. Not that I don't trust you, but we are in the middle of a combat zone, and I would very much prefer to not be in the middle of a combat zone. Especially not one with Keg's gang involved; they don't have much care for collateral damage."

And so we both dropped out of Virtual Reality, returning to the reality of the alleyway on the outskirts of a firefight. I gestured for us to climb to the nearby rooftops, and we both started ascending; me with my gecko pads, and Viyad by simply hovering upwards with her rotors.

A few moments later we reached the rooftop, and I asked "Viyad, you mentioned you wanted to deal with your backups. Where do we need to go to do that?"

My impromptu companion noted "I've deleted all the network-accessible ones already, but there are a couple storage drives I keep air gapped when I'm not updating them. They're held by the sots of people you can trust as long as the payments keep coming in and I've been paying them very well indeed, so we just need to go get them. Follow me."

What followed was an incredibly anticlimactic pod ride to three different locations. At each stop we arrived at a nondescript shop advertising no-questions-asked safe deposit boxes. Some digital currency changed accounts, volition authentication was performed to ensure Viyad wasn't under the effects of any form of mind control, and then we vacated the premises. Simple, straightforward, and with no real disruptions that threatened to derail things.

We picked a different train station leading to the spaceport, and got there via another anticlimactic pod ride that missed the still ongoing street battle completely. That said, we could certainly spot the flashes of light from weapon fire and hear the sounds of violence in the distance. Given the total non-reaction of people directly caught up in it that I could see from the pod, this sort of thing must be a somewhat regular occurrence. Once we got past that little diversion our pod swiftly arrived at its destination, and we boarded the train to High Tide Spaceport.

I couldn't help but notice that Viyad was looking nervous for the entire train ride, and that apprehension only increased as we approached the shuttle terminal. Quickly, I placed a request for two shuttle seats to the Loan Shark, while also sending a one-time pad encrypted message to the Voidskipper in question euphemistically explaining that I'd found an informant.

A few minutes later, everything had been sorted out in terms of transport arrangements. We made our way to our directed gate and exited through the airlock. Viyad compensated for the lack of atmosphere using a set of retractable quadrupedal legs extending from the underside of her orb-shaped chassis, but it was very clear she didn't like using them. Still, a few moments were all it took for us to reach our seats aboard the shuttle, and the cabin re-pressurized shortly thereafter.

The shuttle flight was uneventful at its most exciting. It amounted to about an hour of orbital maneuvering via means of a fusion thermal engine, one of the oldest and most mundane methods of space travel. Aside from a few moderately intense thrust burns and some delicate touches of the maneuvering thrusters to dock with the Loan Shark, it basically amounted to an hour of boredom between the two of us as we sat strapped into our seats in micro-gravity.

Still, we docked with Loan Shark without delay. We both quickly disembarked from the shuttle, before making our way to one of the ship's We-As-Agents areas. As soon as we arrived, I asked "So Viyad. We've gotten you off of Tide; you can Mindcast elsewhere at your convenience, or simply hitch a ride on the Loan Shark back to the Red Star Union."

Viyad thought for a moment, before replying "I think I will pass on the offer of Mindcast; one of the facts you are forced to learn as a pirate is that long-distance Mindcasting is actually a very dangerous method of travel. I will be riding to the Red Star Union in this body, aboard this ship. Anyway, you wished to know the coordinates of Blackwood, and now that you've gotten me here I will gladly provide them."

With that, Viyad provided a data packet with the coordinates for the planet known as Blackwood. The instant that happened, the recording ended and I was back in my own body with Max as we assimilated the information we had just received. Then we realized that Blackwood was actually located deep into Civilized Space and right on the edge of being part of the Interior, as it was nearly a thousand light years closer to Sol, and nearly ninety degrees off from our current location.

Max was the first to voice the concerns this raised, asking "Shen, how are we going to be reaching Blackwood in a reasonable timeframe while maintaining security? While Mindcasting through the Comm Hole network would be very fast it also raises massive cognitive security concerns with that number of middlemen involved. I also can't see a Voidskipper trip there being particularly fast."

That's when Shen grinned, noting "Right, you were born and raised out here on the frontier, where Voidskippers can need Megaseconds just to go a few hundred light years. While you've probably read about the Interior's comprehensive Lane networks, just how much of an impact they have probably hasn't sunk in. With Lanes, a Voidskipper's averaged travel speed can easily exceed one light year per second. Conveniently we here in the Red Star Union are very close to one of the main spoke Lanes providing a straight shot right to the Old Core, and we're only a few minutes away from our first Lane skip right now. We'll be at Blackwood within a kilosecond, so best not to dawdle."

Before leaving the Mindcast bay, I thought to ask "Are we supposed to be armed for this mission?"

Immediately, Shen answered "Yes, though not for fighting people. Blackwood's entire claim to fame is being a playground for irresponsible bio-engineers to create the most hideously dangerous organisms they can dream up before dumping them on the planet's surface and placing bets on if they'll find an ecological niche before going extinct. While it's rare, sometimes these organisms have been known to breach containment and require termination. Further, there is a distinct possibility that you will be required to visit Blackwood's surface. In that case, being armed is mandatory due to the hideously dangerous ecosystem."

I blinked, before noting "We're going to want some backup for this." and without further delay, I traveled back to the Mindcast bay. Once there, I entered a command to copy my current mindstate, and instantiate me into six identical copies of my morph with slight variations to facial structure and hair color. It just took a brief poke of the scanning probe to transfer the data to the printing system, and then I was off to my next stop: the armory.

When I arrived, I was greeted by two more of me, even as Max chuckled in the background. Apparently I'd accidentally pranked myselves into thinking I was the first me printed today, as the two mes in the armory laughed even as one of them greeted me "Hello Madeline 3, I'm Madeline 1. Nice to meet me!"

From the back of my mind, I couldn't help but hear Max chuckle as well. I just rolled my eyes, before asking "So, what's the weapons load you've picked out? I can see the gun printers working away in the background there, and now I'm curious what exactly it is you've got cooking."

Madeline 1 rolled her eyes and replied "The gun printers were working when we got here actually. Anyway, we only want to explain it once, so it can wait until the other four of us arrive."

Then I heard my voice from the door, as four more of me showed up, one of them sarcastically remarking "And here we thought you Maxes and Madelines were having kinky fun times together. Oh well, maybe another time."

I blushed slightly, before Madeline 2 cut me off "Anyway, in light of the threat environment we've decided to go for two heavy mag rifles and five full power battle lasers with raster blaster functionality. For sidearms everyone is getting a raster carbine with an integrated energy cell and a radioisotope recharger. Everyone's gear gets fully linked mil-spec interfaces this time; that gear from the PPA group was fun and beautifully crafted, but it lacked a lot of the smart features that make military grade hardware really shine."

All of us grinned at the thought of having that much firepower to use. And without further delay, Madeline 1 opened up several boxes of armament.

The very first thing I familiarized myself with was my battle laser. It was much bigger than the raster carbine I'd used back in the Bouccan system, being almost exactly 90 centimeters in length, 70 centimeters if I didn't count the stock. That said it was distinctly bulkier in its other dimensions too; which was to be expected, given the presence of the coolant pipes used by its cooling system. Speaking of which, the exhaust vents for superheated coolant to escape from were at the front of the weapon and were oriented to the left and right. Good, that meant the forces were balanced and the exhaust wouldn't throw off the weapon's aim. There wasn't a radiating patch on the weapon, which made sense given the use of active cooling.

This active cooling was a major departure from how the weapon I'd used back in Bouccan had operated, but it made sense. These battle lasers were built for sustained fire, and passive cooling like what that PPA raster carbine used just wasn't going to cut it. A quick investigation revealed that both the energy cells and the receiver on the battle laser featured a pipe for coolant, which the documentation on the energy cells listed as being Supercritical Nitrogen stored at 30 Gigapascals of pressure. Between the extreme levels of adiabatic cooling from that and the 200 megajoules of energy stored in the cell's SMES, this Battle Laser should be able to fire at its rated draw of four megawatts for fifty entire seconds without reloading. In its suppressive fire mode at 200 kilowatts, it would be able to go for an entire kilosecond without needing a reload.

Then I actually picked it up and immediately my biofeedback updated with data directly from the weapon, with lists of targets, customizeable firing parameters, the energy stored from the current SMES cell, current weapon temperature, and all manner of other useful information accessible directly through my nervous system. That said, I was more curious about how much all of this would weigh. The battle laser itself massed seven kilograms, and each energy cell massed three kilograms when full. That meant a fully readied battle laser massed ten kilograms, and each reload would weigh another three.

On the other hand, I was wearing a military grade morph, which had some pretty significant advantages when it came to lugging seriously heavy equipment loads around. Fifty kilograms of equipment would be pretty reasonable, all told.

As for the raster carbine I'd be using as a sidearm, that had a lot more in common with the weapon from the Punkverse Personal Armaments group in terms of form factor. The only significant differences were that the energy cell was fully integrated with the weapon, and that the beautiful nixie tube display and manual controls were replaced with a military grade neural interface like the battle laser had.

Meanwhile, Madelines 5 and 6 wound up getting the mag rifles. 6 mm x 55 mm self-powered fletchette rounds with active target tracking, muzzle velocity around 2 kilometers per second, and almost 500 kilojoules of energy release on penetration from the SMES in the bullet explosively quenching. Couple that with the comparatively negligible waste heat production and an 80 round casket magazine, and we had some really nice rifles for our dedicated markswomen.

In addition, we were all getting a suit of full-body composite armor with heavy use of carbon nanotubes. While it wouldn't protect us against serious laser fire for prolonged periods, it could certainly buy us a half-second or so and that could easily be enough to save our lives. It wasn't powered; we were all wearing military-grade bodies anyway, so it didn't need to be.

We'd just finished familiarizing ourselves with our weapons load when an announcement came over the ship's network, stating "Attention to all passengers. We have arrived at the outer timewall perimeter for the Doctor Reed's Folly system. We are currently negotiating entry and docking arrangements. We expect to enter Blackwood's orbital space within ten kiloseconds."

Madeline four managed to get a witty retort off first, remarking "Well, looks like we lost track of time admiring our new guns. Guess our sense of time was shot."

I laughed for a moment, then stormed over and yanked M4's head right off her neck. As she touched her neck stump to verify what happened, I told her "You can have your head back when we get to the shuttles. In the meantime, consider this your punishment for that awful, awful pun." tucking her currently slightly embarrassed-looking head under my arm for easier carrying.

M1 rolled her eyes, even as she replied "Admit it, you're just mad that you didn't come up with it first." before walking over and yanking off my head too. I wound up watching both from my body's photo-receptor cells and my actual eyes as all the other versions of me laughed a bit.

Then M5 spoke up from the corner of the armory, noting "While this is amusing, the detachable head is a new feature of our morphs that we need to get acclimatized to. We've got some time before we get to Blackwood, we might as well familiarize ourselves with it and maybe have some fun too while we wait."

M1 nodded – which looked rather odd from the point of view of my head – and agreed "You know what? That's an excellent idea. Let's go, I know a room where we can have some privacy while we figure out uses for our heads coming off."

In the back of my mind I could feel Max enthusiastically urging us all on, apparently eager to spectate on our upcoming activities. That distraction aside, we quickly arrived at the room in question. It honestly looked to be a currently unused bunk room, with a number of comfortable-looking hammocks. M1 introduced us to the room, noting "And this here is where we'll be practicing, so heads off everyone. Doesn't matter who gets which one once we're done; we're all thinking with our black boxes as primary, the brains in our skulls are just a booster module."

True to her word, M1 reached up and pulled her head off with a faint click noise as the socket released, before setting it in one of the hammocks. It had a serene, slightly vacant expression. M2 shortly followed suit, M4 and I were already headless, and by the time I thought to look, M5, M6, and M7 had their heads off. That done, we got down to the business of figuring out if there was anything actually useful we could do with this that wouldn't be handled better by a support drone. As it turns out, the answer was a definitive yes, though it wouldn't be often used on field operations.

Anyway, once we were done with that it took a few minutes for us all to get cleaned up and dressed again, leaving us with just a kilosecond or so before we were scheduled to dock to the port station. We spent that time internalizing as much of the documentation on Blackwood as we possibly could, including maps and local government policy. Unsurprisingly there wasn't much serious effort at habitation on the planet's monster-infested surface; instead everyone was in orbital habitats, or living on the planet's moon Bark.

Anyway, Reed's Folly was much more developed than Bouccan; Unlike Tide, Bark was absolutely covered in city lights over every scrap of its surface and a lot more orbital infrastructure. They actually had a station for docking Voidskippers, connected to Bark by a series of extremely high-capacity maglev rail lines running along carbon nanotube space elevator cables. As such we along with the other few million agents openly here in an investigative capacity simply caught a ride through a nice pressurized jetway, navigated through the microgravity mega-arcology to the train stations, and strapped ourselves in for a ride to Bark's surface.

Even with the extremely high speed of the maglev trains, it was still going to take about a kilosecond or so for us to reach Bark. I passed the time by watching the scenery out the train's front camera, getting a virtual front-row seat to the miniature Ecumenopolis getting closer and closer, its dynamically supported orbital rings for heat dissipation and in-system traffic coming clearly into view as we approached. It was beautiful.

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
ebook: Amazon | Smashwords
Paperback: Normal Text | Large Text Edition

Also, if you like the story, please comment! The added visibility will be greatly appreciated, and feedback will help with improving future novels.

 

[We Just Write]

As soon as we reached Bark's surface, our very first priority was to check the public records for a certain Alex Fuller. M7, M5, M1 and I were letting our Maxes use our bodies while they searched through the network for relevant information using our tablets. There was just too much risk of contracting malware if we connected directly, so it was better to handle these things at a remove.

Of course, we'd all pretty much unanimously decided that waiting around in the middle of the street while the Maxes took care of it was incredibly overrated, so we'd found a place to get lunch while we checked the public records. The place we found was a nice hobby restaurant run by a small group of creatively-inclined chefs.

Anyway, they were running a stir fry special today, so we all ordered the noodle dish they were experimenting with. While we waited, Max 3 noted "Got a bunch of search hits, as expected. There have been well over fifty million people named Alex Fuller living here on Bark since the moon was settled, of which around 30% have left for other places since, immediately disqualifying them. Accounting for our man growing up here the old-fashioned way, that narrows it down to just a few million people."

There was a fair bit more talking about the matter, and then our food was delivered by the waitstaff drones. As we looked at the dark brown plate of stir-fried noodles, meat, vegetables, and seasonings Max asked "So, want to take front for the meal itself, or can I keep driving the body?"

I thought for a moment from my position in the cozy back seat of our mind, before noting "I haven't been giving you enough fronting time lately. Go ahead and eat that meal."

Max perked up even as he replied "While having to do all the maintenance for my own body was more than I really wanted to deal with back before I moved in with you, I do appreciate the offer. Thank you."

And with that, Max set about consuming our lunch, artfully twirling the noodles using the chopsticks and spoon we had been provided. Then he brought the first bite to our mouth, and it was amazing. There was spiciness, a distinct savory flavor, a kick of Atmerial, and a faint aftertaste of Runji, possibly from Arsenic if we had to guess about what was actually in the food.

I could feel Max being fairly conflicted about whether to eat it all really fast because it was so good, or savor it for the same exact reason. After couple moments of indecision, I told him "Why not eat it slowly and try narrowing down our search criteria more between bites? That way we'll get more done before we finish and have to find a new venue."

Max replied "Excellent point Madeline." and we settled into a routine of data gathering and analysis while taking our sweet sweet time with the noodles.

It was another few minutes before M5 announced using their Max voice "Good news, we've narrowed down the pool of people we need to ask about to ten. Furthermore we've got confirmation that there are other teams who'll be asking about the other nine, so we only have to concern ourselves with one: Alex Fuller, notable for shipping off on the newly-constructed freighter Bark's Finest about fifty years ago; he had an interest in both astronomy and astrology, made regular visits to the surface of Blackwood, and several of his acquaintances are still in residence. Our first such acquaintance to talk to is one Doctor Sagi Brose; they knew Alex during his childhood, and are currently teaching bio-engineering at one of Bark's millions of universities. Specifically Cthonic Mare Institute."

I felt my Max nod in acknowledgment, before noting "In that case we'd best finish our meal promptly. If we can't call Doctor Brose for whatever reason, we'll have to get there by train."

We tried calling Doctor Brose immediately after that, but our call got screened by a spam filter and Max successfully argued that if we wanted to speak with them on friendly terms, hacking our way past their spam filter was not in fact a good idea. Which meant that we would need to go there in person.

And so we quickly finished up our noodles, complimented the chefs of the restaurant profusely, switched all the Madelines into being the primary drivers of their respective bodies again, and got on our way.

Within minutes we were already at the train station where we needed to be for our ride to the Cthonic Mare, and its local Institute. Soon the maglev train pulled up to the station, opened its doors, and we climbed aboard. The train gradually accelerated up to speed, causing us to get noticeably lighter as it approached Bark's orbital velocity.

Still, we didn't hit full microgravity before the train started slowing down again, arriving at the Cthonic Mare Arcology with a cheerful automated announcement informing us of that fact. I will admit that I was inordinately proud of the way our group turned a few heads when we got off the train, but we were on a mission right now; teasing the locals with our morph preferences could wait.

Either way, once we were off the long-distance maglev line it was a matter of using the local public transport system to get within walking distance of the Institute. Unlike Bouccan they'd opted for steel-on-steel electric trains with high-capacity elevator lanes for local transport, but that was fine. A bit boring compared to Tide's pod system, but fine.

When we got to the Institute, the local security teams ordered that we check our weapons before entering. Considering that we were equipped with a large number of blatantly military-grade long arms, that made an awful lot of sense. We removed the weapons' activator chips before handing them over, meaning they wouldn't be usable before we got back without a lot of time and effort spent on fabricating a replacement or bypassing the authentication system.

Anyway, we quickly reached the Bioengineering wing of the university. Their secretary was wearing a six-armed biomorph, and as we entered she asked "Hello, do you have an appointment?". On the desk, a sign identified her as Gal Hazard.

M1 answered honestly "No, but if Doctor Sagi Brose is available for a walk-in we would like to speak with them please. Though they aren't a suspect in our investigation, they might have information that is extremely important."

Gal looked distinctly unimpressed "An investigation you say? What exactly would you be investigating, madames Zargosty?"

Entirely unphased, M1 answered "We're hunting a pirate by the name of Alex Fuller who successfully stole several Non-Orientable Wormholes. We know he grew up on Bark and narrowed down the list of possible Alex Fullers to ten possible candidates, one of whom was acquainted with Doctor Brose before he left Bark."

Gal tsked, saying "I should have known you lot were from the Frontier, coming in here armed to the teeth like you did. What backwater dump of a system are you from anyway?"

I couldn't help it. "We're from the Red Star Union, a federalized parliamentary republic of eight systems and a total population of nine trillion people. Though we might be far from the Old Core, rest assured that a backwater dump we are not."

With one pair of her hands, Gal clapped slowly and sarcastically, remarking "Wow, I'm so impressed. Just the lack of manners I'd expect from a bunch of yokels like you." Though Gal didn't notice, a bulky synthmorph had silently walked up behind her and crossed their arms disapprovingly, their video screen representation of a mouth curved into a frown as Gal continued to speak "Come back when your capitol is a Megasystem, then we'll talk."

Then the synthmorph spoke up with a smooth, but tense sounding voice "No, we will talk NOW, Gal."

Immediately, Gal whirled around in her chair and gaped "Dean Qualron!-"

The apparent Dean simply raised his voice and talked over Gal Hazard "This is the fourth time this Megasecond I've caught you being bigoted, and it's a persistent pattern of behavior that you have maintained since you were hired. I told you last time that it was your last chance to shape up, and that remains true. Get out, and take your personal effects when you leave. I've already had IT revoke your permissions to the University's systems."

Gal gaped silently before sagging in defeat and starting to clean out her belongings from the desk. As she did so, Dean Qualron greeted us "Hello. I am Soya Qualron, dean of the Bioengineering department here at CMI. You wished to speak with Doctor Sagi Brose about one of his old students, correct?"

We all nodded in affirmation. Dean Qualron hummed understandingly, before noting "Doctor Brose is currently being re-morphed after an expedition to Bark's surface. They aren't expected to finish printing for another few minutes, but I can certainly ask them if they'd be willing to talk to you after they're up and moving around."

I agreed "That's perfectly fine. We can wait here until they're ready."

And with that, Dean Qualron left for the Mindcast office at roughly the same time as Gal finished packing her things and stormed out the door. We sat down in the lobby's comfortable armchairs, the sheer squishiness of the upholstery making it very easy on our tails.

Sure enough, a few minutes later Dean Qualron came back, bringing along Doctor Brose. They were wearing a scaled lizard-ish biomorph, with an eye-like organ in the center of their forehead that was almost certainly a bio-laser. They were also wearing a long white jacket covered in pockets, as well as a pair of heavy-duty cargo pants.

The Doctor greeted us "Hello, I am Doctor Sagi Brose. I was told you wanted to speak with me about one of my former students?"

We all stood up as I noted "Yes, we want to ask you about one Alex Fuller. Evidence suggests he's one of ten plausible candidates for having become the pirate known as Captain Fuller, who is wanted for having stolen four Non-Orientable Wormholes."

Doctor Brose raised one of his eyelids in imitation of an eyebrow, before asking "Question; why is it so important to talk to me about this? Tracking down a pirate ship seems more like a job for a fleet of Voidskippers checking all the plausible locations they could have gone, rather than a job that calls for a bunch of people to ask questions of a professor."

Huh, that was actually a really good point. Still, we had an answer "We have intelligence from a former member of the same pirate crew as Captain Fuller. According to her, Fuller believes in divination and came up with some sort of equation for what stars to go to in order to change his fate. If we can get a copy of that equation we can predict his movements and save an awful lot of work tracking him down; we were hoping you knew where to find some old backups of Alex Fuller we could interrogate about that equation."

Doctor Brose rubbed one hand under his chin for a moment, before saying "Very clever indeed, though it does sadden me to be reminded of my former student's persistence at magical thinking. I have a few ideas where you could go to find a backup of my apparently piratical pupil, but that is not a topic of conversation for a lobby like this. Instead, we should discuss this in my office. Please, follow me."

Doctor Brose turned and led us through the hallways of the University's bio-engineering department, passing the Mindcast bay he'd recently been printed in en route. We passed a few other professor's offices on the way before arriving at a synthwood door with a simple sign reading "Dr. Sagi Brose, Dr. Theren Zuun"

When we entered the office itself, there were indeed two desks present, though apparently Dr. Zuun was out at the moment. Either way, Dr. Brose sat down on his chair and turned to face us. Behind us, some of the currently unused shelving units reconfigured into basic stools. Ah, smart matter.

We sat down, and the first thing that Dr. Brose said was "While Alex did delete almost all of his backups before his departure from Bark, for a Gigasecond prior he had been using archival tapes to store backups of himself as a form of diary."

We all blinked, and M2 asked "Magtape? Who stores a mind on magtape? And why would those backups be more likely to have survived?"

Dr. Brose looked distinctly bemused, before saying "Alex stored minds on magtape, obviously. As for why the archival tapes would have survived when his other backups would not, he had a habit of hiding them in interesting places once they filled up. There were a few on Bark that I know about, but at least half of them were cached on Blackwood's surface. We will of course be checking the cache locations on Bark first due to ease of access."

With that, Dr. Brose got up and started walking, noting "I will of course be accompanying you, but I must also print a second instance to attend to my duties here. We will re-integrate once we are done assisting you." before he turned into the Mindcast bay. We caught a brief glimpse of him headbutting the external scanning probe, and one of the pods spun into motion as he noted "Anyway, now that there will shortly be a second me to help out around here, it is time for us to go and check the first of the cache locations. Follow me please, we are going to Iridescent Crater Park, a theme park relatively close to here. Please leave your weaponry here at the university; the security there will not present you the opportunity to check it, no matter what your justification is. They have sniper turrets guarding the entrance, just in case."

And with that, we were off. It was a quick trip to the train station, and from there it only took a few minutes of waiting to reach Iridescent Crater Park, much of which I spent petting M6 after she slumped into my personal space. She purred happily in response, making good use of that purr emulator we'd spent ages tinkering with back when we initially designed our morph to have superficially feline traits. A few more scritches behind the ears, and M6 practically melted into my lap. Looking up, I could see that all the other mes were clearly jealous, but also too enthralled by the scene to do much about it.

Of course, that didn't last long, since this was still a very short train ride. As we arrived at our stop, Dr. Brose got up and said "Follow me, please. The archival tape we wish to retrieve was located in a position that guests are generally not allowed to enter. As such, we will need to acquire special authorization in order to reach it."

What followed was a dizzying whirlwind of bureaucracy that Dr. Brose navigated like an expert to such a degree that it almost seemed like a performance. We bounced from Customer Service to Facilities Maintenance, to a storage shed to grab a ladder, and ultimately to the station building for the Victorian Steamer, a launched roller coaster done up with a steampunk theme and flashy brass finish.

As we levered the ladder into position to climb up onto the roof of the station and access the clocktower on top of the station building, M1 commented "Any idea how Alex got the archival tape in there in the first place?"

I shrugged as I climbed the ladder after the facilities maintenance person, remarking "Not important. Anyway, let's see if that archival tape is still there."

Anyway, the theme park member in question quickly scrambled up to the clock tower and opened one of the clock faces, noting "Take a look, just don't break anything."

I don't know why I was surprised to see that they were using a simple micro-controller, a speaker, and a set of stepper motors instead of an actual mechanical timekeeping mechanism, but I didn't let it bother me too much. Anyway, the bottom part of the clock tower was empty aside from the timekeeping mechanism, but I could see a synthwood platform directly above.

Anyway, there was no obvious way to climb up there without getting a ladder and it was just a little bit too tall for me to see over it anyway. So I popped my head off (prompting a "huh" from the maintenance person) and lifted it up to get a look at what was up there.

I immediately got cawed at by an iridescent bird that had made her nest in the cranny up there, which actually startled me into dropping my head. Fortunately it was made with properly durable soft tissue and bones so there wasn't any serious damage; after putting my head back on, I replied to the maintenance person "Sorry for the interruption."

Once we were back outside the theme park, Doctor Brose noted "There are two other possible locations on Bark that are worth checking. One in an amphitheater at a rival university, and another in a hydroponic farm facility."

Of course both of those also came up as a bust, prompting M2 to ask when we got back to his office "Alright, we've checked every location on Bark you knew about. So, I guess that means our next stop is the surface of Blackwood?"

Doctor Brose nodded somberly "Yes, an expedition will be required. You were wise to bring those battle lasers and mag rifles, but without detailed knowledge of Blackwood's highly dangerous biosphere they will not be sufficient. I only just got back from an expedition and acting as mission control is not my forte; as such you can either accept a knowledge implant, or I can attempt to find another guide for you."

There was a rapid, brief deliberation between us, before M7 said "I'll take the knowledge implant, then the rest of us will check me over for issues before I share it with the rest."

Doctor Brose nodded, before saying "In that case, allow me to forward the files to your tablet." and entering a few commands on his desktop computer console.

M7's tablet rang, and I could immediately tell by the subtle shift in expression that Max was using her body right now, applying his expertise as a cyberwar specialist to ensuring the encyclopedia files weren't full of malware. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, Max 7 proclaimed "The encyclopedia files are clean. Going to internalize them now."

A couple moments later, M7 nodded. Max 5 and 4 took that as their cue to perform a double check on M7, interfacing their tablets with M7's brain and blackboxes in limited connectivity mode to check through every single scrap of cognitive processing for malware. In the background, Sagi was looking rather bemused at the production we were making of this whole thing, rolling his eyes when Max 4 noted "OK, it's clean."

Doctor Brose replied with a distinctly unamused tone "Of course it's clean, I'm a professor, not some kind of mind criminal. Why in the world would I want to hurt my students?"

We all blinked at that, before M2 asked "We won't have to pay for tuition, will we?"

Doctor Brose deadpanned "I wouldn't have normally asked, but after that display of unwarranted paranoia I am strongly considering demanding a consultation fee."

A few minutes later we had all assimilated the knowledge implant, and were on our way to one of the orbital ring stations used for deploying new and hideously dangerous lifeforms onto Bark's surface. En route, Doctor Brose was talking to us over the network, noting "Fortunately for you Alex had a particular fondness for a single region of Blackwood, known as the Corundum Plateau. As such, you are unlikely to need to explore the entire planetary surface. On the other hand, it is still a large enough area that a vehicle is recommended. As such you are being provided with a drop copter, which will both provide you with versatile air transport and function as a mobile Mindcast bay for when you return."

I nodded as I replied "Right, because the laser satellite grid is primed to shoot first, ask questions never in the case of things leaving Blackwood's atmosphere."

Doctor Brose hummed appreciatively "Exactly. While there's never been a case of an experimental organism escaping Blackwood's surface, no-one on Bark wants to take any chances. Anyway, the list of locations has been loaded into the navigation computer for your helicopter. Still, it's been almost two Gigaseconds, so it's possible the archival tapes have been moved somewhat; they were each encased in a thick carbon nanotube protective layer with plenty of additional fireproofing, so they should probably still be intact."

I replied "Got it, thanks for all the help Doctor Brose."

The professor smiled ever so slightly, before replying "You are quite welcome. I will have to maintain correspondence with you when your investigation is complete."

Anyway, the mag train we were riding in arrived at the orbital ring in good time, and we swiftly reached one of the transfer stations. Sure enough, a fairing was waiting for us containing a folded up ducted fan helicopter with seats for seven people. An announcement came over the intercom "Greetings Expedition 271-666-704-525-623-320. You will be deployed to the Corundum Plateau shortly, please enter the pod."

We all shared a glance before we stepped forward and climbed into the helicopter's passenger cabin. We made sure our weapons and equipment were properly secured so they wouldn't go flying around the cabin, then we closed the door to the cabin, sealed it properly, and strapped ourselves in. A few moments later, the top half of the payload faring lowered around us, and the helicopter's display lit up with a simplified diagram of Blackwood's orbital space even as the computer announced "All passengers and cargo are now properly stowed. Readying for launch."

Then we were pressed back into our seats as the magnetic launch rail of the orbital ring started accelerating our pod around Bark. Gradually we noticed that the downwards force from gravity was getting weaker and weaker as we approached orbital speeds, with a brief period of microgravity before we started getting pulled upwards into our seats. Our speed had now exceeded the orbital velocity for our current altitude over Bark, and before much longer could pass the forces abruptly dropped to zero as our pod detached from the magnetic rail.

Then we were in microgravity, the console showing our transfer trajectory with a countdown to our arrival time. While it would take a little while to cross the forty five thousand kilometers between Bark and Blackwood, we were all far too focused on the mission to be much worried about passing the time. What followed was an agonizing wait as gravity brought us closer and closer to the insanely deadly deathworld below.

Then our pod hit the atmosphere, the aeroshell passively orienting in the correct direction even as we plunged through the skies and were shoved into our seats even harder than the orbital ring had done. Then the faring blew off with the distinctive crack of explosive bolts, and with several loud clunks our helicopter unfolded into its flight configuration, the ducted fans extending from their position folded flat against the fuselage and the tail telescoping to its full length. With a whine of motors the propellers blurred into motion and our descent through the skies halted.

Then and only then did our helicopter's navigation computer announce in a mildly distressing chipper tone of voice "Welcome to Blackwood."

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
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Also, if you like the story, please comment! The added visibility will be greatly appreciated, and feedback will help with improving future novels.

 

[We Just Write]

J: *sigh*, it's hard to tell if anyone actually cares about this story when we get so little feedback. Feels like we're ranting into the void.

 

[GammaRailgun]

(Current reading point: End of Chapter 2)
I like how the second chapter is "secretly" chock full of technical and scientific details, yet they're concealed well enough (by nature of being minor observations of commonplace things in the setting) that they're very easily digestible. Good work! Keep it up

 

[GammaRailgun]

J: *sigh*, it's hard to tell if anyone actually cares about this story when we get so little feedback. Feels like we're ranting into the void.

Click to shrink...

Allow me to fix that.

 

[We Just Write]

Z: Thanks!

 

[We Just Write]

From our helicopter it was easy to see the entirety of the Corundum Plateau stretching out below us. To our south there was a major mountain range, while the northeast was a series of cliffs leading down to the lowlands, and the west gradually disintegrated into the foothills. As for the plateau itself, it was largely grassland fading into forest towards the southern half. The sensor package almost immediately picked out flocks of wild laser sheep, several varieties of airborne predator, prolific exploding trees, and plenty of other horrendously dangerous lifeforms.

Despite the immense beauty and danger of the nature deserve below us, we still had a job to do. M1 quickly loaded up the first set of coordinates on the expedition helicopter's navigation computer, and groaned when she saw where exactly it was saying we needed to go. Honestly, I was rather inclined to agree, given that the first site was a major nesting site for Brose's Wyvern, Revision 58.

That little bit of information was a stark reminder that for all his amiability, Doctor Brose was still a reckless bio-engineer who enthusiastically took part in Bark's national pastime of concocting horrendously dangerous lifeforms and releasing them onto Blackwood's surface. Case in point, the Wyverns; they were horrendously territorial, flew in flocks of several hundred organisms, and Doctor Brose had somehow managed to cram a fully functional electron beam weapon into them. There was no way we could fly our helicopter in there, it would get shot down almost instantly. Similarly, going in loud was a good way to get ourselves killed.

After conferring for a few moments, we agreed that probably the best option would be to park the helicopter a kilometer or so to the south and draw off the wyverns in groups to kill them off until we could take out the rest without too many issues.

The landing of the helicopter went very smoothly all things considered, with no serious issues whatsoever. We found a decently clear area, lasered it clean of flora, and left M1 and M7 to guard our vehicle while the rest of us checked our gear and started making our way to the east, so that we wouldn't accidentally lead the wyverns right back to our landing site.

We'd barely gotten half a kilometer before M2 raised a hand to halt and gestured towards what seemed to be a large pile of laser sheep dung as she noted over our internal radio transceivers "That pile of poop seems suspiciously large and also doesn't smell right. Going to lase it on suppressive fire mode in case it's a shocker."

True to her word, M2 snapped up her battle laser and sent a pulse train right into the apparent pile of feces. Said object obligingly exploded, and the scraps abruptly started changing colors and twitching rapidly as the bits of tissue from the ambush predator M2 detected went through their death throes. I commented "Nice catch M2. Getting electrocuted by that thing would have sucked."

That diversion over, we continued circling around the Brose's Wyvern nesting grounds – taking care to avoid a passing flock of laser sheep on the way – and soon got close enough to start planning how we wanted to do this. It was M5 who noted as she hefted her mag rifle and leaned against a particularly large boulder "Those Wyverns take time to aim and their range with those particle beams is pretty short compared to our weapons; in addition, the lumpy terrain they've turned their nesting grounds into means they can't all fire on us at once, and we've got some nice cover thanks to these rocks. If we just open fire from here we can probably kill a significant number of them before they can respond."

I blinked, before I asked "We'll be pinned down if we do this and probably need to keep an eye out for flanking. Are you sure this is a good idea M5?"

M5 shrugged, noting "We sure can't sneak in, going in hot is suicide, and the terrain didn't work out for our original plan of ambushes. I'm having a hard time figuring out a practical alternative here. Plus all our weapons fire is as close to silent and invisible as such things can get, meaning that they might not even figure out where we're shooting from right away."

M4 and M6 nodded slowly, clearly agreeing with M5's logic. I sighed, noting "Guess we're doing this, then."

And so we carefully propped our weaponry over the tops of the boulders we'd found. I zoomed in on the pack of Wyverns using the smart scope of my battle laser and marked the targets I'd be hitting first on our tactical mesh. Soon we'd all agreed on which Wyverns each of us would shoot in our opening strike, and with perfectly coordinated timing we opened fire.

M5 and M6 actually shot slightly before M2, M4 and I. Mag gun shots had a noticeable time of travel, unlike laser pulses at this range, and we wanted our shots to hit simultaneously rather than being fired simultaneously. So we only opened up with our battle lasers when the first mag gun rounds impacted.

Our laser beams flickered rapidly across the mob of Brose's Wyverns, auto-targeting optics zigzagging between Wyverns with lightning speed to engage the next target the instant the previous ones went down, needing only a fraction of a second to mission-kill each wyvern. Even as we lased away, the mag rifle fire from M5 and M6 was outright exploding any wyverns it hit, sending fragments of bone splintering outwards to injure any other organisms that happened to be standing nearby.

Within seconds it was done and we lowered our weapons; enough of the wyverns had been killed that we now had some breathing room. Then we heard the buzzing. We all whirled around only to see a swarm containing hundreds of thousands of flying insects flying straight towards us. I recognized them instantly as Madame Passy's Psychowasps. Fuck.

Immediately I went into full combat-think, time seeming to slow as my brain ran at maximum speed. It took a mere fraction of a second for all of us to agree on a course of action. The psychowasps were just too small, fast, and numerous for individual targeting, even with raster blaster mode. If we tried to shoot them down individually, we were going to get stung to death in extremely short order. Fortunately our lasers weren't limited to individual targeting.

A very quick adjustment to the laser optics defocused the beams from their normal tight beam to an angular cone nearly thirty degrees wide, with the pulsed mode switching off in favor of continuous wave operation. As expected, massive plumes of coolant erupted from the vents of our lasers even as the cones of infrared death quickly started incinerating whole swathes of the psychowasp swarm. M5 and M6 had drawn their sidearm lasers so they could contribute too, but those were passively cooled; they'd only be able to fire off bursts about a second long at a time, and they only had a quarter of the beam output of our battle lasers. So they were wisely holding fire as a last-ditch save.

Then the swarm split, forcing us to cover multiple angles at once instead of only needing to deal with a single massive swarm from one direction. Fuck, this was the intelligent flanking behavior that made Madame Passy's magnum opus so dangerous.

I immediately called out over internal radio "I'll take the center, M2 and M4 take left and right!" as we all hurried to keep the swarm of insanely aggressive wasps at bay. It was difficult not to panic and fall to wildly flailing my laser around, but it was also critical; in unfocused continuous mode it took noticeable dwell time for our battle lasers to fry a wasp, and to make matters worse the wasps were smart enough to try and dodge out of the beam before they burned to death. The dwell time required dropped off massively as the wasps got closer, but by the same token that just meant we were in even more danger.

There were a few moments where a bit of the swarm got past the cones of death from our battle lasers and M5 and M6 needed to save our hides with their carbines. In one notable case a few dozen psychowasps actually landed on my leg and started biting and stinging before M6 burned them off, leaving some notable scorch marks on my armor. Still, at the end of thirty five incredibly stressful seconds we'd managed to kill enough of the swarm that the remaining few thousand psychowasps retreated, doubtless off to find some other prey item to tear apart and replenish their numbers.

We all took a deep breath to calm down, before one of the remaining Brose's Wyverns poked its head around our cover with its mouth open to blast us with its electron beam. Fortunately M2 was even quicker on the draw with her battle laser then the Wyvern was with its electron beam, and managed to put a pulse train right between its eyes before it could shoot us.

Of course just getting its head blown off wasn't going to be enough to stop a Brose's Wyvern, and it immediately charged at us with the razor-sharp claws on the leading edge of its wings extended. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we panicked and opened fire with everything we had. We only barely managed to take it down before it could finish prying off M5's armor to eviscerate her.

As soon as we verified that M5 was uninjured and her armor was still good, I noted "Alright, let's get this over with. Into the nest."

And so we advanced towards the Brose's Wyvern nesting grounds, finding a deserted collection of nesting mounds, any and all eggs conspicuously absent. Judging by rock scatter and other factors, the nesting grounds had been abandoned in a hurry after we opened fire. I quickly called over radio to M1 and M7 back at the helicopter "Keep an eye out for Brose's Wyverns. They've evacuated their nesting site and are probably looking around for trouble."

We got a reply back from the helicopter almost immediately, M1 saying "Thanks for the heads up M3. We'll keep a watch out for Wyverns."

Still, before going any further into the nesting site, we popped our support drones. They weren't much more than a quadcopter with a laser pistol and a standard sensor package, but better to lose a few drones to an ambush than to take actual casualties.

The feeds from the drones quickly revealed that there were only a few remaining Brose's Wyverns lurking about the nesting ground, and with such accurate knowledge of their location it was trivial for M5 and M6 to snipe them with their mag rifles before they could react.

With the Wyvern nesting grounds now clear, we could start looking around for that archival tape. What followed was an agonizing several kiloseconds of digging through the nesting site in search of a rock that wasn't in fact a rock. We looked high, low, in the actual nests, beneath corpses, and every other nook and cranny we could think of. Then we found it, still perfectly sealed in its protective casing. There was some kind of disgusting slime growing on it that we really didn't want to catch anything from, but we didn't have a good way to clean it off without risking damaging the archival tape inside.

I sighed, and suggested "I'll hatch a hermetically sealed carry bag for that thing. M2, you want to make a pair of tongs? M4, M5, M6. Disinfectant soap. ALL the disinfectant soap." even as I cued my morph's internal 3d printer to start manufacturing an airtight polymer bag full of anti-nanoweapon defenses. Judging by how the rest of my team was looking, they also weren't too pleased by the state the tape was in, but they couldn't think of a better alternative either.

Grudgingly everyone agreed with this course of action, and we waited for our internal printers to do their job. This took a few minutes for each of us, but soon enough my biofeedback informed me that I had an egg ready. Getting that egg out was a minor inconvenience on account of needing to lower the groin plate on my armor and unseal that part of the body glove, but soon I had my vulva exposed to the world and with a bit of a push I ejected the oblong spheroid I'd had cooking up inside me. I quickly re-sealed my armor, then with a bit of tapping I broke open the eggshell to reveal the bag I'd queued up from my internal fabricators.

Looking around, it seemed like everyone else was ready; M2 had her tongs, while M4 through M6 were holding a few unbroken eggs each, presumably full of the disinfectant soap I'd asked for. I held the bag open, while M2 used the Tongs to carefully drop the archival tape in. I sealed the bag shut, then called "Soap, NOW!"

M4 and M5 immediately provided by throwing their eggs at me and M2, splattering us with goo. I quickly smeared it all over the outside of the sealed bag and all the parts of me that had been in contact with it, making sure to scrub under my armor plates and inside the bodyglove, accepting the stinging chemical burns that resulted without complaint. I was taking absolutely no chances with a possible nanoweapon infection, and neither was M2.

We'd just finished up buttoning up our armor after that scrub-down session when we received some bad news from over the radio. M1's voice came crackling over the channel "Bad news, at least fifty wyverns are closing on the landing site for the helicopter, we've got to relocate!"

That was a good reminder for us, and M4 replied "Understood. We've secured what looks to be an intact archival tape, and we'll meet up with you as soon as possible."

There was a brief moment of silence, before M1 sent again "Got it, our vector is West-South-West. We'll try and loop around to pick you up if we get a clear line of travel, but there's no telling when that will happen. Signing off."

We all shared a glance at what we'd just heard, before M5 shrugged and said "I guess that means we're going west, then."

I nodded and said "Seems that way. Come on, let's get clear of this nesting ground. The Wyverns will probably come back to investigate eventually." and with that we started walking towards the hills bordering the plateau.

Shockingly we managed to avoid any more serious incidents for nearly two kilometers of travel after leaving the Wyvern nesting grounds. Yes we nearly got trampled by a herd of Stahlbeest, we had to incinerate a particularly toxic bramble thicket to clear a path, and several other minor annoyances, but none of us really got particularly injured.

Then I noticed a shadow moving across the ground in my peripheral vision. I looked up just in time to see a quartet of Brose's Wyverns flying towards us and had just enough time to shout "WYVERN!" before they all opened up with their electron beam weapons, hitting all of us except M6.

Willpower didn't fucking matter when you had a high-current electron beam penetrating your central nervous system. It directly fucked with the signals used to transmit commands to the motor system, even as it cooked you from the inside out with its radiation load. Yes there were redundant backups that could hypothetically take up the slack, but those were getting zapped too. All I could do was writhe in agony for what felt like forever until it suddenly stopped. I idly noticed a series of loud repeated cracking sounds as the torture ceased, but I wasn't quite sure what it was until I got up to look.

As I agonizingly hauled myself to my feet sporting a shiny new set of internal radiation burns that my self-repair routines informed me would eventually be terminal without treatment, I looked up to see M6 lowering her mag rifle and changing the magazine. I couldn't help but remark "We need to get off this planet."

M6 nodded sadly, even as she started helping the rest of our party to their feet. She replied "Come on, while you were busy getting fried M7 called and told me that they've landed again; she also provided coordinates. We're about three klicks away, if you think you can make it."

I shook my head no, as I said "M6, you're the only member of our group fit to fight right now; the rest of us are in terminal condition without treatment. Call the helicopter over and see if they can pick us up. We only need to transmit the data on the tape and Mindcast out, then we're done with this planet completely."

M6 nodded, before telling me "M1 and M7 are on their way. Just hang in there."

I laughed bitterly, noting "I'm dying, but not that fast. As long as the helicopter gets here sometime in the next hour I'll be fine."

As if to spite me for tempting fate like that, that's the exact moment my biofeedback informed me "Systemic nanoweapon infection detected. Soft tissue countermeasures ineffective. Blackbox guardians holding. Fabricator system compromised. Estimated time until nervous system completely compromised: four minutes."

I immediately panicked and shouted "Scratch that scratch that! Nanowea-" and then I couldn't talk anymore, as control of my vocal chords was seized from me.

M6 immediately grabbed one of the battle lasers off M4 and shouted "M3, are your blackboxes clean?"

I tried to nod, but my neck wouldn't move. Hurriedly I pinged the only organic brain in my body to check if my cranium had been compromised. No response. Before the nanoweapon infesting my system could figure out what I was about to do, I drew my carbine and blew my head off, temporarily regaining total motor control for long enough to flash a "YES" handsign.

M6's expression went grim, and she nodded in the affirmative even as she set the battle laser to that same unfocused mode we'd used against the psychowasps and opened fire.

When we later synchronized our memories, I found myself most identifying with the perspective of M6 for the next part of the whole ordeal. I'd just seen one of me blow her own head off in order to deal with a nanoweapon sabotaging her communications, barely managing to confirm that her blackboxes were clean. Immediately, I opened fire with the battle laser at maximum power on unfocused mode. RSU military-issue black box implants were made to be extremely heat resistant, specifically so that if someone got hit with an incurable nanoweapon all their infected soft tissue could simply be incinerated without compromising the integrity of the stored mind states.

That's what I was doing now, stoically keeping my laser on M3, despite the gruesome scene of her flesh being carbonized and ablated away with frightening speed. Soon I spotted one of her black boxes in the mess, and I quickly checked that its temperature was in the correct range to have killed every single possible nanite before grabbing it. A quick ping verified that M3 was still alive and well in there, and I went back to incinerating the rest of her morph, grabbing a couple more black boxes as I found them.

I'd just finished reducing M3 to a carbon silhouette when the helicopter landed and M1 asked "M6, what happened?"

I simply replied "Nanoweapon infection. Managed to get M3 despite her doing a full scrub down when handling the drive, so we can absolutely guarantee that whoever handles the tape is going to get infected. All of us are probably infected already, so hurry up and transmit the data so we can get off this fucking horrible planet." as I handed the bag containing the archival tape to M1.

M1 nodded in a panicking fashion, and we quickly got down to business cracking open its casing and slotting it into the tape reader. The spindle whirled around in an imperceptible blur even as our helicopter's communication laser array used every last scrap of bandwidth available to send the data directly to our ship.

The wait was agonizingly long. Yes it only took a minute or so for the tape reader to run through the entire length of the archival tape, but with a dangerous nanoweapon in our systems that we had no way of knowing when it would take over, every second of delay was nerve-wracking.

Still, eventually it was done. M1 nodded, before saying "Alright let's Mindcast out of here. Most injured goes first, and delete on exit."

That was fairly obviously M3, and I slotted her black boxes into the data transfer slots without further delay. The indicator blinked to the transmitting position for a few seconds before returning to the idle state. M2, M4, and M5 went next, each sticking the scanning probe to their spines for a brief moment, then slumping over as their sending-selves were deleted. We shoved each empty morph out of the helicopter as we did this; we didn't want to risk them getting back up and trying to kill us because of whatever horrible disease we'd all contracted.

That left just me, M1, and M7. The two of them looked right at me, before saying "You've been infected longest. You go next."

I didn't argue. I just grabbed the scanning probe and moved it into position. The next thing I knew I was back in a Mindcast bay along with the other six of me. The presence of Bud in one of her favorite mini-morphs meant we were almost certainly back in the Red Star Union, and Shen was curled up in the corner waiting for us to finish printing.

I'm not sure why in the world that particular thought popped up, but the first thing that came to mind to ask was "Excuse me Shen, but why haven't we been reintegrated yet?"

Shen bluntly answered "You are all under psychological observation due to concerns about both possible mental contamination from the nanoweapon you contracted on Blackwood, and good old-fashioned trauma. Consider yourselves benched for the foreseeable future; reintegration is strictly forbidden until you all have a clean bill of mental health." There was a brief pause before the spider continued "That said, I do have some good news."

M3 shuddered slightly at the reminder of having that horrific thing in her body subverting systems one by one. Meanwhile M1 gestured for Shen to continue, even as she cuddled M3 closer for mutual comfort.

Shen's carapace shifted colors to a gentle cream orange as he nodded, then he said "First, that archival tape you retrieved did in fact contain a usable copy of Captain Alex Fuller's divination equation; we've got analyst teams using it now to narrow down the possible locations of Bark's Finest. Good job getting that for us, even if we wish you didn't have to go through that particular ordeal."

I nodded solemnly, and Shen continued "In additional good news, we took the opportunity to buy all of Bark's considerable immunology expertise while we were there, since it was incredibly clear they massively outclassed us in that regard. We now know exactly what it was that infected you, and rest assured that your new morphs are fully immune to it."

M3 shuddered again, and asked "Our mission-"

Uncharacteristically, Shen chose that moment to interrupt "Madeline Zargosty 3. You are to consider yourself off-duty for the foreseeable future, and that is an order. Your mission is being continued by an instance of you from immediately before you diverged. M8 has already been fully briefed on the situation and will come visit you once her role in this operation is completed. Until then, your mission is simply to relax and recover from the events you went through, is that clear?"

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
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[GammaRailgun]

(Current reading point: End of Chapter 4)
Interesting plot developments, leaving a nice cliffhanger to draw into chapter 5. I can't help but wonder what any kind of spacecraft needs a crew of a million for, though...
I'd love to say "keep it up", but it's all prewritten.
Good work!

 

[We Just Write]

While Max and I were aware of my other instances being off-duty for the foreseeable future due to the incident on Blackwood, we had been told in no uncertain terms that continuing the mission came first.

At the moment that focus on the mission meant Shen was briefing us on our next assignment, noting "Anyway, thanks to the analysts poking through Alex Fuller's archival drive and reconstructing his divination equation we've already discovered a space station that the crew of Bark's Finest constructed to service their ship in interstellar space, though it looks like they haven't been there for a while."

Shen paused for a brief moment, before noting "You'll be Mindcast back to the Loan Shark shortly to take part in picking through it for any additional scraps of information as to where the pirates might have gone. In the meantime we've got a constrained instance of Alex Fuller running in an isolated server for interrogation purposes, and we're wondering what if anything you might be able to get out of him. We've already got all his memories out the direct way, but there's some things about a person you can only really learn by talking to them."

I blinked in surprise, before asking "Shen you are aware I was never trained for prolonged interrogations, correct? I'm a field agent, not an analyst or an interrogator."

Shen nodded in agreement "I am fully aware of what qualifications you do and don't have, Agent Madeline Zargosty Eight. Still, it has been determined that some firsthand experience with Alex Fuller may be useful for investigating a former base of operations. As such, please follow me and we'll get you hooked into the interrogation virtual reality."

And so I found myself following after Shen as he guided me to a nondescript room in the BoSI office block. When we arrived a synthmorph-wearing technician saluted and greeted us with "The simulation is fully prepared. For security reasons the only data in or out is via bandwidth-limited hardlink; I'll connect you as soon as you're ready, Agent Zargosty."

I nodded, and sat down in the chair provided. I felt a pad being pressed against my neck, and a prompt to accept a virtuality invite popped into my awareness. I accepted with a thought, and then suddenly the BoSI office fell away leaving me sitting across a table from a man wearing a form visually indistinguishable from a baseline human. The simulated area around us resembled a park more than anything, with a river running beside us, soft grass all around, and several colorful flowerbeds being busily pollinated by tiny drones.

Entirely unphased at my sudden appearance, the man raised an eyebrow as he asked "My future self got himself killed, didn't he?"

I shook my head, and replied "Actually no. Anyway, hello Alex Fuller; I am Madeline Zargosty, and I'm with the Red Star Union's Bureau of Starforce Intelligence. It's been a bit less than two Gigaseconds since you were archived, and your future self is a rather successful space pirate captaining a crew that stole four Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs."

That apparently got through to Alex, as his only response was a simple "What. That's absurd; the security on NOWs is utterly ridiculous. You'd need to flawlessly infiltrate multiple different organizations to even have a chance at stealing them without getting exploded for your trouble, and there's absolutely no way you could fence that sort of thing. Plus there would be utterly ridiculous levels of heat from every single direction in the aftermath."

I grinned as I noted "You're pretty sharp there; every single part of what you said is entirely accurate. And yet your future self not only managed to pull it off, but also doubtless knew about every single complicating factor you just outlined. So tell me, what could have lead your future self to this decision?"

There was a pause of several seconds, before Alex answered "He's probably going to try and found his own nation around a young blue star with a mass roughly twice that of sol, preferably with a red dwarf secondary. We both know that he knows damn well there's no way to fence NOWs, but on the other hand having a bunch of extras would be extremely useful for bootstrapping an industrial base in a newly settled star system; especially since they provide a massive shortcut to having your own wormhole industry. I don't think I would have left the galaxy though; too invested in the baseline holdouts to completely sever ties with the rest of civilization."

I thought for a moment and asked "Care to elaborate on that last point? While I can't understand the appeal myself, letting the tiny fraction of people who want to remain as baseline humans do that seems pretty harmless."

Alex winced at that, before he explained "I was born in a baseline enclave, and let me tell you right now that they're anything but harmless. Ever stopped to wonder how they keep people from leaving for the rest of civilization, despite the amazing quality of life increase from getting a proper body, or even just going fully virtual in a secured server? Go on, guess."

Immediately possibilities whirled through my mind as to how exactly that sort of thing could be achieved, and I suddenly felt a chill as the implications slammed home. Cautiously I answered "I'm guessing a mix of childhood indoctrination and emotional blackmail in most cases, along with even more restrictive measures. Like you said most sane people would want out of that sort of place, so they'd need to be coerced into staying."

Alex nodded "Got it in one. I spent the first half a gigasecond of my life swallowing every single lie about transhumanity that the elders spewed before a few friends and I finally managed to break out of the information bubble they were keeping us in. As soon as that happened I made a dash out of the enclave's owned districts and ran to the nearest re-morphing facility I could find. I got the closest thing to a war-morph that I possibly could, then I went back in."

I nodded solemnly, asking "You wanted to get your friends out, didn't you?"

Alex frowned, before replying "Yes, and I only barely succeeded. Anyway, our accounts of the conditions in the baseline enclave hit the news immediately after. Bark's government immediately ordered a forced dissolution of the enclave and that all the elders were to be taken for questioning. The elders responded by turning things into a hostage situation; they deployed a nanoweapon that would allow them to remotely kill any of their flock on command, and demanded that the enclave be allowed to remain intact."

I nodded sadly. Textbook authoritarian behavior, desperately holding onto every last possible scrap of power for as long as possible. After a moment or so, I asked "So, I take it that didn't end well?"

What followed was several seconds of hollow, bitter laughter before Alex managed to answer "Are you kidding? This is Bark we're talking about; a nation by, for, and of mad bio-engineers. They had a counter agent for the nanoweapon designed and deployed via aerosol inside a kilosecond. Still, the cure hadn't reached everyone before the Elders realized what happened and sent out the kill signal."

Alex's face fell as he recounted "Almost everyone I knew and loved died that day, and because of the Elders' rabid insistence on keeping everyone as pure baseline humans they died permanently. Doctor Brose took me in during the aftermath, but we never really meshed on any significant level. I haven't really felt like I truly belonged anywhere since then; it's one of the reasons I was thinking about becoming a spacer, but judging by what you've told me about my future self that didn't exactly go well."

I nodded solemnly, before asking "You never even thought about becoming a pirate until now, did you?"

Alex frowned, before answering "Never is a strong word, but becoming a pirate wasn't really in my plans. What seems most likely is that some other crew members decided to commit mutiny, and my future self went along with it afterwards."

There were another few moments of silence, before Alex said "There's not much else I can tell you about the other me's actions. He's simply diverged too much for me to make a more accurate guess than what I've already told you. I'm sorry."

I thought for a moment, before asking "Is there anything else you want to talk about? It doesn't have to be about your future self, your upbringing, or anything else that makes you uncomfortable."

Alex paused for a few moments, before noting "That's appreciated. Still, I really don't have anything else I want to talk about; I just want to get out of this virtual space and try to rebuild my life. I suppose maybe I could talk about my family, but that just seems like a way to bring up old pain that I'm not ready to deal with right now."

I nodded solemnly and exited the virtual reality. Shen was waiting there, and asked "So, Agent Zargosty. What's your professional opinion on Alex Fuller, now that you've gotten to meet him in person?"

My reply was simple and direct "Get that man a body, a therapist, an identity in no way connected to Captain Fuller or Bark's Finest, and maybe a family if you can swing it. The instance of Alex Fuller in that server is a completely normal person who's been through some bad times, and can almost certainly be a decent citizen of the RSU with normal levels of support. Putting him through the criminal justice system would be an act of pointless cruelty."

Shen chittered agreeably, before noting "While that is a good set of recommendations for dealing with him, it's not quite what I was asking about. Madeline Zargosty, do you believe that the interview helped you understand Alex Fuller as a person, and is that knowledge likely to assist with the investigation."

I hummed "Yes, pretty sure I learned an awful lot about his motivations. I'm unsure how much it will actually help with the mission, but knowledge is power so it's not going to cause any problems."

Shen idly shifted his carapace into a swirling pink and orange pattern before replying "Good. In that case get yourself back to the Mindcast bay. Your next assignment is to join the crew of the Loan Shark in picking through the abandoned space station constructed by the crew of Bark's Finest. You are to be deployed immediately, so get going."

I fired off a quick salute and immediately took off at a jog, my tail swishing behind me as I traveled. I only took a few minutes to reach the room in question, and I quickly encountered Bud. She cheerfully exclaimed "Hello M8! Where are you two going now?"

I answered "Back to Loan Shark please. Max and I have been assigned to go pick through an old base left behind by the crew of Bark's Finest." as I climbed into one of the scanning pods.

Bud answered "Sure thing." as the cover of the pod closed. The scanning probe came down and brushed against my spine, and instantly I was in a different Mindcast pod entirely.

As I got out I was greeted by Grom, who waved a tentacle at me as he greeted me "Hello Madeline, I've been waiting for you. I look forward to collaborating with you on our upcoming mission."

I couldn't help but smirk, noting "Nice to see you too Grom, and I see you're as dry as ever. I'm absolutely looking forward to the mission, and did you know there's an entire harem of me waiting for you after we get this whole thing wrapped up?"

That's the exact moment that I learned Grom's squid-like synthmorph was equipped with blush lights, his face visibly lighting up as he twitched slightly in barely suppressed excitement, before cheerfully remarking "Well, it's a good thing I've got enough tentacles for all of you then. Anyway, I'll give you the rundown on what we've found exploring this place so far while we make our way to the transfer tube." as he turned towards the exit of the Mindcast bay and gestured for me to follow him.

I obligingly trailed along behind Grom as he lead me through the familiar corridors of the Loan Shark. That said, it looked an awful lot less piratey than it had, with most of the decorations having been stripped out and replaced with the Red Star Union Starforce's more utilitarian gray and blue color scheme. Soon we reached a window looking out into the Skimmer bay, and I got my first glimpse of the space station the Bark's Finest crew had constructed.

The first word that popped into mind when I looked at it was "Scaffolding". It was an exposed structural framework for the most part with a few tanks for storing extra fuel in, and a bay for temporary plunder storage. I couldn't spot anywhere a power plant could have gone on it, but on reflection it seemed fairly obvious that they'd have used the Non-Orientable Wormhole reactor aboard Bark's Finest to run the station's systems.

As we approached the tube leading from our ship into the space station, Grom noted "The station's structural frame actually contains a surprisingly large amount of habitat space, though only about a percent of it has been mapped and cleared out so far. We've been assigned to the same sector near the fuel tanks, so come with me. By the way, here's a data packet with everything we've figured out about the place so far."

True to his word, Grom sent a data packet my way that I quickly internalized. Immediately my knowledge about the space station's layout was significantly improved, but still incredibly sparse given how little had yet been explored. Still, looking through the data I couldn't help but note "Huh. I'd have thought that the pirates would have left behind more automated defenses to cause problems for unwelcome visitors."

We were just entering the transfer tube and grabbing on to one of the tram handles when Grom replied "They probably figured no-one would be likely to find this base, to be completely honest. If they'd been selecting locations randomly instead of through Captain Fuller's weird fortune telling they would have been right in all likelihood. The interstellar void tends to be very low on Steaders out here on the Frontier, and those are the only people likely to bother with visiting such a place unless they've got a reason to go poking around."

I shrugged and replied "Makes sense to me. Anyway, it looks like our tram is arriving."

Indeed, the handle we were riding along began pulling to a stop at the other end of the tube, and both Grom and I released to let what momentum remained fling us into the connected area of the space station. An agent wearing a bulky synthmorph greeted us, before saying "Sector 1-2-0. Right that way. I'll be coming with you."

Suddenly, I had an overwhelming premonition that we were about to walk into a deathtrap, and I wanted every last bit of assurance I could get before I went in there.. Immediately, I called out "I'm going to make a backup right this instant before we get out of Loan Shark's network range. Grom, I highly recommend you do the same." and pinged the Loan Shark's network to send them a copy of both Max and myself.

The next thing I knew I was in a Mindcast pod, the agent who'd greeted us in the space station's lobby busily attaching a new left arm to his shoulder where it looked like it had been shot off. As I hauled myself to an upright position, the agent idly glanced over towards Grom and I and noted "Welcome back to the land of the living, agents Zargosty and Hadrian. Though I suppose from your perspective you never left."

I winced at the realization of what must have happened, before asking "So how much time did I lose?"

At the exact same moment, I realized I was wearing a synthmorph; instead of the mess of metabolic pathways typically reported by my biofeedback, there was only exterior sensors, basic system status for primary energy reservoirs and motors, damage readouts, and basic interfaces with the internal maintenance and defense nanites that were the only biological systems. Still, I retained most of my normal looks, albeit in polymer white rather than my normal somewhat melanistic skin tone. It made sense; synthmorphs are quicker to make and have higher combat performance; that's why the army uses them so much.

The agent replied "You lost about a kilosecond, and also all your black boxes; otherwise you'd have remembered what went down. Anyway Grom had a spare morph on-hand so he's been back up and running for a while already, but the same can't be said for you. He's in the nearest armory getting a bunch of explosives ready at the moment; it's highly recommended that you stop by there as well. We're going to be needing some serious anti-materiel weaponry to deal with the automated defense systems that we stumbled into."

I couldn't help but groan. Of course they'd have saved the defenses for the actually important parts of the space station. Quickly, I asked "Mind sending me a memory packet about what happened to internalize? Going in blind is stupid and it's not a mistake I want to repeat."

The agent nodded, and a few seconds later I had a pretty good idea of the fates that had befallen both Grom and my other selves. They'd gotten most of the way through the corridors towards the back frame of the space station, when suddenly everything turned into deathtraps. It was all stuff that could be run off reserve power, but on the scale of a space station that reserve power could do a lot of damage. Case in point, the other me had been almost instantly coated in some incendiary compound and burned to the point where her blackboxes were no longer viable; meanwhile Grom had just been so riddled with mag gun fire from a turret that everything in his morph had been trashed. It was pretty clear; we'd been lulled into a false sense of security.

Immediately after that realization, I stormed off towards the nearest armory on this thirty kilometer ship, fuming at other me's complacence the whole way. I arrived a few minutes later, and came face to face with Grom, my favorite robotic cephalopod in the whole entire universe. At the moment, he was checking over some gear.

As I arrived, he turned to face me and remarked "Ah, nice to have you back Madeline. If you'll come over here, I've got several pieces of gear ready for us to use that we really should have had on the first run."

I obliged Grom and walked over, and just as I arrived he opened up a case revealing thousands of insect-sized drones. Taking a look at them, I guessed "Expendable scouts? Nice."

Grom replied smugly "More than that; each of these bugs has a one-shot plasma cutter that'll let it do some seriously nasty stuff to any hardware we use it on. If they run into something where they can't get close enough to do that, that's what the lasers are for. I've got my tentacle beams like always, though this time with active cooling. As for you, please look to your right."

I did so, my gaze first hitting upon the weapon that Grom picked out from me. The architecture reminded me vaguely of a flamethrower from one of those industrial-age war reenactments, with the huge energy unit and coolant tank in a backpack connected to a pistol-sized beam gun by a hose. I quickly checked the rating; one megawatt. With the massive backpack for running that laser, that meant it could keep up continuous fire for well over a kilosecond.

Looking at it, I asked "Grom, this is the sort of weapon used for extremely heavy-duty suppressive fire, not anti-materiel work. Are you sure this is an appropriate weapon for the job?"

Grom simply replied "The corridors are far too tight for a battle laser to be practical. Similarly, a megawatt of beam power is more than sufficient for destroying defensive weapons, and with how big the facility is we'll need all the endurance on that beam we can get. It's the same reason that my current morph actually has a second entire energy storage unit just for the lasers; I don't want to cut into my main power for this."

I conceded the point and slipped on the backpack, the straps automatically tightening to secure it in a snug position even as I familiarized myself with all of the weapon's firing modes. After a few moments, I noted "Alright, let's get going on this. We've got a space station to pick clean."

And so we traversed the corridors of the Loan Shark once more. When we got to the tram tube, we found a fellow with a large spool of network cable strung with high-bandwidth network routers waiting for us. He didn't even wait for us to ask why, simply noting "Hello, I've been assigned to unroll this cable as you progress deeper into the space station. The idea is that we'll extend the areas our agents can backup and communicate in as we go further in."

Neither Grom, Max, or I had any objections to this; as far as we were concerned having a data pipeline to make backups would be a good thing.

Anyway, a quick ride through the tram tube brought us back to the lobby for the space station, and I couldn't help but feel an extreme level of apprehension as I made another backup. The fact that I didn't immediately wake up in a new body after that was both nerve-wracking and strangely relieving. Nerve-wracking because it meant I still stood a very real chance of being a me that died permanently, and strangely relieving because I knew I still had a chance to get out of this alive.

Grom and I shared a brief glance, and without further delay he opened one of the cases full of drones and sent the activation signal. Immediately a truly vast amount of information patched itself into my sensory awareness as the drones streamed into the air. I will admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by this, so I asked Max "Hey, you want to run the drones? You're the cyberwar specialist, so this is really more your area of expertise than mine."

From the back of my mind Max replied "Certainly, Madeline. Move over a little bit; I'm putting your instance in Black Box number 3 to sleep so I can monopolize its processors."

I felt a little bit of our mental partitions rearrange as Max got himself ready, and within a second or so he started using our body's internal transceiver to synch up with the drones. Idly, Max directed them through a few aerobatic maneuvers before he dispersed them into a proper scouting swarm and said "Alright, let's go."

And so we traveled onwards into the depths of the space station, our follower unrolling cable behind us as we went. The further from friendly territory we got the more of the cable's bandwidth all four of us hogged keeping our remote backups synchronized, the twitchier I got about every single thing that might have been movement, and the more paranoid Max was about inspecting every single little thing for possible traps. This attitude proved rather justified when we found the first mine.

---

This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest, and will have one chapter released per week. If you want to read the entire story ahead of schedule, get access to some premium-exclusive bonus content, and give us some money, it's available for purchase in the following locations.
ebook: Amazon | Smashwords
Paperback: Normal Text | Large Text Edition

Also, if you like the story, please comment! The added visibility will be greatly appreciated, and feedback will help with improving future novels.

 

[We Just Write]

The mine we had found was an absolutely nasty piece of work, as we found out once Max had picked through it with the drone swarm. Ultimately it was a cluster bomb, rigged to blast out massive numbers of marble-sized submunitions to turn anyone in the same corridor to paste while also causing a massive hull breach. It was connected to an array of sensors on a closed-circuit system that Max had to physically infiltrate to defuse, and in doing so he'd discovered several other deathtraps connected to this otherwise isolated system. It actually took him several minutes to identify a path to defusing this particular area.

As soon as he came up with what needed to happen, Max informed us "Grom, Madeline. There are three cables that need to be severed simultaneously to defuse this collection of traps, and it's all just too dumb to properly hack; I'd like to avoid expending any drones if possible, so if you would please use your lasers to do the job it would be appreciated." while also smoothly highlighting exactly where he wanted us to shoot.

Grom replied "Understood" and proceeded to take aim, even as I brought up the business end of my laser. A few moments later we fired our lasers simultaneously, trains of pulses blasting the indicated spots with surgical precision. There was silence for a few moments, as we all waited with anxiety for something to happen, and Max checked things over to make sure it was defused.

Soon enough, Max replied "Alright, this is clear. Onwards." and we progressed further down the corridor, trailing a safety line of network cable behind us as we kept our self-streams going to offsite backup drives. It only took a couple minutes to encounter the next bundle of defenses, which lasered a few drones before we pulled back.

Max groaned as he said "Yeah, no. We don't have the equipment to deal with that from the front. Whoever goes around that corner is getting a lot of really big holes blasted in them."

I thought about the predicament for a moment, before asking "Max, I'm curious; was it gimballed or a phased array?"

Immediately, Max answered "It's a phased array laser hard mounted to the furniture. Why?"

I then turned to the guy with the massive spool of network cable, asking "What's the tensile strength on that cable?"

He grinned, noting "This stuff's clad in structural-grade arachnoweave; the optic fibers will still fail before the cable as a whole goes, but that's fixable and it's really quite strong. Why?"

I simply answered "Because if we can't get past that turret inside the station we'll just have to go for a quick jaunt through a couple new holes in the hull. If we show up behind the laser's arc of fire we can disable it without any additional risk."

Max agreed "Sound plan, but let's stow the drones first; they're not equipped for vacuum maneuvering and I'd rather not lose them if possible."

This is the point where the guy with the cable spool noted "You know, we could just requisition some additional gear for this? We've got an entire Voidskipper full of fun toys within easy travel distance, and a nice high-bandwidth connection."

I blinked, and Grom waved a tentacle as he noted "Good point. I've placed an order for some demolition charges, a length of EVA safety tether, some vacuum-capable microdrones, a pair of portable airlocks to set up in the corridors, and a set of very heavy duty hull patch kits for when we're done."

And so we set down to wait for our new gear to arrive. Sure enough it only took a few minutes before a group of agents wearing an assortment of morphs showed up hauling several cases of equipment through the zero gravity corridors. One of them asked "Alright, we've got the first charge. Where exactly are you planning on blowing the first hole in the hull?"

We'd already talked about this, and I tapped against a specific spot on the wall as I noted "Here. Minimal risk of damaging anything important outside the station, while also making sure we're pretty close to the corner so as to minimize the distance we need to EVA."

The agents nodded and without further delay they got to work on setting up a portable airlock on either side of where we were going to put in a blast. A few moments of stretching smart membranes into place and gluing them in place with spray foam later, the airlocks were in position.

While I was qualified for explosives it really wasn't my specialty, so I let one of the other agents take care of setting up the high-temperature hull cutting charges. They came back through the airlock, and they noted "Detonation in ten seconds."

Sure enough the charges went off exactly on schedule, and the corridor noticeably jerked when the blast sheared-through the paper thin nanotube composite hull. Someone handed me the spool of safety tether, and I made my way through the airlock into vacuum. A bit more of the adhesive foam used for the airlocks secured the tether in place, and I clambered out into the vacuum with only the grip pads on my boots preventing me from dangling helplessly in the void.

After a few moments of this I reached the intended point of the second hull breach and secured a point to clip the tether using more foam. A bit of tinkering with carabiners later, and the tether now represented a taut pathway between the two intended breach points with me being able to freely move along its length while also not being free to drift away.

I swiftly made my way back to where everyone else was waiting and informed the demolitions specialist "The maneuvering line is in place; you should have an easy time setting the charges now."

The agent wearing the multi-limbed utilitarian pod of a morph simply replied "Understood." and proceeded to the airlock. They clipped themselves to the line, tugged themselves along until they arrived at the second breach site, and started setting the charges. They quickly disconnected the safety line from its second anchor point, and tugged themselves back along it.

There was another blast that we all felt rather than heard, and the demolitions expert noted "Alright, we've got the hull open. Go and disable that laser."

I saluted, made sure my self-stream had good connection quality, and passed through the airlock to the evacuated section again. I clipped on the safety line, and another quick spacewalk late I found myself looking at the laser turret from the side, but something didn't quite seem right. Thinking quickly I asked "Max, can you please poke around? I want to make sure that I won't be setting off a massive bomb or something if I just shoot the laser."

From his position in the back of my mind, Max replied "Got it. I'm going to vector some of the vac drones in to take a look." as a few dozen of the insect-sized units zipped past us. Several moments passed as Max investigated the various wires linking the laser to sensors and other such things, puzzling out the connections.

Abruptly, Max alerted me "You were absolutely correct Madeline. There's about a hundred kilograms of plastic explosives stuffed into the base of this laser turret, and it looks set to detonate the instant someone tampers with it."

I thought for a quick moment, before asking "Can we defuse it?"

Max waffled for a second or so, before saying "I'm willing to try, but only after we get clear to a safe distance. That bomb's big enough to completely sever this corridor."

This is about when the demolitions expert chimed in over the radio "Not in vacuum it isn't! That right there is a concussive bomb without much shrapnel to speak of; those that work by pressure more than anything else, and with the great big hole we've put in the hull there won't be much of that sticking around. The cutting charges I used only sheared through on account of being shaped charges; if they had just been bulk explosive I'd have barely left a dent."

I blinked in surprise. It couldn't be that easy, could it? I radioed back "Are you recommending a controlled detonation of the trap?"

There was a distinct impression of a smug impression over the comm channel as the demolitions expert replied "Absolutely. Get everyone to a clear distance and set off the bomb; it'll make that hole in the hull a whole lot bigger, but primary structural integrity shouldn't be compromised."

And so Max and I made our way back to the corridor, passing the airlock once more as we retreated until the demolitions expert confirmed "We're at a safe distance now; even if I misjudged the quantity of explosives by two orders of magnitude we'd be well clear of the blast. Max, you know what to do."

My headmate replied over the comms "Indeed I do!" and mere moments later the corridor jolted suddenly.

A couple seconds passed until the vibrations ended, and I noted "Alright then, let's go check what happened to the blast site." before going through the smart membrane airlock one more time. Rounding the corner, we were confronted with a sight of total destruction. About half the circumference of the hull was still intact, but the rest was one massive gash through the hull metal.

I idly noted the agent with the massive spool of network cable remarking over radio "Right. That's a lot bigger than our current patch jobs are good for. I've called for a repair crew and they should be along shorty. In the meantime we should really get further in, now that we've cleared out that particular batch of traps."

And so on we went, carefully maneuvering around the hull breach so as to avoid drifting into the void of space and needing to be retrieved. As usual for this sort of environment, Max was checking every single thing ahead of us with micro-drones to check for traps, but if anything the lack of them now was distinctly worrying.

Then we came to a bulkhead door, apparently one connecting to an administrative office, if the signage was to be believed. Still, after how many previous booby traps we'd gone through none of us trusted it any more than we could throw it.

I asked Max "So, think you can tell if that door's trapped?"

Max obligingly looked over the door for several moments, checking every last thing with his drone swarm before he noted "It doesn't seem to be trapped at all, actually. That said, it seems to have been bolted shut from the inside, and there's an airtight seal on it preventing them from getting through."

Grom then raised one of his tentacles with an integrated laser and started using it to precisely cut through the door, simultaneously saying "We should be careful; there could easily be viable morphs inside, which may reactivate when we breach. Weapons hot, everyone."

I readied my own laser, even as Max brought the drone swarm into a more aggressive stance and the rest of the agents all drew their own sidearms. Then Grom finished cutting out the door, and with a full-body slam knocked it clear out of its frame even as we all charged through with weapons at the ready, our grip pads and plentiful training enabling relatively easy maneuvering despite the lack of gravity.

Still, when we entered there didn't seem to be anybody active and doing stuff in here aside from us. There were several server racks, around, but there didn't seem to be any actual morphs around that we didn't bring in here, active or otherwise. Meanwhile Max had the drones buzzing around like crazy, looking for traps.

After several moments of this, Max reluctantly pronounced the room clean, and noted "I'll need to take a look at those server racks and make sure that there isn't anything hooked up to them before they get brought back to the Loan Shark for in-depth analysis."

I only needed a moment to ask "Will you require the body for this?"

Max replied in the affirmative, and I switched out of front as he retrieved a mil-spec tablet from our storage and set about trying to interface with the server racks. The very first thing he did was check whether or not the servers in question had a power supply, and the answer to that turned out to be a solid no. Groaning in frustration, Max called out using the body's voice "Can someone please get a compatible power supply for these server racks? I need to do a field check for malware before we bring them back to the Loan Shark, and I can't do that if they're powered down." while simultaneously sending a data packet with the required specifications.

The guy with the spool of network cable replied "Got it. The gear should be here in a few minutes. In the meantime is there anything else you can do with regards to those servers?"

Max thought for a moment, before noting "Actually, yes there is. The servers on those racks could easily be a decoy set to trigger any number of security measures when they get powered up. They're not connected to any cables, so that means any signals they would send would have to be wireless. As such I highly recommend putting the server racks in electromagnetic isolation before activating them. Either that, or broadband ECM."

Cable guy nodded, replying "Right. I've ordered a few bolts of superconducting textiles; that should make building an electromagnetic isolation tent pretty straightforward when they get here."

That's when I realized something that had been bothering me, and asked the cable guy over radio "Curiously, what's your name anyway? We've been working together for a while and it completely slipped my mind."

The agent smirked for a moment, before he answered "My name is Not Important; yes that is in fact my name. I legally changed it to commemorate an old in-joke I had with some friends who I used to know. You can call me Not; Important is my surname."

I thought for a moment, but the only reply I could think of was "Huh."

Either way, not much else of use happened until the equipment that Max requisitioned got here. As soon as it did, Max started setting up an enclosure for the server racks using the superconducting cloth and a few tubes of utility nanopaste that he quickly programmed to act as an adhesive. A few minutes passed as Max made sure all the gaps where radio waves could slip out were closed aside from the entry flap.

Then Max asked "Madeline, there is a somewhat plausible chance that those servers are full of identity-corrupting malware capable of jumping the gap to our brains. If you want to Mindcast out of our body to somewhere safer, now is the time."

It took me only a minute or so to decide, before I asked Grom over the radio "Grom, would you mind sparing some processor space for me in your morph? I'd like to come over until Max is done using this body for cyberwar."

Grom replied "Certainly, Madeline." and extended a tentacle for me to Mindcast over, a concealed compartment opening to reveal a scanning probe. I accepted, and the next thing I knew I was riding in the back of Grom's mindspace instead of being partnered up with Max. I watched through Grom's eyes as Max maneuvered the body I normally wore into the isolation tent, and I couldn't help but muse "Huh, I just realized that I've been headmates with Max since joining up with the Bureau. This is probably the first time in about a Gigasecond that we haven't been sharing a morph."

A few moments of mental silence passed, before Grom noted "It's interesting for me too; this is actually the first time I've ever shared my mind with someone else. I'm actually mildly disappointed; I was lead to believe the experience felt a lot more exotic than it actually does."

I blinked my virtual eyes in mild surprise, before noting "That's actually a bit odd, seeing as most people are made via parogenesis; how'd you start existing that didn't lead to you sharing mindspace, then?"

I got the impression of a shrug, before Grom answered "I started out as a partial cast. Mom wanted the experience of raising a child sharing hereditary traits without all that biological complexity, so he copied over his identity vector to a blank morph without including any of his memories. The end result is that I've spent the last Gigasecond or so as a singlet and never really thought about the alternative."

I hummed appreciatively, and settled in to wait. With the isolation tent sealed, no-one had any real clue what exactly was going on in there; radio comms were obviously blocked, and the room still wasn't pressurized, rendering audio useless. We wouldn't even know if Max got completely burned out until the agreed upon check time, when a pure biomorph would open up the flap to take a look if nothing happened in ten kiloseconds.

Fortunately, only two kiloseconds later Max opened the flap and noted "We were right, those servers were absolutely decoys. I spent way too long trying to get those freaking things to boot up until I figured out that they'd deleted the BIOS. Even after using some nanomachine paste to forcibly install some firmware and get the servers in a bootable condition, there was no data on them whatsoever. Effectively, they were one massive waste of time."

As everyone sighed in sympathy, I commented to Grom "It's been nice sharing headspace with you, but I rather prefer my catgirl morph. So I'm going to be Mindcasting back now."

Another non-transition associated with Mindcast travel, and I was back in my own body as Grom replied "It was interesting having you over, Madeline. Anyway, now that we've confirmed the servers held no useful data, our next priority should be searching the rest of the room for anything else of use."

I felt Max sliding back into his secondary position, even as I noted "Yeah, that makes sense. Not too likely to find anything, but you never know."

Everyone here agreed with me on that, and we got down to searching. The very first things we checked were the air vents; in the microgravity environment of this space station, any unattended objects would have drifted to the intakes for the air circulation system. That said, we didn't find anything of use when we got there; the vents in question looked to have been thoroughly cleaned, and opening them up for Max's drones to investigate the inside yielded nothing but lint clogging up the filters.

That pattern held for the next several kiloseconds as we tore through every single place something could be hiding, and found absolutely nothing that could possibly be of use. We even sampled the mold we found growing on some expired foodstuffs to make sure there weren't any encrypted files hidden in its genome, but that turned out to be a bust too. We were also hearing similar reports from the other teams, and after several kiloseconds we had all come to the conclusion that there was no useful information to be recovered.

As such, we were called back aboard Loan Shark, with the ship in question beginning to make her way towards the Red Star Union. Strictly speaking Grom and I could have simply Mindcast back using one of the comm holes aboard the ship, but we both still had a bunch of cool stuff from when we were undercover as pirates that we wanted to keep; the items in question had already been written off as an expense for the mission, so BoSI wouldn't be asking for them back. In my case there was my huge stash of Alpha Cola, and Grom still had that collection of mechanical timepieces.

About a quarter of a Megasecond passed that way, with us getting roughly halfway back to the RSU in that time. Grom and I got to know each other in even more intimate detail on the way back. I enjoyed some of my Alpha Cola stash, Grom tinkered with his clocks, and we were both looking forward to leave when we got back to the Red Star Union.

Those hopes were dashed when Shen arrived and informed the both of us "Agents Grom, Hadrian, Zargosty. We've found Bark's Finest exactly where the fortune telling equation said they would be, and the Starforce is about to engage the pirates in space combat. We need you there to help process the pirate's surrender and make sure we aren't missing any useful information to wrap up the case."

We immediately started making our way to one of Loan Shark's many Mindcast bays, grabbing onto the handle-hook system that stretched through the crew quarters to speed our travel. As we proceeded, I asked Shen "Just to be clear we'll get to keep the stuff from our time undercover as pirates, right?"

Shen's carapace shifted to a deep saturated purple swirl pattern as he replied "Yes, agent Zargosty. You can consider those items as being a perk of the job. Anyway, we'll be making a brief stop at BoSI headquarters before we Mindcast out to the system in question. We're going to patch you into the combat stream for the upcoming space battle in an observer role so you know what you're getting into, and on top of that there's good reasons not to arrive until after the fighting is over; it's still possible though unlikely that one of our ships could be destroyed in the fighting, and needing to resurrect you after the ship you were on got destroyed would be a waste of time and resources."

As we reached the Mindcast bay I replied "Makes sense, Shen." at the same time as I climbed into the pod. I lay down in the pod squishing the upholstery in the process. As the lid closed I got a brief look at Grom and Shen also getting into their pods. Then the scanning probe came down, and I was back at BoSI headquarters in a new morph.

Shen was already out of the pod, greeting us with "Welcome back, agents. You've got a combat information stream to tap into, and a Mindcast bay to stop clogging up, since we're going to have a few thousand more people coming through there in fairly short order. Please proceed to Auditorium 509 A in the Eastergem Hall."

Grom and I both snapped the standard RSU salute, and without further delay we made our way towards the location in question. BoSI headquarters was a campus of around five hundred square kilometers and Eastergem Hall was a separate building from the one we were currently in, so that meant making use of the local tram network.

Grom and I spent the couple minutes riding the monorail admiring the scenery. From here we had a great view of Union Ring, the continent-sized rotating habitat that the Red Star Union used as a center of government. Looking straight up, we could easily see the artificial sun in the center as well as the other side of the ring a few thousand kilometers away; in the background we had a nice view of Reine, the deep blue gas giant we were orbiting.

Scenic view aside, our train quickly arrived at Eastergem Hall. From there it was a fairly simple matter of going through the lobby, taking the elevator down a couple floors to reach the fifth level, and then navigating to our assigned auditorium. There were a few thousand agents already present when we arrived, but there were still plenty of seats left for Grom and I to use. So we sat down, plugged in one of the high-bandwidth connections, and got ready for the stream. Idly, I wished I had one of those bottles of Alpha Cola to drink while I waited.

---

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Also, if you like the story, please comment! The added visibility will be greatly appreciated, and feedback will help with improving future novels.

 

[We Just Write]

A/N: Sorry for the delay. The weekend's been absurdly stressful and hectic, though the really important stuff seems to have worked out fine.

---

Since arriving in the star system they'd dubbed Luminous Maelstrom, Captain Fuller and the rest of his crew had been quite busy indeed. With an extremely auspicious set of binary stars for founding a new star system while hiding from your enemies, things were looking up. It had been a bit more than a Megasecond since their successful heist of four Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs, and everyone was incredibly busy getting the new industries set up.

At the moment Captain Fuller was wearing his off-duty biomorph, slugging down drinks in one of Bark's Finest's many onboard bars as he talked to Reggie, the quartermaster. "Hah! I told you we could make a Non-Orientable Wormhole heist work. You said it was too risky, but now we're well on our way to founding our very own pirate haven system!"

Reggie rolled his eyes in mild exasperation as he sipped at his glass of liquor, before replying "Yes Captain, it's only the fiftieth time you've told me that. Anyway, I'm going to go check on the construction progress for our wormhole factory; we won't be able to properly defend the system until we get that established, so it's absolutely critical that it proceeds according to schedule."

Captain Fuller nodded as he replied "You do that. I've got to ensure that NOW pairs three and four have been properly mounted in their turrets, once I've properly sobered up."

Reggie sighed, before remarking "I still think that keeping them aboard Barks' Finest is a mistake no matter what you do with them. All the extreme offensive power they offer won't be worth anything at all if the reduced turning speed from hauling that much extra mass around just gets our ship shot out from under us."

Captain Fuller slammed his drink on the counter as he turned to Reggie and shouted "We've been over this! The extra mass only impacts Bark's Finest's angular acceleration by a few degrees per second squared, and the sheer energy levels the antimatter-driven gamma lasers are throwing out will allow them to cripple any ship they hit even incidentally, while conventional beam weapons can need hundreds of hits to mission-kill a Voidskipper in full combat evasion mode."

Reggie sighed as he noted "Alex, even aside from the mere construction of an Obliterator Ship like what you're converting Bark's Finest into being considered a casus belli for a war to the knife, there's a reason militaries don't use winterblasters on their ships. You can mount tens of thousands of conventional beam weapons for each winterblaster, especially given that each NOW pair used to run them can instead be used to power an entire additional Voidskipper."

Captain Fuller groaned, before asking "You think I don't know that? We don't have the shipyards we'd need to make the additional Voidskippers to properly use the NOW pairs any other way, and we both know the thermodynamics of using them to run even more conventional beam weapons on Bark's Finest just don't work. We can't effectively dissipate all the waste heat we'd need to get rid of to get a higher effective power output than what we're currently running. At least this way we get some use out of those NOW pairs."

At this Reggie sighed, before saying "Aye, Captain. You still have not addressed the issue of the response when word gets out that our system has an Obliterator Ship in it." and leaving the bar.

A few minutes later, Captain Fuller paused in his drink and said to no-one in particular "Guess I'd best go get my work body on." as he placed his microgravity drinking stein in the automated bar's used dishes slot and started on his way out of the bar. It took a brief ride on the shipboard tram system to reach his quarters, but that was normal.

A few moments passed as the pirate in question switched back to his heavy-duty synthmorph. Alex then carefully applied the life support mask and catheters to his currently unused biomorph before making his way to his next stop.

Said next stop was Turret A, where the engineering crews were busily at work increasing the offensive firepower available to Bark's Finest. Traveling the ten kilometers from the captain's quarters to where the newly installed weaponry was being integrated into the now ex-pirate Voidskipper's systems. En route Alex had to dodge several construction drones hauling raw materials, but that was old hat for someone used to living on a pirate ship.

Soon enough he reached the new turret well, finding Green the engineer currently checking over the Non-Orientable Wormhole containment unit at the base of the turret's rotational axis. Green snapped to attention, chromatophores flashing as he exclaimed "Captain! Just doing final checks on this wormhole pair before the first test firing for turrets one and three. We really don't want to find out that the antimatter pipe and director have any leaks the hard way."

Captain Fuller winced at the thought of the utter wreckage that the front end of Bark's Finest would be reduced to in the event of an antimatter containment breach and replied "Yes, that's definitely of the absolutely highest priority. Good job, keep at it. I'm going to go check on the teams working on the optics; we want to make sure those are in good working order."

Green simply nodded and replied "You do that, I still have my job to do here."

And with that Captain Fuller set about ascending the turret well, navigating around the thick extremely heavy duty feed lines for matter and the large motorized trunions used for elevating the weapon. He passed by the magnet array used to redirect the antimatter flow, the reaction chamber, and soon arrived at a scaled down warp torus with an internal diameter of two hundred and fifty meters, currently being checked over by a small armada of drones directed by one Jerome Chaeuff.

Jerome barely looked up for a few moments to greet "Ahoy, captain. I'm testing the metric beam director for this turret at the moment; got to make sure it can scan properly for targeting purposes. By my best estimates it should be capable of forty degrees of traverse independent of turret orientation."

Captain Fuller nodded appreciatively as he watched the image of the starfield visible through the aperture slewing around as the optic did its work. After a few moments of this he remarked "Good work Jerome. I look forward to seeing the results of your work during the first test-firing."

Jerome shrugged, before replying "We're still not anywhere near done with this turret; the cooling system for the gamma laser still needs a lot of work before we can be confident it will work properly, and considering that this laser will be rated at almost thirty Yottawatts of beam power we really don't want a cooling failure."

Captain Fuller was silent for a few moments, before remarking "Yes, that would definitely be bad. Considering that this laser is going to outshine the system secondary, we really don't want to inadequately cool it. Given that we'll have about forty Exawatts of waste heat to dump we really don't want the coolant pipelines developing an issue, nor the magnetic vents used for directing the waste plasma."

Jerome nodded in the affirmative, "Aye. By the way, we've calculated that there might be significant issues with the waste plasma and luminosity causing recoil. We've talked with the power engineers about using the waste plasma from the power plants for counter-thrust to prevent the ship from getting uncontrollably spun around when we fire these lasers, but we need you to sign off on it."

Without even delaying, Captain Fuller replied "Approved. Make it happen, we don't want to completely lose control of the ship whenever we fire the Winterblasters. Actually, if you can configure the maneuvering systems to use them as a source of turning thrust that could mitigate the maneuverability penalties of having them in the first place."

Jerome thought for a moment, before replying "Yes captain, I'll see you soon."

Captain Fuller nodded as he turned to leave "I'm leaving the engineering up to your department. In the meantime, I've got to take a reading, make sure the future hasn't changed too drastically."

And with that the pirate captain began climbing down through the turret well once again as he passed all the machinery he'd passed on the way up, Green and her drones still working on making sure the antimatter pipe wouldn't have any leakage. Soon he reached one of the internal tram lines running through Bark's Finest, and from there he got a ride to one very specific place: the Divination Room.

The door opened with the transmission of Captain Fuller's personal authorization code, and closed behind him as soon as he was inside. The Divination Room was in a rotating section of the ship meaning it had gravity, so Alex's footsteps fell heavily on the carpeted deck as he approached the interface chair connected to the server racks he needed to run the equation.

Then Alex sat down, and felt his mind expand as he provided the encryption key to activate the Oracle Machine. Of course he could get a prediction without the cognitive booster, but for best results it took a lot of up-to-date astronomical data, and processing all that would take quite a lot of time without some acceleration. Well, at least Alex thought he could get a prediction this way.

And so the processors whirled away, correlating all sorts of data about the nearby celestial bodies, measuring the distances to various pulsars, determining the location of a bunch of other stars, and several other factors about the heavens. This information was then run through an immensely complex but still deterministic function to arrive at its completely baseless and irrelevant conclusion that the location of Bark's Finest wouldn't be discovered for two Gigaseconds yet. Idly, Alex noted that the time was longer than the previous estimate; he wondered what had caused the future to shift that way, but didn't worry about it too much.

And so Alex Fuller settled in to wait for the test firing of the Winterblasters aboard Bark's Finest. It took around a hundred kiloseconds of waiting before everything was checked properly, but soon enough it was time. Captain Fuller had planned out a speech to give his crew for just this occasion, and so he stepped up to the virtual podium to make the announcement, starting the stream with an expression of confidence.

"When you elected me to be your captain I promised that under my guidance, Bark's Finest would become one of the most successful pirate operations on record. I am confident to say that we are well on our way to achieving this goal. Through cunning planning, infiltration, and flawless execution we managed to perform a successful heist of Non-Orientable Wormholes, a feat few pirates can claim. We are now compounding on our success by founding our very own pirate star system, scaling up our operation to cover everything within a hundred light years! Soon we will be building our own fleets of Voidskippers to secure our claim on this system and bring back immense hauls of plunder to live like emperors!"

As the growing crowd of pirates attending the stream cheered, Captain Fuller noted "In addition, while we won't have to worry about any interlopers reaching the system for Gigaseconds to come, precautions have been taken to appease the skeptics among you. Two of the Non-Orientable Wormholes have been used to fit Bark's Finest with some of the most devastating weapons it's possible to build. As such, we will now be test firing the new array of gamma ray lasers our ship is equipped with! Behold the power of our new armaments!"

And with that Captain Fuller sent the order to gunnery control to initiate the test firing of the Winterblaster turrets, not showing his nervousness at all. Deep within the bowels of the thirty kilometer long ship the immense high-pressure pumps used for feeding the laser turrets started to spin up, even as her tip was angled to point at the Red Dwarf orbiting in the outer star system. Then the ship lurched backwards as all four lasers fired at maximum power, both the Yottawatts of beam power and the immense plumes of coolant plasma being vented out generating immense thrust. After six seconds the lasers cut off, and twenty seconds later the surface of the red dwarf flashed in intensity as the gamma ray beams heated its surface far beyond what its normal level of luminosity would achieve, blasting massive plumes of plasma off the star in an exceedingly large coronal mass ejection.

As the comment stream rolled on in awe of the successful test-firing of the new weapons, Captain Fuller basked in adulation. Finally, after all this time he felt like he truly belonged, with a crowd of adoring followers, a growing power base, and now a weapon powerful enough to guarantee said power base would remain secure. It's as the rolling applause was just starting to die down and the pirate captain in question began planning his next move that the alarms went off, and the automated systems aboard Bark's Finest fired up the warp drive at Skimming power for evasive maneuvers.

Acting on ingrained instinct, Captain Fuller called out "All hands to battle stations!" over the ship's network, even as he Mindcast directly into the Combat Command Computers. These were ultra-specialized computers with one purpose only: run the minds inside at as high a speed as possible, so as to enable effective responses to the incredibly rapid pace events could take during space combat.

Captain Fuller felt his mind partially fragmenting as it was spread over the decentralized networks laced throughout the ship. The speed of light imposed unfortunate limits on exactly how fast the various systems on a Voidskipper could respond based on the distance signals would need to travel from the sensors, to the decider, to the system in question, which could lead to missing a chance to act measured in microseconds. Therefore standard practice was to make decisions as close to the system needing them as possible, so as to minimize lag.

And so with grim certainty of what had happened, Alex Fulle received the combat sitrep from the "bridge crew" of Bark's Finest. The information wasn't good at all. There were just over a hundred Cruisers of twenty five kilometers in length encircling Alex's position, all of which had warped in with their broad sides facing his ship for optimum dodging, coincidentally displaying the multiple redundant warp drives each of them was equipped with and using to jink back and forth at barely sub-light speeds.

By comparison, Alex Fuller was in a much worse position; no matter which way he oriented his ship his axial vector would be aligned with one of his enemies, massively cutting down on his opportunities to evade incoming fire. Still, this situation was maybe salvageable, the stars had said he would go on to achieve legendary status. The stars had said…

The stars had said…

That marked the exact moment when Captain Fuller realized that the star-reading he'd been living his life by was complete nonsense, a feeling of standing on an incredibly shaky foundation spreading throughout his consciousness. If his predictions had been accurate, this fleet wouldn't have been here in the first place!

With a feeling of hollowness, Alex ordered "Full forwards drive, open fire on ships closest to our forwards arc first" barely paying attention to the orders he was giving as he tried to process the realization he'd just had.

If the revelations of the stars meant nothing, then the single biggest cornerstone he'd built his life around for the last two Gigaseconds was completely meaningless. If that were true, then his grand destiny was a lie and his quest was meaningless.

No, no, that couldn't be the case, could it? Of course it wasn't the case, he was Captain Fuller, the greatest space pirate to ever live (in his own somewhat narrow-minded opinion), and this was only a minor setback!

...But still, the divination equation should have predicted this! This fleet's mere presence here in the Luminous Maelstrom system directly contradicted the readings of the stars, so maybe the equation was in need of some adjustments? It had never failed before (aside from all those times where the "prediction" required some serious contortions to fit observed events), so what went wrong this time?

The idea that the divination equation had never worked in the first place briefly whirled through Alex's mind, but was summarily crushed before it could take root. No, no, the divination equation had to work. Maybe it had just made a mistake this time, and needed work to reach true infallibility? But it had been "infallible" for two Gigaseconds now, leading up to this disastrously wrong conclusion about how long he would have before being discovered. How would he know he'd cleaned out every single edge case or bug in the new version, given that this issue had gone undetected for so long?

Then the sensor feeds revealed the second rank of ships ahead of Bark's Finest's travel vector, as the light from their arrival finally, agonizingly arrived at the pirate ship's sensors. That's when Captain Fuller realized that whoever this was hadn't sent out patrols of two hundred ships to manually scour the stars until they found him. They had a pretty good idea where to look, and they had sent a massive fleet directly to his location to bring him down.

That marked the exact point at which Alex snapped, almost completely withdrawing from command as he laughed sadly at his predicament. The ship shook as a particle beam hit blasted a crater out of the frontal hull, and Alex's laughter reached a crescendo as he finally processed that not only did his fortune telling equation not work for its intended purpose, but these people must have somehow gotten a copy and used it to track him right to this system.

Events proceeded, Alex Fuller barely paying any attention to what was going on as he tried to process just how badly he'd screwed over everyone relying on him. If they'd just used a random number generator to pick a destination system they wouldn't have been found, and they would have had time to build up before attracting attention.

Yes he occasionally gave an order here or there, but it was half-hearted at best. Almost a second, an agonizingly long second passed before the rest of Bark's Finests' command crew realized something was wrong. They'd covered almost a light second so far at full skim, and there was still no sign whatsoever of escaping the enemy fleet this way; making matters even worse they couldn't just kick the warp drive to Skip Power, since that would require spending several seconds stationary to prime the warp metric; an open invitation to have everything remotely important shot off if ever there was one.

And so Bark's Finest corkscrewed through space at just barely below the speed of light with her lasers blazing, the sheer fact that she was almost keeping pace with the light racing ahead of her that could inform her pursuers of her whereabouts shielding her from most incoming fire. Keyword, most; another hit rocked the pirate ship as another large crater was blasted in her forwards hull plating. Despite this predicament Captain Fuller was still lost in the spiral of his ongoing existential crisis, barely of any use to anyone.

This is of course when the rest of the crew noticed that their captain seemed oddly distant, and told the Quartermaster to try and get their captain back into fighting condition. And so Reggie found himself in the unenviable position of trying to perform therapy on Alex Fuller in the middle of chaotic space combat. He started by saying "Captain, we need you fully focused on command right now. Whatever's eating at you can wait, seeing as we're in the middle of space combat."

A tiny amount of processing power was spared on a virtual reality for Captain Fuller and Reggie to manifest avatars in, as Captain Fuller whirled on Reggie and practically roared "If I had never been elected captain, we wouldn't be in this predicament to begin with! I am a FAILURE, and unworthy to be your captain!"

Reggie couldn't get anything out as Alex continued his furious rant "Even since before I became a pirate I've been living by a fortune-telling equation that I thought predicted fate, but this incident proves that it has been doing no such thing! Not only is the equation completely useless for that, but because I used it to select destinations to lay low and the equation is deterministic, anyone else who got a copy could use it to track us, and that's EXACTLY what happened! I am DIRECTLY responsible for getting us into this mess!"

Only now did Reggie start shouting back "You're also the only one who's got even the slightest chance of getting us back OUT of this mess! You are Captain Alex Fuller, with a unique blend of cautiousness and audacity that makes you the single best pirate captain I've ever even heard of! We need you as captain, Alex, or we're all going to die!"

Alex Fuller snarled, before he replied "I'm no such thing! I'm a fucking idiot who got lucky far too many times to count! Doctor Brose was right to be disappointed when I told him about my equation, I just wish I'd realized that at the time instead of dismissing the idea he might have even possibly been right! Don't you understand? THE SINGLE MOST SOLID CORNERSTONE I'VE BUILT MY LIFE AROUND NEVER EVEN EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE!"

That's when Reggie changed tactics, saying "You aren't an idiot, Alex! Planning out the wormhole heist was not luck! You worked yourself into a fit at times helping figure out ways around all the security on that wormhole factory, and it went off without a hitch! The same goes for getting that informant network paid off so we'd have an easy time jumping vulnerable ships back in our old stomping grounds! That was not luck, that was legitimate skill and talent, and you're doing all of us a great disservice by denying that you really are an extremely effective pirate!"

Captain Fuller glared right at Reggie's virtual avatar and snarled back "So what if I managed to blunder my way into getting a couple things right? I'm still utterly unfit for command due to the massive botch I've made to get us here in the first place!"

Reggie leaned back and crossed all six pairs of his arms as he fired back "So what if you made a mistake? That just means you're a person, and now's your opportunity to fix that mistake before it gets us all killed."

Captain Fuller paused for about half a millisecond to think about how to respond, but he had run completely out of rationalizations to fire off. So all he could think of to say was a simple "You're wrong, Reggie."

Reggie leaned in close, and in a calm but serious tone he replied "No, Alex. You're wrong. And now's your chance to prove it to every single person in the system, yourself included."

Captain Fuller suddenly stood to attention as he realized the stakes of what was about to happen next. Without further delay, he re-focused his attention on the tactical data feeds as he figured out what needed to happen. Quickly he concocted a plan, before ordering "Attention to helm! Change course to approach the system secondary while maintaining evasive maneuvers! I have a plan to get us all out of here in one piece, but it's going to be tight!"

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