Intercessor (AKA Kemonomimi Yuri Space Fantasy)

[Kei]

This is a very silly work of space fantasy isekai commissioned by and written for @shaderic.

*****

あたしは異世界に移動された、獣耳の女の子を襲われた（性欲的に）
AKA
Intercessor
AKA
Kemonomimi Yuri Space Fantasy​

Chapter 1: The Arkology (I)

In my defense, I hadn't actually been trying to get hit by a truck.

*****​

The first hint that something was off was the smell. Or, more precisely, the lack of it.

It didn't immediately occur to me that I should've been anywhere else aside from the dubious comfort of my cheap mattress. Therefore, as I woke and stretched and moaned and did all the necessary things to rouse myself from among the sleeping dead, it wasn't quite until I opened my eyes that I realized something was off.

Because the ceiling I was looking up at was clearly not my own. It was white and too clean. It lacked a ceiling fine, serpentine cracks running across, that weird brownish-red stain in the corner I'd always been too afraid to touch even with cleaning gloves. And it definitely wasn't supposed to be comprised of smooth, spotless white metallic panels.

Then the realization set in, and I bolted up in my bed. Or, really, "my bed". Quotation marks because, first, it wasn't mine - a fact I discovered as I looked down and yelped and fell out of it like an idiot - and second, it didn't look like a bed. In fact, it looked more like the kind of pods space people in the future sleep in, where you're either floating in some kind of liquid or frozen. I'm not really a nerd, but I've seen enough sci-fi things simply through the sheer power of pop culture osmosis. And speaking of sci-fi...

The room I was in was brightly lit, about the size of a high school classroom, and was similarly comprised of those spotless, white, grooved metallic panels, save for what seemed like a futuristic-looking screen here or some kind of black super advanced machinery I couldn't identify there. All things I would've described better had I any idea what they even were, all the markings of a super far-flung future that belonged in a sci-fi film.

Which probably meant I had been abducted by a secret government cabal. And definitely meant I was suddenly very, very far from home.

I thus felt it was entirely appropriate for the next three words that came out of my mouth to be "what", "the", and something rather impolite, roughly in that order.

*****​

I spent a while sitting frozen on my ass like a little pussy and gauging my surroundings before coming to the conclusion that there wasn't going to be a distorted voice on unseen speakers going "I want to play a game".

"Hello?" I called out as I walked down large, wide corridors, halls, and chambers, my voice - which I hoped sounded inquisitive rather than scared shitless- echoing off too-clean walls in the empty silence.

The good news, for better or for worse, was that I still had all my clothes: A cheap suit-blouse-skirt in slightly mismatched colors, picked up at a garage sale where a middle-aged woman had kindly offered me a pity discount until it became clear I intended to haggle down from even that. So no one had undressed me and put me in fetish wear yet. Not exactly a particularly optimistic outlook, but it's sort of amazing to see the twists and turns your brain makes when you want to look for any hint of comfort in an alien situation.

Speaking of aliens, I had probably been kidnapped by them. That was my revised assessment after I finally became half-convinced that the room I woke up in wasn't some kind of death trap, and that it was okay to get off my ass and explore. That, or I'd sleepwalked onto a truly humongous set for Hollywood's next multi-million dollar sci-fi blockbuster. Or, like I said in the beginning, I'd actually been kidnapped by the government and sent to a high-tech facility like Area 51 or something.

The first possibility was stupid, only slightly credible in the mind of a scared little shit like me. The second was a bit more probable until you realized that - seeing how everything here was actually made of metallic substances and glass instead of cardboard and green screens and CGI - this was well beyond the budget of even Hollywood. The third was most probable on its face, save for the fact that I was more likely to have been kidnapped by aliens looking for random test subjects than I was of government interest.

The architectural theme largely repeated itself as I walked further and further, surrounded by black metallic walls largely covered over by large white metallic panels that were so clean and pristine that they were almost semi-reflective. This minimalist design was sometimes complemented with gold-colored highlights that might've been wrought from real gold for all I knew, all well-illuminated by nothing in particular; there were no obvious major sources of light, nothing like a fixture or a lamp or even a spotlight, almost as if the architecture itself radiated luminescence. There were, of course, tinier sources of light, like the power indicator on devices that looked like computers but had no obvious interface or screen and did not respond to my attempts to press anything that looked like a power button. Not to mention glass panels, futuristic-looking furniture that resembled tables and chairs, barriers here that looked like railings and barriers there that looked like computer consoles embedded into the architecture, and little decorative details that seemed to suggest whoever designed this place didn't want it to look drab and soulless. Certainly, there was a simplistic elegance to it, the place looking less like an empty canvas and more like it was itself a work of art.

Not that it changed the fact that this place was huge and creepily deserted. "Hello?" I called out for what felt like the hundredth time for who knows how long. Hours, at least, but I didn't know how many; I didn't wear a watch, my phone was missing, and there were no clocks. Or perhaps there were no clocks I could recognize.

Nor was I keeping track of how many doors I had passed through at this point. Sure, the fact that there were sliding doors - terrifyingly thick metallic barriers that glided open soundlessly, the kind you'd think you'd find only in military bases or secret government labs researching the zombie virus - was, almost bizarrely, a source of relief: There was a familiarity about it that reminded me of supermarkets. But at this point, I was almost certain that I had passed through at least a hundred different rooms, hallways, corridors, chambers, and passageways in this unholy maze. Save for corridors that were nonetheless about as wide as two-lane streets, the rooms were all invariably large, or at least large by the standards of a poor person, ranging in size from "high school classroom" like the room I woke up in to "Las Vegas hotel lobby", not that I'd ever been in one. I had no good frame of reference, but given how long I had been walking and how much my feet was starting to ache, I was convinced that I long passed "baseball stadium" territory and was in danger of surpassing "Disneyland" on the scale of hugeness as well.

There were signs that people were supposed to have lived here once; I could, at least, recognize chairs, tables, desks, and similar pieces of furniture, sculpted in the same futuristic minimalist style as the rooms. And after what felt like hours of walking, I passed by at least two more rooms that resembled the one I woke up in, complete with those weird futuristic pods that looked like sci-fi beds. But no one was in them, nor were there any hints that anyone had been in them recently. And even at what felt like a hundredth-plus-one "hello", there was still no response but the echo of my own voice.

I started to tremble. It wasn't particularly cold - air conditioning, if there was such a thing here, must've be set to a comfortable temperature - but there was a very real fear given the...nothingness. Things could've been worse, but even though I didn't seem to be at risk of any particular harm, that I was here with no tools, no explanation, and no people was inherently terrifying.

Equally terrifying was the suddenly realization that I wasn't entirely sure - now that I had spent hours exploring - how to get back to the room I woke up in. There was no actual rational reason for me to go back, seeing how all of these rooms had a similar level of utility for me - that is to say none - but I must've been put in that specific room within that specific pod for a reason, right? If anyone was ever going to come along after having deposited me there - even if they were aliens who just wanted to stick an anal probe in me or something - surely that's where they'd come looking for me, right?

...Right?

*****​

It was another few hours when I finally got back to "my" room, a little breathless from frayed nerves, the anxiety of the possibility of never being able to make it back having weighed rather heavily on my mind. I managed not to hyperventilate, something I would've felt more proud of had circumstances been different. For better or for worse, the room was exactly as I had remembered it, untouched and unchanged. Which was both relieving and depressing. Relieving in the sense of me going back to my room after spending the entire day worrying someone had broken into it, only to find out that there's no sign of such whatsoever, save for the fact that this wasn't my room. Depressing in the sense that, of course, I'm still alone.

I'd spent the last few years of my life being something of a loner, so it felt almost pathetic as to how starved for company I was at the moment. It hadn't even been an entire day.

At least, I thought it was an entire day. It's hard to tell, what with the whole "being stuck indoors with no windows or clocks".

It had just occurred to me that I was growing hungry when a slot at the bottom of the thick doors to "my" "bedroom" - I actually wasn't sure it was a bedroom - slid open, something that actually made me turn around in shock and alarm and anticipation; was someone finally here, someone I could talk to and get answers out of?

But in scooted in what I could only describe as a futuristic Roomba, sliding across the pristine floor. And on it was...a tray, actually. At least, it certainly resembled a cafeteria tray, albeit stocked with what seemed like blocks wrapped in a plastic wrapper, the kind of packaging you might've expected for a block of butter at a supermarket.

Tentatively, I picked up the tray, wanting to give its contents a closer look, trying to figure out if this was actually a tray of food...and then the Roomba-like device - I'm just going to call it a Roomba - suddenly slid away towards the open slot in the door. "Wait!" I called out, half-hoping - and half-dreading - that the Roomba was actually sentient.

No good. It ignored me completely and disappeared under the door before the slot slid shut. I rushed after it nonetheless, waiting for the doors to slide open as I reached it, but by the time they opened, the Roomba was long gone.

Scowling at my unsuccessful attempt to befriend a Roomba and at the fact that I had been attempting to befriend a Roomba, I returned to my bed and the discarded tray left there. The blocks of food were still there - at least I assumed it was food - still wrapped tightly like something on a supermarket shelf. I didn't plan on going hungry if I could help it - I had a longstanding grudge with hunger - but peeling open the wrapper was admittedly a half-hearted affair; the unwrapped block inside looked brown and nondescript, odorless and textureless. I couldn't help but think that what I held in my hand was what would happen if you threw a granola bar into a blender and tried to turn it back into a granola bar.

I also had no way of ascertaining whether or not what I held in my hand was poisonous - or if it would cause me diarrhea - but hunger sucked, so I took a tentative bite.

...It actually didn't taste too bad. A little salty, which I didn't quite expect. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, honestly. I couldn't really place the taste, and maybe hunger was playing a role here, but I wasn't instantly spitting the part I nibbled out of my mouth in disgust, so that nibble turned into a bite. And several bites and unwrapped plastic peels later, I had not died from poison.

So the food was safe to eat and - although entirely boring - was largely not utterly revolting. Hooray.

Speaking of diarrhea, I was pleased - at least as pleased as I could be under the circumstances - that there was a bathroom at the back of the room. That allowed me to wash up with warm water - coming in two varieties, clear and soaped - and relieve myself. Fortunately, unlike the pod-like bed, the weirdest thing I could say about the bathroom was how automated everything was. The faucet I expected, but warm water coming out of the shower the moment I stepped in was a surprise, although given there were no obvious knobs or buttons, I suppose I should've saw that coming.

So if this was some kind of super high-tech facility where confused inmates were subject to weird social or psychological experiments - like, if I was later expected to fight ninety-nine other people I didn't even know were in this facility to begin with, and to the death at that - then at least I got to spend my days in relative comfort, with weird but functional food, running water and toiletries, a clean "bedroom", and - of course - a bed. At least, if that's what you called the weird science fiction pod thing I was lying on. In. Whatever.

"Alright," I muttered to no one in particular, except possibly the ceiling above where I was lying down in the aforementioned "bed", "you're trapped in a giant base in the future. You have no idea where you are, you have no idea how to get out, and your only company is a space Roomba that feeds you.

"Got any bright ideas?"

*****​

Roughly four days had passed, and I came to several conclusions.

I had, of course, absolutely no faith in my conclusions, nor in the assumption that four days had passed, but that's beside the point. Is that my first conclusion? I'll say that's my first conclusion.

The second was that unless this was some kind of experiment as to how much boredom a human being could tolerate, this place was probably well and truly abandoned, for one reason or another. Everything was still automated, which meant that while my hunger needs were being seen to by some kind of supercomputer - at least for now - it also meant until I could find a way out of this place, there was no one I could talk to. No weapons that I could find either, reducing the possibility that I was being set up to fight ninety-nine other abductees. Almost strangely, I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

I had hoped that by tugging on the thread that was the Roomba, I could at least figure out whether or not there was actually someone hidden away in another room, toying with me through the power of a remote control. I "ambushed" the Roomba bringing me my meal by clinging onto it, preventing it from fleeing without me...except the Roomba ended up having much more torque than I thought. As a result, I was pulled along the floor screaming in terror before the Roomba slid into a small slit under the wall. A small slit that I couldn't fit through, so - obviously - I slammed into the wall very ungracefully.

That actually caused me to roll on the floor for a full minute, writhing like I had stubbed my toe. I'll remember that, you little Roomba.

Third conclusion: Getting out of here was going to be a problem. I had already known that this place was mind-bogglingly huge. To test just how huge it actually was, on the third day, after the little Roomba handed me my meal - and after I had failed to catch it again - I tried to walk in as much of a straight line through a series of rooms as possible, leaving crumbs from my food where I made turns, almost like Hansel and Gretel, if Hansel and Gretel were stuck in a science fiction facility and were actually nineteen-years-old.

This method worked great, actually. I felt pretty good about myself as I started my return trip to my room, except that was when I realized that the bloody Roomba was cleaning up all the crumbs I had left behind.

So the space Roomba was actually a Roomba. I again attempted to chase it down - albeit this time in frustrated anger rather than desperate curiosity - only for it to flee and lead me to another abrupt kinetic visit into a wall while it slid into a slot at the bottom.

Clearly, the space Roomba was fast becoming my greatest enemy in this facility.

Finding the way back to "my" room afterwards was a difficult exercise, and the fact that I managed it actually made me feel pretty good about my own abilities at pathfinding. It did mean, however, that long excursions from my room were out of the question unless I developed a strong familiarity with my local surroundings...or unless I got creative with my pathfinding.

The space Roomba eventually came back with what I assumed was dinner. Previously, it had waited for me to take the tray from atop it before darting off; this time, it hit the brakes the moment it came through the slot underneath the giant double sliding doors. The tray of space food subsequently slipped off the space Roomba, slid across the floor, and came to a halt at my feet where I was seated on a chair. It then turned around and fled through the slit in the door before I could even get up and give chase.

I was becoming increasingly sure that the space Roomba was sentient and screwing with me.

*****​

Back when I had still been in college, some student activists had come up to me and started talking about the prison system and how we needed to fight against solitary confinement, which was apparently a form of torture. Something that had always stuck out to me in that half-minute of our interaction was how human minds are just not meant to cope with isolation, with the absence of any human interaction, and that permanent psychological damage can be seen in as little as fifteen days.

Of course, at the time, I had told the girl - more politely, and in different words - that I was broke and already busting my ass trying to graduate, so please piss off.

Oh, incidentally, I had no way to tell aside from hoping that my sleep schedule in any way still resembled a twenty-four-hour clock, but I suspected it was just about fifteen days at that point.

I couldn't really tell, of course, but I thought the isolation had done something to my posture. Also to my attention span; I wasn't exactly getting jumpy, at least not in the sense that every little hint of a noise scared me, but given how silent the whole place was, I started at every little hint of noise - some of them merely the echoes of my own footsteps - hoping that it was someone or even just something to change the routine. I was pretty sure I was slowly becoming a very obvious basketcase who would've been thrilled even with the company of those annoying student activists who had stopped me from going to class one day.

Part of it could've simply been the deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability that was invading my mind. The understanding that human minds were not meant to cope with this kind of isolation. That I was feeling deeply bored and also simultaneously panicked at the idea that I might have to live in this strange futuristic facility, forever, with no one for company but a space Roomba that kept fleeing from me. There was nothing to figure out here, nothing to deduce or to discover. It was just...more and more of these spotless, beautiful rooms that explained absolutely nothing. There were no systems for me to analyze, nothing for me to take apart, no story to be uncovered.

Things just...were.

It was great that the place was clean and that my basic material needs were being met. There was sadly no laundry room that I'd found yet - at least nothing I recognized as a laundry room - which meant I had been stuck in the same clothes for about two weeks or so, and I was not yet desperate enough to just go nude for the sake of hygiene and risk the off-chance that I'll eventually run into someone naked. It was tempting, though. Wearing my unwashed clothes felt dirty at this point. I'm pretty sure that the space Roomba wouldn't mind looking at my naked, malnourished body. I had actually thought of throwing my clothes at the Roomba in hopes that maybe it'd do my laundry or something. I didn't go through with it, though; for all I knew, it was just as likely that it would burn my clothes.

I was thinking about at least removing my jacket and unbuttoning the entire row of buttons on my blouse in "my bedroom" when the lights abruptly turned from white to flashing red and alarms began to blare at a distractingly loud volume to my oversensitive, unstimulated ears.

I froze. Actually, I cringed first, covering my ears, not panicking insomuch as having a complete deer-in-the-headlights moment as I tried - after fifteen-days-or-thereabouts of isolation - to act like a normal human being at something that resembled a fire alarm. Or air raid alarm. Or zombie alarm.

On the one hand, I was relieved there was something to break the utter tedium of the uneventful weeks spent with a space Roomba and literally nothing to do. On the other hand, fire alarms and just pop culture in general teaches most people that sudden red lights and klaxons were very bad things.

I was still in the midst of trying to figure out what was going on and what I was supposed to do when, lo and behold, the slit at the bottom of the metallic sliding doors admitted my old archnemesis, the space Roomba...which, for some reason, had a white flashing light blinking on top of its disc-like structure. When I approached, it started moving away again, through the slit in the door that promptly slid apart for me. But rather than fleeing like it usually did whenever I tried to chase it, it traveled at a noticeably slower speed, traveling almost exactly at my pace - which was not particularly fast, seeing how I was in the heels I had been wearing from work - and keeping an even distance from me even as it navigated the twists and turns of this facility, remaining in my line of sight at all times.

In a way, it reminded me about the jokes about blinking light on an airplane that led you to an exit in the case of an emergency. This was clearly the space Roomba's equivalent.

I followed, of course. Not just because I still had no idea why I was here or where I was or what was around the corner that could probably eat me very messily so as to trigger an alarm with scary red lights and scarier alarm sounds. There was, in fact, a weird kind of hope that this was an opportunity to follow the Roomba out of this clean and convenient but lonely and desolate. Maybe I'd just end up stuck in the middle of the Nevada desert, but at least I'll be back under the open sky. The irony that I had spent so many years struggling to keep a roof over my head was not lost on me.

The space Roomba continued to dart along ahead of me, taking me through a series of twists and turns through pristine halls and immaculate corridors, the white walls and golden highlights reflecting the red lights into my eyes. I swiftly lost track of how many times we've turned left and right; the space Roomba navigated the place with a daring I would not have imagined, at least not without leaving a breadcrumb trail behind me.

That the Roomba would clean up anyways, so maybe it is its fault to begin with. I haven't forgiven it.

The twists and turns continued, building an anxiety in me even as I felt my body practically vibrate with each and every blare of the alarm, my eyes straining to adjust to the flashing red lights that played hell with my vision. "How much further?" I asked the space Roomba with no real expectation that the question would be answered. Indeed, the glorified metallic saucer ahead of me simply went ever onward, flashing a white light for me to follow. At this point, I had long taken off my heels and was running barefoot across the metallic floor, if one didn't count my black stockings; I was at least thankful that the floor was almost perfectly flat and without a hint of cracks or bumps that would end with me rolling on the floor, clutching my toes and howling in pain. The space Roomba was good at setting me up for that, but I'd like to think it wasn't actively trying to mess with me this time.

I was getting tired. I had no idea how far I had run and wasn't exactly keeping track, but I felt like this was the closest I had ever come to running a marathon. My breath was coming up a little short, the minutes blurring against each other with every honk of the alarms and every flash of dreadful lights.

It was also beginning to occur to my sense of direction - my limited sense of direction, anyways - that I was not running in a straight line. That the space Roomba was leading me in weird directions. Which felt like it was screwing with me - it's already done so for the last two weeks or thereabouts, why would it stop there? - but there was part of me that wondered: What if it was trying to avoid something? Something dangerous? A bit more peripherally: How would I get back to "my" room?

I was just about to stop running so as to catch my breath and rest my burning legs when something happened. A sound, specifically, unintelligible, muffled behind closed metallic doors to my left. Sounds, actually, continuing to ring at a barely audible volume.

I blinked, straining to hear it against the blaring of the alarm, wishing it would be quiet. There was just something about that noise that made me pay attention, that made me think I needed to stop running and figure out what it was and why I was suddenly so interested in it. Instead of doing the smart thing, which was realizing that this was very possibly the thing the space Roomba was trying to lead me away from, and run away.

Annoyingly, the space Roomba had stopped about ten feet in front of me, turned around, and flashed its white light a little harder, as if realizing we needed to flee.

Then I remembered that the back of my brain categorized this sound as "unintelligible". And then the front of my brain suddenly realized that "unintelligible" meant something. It meant I couldn't understand what was being spoken. It meant something was being spoken. After a fortnight of what had amounted to "comfortable" solitary confinement, after having been isolated for so long, after struggling to find someone - anyone - in this facility to take to...

...There were people. On the other side of this door. Talking.

I ignored the increasingly urgent flashing of the light on the space Roomba's head, moving breathlessly instead for the metallic sliding double doors from which the voices were coming from. Three more steps. Two steps now. One more step and the doors would slide apart, admitting me to whatever was on the other side, and I would see people. I would see people who might very well mean me harm, but I didn't care at this point. This was stupid, and I would probably hate myself later for being so weepy and needy and stupid, but I needed to see someone right now.

I took the last step. The doors slid open.

I'm not sure what I was expecting on the other side, exactly. I mean, I expected people. That much was reasonable. But what I got instead as I was presented with another one of those ornate futuristic halls ahead of me was the sight of three people prone on the ground - all of them clothed in dark outfits that actually looked kind of like spacesuits - and a redhead girl, roughly my age in her early twenties, dressed darkly in something that looked like this weird mix of "modern soldier" and "medieval knight" - straps and pockets over tight leather clothing, linked with something that looked like armor plates here and there - who was suddenly charging at me with something that looked very much like a pistol in her hand.

When you grow up in a bad neighborhood, you learn to defend yourself, especially if you're a girl. Not necessarily in learning how to fight - although I had tried to do that - but just in how to protect yourself. Little things like shielding your head and kicking sensitive spots and running away. This being said, I'd only ever been in one actual fight with another girl, and it hadn't really been something I walked away victorious from. Not that I had lost either, strictly speaking, but whatever.

The point I'm trying to make here is that when the girl delivered a kick to my midsection, I wasn't really in any real position - any real training, any real expectation that I would be attacked so immediately - to defend myself from the painful blow that sent me tumbling equally painfully onto the ground. I barely caught my fall backwards in time, which was to say the back of my head slamming against the metallic floor beneath me didn't knock me out entirely, only "merely" momentarily reduced my thoughts to white noise and my vision to stars swimming through the night sky.

Somewhere in the back of my head, at least, alarms were screaming for me to get up, to repair those connections between my brain and the rest of my body. But my vision had only just cleared - even as I remained flat on my back - when I felt something cold and metallic - something that suddenly and terrifyingly felt like the barrel of a gun - press against the soft bottom of my jaw, and for a moment my vision was filled with the face of the redhead girl looking down at me with a surprisingly blank but ultimately scary expression.

"Sorry," she said dispassionately, her eyes cold as they locked into mine, and for no reason I could explain - even through the terror - I found it weird that I could understand her, even as her finger increased the pressure on the trigger to slam a slug right into my brain. "This isn't personal."

 

[Kei]

Chapter 2: The Arkology (II)

I could feel the pressure from the barrel of the handgun against the soft, fleshy part of my jaw, feeling weirdly cold instead of searing hot like I otherwise would've expected. My fight-or-flight instincts seemed to be busy elsewhere as I opted instead for freezing up, wide-eyed like a little pussy. As the redhead stared at me with that cold, impassive look, I was waiting for that flash underneath my chain that would launch a bullet into my head and blow my brains into tomato juice, ready to put an end to my story.

Except there was a sudden crackle - the kind you'd associate with electricity - and suddenly the redhead was yelping and falling off of me to my right, just enough for me to suddenly reestablish my brain's connections to the rest of my body and roll away to the left in something that resembled blind panic.

As I did so, I realized that I rolled and bumped into something hard but not particularly tall. And when I finally scrambled back onto my knees, I realized what I had hit was, in fact, the little space Roomba with an appendage sticking out from its shell, looking like a robotic arm at a factory, except the very end was sparkling with electricity.

So it had shocked the redhead girl off me. That was nice. We're not even yet, but the space Roomba is steadily working off the emotional debt for all the grief it had caused me. And physical debt too, but that wasn't as important right now.

Still, I found myself locking glares with the redhead in front of me, who had similarly tumbled across the floor but had achieved a three-point landing, with her remaining hand holding the gun that was pointed at me. Or not at me, but the space Roomba, which happened to be in roughly the same direction anyways. There wasn't really anger in her eyes, just a kind of emptiness that people might've associated with the mugshot of a serial killer or a school shooter, focusing on me like I was some kind of pest to be eliminated. So I did the natural thing people do when faced with a complete stranger with a gun.

That is to say, I begged for my life.

Well, no, not really begged for my life. I wasn't that miserable. I just...asked a question as I waved my hands in front of me. Desperately. Specifically: "Wait, wait, why are you trying to kill me!?"

The redhead blinked in confusion, and when she blinked a second time, it seemed as if some kind of realization suddenly overcame her, and just like that, her eyes were no longer cold and clouded and empty, but danced with the kind of life that I saw in (and had been jealous of) frat boys and sorority girls when they were partying. Like someone who was human, with emotions.

"I didn't see you on the ship," she observed, her voice still bland but not quite as cold as before. I realized for the first time - despite this being the second time I heard her speak, but she had a gun under my chin then and that's my justification - that she had an accent I couldn't quite place. It definitely wasn't American, at least. European, perhaps? She did have pale skin. For however much that mattered. Not that I could recognize European accents.

Of course, that didn't really help explain anything at all, so I asked the obvious after a moment of complete blankness: "What ship?"

Again, the redhead blinked, tilting her head slightly to the side this time in clear confusion. "Are you trying to kill me?" she asked.

"What?" It was my turn to blink. "No! I'm not trying to kill you." I blinked again before realizing that maybe this statement of hers was something to panic over. "Wait, are people trying to kill you?" I looked over the redhead's shoulder and past the open doors where she had come from, taking note of the fact that there are three people still on the ground where I last saw them, except they weren't moving and what was unmistakably blood was beginning to pool on the floor. "Wait, did you kill them?"

The redhead, however, didn't seem super interested in answer my question right now as she looked at the space Roomba between us, still poised to strike with that robotic arm sparkling with electricity, almost resembling a scorpion in a weird way. The look of confusion turned into something deeper. Astonishment, perhaps, not quite believing what she was seeing in front of her. "Is that servitor protecting you?"

"You mean this Roomba?"

"No, that's a servi..." the redhead trailed off, frowned, then asked me, "...what's a 'Roomba'?"

So she came from a place that didn't have Roombas, I guessed. Which made me wonder if Europe had Roombas, but I suppose that really didn't matter all that much in the end. "Never mind. It was...trying to lead me somewhere."

The redhead's expression looked skeptical at this instead of just confused, but she nodded slowly, as if accepting this...for now, for the lack of a better alternative explanation. "Right," she nodded; there was a lilt to her voice that wasn't there before, something that seemed to give me the impression that she was, in general, a fairly cheery person. Also that she didn't really believe me right at the moment. "Were you a stowaway?"

Well, the redhead was talking about a ship earlier. Not that I knew anything about that. "I don't know?" I admittedly lamely. "I'm...not from here. I just woke up here a few weeks ago."

That skepticism on the redhead's face looked much more pronounced now, but she nodded again like someone that was eager to get to something else that was more important. "Right. Well, do you want out?"

Oh, boy, do I ever. "Yes!"

"Then you'd better follow me," the redhead announced, sliding something into her handgun in a way that kind of reminded me of movies where soldiers would reload. And in a way, the redhead - in terms of attire and demeanor - reminded me of a soldier. Or maybe a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, one of those combatants from private military companies that I used to hear on the news and see in movies as villains.

Not that I had any real idea of what she was, exactly, save for the fact that I saw her first when she was surrounded by three dead bodies now bleeding on the ground. "Um," I started, raising a hand awkwardly to shoulder-level, reminded of this little detail about the three dead bodies past the open door and suddenly not feeling all that hot about walking beside someone with a gun. "So...why did you kill them?"

The redhead was already beginning to move back in the direction of the room she came from, marching up to the bodies before picking up one of the guns on the ground. "Because they were trying to kill me."

...Yeah, it was a bit hard to argue with that, I supposed. Not that I knew whether or not she was telling the truth, but the fact that there were guns beside the dead bodies seemed to support that claim. Either way, the redhead slung the gun she picked up by the strap around her shoulder - some kind of rifle or submachine gun, I didn't know, not actually being any kind of gun person - and began moving on once again.

Not knowing what else to do, I followed sheepishly behind, not even having the presence of mind to pick up one of the other two guns on the floor. Not that I even knew how to use them anyways, and they likely would've been greater harm to myself than anyone else, but that's really just an excuse to say I wasn't in a frame of mind where I knew what the hell I was doing. And, behind me, the space Roomba followed, albeit flashing its light ever harder - I was surprised that was even possible - as if nagging at me to follow it instead of this mysterious and probably dangerous redhead with a gun who had killed three people and just tried to kill me.

Well, "tried" is past tense, after all. And she had stopped when she realized I hadn't been trying to kill her. That's...nice, I suppose? That I wasn't in immediate danger? Maybe that made her a considerate person? This place was doing something bad to my basic standard.

"We need to get back onto the Fortune's Wings," the redhead announced as she moved past another set of sliding doors, unphased by the fact that a complete stranger was following her; if anything else, she was giving the space Roomba following us a much more wary glance. And there was just something about the way she said "fortune's wings" that made me think the words needed to be capitalized. Like a name or something. "If we can't sneak back on, we're stuck here forever."

"Oh," I mouthed blankly. That was probably a bad thing. I mean, I had company now, but two weeks were enough to drive me near-crazy. I wanted off.

The redhead definitely knew the place better than I did, navigating its twists and turns deftly, moving through each door cautiously, as if expecting a threat behind every one. I wasn't sure if that meant she was an inhabitant here or if she just had a much better sense of direction than someone who needed Google Maps on her phone.

The silence was awkward. Here was finally someone who was willing to talk to me - even if she had two guns now - and we were just walking around in silence. Struggling to find something to talk about, I reached back into my memory for something that seemed at least relevant to our situation, asking, "So...is that a ship? Um, what you said, I mean. Fortune's Wings or something?"

"Yes," the redhead replied, moving towards the next set of doors, but approaching it from the side. The angle reminded me of how kids would try to get close to the automatic sliding doors of a supermarket without triggering the sensors that opened them.

"So...are we on an island?"

"No," the redhead answered, pressing herself against the walls of sliding doors that were still close, her gun - the longer one, not her handgun - now gripped in both hands, "we're on an arkology."

I copied her movements and pressed myself against the wall behind her. "What's an arkology?"

"Can I answer those questions later?" For what it was worth, the redhead did not actually sound impatient or frustrated; there was, in fact, a level of something that sounded suspiciously like earnestness in her rather matter-of-fact statement as she pointed calmly towards the doors. "The hangar is beyond these doors and I want to try to get in it before they set up any mounted guns."

"Oh, okay, sorry." I said that politely and with an appropriate amount of contriteness despite the back of my head telling me there was something wrong with her statement. Which I thought was nice because people usually complained I was too sharp and sarcastic and insincere. Which of course had nothing to do with the fact that the redhead in question had a gun in her hands, and was strangely generous enough to help me get out despite her being stuck in a situation that I didn't fully comprehend but which apparently necessitated a gun.

The redhead nodded, taking a breath as if to steel herself. "Ready?" she asked. The question was rhetorical; she was already moving towards the front of the doors, the two metallic panels sliding open soundlessly, and I was already beginning to take that first step, shifting my momentum forwards.

Myr foot had not yet even landed on the floor to complete that step when I realized exactly why I was having an uncomfortable thought at the back of my head. And now that my consciousness finally registered it, "uncomfortable" turned to "alarm". "Wait," I said blankly, "you said 'mounted gun'?"

My answer came as I found myself looking through the open door and towards what laid beyond it. It was the largest room I had come across in this facility thus far - no, easily the largest room I had ever seen, ever, looking like it was the size of a dozen football stadiums, if not more - stretching to the reaches of my vision. It formed a bit of an arc, and so I couldn't see the "end" of it before it turned away beyond my line of sight, as if I was moving out of a giant circular stadium, but even then it felt like I could stare down its end for miles. On the far side of this giant room hundreds of yards away, opposite of the door I was already stepping through, should've been a wall, except there wasn't. In fact, I found myself looking at what looked like a blue glowing window - the kind you'd maybe see at a rave club as decoration - and on the other side of it was...

...The starry night sky.

It's unmistakable: Clusters of stars against the black sky. Faint clouds of light that are supposed to be nebulae. A path away from the suffocation of an endless stretch of silent halls and lonely chambers. Freedom.

I might've appreciated the moment more, the realization that I was suddenly this close to getting out of there. I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it felt like an emotional moment.

Sadly, I had other things to worry about. Like the fact that the redhead beside me wasn't charging forward, and was in fact staying behind one of the two sliding doors. The fact that in front of me this time wasn't the smooth metallic floor that stretched on to the walls, but relatively narrower walkways - wide enough for at least two vans to easily pass each other side-by-side - that reminded me of a pier or factory walkway, suspended over what I assumed to be the sea or at least a distant floor, making me think I was actually stuck in a secret supervillain base under a mountain island or something. The fact that there was something at the end of one of these walkways a hundred yards in front of me: A strange-looking ship-like vessel about the size of a very large luxury yacht - the kind some rich asshole would throw big parties on - with an aged, brown hull that looked like it had spent years in Afghanistan, something that seemed so weirdly out of place in this pristinely white-and-gold facility. The fact that there were people in front of that ship - women, in fact, a bit more than half a dozen of them, clad in that hodgepodge of what Hollywood has convinced me is special forces attire, hardly dissimilar to those of the redhead I've been following - who were now pointing at me and the redhead and shouting something in a tone that made it clear they weren't trying to be friends. The fact that they were holding things in their hands that very suspiciously looked like guns that were now being raised and pointed in our direction.

Oh, and there was the fact that amongst them, there was something fixed onto a tripod. I've never fired a gun, nor was I a nerd, but that "something" looked very, very much like a machine gun. Something I sadly did not fully register until I had stepped past the doors and walls that would serve as a shield between me and any bullets fired in my direction.

I did the smart thing. I tripped and stumbled and scampered back to the door like the frightened little rat I was, making incoherent yelping noises, waiting for that inevitable moment when the machine gun would start spewing hot lead at us. The redhead, meanwhile, stood her ground, leaning out just slightly from the door, enough for her to admit her handgun, firing at the women fifty yards away in a stance that struck me as terrifyingly professional, the kind that one would imagine belonged to some kind of superspy or something. One of those quick shots actually managed to hit someone with a bullet that trailed blue as it tore through the air, the victim of her shot screaming as she slumped to the floor.

Then the machine gun started firing, and that's when I realized it wasn't a machine gun.

I was fifty yards away, around the corner of the door, and not even within the line of sight, and yet what the redhead had called a "mounted gun" fired in my general vicinity. What struck me as surprising at first - insomuch as I could be surprised in the middle of my panties-wetting terror - was the sound of the mounted gun rather than the sight of gunfire streaming through the open door I was hiding beside. It was clearly not the ear-shattering mini-explosions of firecrackers that Chinatown let off during Chinese New Year, if those firecrackers were actually on steroids. Rather, it sounded like a combination of a high-pitched mechanical whine and electricity, a combination of crackling and rumbling that a giant Tesla coil would make. Tragically, it was no easier on the ear, abruptly swallowing me into a world of an unholy cacophony, blasting my eardrums and my head with what my brain was deathly certain was all the explosions in the world, despite the fact that the gun wasn't even firing at me, but through the door of which I was beside, a detail that I was slower to notice in part because I was cowering behind the wall and curling into a ball and covering my ears and closing my eyes and screaming like a little girl.

When I did open my eyes a moment later, I noticed a second detail. The gunfire in our direction? The bullets that were striking the walls we' were hiding behind and through the door we tried to pass through? They weren't bullets. Rather, what streamed through the door was bright, thick, jagged line of light that looked like an unstable bolt of electricity, crackling violently as it twisted this way and that every few milliseconds. Despite lashing out like a whip, it didn't bend and twist enough to strike me from around the automatic doors, nor did it automatically swerve to strike the nearest soft and flesh target. Nor, in fact, did it simply melt the thick, pristine wall I was hiding behind, which seemed to suffer nary a scratch as it violently lashed this way and that in an attempt to kill the redhead and myself. But the twisting, crackling beam was enough to make me roll away in terror, not only because that lightning bolt was uncomfortably close to zapping me into charred jerky, but because, for all intents and purposes, the women I saw on the other side of this door had what was basically a literal lightning gun.

Hi, I have been kidnapped by secret elements of the government to a classified science fiction facility where military special forces test experimental weapons, including weapons from the future like a literal lightning gun that is spewing a steady stream of electricity or something at us. Please send help.

Amidst all of this, the redhead had similarly ducked back from where she was peeking out around the doorframe, reloading her handgun with the kind of calmness that one doesn't generally associate with "being shot at with a mounted gun". That coldness in her eyes - that deathliness in her gaze the first time we had locked stares as she shoved a gun under my chin - had returned, and I was even more certain that I had, proverbially speaking, picked the wrong horse, that this girl was crazy, and that I was going to die one way or another because of it.

"Holy shit!" I screamed in her direction, my voice shrill and lilting with clear panic. I must've looked like a massive sissy. I didn't find it in me to blame myself; I've witnessed gang violence before in the bad neighborhoods I had lived in, but never had I ever actually been shot at before, because I always maintained my distance; you learn to be sensitive about these things when you live in shitty places. Now my virgin shootout experience involved a literal lightning gun, and it was like the cherry on top of an already terrifying few weeks. "What the hell is that!?"

Despite having to raise her voice over the sound of the gunfire, the redhead sounded infuriatingly calm - making me look bad by extension - as she shouted back, "Plasma array!"

I would like to note, then, that tech from the future is officially here, and I am being murdered by it. More importantly: "Why are they shooting at you!?"

"On-site negotiations really didn't work out well!"

"What the hell in those negotiations did you do to piss them off that badly!?" I screamed. It occurred to me once again that I was stuck with a killer - a complete stranger in who had already killed, someone good at it, to my entirely uninformed observations - and that staying with her in the middle of this conflict I knew absolutely nothing about was increasingly looking like the result of an awful decision-making process. Except alternative choices - the totally nice-looking people fifty yards whose motivations are also entirely unknown to me - were currently being violently postponed by a combination of rifles and a mounted gun that was shooting not lightning, but plasma.

It didn't matter that maybe these people who were firing that plasma array maybe had perfectly legitimate reasons to try and kill this redhead, whom, for all I knew, might've been a terrorist or a serial killer or chewed with her mouth open. Under the circumstances, the redhead - the killer who nearly fired a bullet into my brain from under my jaw - suddenly seemed like an entirely reasonable person to stick with. It's funny how much fired and unfired bullets change one's perspective on how to justify horrible, horrible things.

For just a moment, the "plasma array" stopped firing - a moment in which my world isn't full of electric screeching and that crackling beam disappears - and the redhead leaned out from around the doorframe to fire several shots again. But this incurred a response of what is clearly gunfire - sounding more like actual guns this time, at least the guns that had been involved whenever there had been a shooting in the neighborhood - forcing the redhead to hide back behind the doorframe once more, followed by the return of the plasma array firing through the door in hopes of hitting anything, or at least deterring any counterattack.

This exchange of gunfire lasted for a few more moments before the redhead grimaced, pulling back behind the door and announcing to me, "This isn't working." And before I could fully process this statement, she stepped away from the door, allowing it to automatically close, and grabbed me by the wrist, shouting, " Let's go!"

And for a long, fleeting, surreal moment - where the world seemed to pass me by without me ever really taking full account of it - I was dragged through a dizzying chain of corridors and doors. We could've been going back the way whence we came, or we could've been going through an entirely new path. I didn't know, as much of a daze I was in. I'm sorry if you expected me to already be some kind of stone-cold killer, but I was only a bit more than two weeks into my kidnapping, and for the low, low price of having being shot at with experimental prototype military weapons from space, I was already missing my dingy apartment, my moldy mattress, my dead-end job, my sexist and racist colleagues, and my half-senile mother who was somehow not yet senile enough to ask why I wasn't making grandchildren for her.

Seconds passed. Maybe minutes. It was hard to tell, in my current state of mind. All I knew was that eventually, the redhead stopped and let go of my wrist. She looked back towards the door we stepped through, seemed to think about things, then declared a moment afterwards: "They shouldn't be able to find us. Their only other tracker is kind of a hack."

Ah. She was a tracker. I realized that I didn't understand what that meant and - right at that particular moment - didn't care. I collapsed onto the floor, sprawling across its cold metal surface, wheezing my lungs out, looking blankly upwards. I didn't care whether or not the floor was dirty or bad for my back. I was small, thin, malnourished, and horribly out-of-shape. This was the hardest I had ever ran in my life, my body starting to tremble as I started to come down from my adrenaline high, leaving me with only this cold, numb feeling - realization, really - of "holy shit, holy shit, I probably almost died five different times in the last fifteen minutes". If I had more energy, I would've curled up into a ball and stayed there for the next hour or something.

Beside me, too close for me to ignore it but far enough that I couldn't reach out and smack it, the space Roomba - or "servitor", whatever - continued to intensely flash its blinking light in my face.

This was a fact that did not escape the redhead's notice. "The servitor is still following you," she remarked, continuing to stare at the space Roomba with an expression of muted confusion and astonishment.

"Is that what you call the Roomba?" I asked between breaths.

"I don't know what's a Roomba." Because clearly, Europe is superior; why have Roombas when you have French maids? Not that I knew what a French accent sounded like. "Why is it following you?"

"Because the universe hates me," I snapped bitterly. I tried to calm myself by taking deeper breaths. It wasn't working; I was neither calmer nor taking deeper breaths. "I don't know what it's doing, honestly. I want to kick it."

"Right," the redhead remarked in a tone of voice that suggested she was dissatisfied with my answer but knew not to press. "Well, if you have your secrets, I won't pry."

"No," I was quick to say, not wanting any reason for this redhead to distrust me. "I don't have any secrets. I mean, this isn't a secret. I have no idea what is going on." I sat up, trying to take on my most beseeching look at the redhead even though all my colleagues told me I had "resting bitch face". Honestly, I was panicking a little, terrified at the idea that this girl with a gun - who nearly blew my head off at one point - didn't trust me. "I don't know why I'm here, why I'm being shot at, why I'm stuck here with you."

"Ah," the redhead allowed blankly even as I began to hyperventilate.

"Holy shit," I clawed at my throat in a panic, trying inhale and exhale air that felt like it was stuck there. "I can't breathe."

To my surprise, the redhead actually knelt down to where I was heaving on the ground, putting a hand on my back that was much gentler than I would've reasonably associated with a killer. "Calm down," she said, her voice soft and soothing. "You're going to be alright. I'm going to find a way...we are going to find a way to get off this arkology. Alright?"

"No, not alright," I said. I'd always been unnecessarily blunt. "But I'll try to breathe. I'm..." I paused, not entirely sure how to properly continue, before ultimately lamely settling on, "...I I'm sorry."

The redhead gave my shoulder a squeeze. "Don't worry about it." She waited for my breathing to slow down a bit - for me to stop hyperventilating, basically, which took a while - before asking, "I didn't catch your name."

Oh, right, it's that time of the year again. "Artemis," I said glumly.

The redhead blinked. "That's a strange name."

"Yeah," I sighed, "that's the curse of having parents who think names have to mean something."

There's something about the redhead's reaction that suggested my response didn't quite connect with her thoughts about the strangeness of my name, but she decided to let it go with a shrug. "I'm Scarlet."

I nodded. Then sighed explosively. "God, I have a million questions."

"Okay."

"I'll ask them later. I don't think now is a good time for question-asking."

"Okay."

"But can I ask one question first?" I added sheepishly. It was this thing that had bugged me terribly, nibbled at my brain ever since I first ran into the redhead. With all the guns, though, there just hadn't been any good moment to ask this question. Now was as good a time as any.

Scarlet shrugged. "Sure."

Shifting my weight awkwardly, I pointed at the top of her head, and then her backside. "Why do you have fox ears and a tail?"

 

[Kei]

I'm so sorry this has taken so long. I've been juggling work and other writing commitments. I'm still determined to go on with this, though, so please don't think of this as a dead project. Stay tuned~ >_<

*****​

Chapter 3: The Arkology (III)

"What do you mean," Scarlet blinked with a quizzical tilt of her head to the side, "'why do I have fox ears and a tail'?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that. On the one hand, she had the kind of tone that sounded like the kind of tone any sane person would take when replying "what do you mean, 'why do I have eyes and ears'". On the one hand, I had no idea how to react to the fact that Scarlet sported pointy, fluffy ears on the top of her head that resembled fox ears - orange in color like those of a red fox - and definitely didn't resemble human ears, the latter of which I could not find on the sides of her head. And it wasn't just the ears; Scarlet had a long, bushy tail that was definitely evocative of a fox, coming out of a slit in the back of her pants. There was a puff of white fur at the very end, but otherwise the appendage matched the color of her hair. And ears, really.

It wasn't just her either. The women I saw - the corpses that had been lying on the ground when I had first met Scarlet and then later those who had been shooting at us - all sported ears and tails of some description. Everything had been happening so fast, of course, and with bullets and lightning flying through the air, I had not been in a particularly inquisitive mood to either double-check their ears or ask about them. Now, however...

Now, I would like to amend my previous statement: I had not been transported to Area 51, but a goddamned anime. Not like I'd watched them, but I'd been surrounded by enough white Japanese fanboys in my life to see not-safe-for-work images as their phone wallpaper. That, or the government's genetic research and development program had suddenly gotten very interesting. Either possibility was terrifying.

Still, I was at least going to try to make sense of anything. With naive hope, I pointed more at her ears and tail, muttering, "Well, you know. Your ears are...different. And you have a tail." Such eloquent observations. The fact that I was pointing this out made me feel simultaneously silly and stupid. "Which is, uh..."

"Well, yes," shrugged Scarlet. "I'm a vulpis."

"Gesundheit." I couldn't help it.

The "vulpis" or whatever blinked. "Pardon?"

Sighing, a waved a hand at her in defeat. "Never mind. I'm not going to pretend I make sense of that." Not that my curiosity had been sated in any way. It wasn't some kind of hairband with fox ears that she was wearing; the fluffy things were actually making these small, twitching motions. As was her tail, swishing this way and that in a way that reminded me all too much of a real fox.

Scarlet studied me for a moment before merely nodding. "Exile?" she asked.

"From where?" I snorted, still staring at what - to me, at least - were extra appendages on Scarlet's body. "Westside? I wish."

Again, the only person with a gun in the room looked at me blankly for a moment before blandly saying, "Right." It seemed like this was her go-to reaction when she couldn't make sense of things but decided that I was keeping secrets or something. Admittedly, "Westside" wasn't the best of all explanations; maybe I should've told her my city. Or at least state.

Tragically, I was still too fixated on the fact that Scarlet has fox ears and a fox tail. Because seriously, they looked so real. "Is that even real?" I asked, reaching out for her ears like she was a fox at a petting zoo.

Except as soon as my hand got close, Scarlet suddenly snapped away, her eyes wide and her posture suddenly cautious. I jerked back my hand as if I had been shocked; Scarlet didn't seem alarmed enough to draw her gun - mostly instead looking like I had just tried to grope her - but the reminder that she had a gun suddenly made me go very cold, compounding the fact that I was suddenly feeling very contrite. I would've felt contrite even if she didn't have a gun, to be honest, but the gun really didn't help matters. What had I been thinking? How would I have liked it if some weirdass stranger had tried to reach out to touch my ears?

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I stammered quickly, hunching my shoulders in a bit both in fright and embarrassment. "I'm not sure what I was thinking. I didn't mean to offend."

Scarlet again looked at me with that blank look, trying to figure me out. Finally, she visibly relaxed a bit; mercifully, not once did she look like she was going to reach for her gun or even motion towards it. So I was still safe. "It's fine." A pause. "You're strange."

"Yeah," I scowled, trying to look like I had already gotten over my awkward, panicked demeanor at having possibly offended a girl packing heat, "well, imagine waking up two weeks ago and realizing that you've been kidnapped to some Area 51 place and being shot at with a lightning gun. Or plasma array. Whatever." That statement alone was crazy enough that I just buried my face into my palms, coming to terms with the fact that, yes, my life had truly gotten that crazy. "God."

For her part, Scarlet did look cautiously intrigued, if also a little confused. "Were...people here before?"

"I don't know. You've been the only person I've seen since I got here. Aside from this stupid Roomb...!" I scowled, pivoting around on one foot as I attempted to deliver a sharp kick to that stupid Roomba that was still rapidly flashing lights in my eyes, as it had been doing for maybe the past half hour. Tragically, the space Roomba swiftly slid away well outside by kicking range - not that my landing that kick was highly probable to begin with - and continued to both watch me warily like a cat on its guard and flash that stupid light. "Get back here, you dick!" I vented my frustration at the space Roomba, only to notice that Scarlet had flinched a little at my outburst, and was now looking at me in muted bewilderment. That made me instantly awkward again as I muttered, "Sorry."

"I don't mind," Scarlet said mildly. It was great that she could tolerate my frustration and that bloody space Roomba, although she started looking between the two of us, as if expressing obvious wariness at my antics, or just being around the two of us - me and space Roomba - in general.

I, in the meantime, was too busy trying to chase the space Roomba down, albeit with only a quarter of my previous enthusiasm; in despite of my simmering anger, I was totally aware that it traveled faster than me, could disappear into slits at the bottom of walls, and otherwise had successfully evaded every single previous attempt to capture it. Or punish it. Either was fine to me. And indeed, the space Roomba was backing away in circles, so my following it while muttering swear words under my breath meant we were literally going in a circle around Scarlet, who just watched on awkwardly. "If you're going to follow me," I finally snapped after about half a minute of futilely catching that blasted thing, "at least go get me some food!" Then, as an awkward afterthought, "Oh, and, uh, for Scarlet as well."

The space Roomba, of course, stayed rooted to where it was, flashing its light in my eyes with silent persistence now that I was no longer trying to kick it into the upper atmosphere. Or, at least, that was what I thought would happen. Instead, after a moment of seeming consideration, the space Roomba suddenly spun around and darted into one of the slits under the walls that I at this point suspected were service corridors specifically for those little shits.

"Wow," I blinked, not actually sure how to react to this. "That...worked?"

"It...seems like it," Scarlet offered, sounding just as incredulous as me.

"That thing never actually listens to me."

Scarlet sent me a look that borders on alarm. "It's not supposed to."

At least Scarlet was more familiar with these space Roombas - or servitors, whatever - than I was. "Well, I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth."

"Pardon?"

Right, English idioms might've been something unfamiliar to someone who didn't speak English as a first language. "I'm not going to get pissy about little blessings here and there I can get in a pile of shit."

Again, Scarlet stared at me for a moment of muted confusion before simply stating, "Right."

I felt like I really lucked out. That for a girl with a gun and clear familiarity with how to use it to kill people, she was being remarkably patient. If she was, in fact, keeping me around so she can sell me to Eastern European sex traffickers or whatever, then at least she was being awfully nice about it. I hoped she wasn't an Eastern European sex trafficker. Her accent sounded like it? I didn't know. I certainly didn't think that Eastern Europe had any foxgirls.

But already, Scarlet was moving on, striding in a direction that I thought was in the general direction of "away from the people who were shooting us". She didn't motion for me to follow; perhaps she assumed that I would just tag along without being told. In this, she was probably right. "We should move deeper into the arkology," she declared. Then, after a moment, she suddenly stopped and swiveled around on her heels, and I almost crashed into her. "No, we should've taken the firearms from those idiots I killed." She looked at me and shrugged. "I didn't expect to...be with anyone else here."

I nodded agreeably, although there was one bit of concern I felt obligated to raise: "But, uh, the space Roomba is getting food for us. Shouldn't we wait?"

Scarlet blinked at me again in that inscrutable way people do when they think you're crazy, an idiot, or both. "The...servitor knows where we are. This is an arkology."

It was my turn to blink, right up to the point where I nodded along and replied, "Right, I'm going to pretend I understood what you just meant. Lead the way, I guess."

And so she did, retracing her steps through the corridors of stainless white panels and gold highlights, navigating the twists and turns that rooms with multiple doors presented. Or at least I thought she was retracing her steps. Even if I did have a good sense of direction and did remember the rough path we had taken in our escape, there was a period a time after the whole "getting shot" thing that had been excised from my memory. Or perhaps it had failed in even registering in my memory in the first place, so blind had my panic been.

And so it was after about five minutes of incessant walking that I finally worked up the courage to ask, "Do you know where to go?"

Scarlet's answer was as curt as it was surprising: "No, of course not."

"Oh," I blinked, my sense of concern swiftly rising. "Well, you seem like you do."

"I'm making some guesses," she admitted. "You begin to get a feel for the patterns these arkologies are built in, usually around your third or fourth expedition." I imagined that was a nice way of saying she was making educated guess, which I supposed was still significantly better than any uneducated guess I could make.

Thankfully, although it took somewhere in the realm of half an hour - and although there were a few moments involving hesitation and backtracking that made it seem like Scarlet was losing her way just a little - yet another set of doors before us opened...

...And we were rewarded to the sight of half a dozen space Roombas.

It was almost a comical sight, watching a bunch of these disc-shaped robots zipping around left and right. Then I noticed that this was indeed the same room where Scarlet had shot dead the three women that had already been lying as corpses on the ground. You know, the same room where Scarlet had almost blown my brains out. Half the space Roombas had attached cords to the bodies and were apparently dragging them away. I wasn't exactly trying to look too hard, but just as I had thought, all of them had fluffy ears coming out of the top of their heads and tails from the rear. The remaining space Roombas, meanwhile, were gliding over the trails of blood coming from those bodies, cleaning it away and leaving the floor behind them almost startlingly pristine clean. That part was less comical and more like something from a dystopian movie, where all signs of screwed up violence were eradicated to give credence to the image of a "perfect" society.

There was also the fact that they seemed to be trying to take away the guns that were on the ground as well, though, leading to Scarlet dashing ahead to pick them up off the ground away from the space Roombas reach. After a futile attempt to chase after their targets, the three space Roombas turned towards Scarlet - now carrying about five different guns - and seemed to stare for a moment, as if trying to say "what gives". Then they decided that cleaning the blood was more important, and simply rolled off.

For me, cleaning the blood was an important thing too, because the weapons were still stained with blood from the pool it had been lying in. Unfortunately, Scarlet didn't seem particularly perturbed by this, and even more unfortunately, she gave each gun only a cursory rub against her trousers - leaving semi-dry stains - before handing one over to me. Trying not to hesitate for too long, I gingerly took what seemed like a handgun in between two fingers, trying to hold it where it wasn't stained with the blood of bodies that were now being dragged out of the room. The space Roombas passed through the sliding doors before they closed, and that was the last time I saw of them.

It was another moment before the fact that there were multiple space Roombas completely settled in. I mean, this was a giant place, so somewhere deep down, I had always assumed - without ever really thinking about it - there was going to be more than on space Roomba cleaning up the place, but I had only ever seen one at a time. Now that I was confronted with this fact, though, I wondered whether or not the space Roomba that tormented me was among those that had dragged away the corpses and cleaned away the blood. Whether or not it was the same space Roomba, in fact. Or if those little bastards were all in on it and took turns messing with me.

I didn't have a lot of time to think about it, though. Even as I was trying to figure out which parts of the handgun were less bloody and thus sanitary - and non-gross - for me to touch, Scarlet was looping gun straps around her shoulders where applicable, shoving a smaller gun into a spare holster, and hiding another gun into a bag. "How good are you with a gun?" she asked.

"I've never fired one before," I admitted. I had never been comfortable with them.

"That is unfortunate," said Scarlet in the kind of tone that suggested she somehow expected this to be the answer. "It's a useful skill for a hacker to have."

"I'm not a hacker," I pointed out. I was increasingly unsure from where Scarlet was getting this impression. "I'm a mechanic."

"Ah," Scarlet allowed, looking quietly thoughtful for a moment. Finally, she concluded, "It's still a useful skill to have. Do you know how to shoot one?"

"Point, pull trigger?" I shrugged helplessly, still looking at the handgun between my fingers like it was toxic or radioactive. Or both. "I'm not trying to be a smartass, I'm trying to express the degree to which I know."

"Right," Scarlet said, slipping in behind me with such casual grace that I didn't even fully realize she was suddenly pressing up behind my back until her arms had slipped under my own and her hands had slid the gun into my own hands, apparently trying to push me into a proper firing posture that I might've paid more attention to were it not for the fact that, first, this felt incredibly awkward and maybe even embarrassing, and, second, Scarlet smelled kind of nice.

Which was not exactly the kind of thing I really wanted to be noticing when there were corpses here just a moment ago and my hands were probably now stained with blood from the spots Scarlet hadn't bothered to give a thorough cleaning to, but.

Already, with all the grace of a master pianist, Scarlet's fingers guided my own to the different parts of the handgun, first at the level behind the trigger. "This is the safety," she explained, clicking the mechanism up and down. "When you think it's super unlikely for you to run into anyone hostile, click it to safe like this. Never put your finger in the trigger guard, this circle here," she guided my finger along the metallic loop that surrounded the trigger, "unless you need to shoot or prepare to shoot. Now when you need to shoot..." She trailed off for a moment, a thought seemingly occurring to her, then asked, "Are you dominant in your left or right hand?"

"Right," I answered, like the ordinary schmuck that I was.

"Alright," Scarlet nodded, readjusting my hands around the gun, which was my first clue that the foxgirl behind me was probably left-handed. "Hold the gun in your right hand. Pull back your right foot just a bit..." and here Scarlet's foot reached out and pulled my right foot back, causing me to assume a slightly sideways slant even as my arms continued to be angled and bent forwards, "...and bend your knees a little. Take your left hand up to your right like so."

It was - in my completely inexpert opinion, formed through the course of watching cop or spy films while on lunch break - a pretty simple stance, nothing particularly special or fancy. Still, having been made to assume what I was assuming to be a proper shooting position, I still felt pretty badass. Like I was actually some kind of super capable superspy instead of someone who had twice within the last few hours tried to run away screaming like a little pussy.

"When you shoot," Scarlet concluded, letting go of me and stepping into my field of vision before gesturing to her boobs, "aim for the chest area." She looked at me for a moment, as if to make sure that I was maintaining a proper position even after she had let go, and nodded in satisfaction. I felt a bit irrationally pleased; despite being underutilized, underappreciated, and undervalued, I did work in a somewhat physical, precision-demanding technical job. I knew how to hold a proper position at awkward angles. Scarlet returned to my side, sliding a finger to a button just beneath the safety. "This releases the magazine," she explained, allowing the magazine to slid out from the grip of the handgun before sliding it right back in, "and you just slide a new one in like this. Easy."

"I guess," I shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant rather than confused. I was almost certain that there was much more to shooting a firearm - this was supposed to be something that soldiers trained months for, if not years - but as a one-minute crash course, it was...sufficient. It was easy enough to understand, even if I knew that, realistically, all of that was going to fly out of my head faster than flying bullets when the bullets started...well, flying.

There's also something hilarious about the fact that I was trapped in a secret giant military-like technology facility with foxgirls running around in special forces outfits, yet with the one obvious exception of an lightning gun or a plasma array or whatever the shit, guns were still guns that shot bullets.

It was right around this time when a slit at the bottom of the wall opened, and - ignoring the fact that Scarlet and I whirled around in preparation for being attacked by people with guns again - the space Roomba suddenly appeared, a tray perched atop its "head" with twice the amount of packaged food as it had carried previously. Somehow, through no rational explanation I could provide, I knew - distinct from the half dozen space Roombas we saw dragging away corpses and cleaning blood just minutes before - that this was the space Roomba that had harassed me for all this time.

True to form, the space Roomba skidded to a stop a few feet away from us, allowing the tray to slip off itself and across the floor, coming to a near-perfect stop just inches from our feet. Then it remained a few feet away, as if furtively watching for any sign I was going to try to kick it again.

And since the tray was now off its head: Of course its light was still flashing irritatingly.

Scarlet was still staring at the space Roomba for entirely different reasons, of course, looking mutedly as if she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. After a moment, her hunched soldiers finally relaxed a little bit as she bent down to pick up the tray. "It...seems to be cautious of you," she allowed eventually, as if trying to find something relatively polite to say in the middle of her disbelief.

"It's a little shit," I sighed, even as I began to make a short sprint to the space Roomba, such was my annoyance with its badgering. "Stop. Flashing!" I screamed at it, even as I delivered a swift kick in the area where the space Roomba once was. I knew, of course, that it'd safely retreat another five feet back like a cautious housecat. I didn't really think I'd be able to successfully send it flying in the first place. Sure felt like the point needed to be made, though. After feeling a bit annoyed at my predictable failure and feeling a little embarrassed when I turned around to see Scarlet staring at me, I coughed and made my own attempt to find something relatively polite to say. "So how many bad guys do we have to shoot?"

"The Fortune's Wings was carrying about a hundred, although probably a fifth of them or less are going to be crew."

"Oh." So that's about eighty-ish people. Which was not so significant a downgrade from a hundred that I was feeling in any way better about all of this. "That's...a lot of people we have to shoot."

But Scarlet corrected, "We don't. Over the next few days, or so I hope, they'll be too busy stripping out everything that isn't bolted down. They'll have to come deeper and deeper into this arkology if they want to break even with everyone they've hired." She plucked a packaged food bar from the tray before passing it to me when I finally got back within arm's reach of her. "We should pick some things up along the way too. But we wait for them to stretch themselves a little thin, sneak past them, and get back onto the ship. Preferably when we start detecting voidwaves."

"'Voidwaves'," I repeated slowly, even as I took the tray, set it down on a nearby surface that wasn't quite a table insomuch as it seemed like a metallic block that was part of the architecture, but which served fine enough as an ad hoc counter. I was, of course, trying to seem nonchalant - unwrapping my own food bar and taking casual bites out of it - about the fact that more bullshit words were being thrown around, and I was continuing to feel like the biggest idiot in the room. "Right. So what happens when we start detecting the 'voidwaves'?"

"Well," Scarlet explained in between bites, "the arkology begins its transition back into voidspace. At which point we need to get off before our innards get splattered across the walls." She shrugged. "Or worse."

This was a conversation I wish we had before I started eating. "There are...worse things than getting our innards splattered across the walls?"

"Theoretically, we could also have our innards stuck inside the walls."

*****​

The next few days were actually remarkably uneventful and stress-free, if one discounted the fact that we were - as far as I knew, anyways - perpetually within a mile of people with very dangerous guns. So it wasn't exactly an entirely stress-free environment because of the lingering background radiation of my current life that was suddenly being shot with little to no warning, but humans are good at coping.

Still, it was mostly just a matter of waiting for the aforementioned "voidwaves" to appear, or something. I didn't exactly know what it meant or how to look out for it, Scarlet didn't explain it because she thus far had the impression that I wasn't as dumb as a brick and I didn't really want to change that, and I figured I'd just start running when she told me to.

So in the meantime, we waited. Hours blended into each other, marked only by the clock on what looked like Scarlet's super-advanced phone. One meal arrived after another from the space Roomba, which wisely maintained a cautious distance from us. Light conversation was made, even though I got the feeling that both of us were maintaining a respectful distance from each other, at least until we figured each other out. Which was something that was still being relegated to the distant future, perhaps. I mean, Stockholm syndrome or no, I tend to have my guard up around anyone with a gun. I blame my mother.

Scarlet wasn't terrible company - she remained polite and helpful and astoundingly tolerant for someone who didn't bat an eye at killing people - but she also didn't really offer much about herself either. She mostly talked about what to do if we were to run into anyone, how to properly fire my handgun, how to stay behind her whenever possible, so on and so forth. It felt like she was one of those survivalists who had their own show on Discovery or National Geographic, the kind of people who stocked up on guns and canned food in the middle of the woods, waiting to duck into their bunkers at the first sign of nuclear armageddon. And speaking of Discovery or National Geographic, Scarlet reminded me in a way about something I had probably learned from one of those wildlife shows some time back, talking about the differences between "domesticated" and "tame" animals, where "domesticated" animals such as dogs were bred through the generations to be hypersocial with humans, whereas "tame" animals largely tolerate the presence of humans but are still fundamentally "wild". For all Scarlet was polite and patient, she didn't seem like she was in all that much a hurry to get to know me or introduce herself. It was surprisingly professional for two girls surrounded by a lot of people with guns.

But maybe some people are just like that. Maybe people would've describe me like that too, an anti-social, frigid loner bitch. Gunfire, I suppose, was bringing out the clinginess in me, which was pretty pathetic, to be completely honest. That, or I still hadn't gotten over the fact that this was literally a foxgirl. Did I mention that I'm stuck in a sci-fi military base of some description with a foxgirl? I felt like that was really worth repeating. Because the past two weeks needed to get even weirder, apparently.

Still, I was entirely willing to just follow her lead, where she's move from room to room, picking up little trinkets and pieces of equipment here and there before shoving it into her knapsack, sometimes removing something she had picked up before to make room for something new. Sometimes she'd stay in one place for a while, even hours at a time, making some obligatory small talk with me about nothing in particular, telling me the ins and outs about a potential threat we might face. We'd find the increasingly familiar futuristic beds, bathrooms, and showers. We'd sleep in shifts. Then her ear would twitch, as if she heard something, and then she'd stand up and say that we have to move. This happened a few times, although there was at least one close call, where we evacuated from one room just a bit too slow, and as we reached the door on one side, the door on the other end of the room slid open, revealing a quartet of armed women on the other side. I did manage to spy more animal ears and tails, but I understandably did not make out that many more details on that front, in no small part because my attention was far more fixated on the guns slung on straps around their shoulders.

Fortunately, they were also carrying all sorts of gizmos and gadgets in their arms - significantly larger pieces than the trinkets Scarlet was picking up, some as large as mini-fridges - and they did not expect to see us. Scarlet, on the other hand, was prepared, had both her hands free, and was faster on the draw.

I admit I didn't pay that much attention to the outcome of that brief shootout, because I was tripping all over myself in the opposite direction, panicking pretty much all the way, and by the time I managed to gather my wits, Scarlet had dragged me several rooms away before assessing that we were probably safe, and it was all I could do to laugh maddeningly a little and try to kick the space Roomba again for still flashing its stupid light. I didn't even remember the fact that I had a gun until some five minutes after I remembered how to breathe like a proper human being again.

But after two weeks of being alone and a couple of awkward days with Scarlet, things started to feel like they were settling into a sense of normalcy. That this was the new normal, a routine that I could get used to. The space Roomba constantly following us - or me, at least - even stopped flashing its lights at me after the first day with Scarlet was over. Things felt like they were going to be tolerable, calm, alright.

Right up until the point that the facility's klaxons started blaring again, red lights turned on, something on Scarlet's person suddenly started beeping, and I almost shat my pants.

"That's the signal," Scarlet announced. She was in the middle of examining yet another small pile of little gizmos and gadgets that I couldn't identify for the life of me, but she was suddenly alert and adamant after checking some kind of small electronic smartphone-like device on her forearm, and I was in absolutely no mood to contest this, even as the space Roomba began to incessantly flash its lights at me once again. "We need to go."

I merely nodded. I certainly wasn't going to follow the space Roomba again.

And so we ran. Dozens of minutes through a dizzying maze of bright corridors and splendid halls, where I remained in awe of Scarlet's ability to maintain a sense of direction, because I had no idea where we were going. It was scary, running around and fearing that we might eventually run into someone dangerous and hostile with a gun, but there was never a hint of anyone else. Just our echoing footsteps off empty halls. It lured me into a state of false complacency.

And of course, by "false complacency", I meant we passed through a hallway, reached the door on the other side, stepped into one of the rooms, and suddenly we were looking at a dozen people with guns looking right back at us.

A dozen people in similar garb and gear that Scarlet was wearing, that really weird combination of special forces and medieval knights, a combination of form-fitting suits of high-tech textiles, rugged scarves or jackets or capes, and scuffed-up metallic guards on the elbow or on the shoulder or on the knees or around the chest. A dozen people who - like Scarlet - had different animal-like ears and tails. A dozen people who swiftly spun around when the doors, shouting warnings as guns were raised, as I froze in place and Scarlet immediately pushed me in that thin space beside the corridor doorway.

The first time we had ran into a bunch of other people with guns, we had caught them by surprise. As in, they had seemed to be genuinely startled and had had to improvise a reaction. This time, they seemed utterly prepared. Not as if they were expecting us to come through the door in that precise moment, but the kind of expectation that we would do so eventually, and that they needed a bunch of guns, including our long-lost friend: The fixed lightning gun. The plasma array. Whatever.

In other words, we were being ambushed. I'm not sure how the dynamics worked or how it happened, but one didn't end up on this end of so many guns without them expecting us. Scarlet's prediction - that we would be able to sneak through while everyone was busy looting the place - was sadly off.

All I knew was that my world exploded in gunfire. And lightning, now that the plasma array was firing. It was hard to register anything or explain anything under this sensory overload and panic attack. All I knew was that I was stuck in a corner on the wrong end of too many bullets. I was only peripherally aware that Scarlet tried firing back a few times, but the hail of gunfire eventually got so bad that she, too, was forced to duck back with me. With the amount of bullets flying around, with the enemy approaching, it was all we could do to make slow, haphazard moves from cover to cover, Scarlet dragging me along at a speed slower than these people with guns were advancing on us.

I screamed. I cowered. I cried. I was certain I was going to die.

Then...

<Attempt #38145...SUCCESS. Neural handshake protocols established.>

What. The. F...

*****​

For those of you who have played "The Jovian Concord" for Warframe: I came up with the space Roomba first.

 

[Kei]

Chapter 4: The Arkology (IV)

<Reassessing situation...>

Something was talking in my head. It sounded feminine and damningly calm, despite the situation...except I wasn't hearing it insomuch as I was perceiving these words directly in my brain. It was a total telepathic experience, and it was weird and terrifying, but I guess I would've been more shocked had I not spent the last three weeks in this weird-ass facility and were I not being shot at by all the guns. There's a point of diminishing returns, a level of surprise that really can't be psychologically exceeded, I supposed.

<Unidentified armed belligerents on arkology. Unsanctioned conflict detected near Unidentified Civilian Inhabitant 1 in Section 12-16-39-4.>

<Assessing probability of successful retreat: 7%.>

<Assessing probability of mitigating death or serious bodily harm: 3%.>

Oh, gee, thanks. Great to know.

<Locating nearest armed patrol...FAILED.>

<Contacting nearest emergency response dispatch...FAILED.>

<Contacting Arkology Control...FAILED.>

<Contacting Local Fleet Command...FAILED.>

<Pinging on all channels for response...FAILED.>

Holy shit, that was a lot of failures. Should I've been concerned?

<Activating Contingencies 14, 15, 17, and 21 under Section VI, Article XII. Running Protocols 331-1 to 387-5.>

<Reassessing situation...>

What was actually really, really weird was that I was not listening to these words in real-time. Or, more specifically, it was not like I was "listening" and "waiting" for this weird feminine voice in my head - speaking with all the deliberate clarity and cadence of an artificial intelligence in sci-fi movies - to get all the words out one-by-one. Rather, it was almost as if the messages themselves were being shoved into my brain, and the speed at which I comprehended the message really only took as long as...well, as long as I needed to comprehend what seemed to be like signals in my brain. Maybe it was just the adrenaline, but I was almost sure everything I'd been "hearing" or "receiving" in my head thus far took only a handful of seconds.

<Unidentified civilian inhabitant, you are currently deemed to be under imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm due to unidentified armed belligerents on this arkology. Relevant official organs are not responding. Under Contingencies 14, 15, 17, and 21 under Section VI, Article XII, you may exercise your right to assume control of defensive emplacements until relevant official organs can respond. Estimated time until response: Unknown.

<Would you like to assume control of defensive emplacements?>

"Yes!" I screamed, barely hearing my voice above the gunfire. Scarlet probably didn't even pay me any attention. I didn't care. I didn't care that there were literally psychic voices in my head and I had no idea what it was trying to say. All I knew was that someone said "defensive emplacements", and I would really, really like them right now.

<Request granted. Transferring control of defensive emplacements to Unidentified Civilian Inhabitant 1...SUCCESS. Please review all technical manuals for relevant emplacement modules, and engage in defensive action responsibly.>

It was at this point that my consciousness was suddenly flooded with this complete perception of the room I was in and the room from which a dozen armed shooters were still coming at us. It wasn't a video feed - nothing like surveillance camera footage popping into the corner of my vision - insomuch as it was this strangely instinctive understanding of these rooms I was caught between, being able to understand the layout the same way I could instinctively imagine what a ball would feel like in my hand. I could perceive everyone around me - Scarlet, the dozen other people - despite not being able to see most of them, given I was hiding behind something like a large computer console. Rather, I felt their existences, their state of being in the space around me. It was almost like how I could feel ants crawling across my skin even if my eyes were closed, except they were crawling across the surface of my consciousness. It was as if I had developed a new sensory organ, one like a radar that perceived space all around me. It was a wholly alien, strange, and terrifying sensation.

But there were other things I could feel too: Machines, hidden away under the panels of the walls and ceiling. I could feel them in the same way I could feel my fingers; I could feel in what direction they were pointed despite not seeing them, could feel that with a mere thought, they could pop out from the walls. I could feel their capacity to turn in any direction I wished, the ability to direct the focus of these machines, the ability to flood any part of these two rooms I wished with hostile intent, directing them through my new spatial understanding of the world around me. I wasn't entirely sure what they'd do, but there was just that instinctive understanding that I could defend myself through this new expanded consciousness.

And let's be honest here, it was almost certainly going to be guns.

So with a thought, I commanded these new minions of mine to counterattack.

Hidden seamlessly into the white metallic walls and ceilings of the corridor we were cowering in, three white circular panels the size of manholes - previously invisible to the naked eye - suddenly popped out, revealing beneath each one menacingly black machines that looked very much like some kind of futuristic machine gun, possessing two barrel-like shapes each, albeit almost rectangular in shape and with slits running down its length. There was a sleek, futuristic quality about them that was at odds with the almost strangely rugged quality of the gear that everyone else carried, something that was only noticeable in contrast; the defensive turrets, like this facility I was trapped in, looked like it was designed by an artist and built by an engineer with laser tools, while the guns that Scarlet and I and all these people shooting at us held felt more like old hand-me-downs from the Cold War, built decades ago out of spare parts in some bleak Soviet factory or something.

More importantly, I could conceptualize where these defensive turrets were. Even in my panic, I could see them, but more pertinently, I could understand their positions relative to everything and everyone else, and in what directions I could make them fire. I could practically feel the guns telling me their predicted lines of fire as vectors converged in my mental map of the my surroundings, focusing on the door through which all the gunfire was coming from. And there was the understanding that I could make them fire.

So I thought that particular thought very hard.

A small group of three shooters had just pushed past the door, rounding the corner in preparation to gun Scarlet and I down, when the three guns that had emerged from the walls swiveled with the silence and speed of a ballerina. With a thought, the guns fired, and even though I didn't watch the guns fire - focused as my eyes were on the people with guns a split-second away from killing all of us - I could somehow perceive the green lines of powerful energy leaving the barrels, smooth and clean beams unlike the jagged, messy that came out of that plasma array. The jetted across the corridor, and then suddenly all three of our assailants were on the ground with smoldering holes in their chests, exactly where I had intended those shots to land.

I barely noticed Scarlet flinching beside me, reacting with alarm to the fact that these guns were suddenly firing, even as she swiveled her aim at the guns that just saved our lives. She didn't fire, at least, insomuch as she was trying to make sure they weren't trying to kill her. But that didn't entirely register in my mind, nor did the fact that I just managed to eliminate three people, because I was already preoccupied with the lingering threat to my bodily integrity and life: The other assholes on the other side of the door with all those guns. Shouts of confusion and shock came from the other room as the remaining nine-or-so shooters realized what was going on, but I wasn't going to give up the initiative. I could feel their presence in the chamber beyond the doors I was hiding behind, just as I could feel the five guns beyond the door, hidden behind the white metallic surfaces of the walls and ceiling.

A thought, again, was enough to activate the guns in those rooms; I couldn't see them, but I could perceive where they were and how they were and where they were aiming. I could hear the panic in the other room as I swiveled the guns - my guns - towards the enemy. I could feel them barely managing this register the presence of the threat to their live, as if they couldn't believe what was happening. And then my guns started firing. Four of them were instantly killed as I directed my guns with lethal intent, energy bolts flying smoothly in clean and straight lines landing in their chests. The others - finally coming to their senses - started running around, diving for cover, firing back. But they were no match for me and my understanding of the spatial dynamic of that chamber they so futilely attempted to ambush in. Some of them sought cover behind furniture, consoles, and pillars from one or two guns, so I simply directed another gun to swivel around and slam energy bolts into their backs. Their bullets bounced harmlessly off the instruments of my vengeance, and seeing how they exposed themselves to my return fire, I was entirely happy to create smoldering holes where their faces used to be.

With almost methodological precision, I focused on each of the shooters, and my will was made manifest as energy surged across the room, dropping our assailants one by one, until the remaining two survivors managed to cut their losses and run, fleeing through the door and out of the range of my expanded consciousness.

Eventually, where there was once an all-encompassing cacophony of gunshots, now there was only silence. Hesitantly, with no small amount of fear and confusion, Scarlet looked out around the door with trepidation, only to eventually relax a little bit as she looked around her, stunned, looking around with a half-dazed expression as if barely managing to comprehend what was happening even as the adrenaline rush began to pass. I myself finally stood up, having been cowering in a corner. I felt pretty good, all things considered, at least for a girl who nearly just pissed herself moments before being shot. Just a moment ago, I had only a three percent chance of surviving. Now, I had turned the tables on the people with guns who had been trying to kill me, and they were dead.

Which was really an abstract concept for me, up until the point where I saw the bodies on the floor. Smelled them. Saw their corpses with terrified expression frozen in time, with slack jaws and empty eyes, with smoldering holes in them, charred wounds where flesh used to be. Dead people where live ones used to be.

I was cutting them down. I was cutting them down.

I crumpled onto my knees and fought the urge to puke my guts out, urgently clasping my hands over my mouth while my eyes glazed over with tears. It hit me all at once, the fact that this was the first time I killed, the first time I turned complete strangers into fatalities, and I didn't even blink until well after the fact. It didn't really matter that they were trying to kill me. That all of them had animal ears and tails didn't matter, and wasn't a subject of intense curiosity like it once was. The full weight of what I had done was...different. Terrifying. A visceral realization that no amount of self-justification could paint over.

I wasn't a cop or a soldier or anyone particularly acquainted with killing or violent death or even shooting; I was an underpaid, underappreciated millennial mechanic. I was not ready for this.

"How did you...?" Scarlet began to ask, sounding amazed and breathless and scared at the same time. As if she could not comprehend what had just happened, which was fair because I could barely comprehend what had just happened. But seeing me on my knees, hyperventilating over the fact that I had just murdered people - in self-defense or otherwise - she seemed to cut her questions short and collect herself. When she spoke next, it was in a soft, comforting voice. "It's alright," she murmured, kneeling down and placing a hand on my shoulder. "They were trying to hurt you. You only reacted in self-defense. It's fine. You're fine."

In that moment, I could've kissed Scarlet. She was a complete stranger, yet acted like the closest, supportive friend I've never had. I tried to control my shaking, my shivering, my trembling, even as Scarlet put a hand on my shoulder as if trying to reassure me that I did the right thing. That I did the only right thing. That this was self-defense, and regardless of my visceral reaction towards dead people that I killed, that I did the right thing.

"I'm alright," I lied, trying to catch my breath. It was funny, in a way; Scarlet was still in shock for one reason or another, but was trying to prioritize my emotional well-being, so here I was, trying to overcome my own current emotional shock so that we could get a move on, just as Scarlet had wanted. "I'm..."

<Automated systems have elevated the current threat assessment to Level 3,> went a voice in my head once more, and although it was still a calm and feminine voice, it was clearly different from the one that had spoken to me earlier and granted me access to the turrets that were now retracting back into the walls until no sign of their existence remained. <As per Section II, Article XII, all civilians are to evacuate immediately to their nearest emergency shelter.>

Again, I wasn't hearing this insomuch as the words were forming in my head, so I couldn't exactly use my sense of hearing to trace it back to the source of a sound that didn't exist. Yet somehow, I was already turning in the direction of the space Roomba behind me, the little bitch having been hiding in the corner with us when we were under fire, and which was now maintaining a healthy ten-foot distance away from me again. For no reason I could ever adequately explain, I somehow just knew it was this little bitch that had been talking to me just now.

If you could talk, I wanted to say, you should've bloody done so earlier. For better or for worse, however, I was too busy staring at it wide-eyed even as I blankly told Scarlet, "It's...trying to tell me to evacuate."

Scarlet, still kneeling beside me where I had crumpled onto the ground, blinked in confusion. "What?" she asked.

I took a deep breath in an attempt to calm myself before explaining, "It's telling me that we need to evacuate to an emergency shelter."

Frowning, Scarlet looked around for whomever "it" might've been, followed my gaze, and stared at the space Roomba. "The servitor?"

"The space R..." I began, before deciding now was probably a decent time to just use terminology she was familiar with. "...Yes."

Scarlet stared at me for a moment, then at the space Roomba. And then that shock and uncertainty was gone, replaced by that cold, blank, single-minded focus in her expression whenever shit was about to get real. "We need to go," she says simply, her voice devoid of emotion, "or we're stuck here, forever, even if we don't die."

I nodded along dumbly.

Unlike before, although she moved with caution as if expecting a second ambush, Scarlet did not check the bodies for weapons or equipment, and instead was largely heading for the door directly on the other side of this large chamber, her submachine gun shouldered and pointed at every possible corner that any of these assholes could be hiding behind, every possible door that they could emerge from. I, too, was following along at a respectable distance, not so close that I would interfere with this foxgirl who was my guarding at this point, but close enough that she could shove me into safety again or something if something went wrong.

As Scarlet passed by every corpse on the ground with sizzling, smoking holes in them, she would stop right beside them and fire two more shots into their chests. It was shocking to see her do that for the first time - to inflict further violence upon someone who was dead, followed shortly afterwards by the realization that she was ensuring that someone who might've survived was truly dead - and that shock wasn't something that had entirely left my psyche even as the surprise passed, even as I resolved to just look away instead of commenting on what felt - to my pampered first world sensitivities, at least - like cold-blooded, excessive cruelty.

Of course, maintaining a ten-foot distance behind me, the space Roomba continued to follow me as all this was happening, and in addition to trying to flash a light into my eyes, it was now talking in my head: <Please follow this servitor to the nearest emergency shelter. Please follow this servitor to the nearest emergency shelter.>

It was fortunate that I was too preoccupied with the whole "get out of this facility before the voidwave thing happens and I end up having my entrails splattered across the wall or whatever" thing to care that much about the space Roomba's continued attempts to annoy the hell out of me. I had bigger things to worry about as we finally reached the double sliding doors on the other side, and were greeted with a family sight.

Once again, we found ourselves in that giant, pier-like expanse that stretched for miles to my left and right, that nexus of platforms and railings and cargo crates, that spot where I saw the starry night sky beyond the familiar sight of that ship Scarlet had been trying so hard to get back to, the Fortune's Wings, the ship sounding like its engines were whirring and increasing in power. I had known, of course, that we were getting close to our escape, but I hadn't quite realized we had been this close. That, once again, I could see the stars, that distant promise of an escape.

The problem, of course, was that the starry night sky was no longer, in fact, a starry night sky. Or at least not entirely. Instead, that black expanse with pinpricks of lights was suddenly saturated with color, going from green to yellow to pink and on and on. It took me a moment to realize that the closest thing I could compare it to was an aurora borealis, like as if clouds of colorful light had come between me and the sky. It was all at once beautiful and at the same time terrifying; defying the appeal it made to my visual aesthetic senses, looking at it somehow filled me with a sense of dread, as if there was some deep, instinctive part of my subconsciousness that told me this was wrong, that the lights I was looking at were somehow an affront to reality as I knew it.

I suspected these were the "voidwaves" that Scarlet was talking about. And I was beginning to understand why she was so concerned about this and so adamant about getting back onto the Fortune's Wings.

Of course, we weren't going to get back on and escape without a fight. The two survivors who had fled from my turrets of wrath had made it back to a ramp that led into the Fortune's Wings, joining about another half dozen of their compatriots who looked alarmed at these escapees screaming warnings at them. This surprise gave Scarlet just enough of a moment to shove me behind a crate, and against we were caught in the middle of a shootout, bullets flying across this pier.

"Can you do what you did back in that corridor again?" Scarlet demanded, even as she popped off two shots around the crate before ducking back to avoid a hail of gunfire in her direction.

"I'll try!" I shouted back at her, even as I tried to think about connecting with things in self-defense. I had no idea how to do this; this was an entirely new sensation that made absolutely no sense to me, and I was trying to take the initiative this time instead of the voice just speaking inside my head first. At this point, however, it wasn't like I had a choice; Scarlet was hell-bent on trying to get back onto the Fortune's Wings, even if that meant putting us in a situation where we were pinned down by something like eight people with guns, because apparently the alternative was worse.

Fortunately, however, fate was working in our favor just a little longer, because a feminine voice spoke in my head again: <Unidentified armed belligerents on arkology. Unsanctioned conflict detected near Unidentified Civilian Inhabitant 1 in Hangar 12-16-3. Under Contingencies 14, 15, 17, and 21 under Section VI, Article XII, you may exercise your right to assume control of defensive emplacements until relevant official organs can respond. Estimated time until response: Unknown. Would you like to assume control of defensive emplacements?>

"Yes!" I screamed again. In part because I wasn't entirely sure how hard I could think "yes" at this weird voice in my head. But it did the trick; once again, my senses could perceive space around me, and there was a momentary sensation where my mind suddenly felt like it was in free fall, as it struggled to fully comprehend in spatial terms just how large this miles-long pier was around me, as I attempted to grasp its space in more than just visual terms. There was a terrifying sense of vertigo, as if my mind was entirely unmoored and drifting out of my body.

But then I focused on the fact that there were four turrets in the vicinity, hidden above us in the walls. Once again, I could control these guns with my mind as they emerged from invisible seams in the wall, as I registered where the people shooting at us were, as I directed this lethal firepower at them.

And once again, bursts of powerful energy zapped their way across dozens of yards, and screams could be heard as my shots - my shots - found their targets. There was something to be said about not having to look at where I was shooting; there was that psychological, emotional distance - even after my previous episode of panic and hyperventilating - between myself and the fact that I was committing multiple homicide. Plus not exposing myself to gunfire around the crates I hid behind was also quite nice. All I needed to bear was the clear sense of panic amongst the enemy, the screams that escaped their throats as energy zapped at them like a machine gun, burning smouldering holes into them. Survivors were shouting for a retreat, for an evacuation. I mustered the courage to peek around the crate; most of our assailants were dead, but the few that remained - three or four of them - were swiftly fleeing up the ramp and into Fortune's Wings.

Scarlet saw the same, and already she was dashing from the crates, taking advantage of the fact that our enemies were too busy evacuating than shooting at us. But she had made it little more than a quarter of the distance between our starting position and the Fortune's Wings when the last assailant boarded the ship, and the metallic door on its hull slid shut with a hiss and thud. Seconds later, that whirring sound that the ship had been producing from since we stepped through the doors and onto the pier became a full-on roar, and the ship began to drift away from the pier, as if pushing off into the distant seas.

"No, no, no!" Scarlet screamed in equal parts terror and frustration, even as she realized - just as I realized - that the ship was pulling away further than Scarlet could reasonably cover the distant by the time she got to the end of the pier. Certainly, the ship was drifting away with surprising speed for something its size, swiveling around to point in the direction of the night sky, and...were those rockets on its back?

Flaring with heat or some other energy, the rockets on the back of the Fortune's Wings flared with blue light, and then it suddenly accelerated away from us, knocking Scarlet off her feet and sending her flying through the air before she landed on the metallic floor and slid back towards me. It was all I could do to take cover behind the crates and hope the sheer pressure of those rockets didn't just kill me.

It didn't kill Scarlet, though, so it certainly didn't kill me; the redhead seemed a bit dazed, but she managed to pick herself up for a moment, as that slack-jawed shock was replaced with the dawning realization that we may have just missed our only ride out of here, leaving us to the mercy of whatever "voidwaves" were, because at this point, it seemed like nothing was going to surprise me.

Save for the fact that there was more that we were at the mercy of. As the Fortune's Wing cleared the hangar and accelerated away, going from "small tanker" to "size of my thumb" in mere seconds, lines of flickering light suddenly appeared, flying away from the vessel before turning in an arc towards our direction. Given everything I'd seen thus far, it was almost surprising to see something that I maybe recognized, but I still found myself staring at those lines of light approach at startling speed, asking like a complete moron: "Are those...?"

Scarlet didn't let me finish my question, because she suddenly got back onto her feet just to throw herself at me. "Get down!" she yelled, tackling me down to the ground behind the crates I was already hiding against.

A split-second later, those arcing lines of light finally reached us, propelled by streaks of blue flames, slamming into the hangar in sudden explosions, concussive force, deafening sound, and ballooning mansions-sized balls of fire that threw crates and scrap metal into the air, tossed around large metallic containers like they were plastic bricks. The white lights were swiftly overwhelmed by the orange glow of violent flames that threatened to engulf the entire area, even as I shrieked and tried to cover my head with shaking hands.

"Are those missiles!?" I screamed over the blasts, as each missile slammed into the hangar and turned our surroundings into a firestorm with every miss. "Is that ship firing missiles at us!?"

"Yes!" came Scarlet's urgent but otherwise damningly succinct reply, even as her hand continued to press my head against the ground, as if it would provide me even the slightest hint of protection..

Well, then, I figured we're pretty screwed. Although the missiles were going fairly wide, slamming into the general area rather than our specific area, every blast launching hundreds of pieces of large debris at terminal velocities that threatened to crush us or impale us. Fires were beginning to catch on, although the missiles - for all their power - did not actually seem to be doing significant structural damage, did not seem to put any real dent into the walls or the catwalks.

But it didn't really matter. Either the missiles were going to kill us, or the colorful aurora borealis that was already beginning to enveloped this facility was going to melt me into a wall or something equally horrifying, neither of which seemed to be good news for my internal organs. My only source of comfort was a moment where the explosions had somehow flipped the nearby space Roomba onto its side, the little robot spinning helplessly on its cylindrical edge as it made distressed beeps, invoking a barely-noticed sense of smug satisfaction at the stupid space Roomba finally being messed with. It took a while before the force of another explosion finally managed to knock it back down on its side, like a coin that had finally managed to stop spinning.

Still, smug satisfaction or not, we were almost certainly going to die. And it was in that mindset - as I desperately looked for somewhere else to be, somewhere else that wasn't here - that my eyes caught onto one last interesting thing, one last string of hope. I pointed further down the catwalks and shouted, "What's that!?"

"That" was a vessel, docked at the end of a perpendicular pier about a hundred fifty, two hundred yards or more away from us. It was smaller than the Fortune's Wings but still of a respectable size - like a large yacht or a small superyacht that a family could take a vacation in - and pristine where the larger ship looked aged, creaky, and rusted. In fact, the white sheen of its hull matched the rest of this facility so well, it seemed almost logical that the vessel was part of this facility. This being said, it didn't look like a ship. A large ramp led into the vessel in a way entirely similar to how cargo planes loaded cargo through the back hatch. In fact, the vessel seemed to have "wings", albeit not necessarily in the shape of a plane; from behind, the oblique delta-like structure of the vessel had an almost avian look to it, its swooping wings outstretched.

In spite of her reservations towards me, whenever she thought I said something stupid - or whenever I thought she thought I said something stupid - Scarlet would at least do me the courtesy of being patient or at least just guarding her expression really well. But perhaps the prospect of being left behind and being shot at by literal missiles was finally putting a crack in that mask, and although it's mild, she finally gave me the kind of expression that normal people make when you ask a stupid question. "That's an Antecessor ship," she pointed out flatly. "We can't..." she started but quickly trailed off, her eyes suddenly widening as she started thinking exactly what I was thinking. Hesitantly, she whispered, "...Can we?"

For some reason, I had been able to take control of this "arkology's" defensive guns. This was clearly something that Scarlet could not do. And if I could do that, could I take control of a ship? "Only one way to find out," I scowled, even as I began to run down the catwalks towards that ship, Scarlet taking a moment to realize I was moving before easily catching up with every athletic stride of her long legs.

There was a brief lull in the explosions, almost as if the Fortune's Wings was reloading her missiles, even though the sounds and sight of fire continued to consume our surroundings. Blue lines erupted once more from the sides of the ship, seemingly slowing in its shrieking speed as it angled at us instead. I tried not to pay it much mind even as I found safety in the yacht in front of us, dashing up the ramp and into its interior, with Scarlet having caught up at my side and that damned space Roomba still chasing after us, flashing its stupid light and trying to tell me something about how the threat assessment has been increased to Level 4.

Scarlet, meanwhile, had outpaced me, running ahead and leading me towards what I could only guess was going to be the helm. We struggled to keep our balance door after door as the vessel trembled with every explosion rumbling nearby, until the last door brought us to what I assumed to be the helm: A triangular room with seats, computer consoles, and a massive slanted window that looked right outside, returning us to the view of the arkology and the night sky and the flames burning around us.

"Can you take this ship?" Scarlet asked before I even had a chance to acclimate myself to my surroundings. Honestly, although there was a level of familiarity to the helm - just from pop cultural osmosis that surrounds sci-fi and superhero films or whatever - I had absolutely no idea what anything was or what they did.

"I...I'm trying," I said, trying to psychically concentrate as if I knew what psychically concentrating even was. I was much more accustomed to a world that didn't have psychic powers, unfortunately. And the flashing light from the stupid space Roomba that had persistently followed us here was not helping.

"Do you know what you're doing?"

"No," I scowled. "No, I really don't. I have no idea what..."

And of course a voice chose that moment to speak in my head: <Per Regulations 4 and 6 under Article IV, Section V, impounded vessels not reclaimed after a civil investigation for a period longer than fifty standard years will have their registration voided. Would you like to register this vessel to yourself?>

Although the timing was annoying, it was at least convenient. "Yes," I said, even as an explosion went off way too close to the yacht we were on, filling even the window with bright fire, and I screamed and ducked and covered like a complete coward.

<Biometric scan complete. Please state your name for identification and voice recognition.>

"Artemis Chan!" I screamed.

And right at that moment, there was suddenly a mechanical whirl that reverberated through this yacht, as if an industrial power switch had been flicked on, as the dull lights around us swiftly brightened and as blue icons began appearing on what I assumed were computer consoles all around us. "It's starting up!" Scarlet said excitedly, even as another explosion went off and filled the view outside with flames.

"Why the hell are they even shooting at us!?" I screamed, mildly less concerned about whether or not things were turning on compared to all the explosions.

"Whatever you did with the arkology's defense must've caused them to panic!" Then, looking around at the computer consoles that were starting up, Scarlet looked at me and asked, "Can you fly this thing?"

"Are you kidding!?" I shrieked. She may as well have asked me if I knew how to assemble a nuclear bomb. "No, no, of course I can't!"

Wincing, Scarlet took a deep breath before she turned around and settled into one of the chairs, the one that I assumed was the helmsman's seat or whatever. "Alright, let's see if this works," she muttered, looking at all the dials and switches and buttons and things around her, holograms materializing to the left and right, trying to acquaint herself with whatever systems controlled this vessel. "This is the stick. This is...throttle, the throttle. This should be..."

Oh, great. Scarlet wasn't really a pilot either. We were all going to die. Me, her, and that stupid space Roomba. At least that stupid space Roomba would die with us. That was a silver lining in the middle of this horrid two weeks here.

"Alright," Scarlet muttered, flicking a switch, "is this the...?" And a shrill alarm began to sound, causing the redhead to wince and flick that switch back. "No, no, it isn't."

Yup, we're all going to die.

"Here!" Scarlet suddenly exclaimed as she pushed some sort of lever, and there was suddenly a quiet whining sound that reminded me of a plane's turbines reaching takeoff speed. Holograms began popping up all around her with panels and icons and readouts and basically nothing I understood. And just as suddenly, I nearly lost my balance as the floor below me shifted just a bit while the yacht itself abruptly shot forward like a rocket - literally like a rocket, albeit without the actual acceleration as we went from zero to a kajillion instantly, the pristine-albeit-burning surroundings of the arkology disappeared within the blink of an eye - tore through what I had originally thought was a blue glowing window but turned out to merely be light, and shot into the night sky at a speed that I would ten seconds ago never had associated with even a jet ski.

And it was at this point as I looked out the viewport that I realize that the night sky over a tranquil ocean I was looking at - with all those clear stars in the sky and the aurora borealis that I've been told is void waves or whatever - was not actually the night sky over a tranquil ocean after all.

I was looking at outer space.

 

[Kei]

As usual, this chapter's equivalent can also be found on SpaceBattles and Royal Road.

*****​

Chapter 5: The Arkology (V)

"Holy shit," I screamed in what I thought was an entirely warranted and reasonable reaction as I stared out the viewport of what I realized now was a spaceship, "we're in space!"

"Yes," Scarlet said blankly from what I now realize was actually a pilot's seat, not understanding my reaction. "Yes, we are."

Which meant the vessel I was on was not actually a yacht, but a spaceship. Or a space yacht. Whatever. And that the "arkology" I had spent so much time on was a frigging space station.

I think, deep down, I had always known that we were actually in space. The signs were everywhere. It had been easier to pretend otherwise when it was just me, alone, in a weird, gigantic building that was - as far as I knew - quite possibly underground in some Nevadan desert. It became harder when I had seen the Fortune's Wings, the fact that the pier had resembled some kind of science fiction spaceship hangar, the starry sky outside, the foxgirl I had gotten myself paired with who increasingly seemed like she wasn't actually from Earth - to whom I had deliberately avoided asking questions that would prove or disprove this theory because I really hadn't wanted to know the answer. Individually, they were all easy to justify away. But once I viewed them as an entire set of evidence...well, like I said, I've watched movies before. Really, the only thing that had been left to me was a desperate, inner denial, a mental clinging to that tiny bit of hope, that attempt to maintain the last bit of calm and sanity I could muster under the circumstances. That maybe, maybe if I was just really patient about it, my perseverance would be rewarded and that on the spectrum of outcomes from "batshit insane" to "actually, you're currently zipped in a straitjacket, drooling on yourself in a padded room", I'd be somewhere closer to the former.

Humans are really good at self-rationalization.

It was impossible to deny it now, though: I had spent weeks on a space station, had run into people who clearly weren't human and were probably aliens, and was now engaged in a spaceship-to-spaceship duel.

No, wait, maybe I was the alien, given the circumstances. And speaking of spaceships...

"Um," I gulped, pointing out the window - the viewport - of our little avian-like spaceship, at that rusted shape far off in the distance that was the Fortune's Wings, from which what seemed like dozens of streaks of light suddenly erupted. They were almost like bursts of magma spurting out from the mouth of an active volcano, at least if those bursts of magma were glowing blue instead of hot burning orange, and at least if those bursts of magma had homing capabilities, because it didn't take all that long for those dozen missiles to turn and rocket towards us. "They're firing at us!"

"I know!" hissed Scarlet, her hands tightening on the controls as she fumbled with switches in a way that convinced me pretty quickly that she was still pretty new at this piloting business. The missiles looked like they were getting dangerously close when she yelled, "Hold on!"

I launched myself onto the back of Scarlet's seat, expecting to possibly be thrown off my feet if my pilot was going to hit the throttle or do a barrel roll. It barely registered in my head at this point that I was, in fact, standing upright in space as opposed to floating. Regardless, my worst fears were realized when Scarlet twisted what I assumed to be a yoke in a manner that I assumed to be a barrel roll, and I hugged onto the seat for my dear life, expecting to be thrown into the equivalent of a roller coaster ride with no seat belts.

The Fortune's Wings vanished from my field of view out the viewport in the blink of an eye, and the stars began to spin in and out of view as our spaceship tumbled and rolled with all the speed of a fighter jet.

What wasn't spinning was me.

It wasn't just the fact that I was clinging desperately onto Scarlet's pilot seat. It was that I felt no sense of vertigo, no force throwing the rest of my body this way and that, nothing but the feeling of standing upright as I always did. At most, there was just the barest of sensations associated with our roll and acceleration, the kind of movement you feel when a bus is crawling along at one mile an hour. The minimal shift of my center of gravity told me that we were, in theory, going into a spinning dive, although the degree to which I actually felt that shift seemed almost insulting relative to our actual speed of approximately a kajillion miles per hour. Somehow, the fact that I didn't feel vertigo despite the outside world spinning round and round me made me feel even more nauseous. You just can't beat human biology.

Scarlet, however, seemed to be having the time of her life. At least, as far as I could tell; her usually blank face had turned into what could be generously described as a look of mild surprise. Not that I was sure what she was surprised by, but there was almost an excited air about her as she continued to work the controls and pedals of the ship like an overexcited eighteen-year-old who just found out the first car her parents got her was a Lamborghini. "Wow," she murmured, looking at her controls in slight awe. "This thing handles like a dream."

Oh, it's on the upper tiers of spaceships, that's good to know, I thought, moments before my world rattled with multiple deafening blasts.

What I could only imagine were the missiles I had forgotten in my pseudo-vertigo exploded uncomfortably close to us, slamming into our hull repeatedly within seconds. It was almost enough to throw me off my feet had my panic instincts kicked in and my arms clung onto the back of the seat before me. Scarlet herself twisted the yoke as our ship snapped sharply into a new evasive trajectory, evading the remainder of the missiles. Those projectiles I once saw as blue lines far in the distance materialized into large pointed gray cylinders spewing azure fire from its rear, shrieking past us in a lattice of contrails across our viewport in what seemed like a dozen near-misses.

Judging by the lack of flickering lights, bursting panels, fires, or general death, I assumed that we hadn't actually suffered a direct hit. There were only two or three different shrill alarms going off, joining the chorus of insistent beeps and screaming klaxons, which was still sufficient to drive my anxiety and panic skywards despite us not being very much dead. And despite there being no sky here.

As grateful as I was to Scarlet about everything thus far, her arrival has led to a consistent pattern of me being shot at, and in the face of almost-certain death and a fox-eared girl who was otherwise distracted with flying, I was a little less terrified the possibility that she might kill me herself. I was mostly tired of being shot at at this point. With all the force of my millennial sarcasm - watered down somewhat by pants-wetting fear - I screamed, "Shouldn't we, I don't know, shoot back!?"

"Working on it!" Scarlet called back distractedly, one hand on the yoke and the other hesitantly flipping switches and tapping on computer consoles and holograms again with - despite otherwise swift movements - all the confidence of a great-grandmother trying to use a new smartphone. One of the buttons or switches or whatever managed to cause a hologram the size of a small sedan to pop up to the right, located a bit too far to the back to be particularly useful to the pilot, but which I almost instantly recognized as some kind of three-dimensional radar display, a roughly spherical representation of our surroundings with fuzzy borders. At its center was the icon of our very own spaceship, its avian-like shape with outstretched, sweeping metallic wings colored in white. To the icon's rear was a strange, large object, shaped not unlike a sword with wings sprouting from its guard and down towards the blade, surrounding by a series of large rings. It occurred to me belatedly - for no reason other than its size and the lack of any similar such objects around - that this was the arkology that we just fled from, the giant space station that we had taken off from mere minutes ago, where I had spent more than two weeks of my time.

I thought it was nice to be able to see the ship's surroundings beyond what was directly in front of us out the viewport...until I noticed another object on the holographic display: The bulky, blocky shape of the Fortune's Wings...and the dozens of pulsing dots trailing lines across the holographic display and jetting with alarming speeds towards us with deadly, explosive intent.

Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

I was in the middle of thinking about whether or not to inform Scarlet that we were still being tracked by a kajillion missiles when she spoke first with a slightly hesitant tone: "Um...Artemis?"

"Yeah?" I asked, wondering how things could possibly get any worse.

"I don't think this ship has weapons."

Things had gotten worse. "What!?" I shrieked.

"I don't think this ship has weapons," Scarlet repeated with almost aggravating cool. Pointing at one of the suspiciously blank holographic panels in front of her, she explained, "I think this is the weapons console...but there's nothing in it."

Oh. Wonderful. We were so going to die.

"Wait," Scarlet murmured as she began swiping through the holograms a bit more, which was a bit concerning because I'd much rather she pay more attention to the seemingly endless stream of missiles headed our way, even as our ship trembled with every explosion blasting us from not-far-enough. "There's...an Empyrean Guard down in the hold."

"...A what?" I blinked.

"An Empyrean Guard," repeated Scarlet, as if saying this term a second time would clarify things. "It's down in the hold. I need you to get down to it, now."

I had no idea what she meant by an "Empyrean Guard". More importantly, "I...have no idea what an Empyrean Guard looks like."

"It's down in the hold. You can't miss it."

That really didn't answer my question, but an attempt on my part to express this was interrupted by our ship suddenly rocking more violently than it had before. Not enough to knock me off my feet, but certainly enough that I had to grab onto the back of Scarlet's pilot seat for balance. Whatever the Fortune's Wings was shooting at us, they were getting closer.

Twisting the yoke this way and that to avoid further incoming fire, Scarlet spared me the shortest of sidelong glances, her tone curt in a dry, almost exasperated way. "Downstairs. Empyrean. Now, please."

Explosions and an annoyed girl with a handgun tended to be very good motivators. It didn't really matter that the space Roomba continued to chase me down the halls as I ran circles around a ship that wasn't even that large. Nor did it matter that I had no idea where the hold was and spent about two minutes before I found a ladder within a semi-cylindrical glass-like half-tube leading down to what I presumed would be the hold. It certainly didn't matter that the ladder wasn't actually even a ladder at all, because I had just grabbed onto it and prepared to descend down the hole in the floor when an unseen force suddenly enveloped me in a near-zero-gravity environment, sending me floating down to the floor below in slow motion.

I stood at the bottom of the "ladder" for a long moment as I tried to process what had happened, tried not to move my legs as I attempted to ascertain whether or not I had just wet my panties.

"Artemis!" came Scarlet's voice over what I could only assume was the intercom across the ship. "Have you found the Empyrean yet?"

Scarlet was right: I couldn't have missed it. The hold was largely empty, a single room just a little larger than a basketball court that I imagined was used for storing cargo, roughly the size of a basketball court, if not a bit larger. It was mostly devoid of any cargo, however, except for one very conspicuous fixture at the very end of the hold. Within a large semi-cylindrical glass-like half-tube - illuminated by a series of lights that suddenly flickered on as I approached and held aloft by something that looked suspiciously like a high-tech garage rig - was a sleek, futuristic set of armor unlike anything I had ever seen, angular in some places and grooved in others. It wasn't even a complete set of armor, but rather a set of gauntlets, boots, and backpiece that looked very much like a pieces of a fighter jet's wings disassembled and then reassembled into something that resembled an angel's wings, at least if Jesus had decided that it wasn't enough that angels had future fighter jet wings, so he smashed a jet engine within each of the angel's metallic feathers. Everything from the forearms to the thighs were exposed. Had the arms and legs of the whole thing not looked so thin - at least thin enough to reasonably fit human hands - the length of the whole thing looked like it was meant for a giant angel nine or ten feet tall. Unlike the white-and-gold color scheme that I had gotten used to over the past few days, the armor was black in color, polished to a mirror sheen not unlike a Porsche, albeit with a few golden highlights here and there. To the side was what very much looked like a black sword, similarly with streaks of gold, its blade shaped like a giant boxcutter's blade, one foot wide and something like seven, eight feet long.

Scarlet's voice rang out over the PA; there was a strain in her voice as she struggled against the ship's controls, weaving the ship through an increasingly narrow window of space that was not exploding. "Have you found it?" she asked.

"Is it the...armor-looking thing?" I asked hesitantly, taking a half-step away from something that I heavily suspected was going to spell my doom.

"Yes. Hurry and get in the Empyrean."

I'm not a nerd, but I've seen enough commercials and trailers and promotional materials for sci-fi movies and shows through the window of an electronics store. Or whenever I stepped into a Best Buy for their air conditioning. I could see where this was going. "Um...Scarlet?" I asked hesitantly, knowing in my heart of hearts that I was not nearly that lucky, but feeling desperate enough to hope anyways.

"What?" she asks, jarringly calm. Or maybe her voice was just under too much strain bobbing our ship this way and that to sound particularly panicked.

"Are you asking me to go out into space?" Because space is bad and will kill you. With no oxygen, no air pressure, and temperatures simultaneously hotter and colder than anywhere on Planet Earth. Which was feeling so far away now.

"Yes?"

"Because I don't really, really want to go out into space."

Scarlet's reaction was decidedly unsympathetic as she hollered at me for the first time: "Get in the Empyrean, Artemis!"

I got into that incomplete suit of armor so fast. It's honestly kind of embarrassing, like I was a whipped dog. Fun fact: Lots of war veterans fear death less than letting their war buddies down. Or so I've heard. Apparently, I feared letting down this girl who treated me well enough to look past the fact that maybe I was being super pliant because she had a gun. It's funny what Stockholm syndrome does to the human brain.

But the whole thing was almost an automated process. I stepped awkwardly backwards into the metallic boots at my heels, and its mouth revealed itself to be comprised of small metallic plates that slid upon each other and apart to admit both my feet as soon as my toes were near them. The same was true for the gauntlet, the plates sliding apart into two halves to allow my arms to pass through before they slid back shut again, tightening around my limbs. The backpiece latched around my shoulders and waist like a camper's backpack, and it was at this moment as I looked around that I realized the wings of smooth metallic plates on my back weren't actually so much on my back so much as they were floating at my back, not actually connected to the backpiece at all. Space in front of me shimmered for a second, enough to alarm me as I reached for my face...and watched what looked like a bubble around my hand merge with a bubble around my face in a prismatic shimmer, almost like there was suddenly a transparent forcefield or energy shield that was surrounding my body.

I was beginning to suspect that technology here was indistinguishable from magic.

Computer-like graphics began materializing in front of me in a series of graphs and readouts that I couldn't possibly hope to understand before flashing what I thought was a logo of some sort, A voice in my head - that telepathic voice that I've been hearing ever since I was shot at and given control of the arkology's defenses - announced not at all long after: <Neural handshake protocols established. Startup sequence complete, all systems nominal. Glory to...> and then, for no reason I could explain, there was a slight change in the quality of that voice in my head for the next two words, <...Lost Horizon.> It wasn't so much a change in voice or in tone, but just this strange feeling that those two words in particular were being said by someone or something else other than the original voice for what I assumed was a series of prerecorded bootup messages. But then that original voice came back: <The registry for Empyrean Guard Arca-7024 has expired five thousand six hundred twenty-seven years, two months, and eighteen days ago.>

...Wow. That was a long time.

<Would you like to claim this Empyrean Guard?>

It's probably just a hair too late to say no at this point. "Yes," I announced clearly. I didn't even sound too panicked this time, unlike when I claimed our spiffy ship. Go me.

<Biometric scan complete. Please state your name for identification and voice recognition.>

I was feeling a lot more confident when I declared, "Artemis Chan."

<Empyrean Guard Arca-7024 registered to Artemis Chan. Pilot profile established. Lowering Empyrean Guard into linear catapult.>

And there went my confidence. "Linear what!?" I demanded, even as the glass tube the Empyrean Guard and I and the space garage rig I was in began to lowered into the floor and tilt forward, almost as if I was slowly falling face-first onto the ground like a plank. Metallic panels to the side began to slide apart as I was lowered into a small, metallic, windowless chamber that barely admitted the Empyrean Guard I was it. The floor above me sealed as metallic plates swept back into place, sealing me in this small metallic chamber.

And suddenly orange rotating lights lit up and spun while a small, shrill alarm began to ring, and there was a hissing sound of air being sucked away by an impossibly powerful vacuum, and I realized to my horror that this was a deathtrap, that this was an airlock, and oxygen was literally being sucked away around me.

"No, no, no, no, no!" I screamed, futilely shrugging against the garage rig that held my Empyrean Guard in place, and thus me inside it. I tried to free myself from what were now restraints around my arms and legs. No luck, I might as well have been struggling against a boulder. "Scarlet!"

"What is it?" asked Scarlet, alarm in her voice at my dying screams.

"I'm being ejected into space!" I continued to shriek as the floor below me - not the one above me that admitted me into this airlock to begin with - parted, two halves of metallic panels flowing apart until I could see space in all its glory, still coated in that green-ish glowing aurora borealis that was so helpfully described as voidwaves.

Scarlet mostly just sounded puzzled as me and my Empyrean were slowly lowered out of even that lower hatch and out into space, until I was literally sticking out of the ship - I could see the bottom of its hull, in fact - facing towards the fore of our ship. "That's the point."

Oh, god, she's actually trying to kill me. "I don't know about you, but I need to be able to breathe, this Empyrean doesn't actually cover my entire body, and I don't have a spacesuit!"

There is a slight pause on the other end of the radio, as if Scarlet was confused. Then: "Oh, you don't need one. Your shields are keeping breathable air produced by your Empyrean inside."

"Okay." That's relieving to know. I began to calm down, helped by the fact that I was somehow still managed to scream despite being exposed to the vacuum of space. I've seen enough sci-fi horror poster taglines to know that no one can hear you scream in space. After a moment, I suddenly realized the logical issue with this: "Um, doesn't that mean I'll die if my shields are gone?"

"Yes. You'll probably die from being turned into pink mist by a railgun round penetrating your shields before you have a chance to die from not being able to breathe."

That's very comforting to hear. I am so relieved by this explanation. Why, no, I'm not being sarcastic at all.

The machinery that was my space garage rig began to whine with increasing intensity like a jet engine spinning up. Holographic lights began to light up in front of me, rectangular rims of blue line-lights forming something like a short tunnel in front of me. I had a sinking suspicion that this was going to be the trajectory through which I was going to be launched through the "linear catapult". "Scarlet," I asked in a plaintive voice, "can we stop for a second and talk about the whole 'going into space' thi...?"

And then I was rudely interrupted as explosions detonated all around our ship, and I screamed as my world was filled with light and fire and concussive force, which was even worse than when I was in the cockpit because now I was outside, directly in the way of those blasts.

Scarlet seemed to take this as further encouragement to make me piss my panties. "Right, activating linear catapult!" she announced.

<Synchronized with linear catapult,> the voice in my head announced as the golden outlines on my black armor began to glow. <Bridge has launch authorization. Launching in three. Two. One...>

And then I was screaming incoherently as I was hurtled forward, accelerating like a stone from a slingshot, except faster. I half-expected myself to accelerate in some respectable fashion, like a suped-up Porsche going from zero to sixty in four seconds. Instead, one moment I was completely still, the next moment I was going a kajillion miles an hour. It didn't matter that I was in an incomplete robot suit with giant wings and jet engines held together by a forcefield; I was too busy tumbling through space, screaming and flailing and wondering if I had just wet my panties. If anyone thought I was darting forwards like a skydiver, I was instead stuck in a forward spin.

It was several moments of this before Scarlet deigned to unhelpfully call over the radio: "Artemis, you're going the wrong way!"

Have you ever noticed how millennials revert to sarcasm during moments of stress? "Oh, I'm sorry," I screamed back in the most insincere voice possible. "You didn't exactly ask, I didn't have a chance to tell you that I don't know how to fly this goddamn thing!"

"...Oh." Scarlet replied blankly after a moment, as if only remembering this rather vital fact. "Well, alright, listen, you're tumbling out of control at a forward spin. I want you to curl forward a bit with your waist, while at the same time bending your knees a little before kicking downwards with your feet pointing down, alright? Hopefully that will get your spin under control."

That "hopefully" part wasn't putting an optimistic spin on things. Nor the confusing instructions that seemed to be better suited for a ballerina than some poor, innocent girl thrown into space. That I wanted to hurl from all the spinning was just the cherry on a shit sundae. I was seriously wondering why Scarlet wasn't in this stupid Empyrean before remembering that, right, I don't know how to fly a spaceship. That said, I don't know how to fly an Empyrean either. But whatever, everything had gone to shit, so maybe, maybe I'd be a bit happier if I just stopped spinning. Alright, I told myself, trying to remember Scarlet's body contortionist instructions. I'm spinning forward. I want to stop spinning. Now to curl...

Which was about as far as I got, because before I even got to move, the wings on my back suddenly unfurled to its full wingspan, and the thrusters in the middle of them didn't so much spew fire as it simply flared a little once, letting off a cyan burst of light that looked less like flame from a jet engine and more like a ripple on the surface of the water, giving off a sound that resembles less a fighter jet and more high-speed wind streaking through a tunnel...

And then suddenly I stopped spinning.

I blinked. No longer was I tumbling in space, having come to a full stop, floating in the glowing vacuum. The stars around me were no longer spinning as I tried to regain my bearings and look around. The most obvious thing in my field of vision was, of course, was that giant white sword with a pair of wings running from its guard down to the tip of the blade, surrounded by several giant rings, all of them larger than anything I've ever seen. I couldn't even begin to make a guess at how large this thing was supposed to be, separated as I was from it in outer space distances. Almost certainly dozens of miles. I had absolutely no doubt that this was the arkology, if only because there were two other infinitesimally smaller but still significant objects in my general area.

Approaching towards me at high speeds as it started turning away was our little avian ship. I could spot Scarlet through the canopy of the cockpit as the ship hurtled past, her hands gripped on the yoke, her features twisted into tight concentration.

Immediately in her wake were angry blue lines that twisted this way and that in their pursuit of Scarlet, like a small swarm of hornets, at least if hornets were missiles and could explode in the general vicinity of their victims. I actually physically flinched and recoiled backwards...and instantly my Empyrean's jet engines pulsed again, and I was suddenly hurtling backwards - with much better balance this time, with no credit to myself - instantly traveling backwards by something like fifty yards, throwing me well out of the path of the missiles as they shrieked past me and chased after Scarlet.

Explosions detonated all around our ship, but I was at least a little relieved that despite all the explosions, I couldn't see any direct hits, and there were no obvious signs of serious damage across its hull.

Which brought me to that last major object in space.

The Fortune's Wings chugged along slowly, its mass inconsequential next to the arkology, but still a large hulk as expected of a bullshit sci-fi spaceship. Thin blue lines still arced from its rusty hull, a steady line streaking towards Scarlet, who continued to twist and turn as explosions trailed behind her. The whole thing was pissing me off. Yes, this was a stupid idea. The enemy was the size of a naval tanker; I was maybe a very tall NBA star. The enemy was powered by crazy technology I completely did not understand; I trained to fix water boilers and swap brakes on a Honda Civic. The enemy could fire a kajillion missiles; I had a sword.

So yeah. This was completely stupid. But you know what? I had been doing nothing except running away like a little bitch over the last five chapters. And since I wasriding around in this bad boy - this Empyrean Guard that's probably made of bullshit tech, versus what was ultimately still a spaceship albeit one that looked rusty and built from junkyard parts as far back as the goddamned Civil War - I could probably take on a stupid giant bucket of bolts.

And so I charged towards the Fortune's Wings with exhilarating speed. One moment I was floating in space, the next moment my Empyrean's wings flared with energy, propelling me through space. It was hard to tell just how fast I was traveling through the vastness of space - something was dampening the inertia of accelerations that would've killed me by now - at least until I saw how fast the Fortune's Wings was growing within my vision.

My first warning was when the blue lines launching from the enemy ship began to change their trajectory, cutting space at another acute angle. In a panic, I thought about dodging, about fleeing from those missiles well before they were even anywhere close to me, and just as fast as that thought passed through my mind, just as I thought about banking sharply to the side, the wings of my Empyrean shifted, and I spun sharply to my left without losing any forward momentum, twirling gracefully from where I once was like a professional ballet dancer. The missiles - now close enough for me to see them as the metallic cylinders spewing blue flame - tried to track me, tried to follow my move, but they couldn't turn fast enough; I spun to the side again, and those projectiles hurtled right past where I was seconds ago, well beyond any distance within which they might've been a threat to me. Some even exploded impotently, too far to even scratch me, as if those great balls of energy could make up for how widely they were missing.

I laughed, almost absurdly. I was faster than anything they could throw at me. The missiles had no moves. I was a F-22 and they were Fokkers. Sure, they were still super-fast missiles screeching past me at speeds I could barely comprehend, but all I had to do was keep accelerating, keep throttling towards the Fortune's Wings at an angle, and the missiles would just shoot past where I was seconds ago.

I was maybe within three miles of the Fortune's Wings when red hot lines erupted from different points of its hull, different hails of machine gun fire blasting towards me at what was maybe a million rounds a second. The shooting was extremely inaccurate, but my surroundings were nonetheless filled with bullets - a depressingly frequent phenomenon at this point - and it was all I could do to accelerate through the gunfire. I could hear a few electrical snaps as the energy shields around me rippled with two or three hits, but the fact that I wasn't dead was at least an indication that my shields were holding despite my foolhardy charge.

I was maybe just two or three football fields away from the Fortune's Wings - ready to hit a giant spaceship with my large-but-significantly-smaller sword in a desperate swing - when Scarlet suddenly remarked over the radio: "Wow, you're fast. Be careful, don't get too close. Watch out for her melee system."

Her melee system? I thought to myself, looking at the rusty, bulky, unwieldy ship now just a football field away, certain that I had misheard. What the hell is a melee system?

Which was about as far as I got before the top of the Fortune's Wings suddenly sprouted a large robotic arm like that ones you see at a car factory or a construction truck, a beam erupted from its end before swinging at me, and my vision was suddenly full of light as I was hit across the face with a giant lightsaber.

 

[Kei]

Gazetteer helped me immensely with this chapter, because of course she did, and I'm a useless idiot.

*****​

Chapter 6: The Arkology (VI)

"What the shit!" I screamed as I once again tumbled uncontrollably through the emptiness of space. That was a statement, not a question.

The screaming was a good thing, honestly. I was still alive.

Bright stars against the aurora borealis across all of space spun so fast across my vision that they became faint lines. The temperature in the Empyrean's forcefield - previously kind of comfortably cool - suddenly rose to sauna-like temperatures. Alarms and alerts of different sounds and pitches and tempos began ringing in my head, and holographic pop-ups with different warning icons flashed in my field of vision. A bar on the top of what could generously be called my holographic UI - colored blue with the glaring exception of a transparent fraction on the right - began flashing red frantically as the digits at its center dropped rapidly in value. The female voice in my head, slightly distorted for some alarming reason, filled me in: <Warning: Shields at 60%. Auto-repairing minor damage to shields subsystem.>

Holy crap, it took our two-fifths of my shields? What the hell was this stupidly powerful shit?

"Artemis!" came a familiar voice that I could barely process in my head. It was Scarlet over the radio, but at this point in time, while fighting down the nauseating urge to hurl, I mostly thought it was probably Scarlet. "Artemis!"

I struggled to regain control of my Empyrean. It wasn't actually very hard; I thought about it, and energy pulsed from the wings of my suit of armor. It took a moment, but I finally stopped tumbling through the vacuum, regaining my bearings. I reflexively flinched away from the Fortune's Wings - the asshole who had smacked me - as soon as I saw it. Of course, my Empyrean interpreted "flinch away" as "fly half a mile backwards within the space of a breath", which was just as well. But I need not have bothered; actually taking a good look at the ship, I realized that I had apparently been knocked out of the range of its lightsaber.

"Y-Yeah!" I gasped to Scarlet, wondering whether or not I actually wanted to throw up from that spin. I wasn't sure I actually felt vertigo - I most certainly would've felt it if I were back on Earth or whatever - which actually somehow made it worse. Like, my body expected something there, but the lack of a physical response made my body feel like it was in limbo, which somehow made it feel worse. "Yeah, I'm here!" I briefly wondered what vomit in space would look like.

Even across the radio, Scarlet actually sounded relieved. "Oh, good," she exhaled. Then, with a hint of frustration, like a very angrily chiding mother: "I told you not to get too close! You can't rely on that thing missing again."

About that. "Well, it didn't."

"...What?"

Machine gun fire was being directed towards me again. My vision filled with angry orange lines from the Fortune's Wings' turrets as I darted away and created even more distance between myself and the ship. "It didn't miss. It hit me in my goddamn face."

There was a very notable pause, and I could almost hear Scarlet blink over the radio. "...Okay," she replied blandly; I had a feeling that she thought I was bullshitting her, for whatever reason. It's not like I had wanted to be hit in the face with a lightsaber. "Well...don't let it do that again."

Taking a good look at the Fortune's Wings, I also realized the giant lightsaber it was swinging from its giant robotic arm - I was still having trouble getting over how ridiculous that was - was not actually a lightsaber, at least not in the sense that plasma or whatever was spewing from it. Rather, I had been deceived by its smouldering edge, glowing an intense red with heat. In other words, the damn thing was a giant soldering iron shaped like a giant sword. Wielded by a spaceship. For some reason. It not being a real lightsaber would have been disappointing, if I had any room to consider that. Instead, all that was going through my head were unhelpful facts about the properties of metal from my classes and internship, that superheating steel or whatever wouldn't improve cutting power, and should've only made it more fragile.

I had, however, been shot at days ago with a lightning gun. The last two weeks here had taught me that my common sense and applied knowledge was not necessarily held in high regard by this part of the universe. So not being hit by that heat sword was probably a really good idea.

No time to think that much about it; gunfire and missiles were still coming at me from in ludicrous amounts. The good news was that the Fortune's Wings had decided our ship wasn't a threat, and was no longer firing missiles in her direction. The bad news, of course, was that the machine gun fire and missiles were all pretty focused on me.

At least, for a while, it was. But after about half a minute of dodging and weaving and trying to figure out how I was going to swordfight with a spaceship, the gunfire and the missiles abruptly stopped. Four glowing lines - red this time instead of the blue lines the missile contrails had formed - suddenly jettisoned themselves from the Fortune's Wings' side. The shapes creating those red lines were larger than the missiles this time, and in fact looked dismayingly familiar...

"The Fortune's Wings is deploying Empyreans," Scarlet helpfully announced, a moment after I'd come to that same conclusion. "I count four. Be careful, your Empyrean is of Antecessor make, but I have no idea how well it'll hold up."

Meaning we had no idea if it would just blow apart on the next pass. Did Scarlet want me to dogfight, four on one, against the flickers of light blazing toward me, trailing angry red flame? Because that was what it seemed like.

Having someone actually believe in you, even out of necessity, for the first time in your life shouldn't have felt this terrifying.

The day was getting worse and worse by the minute. I had no idea how to fight with a sword, and I just had the snot smacked out of me when a spaceship hit me with a sword. The extent of my knowledge in this regard could be summed up as "hit the other guy very hard". But I tried to remain positive. I had - supposedly - the superior Empyrean. And I hadn't survived two weeks of this crap to go down now.

So I got ready to charge, sword ready...

...When four staccato lines of orange fire - one from each of the approaching Empyreans - suddenly whizzed right past me. Several of those bursts of lines of light struck my shield, bouncing off with a distinctive electric-like hiss as they snapped by. Once again, I instinctively tumbled away, trying to dodge, yelping as I panicked and ineffectually dodged a hail of bullets from four different Empyreans spreading out before me to flank me from four different directions.

Oh, I thought almost blankly, too exasperated to actually be angry anymore as I once again spun uselessly in my Empyrean. Oh, this is great. They have guns. Friggin' guns. I have a goddamn sword.

I did the proper thing: I started flying away, fleeing once again like a total pussy. "Scarlet!" I cried into the radio.

"What is it?" came Scarlet's reply; she has the grace, at least, to sound genuinely concerned at my distress.

"They're shooting at me!"

There is a moment's pause. Then, in a tone that did not lack a hint of incredulity: "Well, then, shoot back!"

"I don't have guns!"

There was a pause. "Oh. Oh." I half-expected to hear Scarlet's heart sink to the pit of her stomach, but she actually seemed to have things together despite the very obvious bad news of "we have even less weapons than we expected". That, or the long electric-hiss of another stream of bullets bouncing off my shield - another cluster of flying metal - had masked any such sounds. "Um. What do you have?"

"I have a sword."

"Then go cut them down."

Despite the urgency of dodging bullets, I actually almost paused for a moment. I wasn't sure if Scarlet was being sarcastic or unreasonable, or if she was actually trying to get me killed after all. But with the power of all my limited experience, I could safely declare that typically speaking, in a game of rock-paper-scissors, "sword" did not actually beat "machine gun". "I have a sword, Scarlet!" I shrieked back.

"And you're flying faster than the other Empyreans can hit you!"

I blinked for a moment before turning back. Streams of bullets were still flying after me, but the fire was growing increasingly inaccurate. I was no longer hearing consistent snaps of bullets bouncing or disintegrating or exploding against my energy shield. And the Empyreans - those streaks of red lines marking their contrails - suddenly seemed much further away, at least compared to when I had started fleeing from them mere seconds ago.

I glanced at the graphics encompassing my vision - a series of holograms functioning as a UI - and a bar stretched across the top of my field of view. The blue within it had shrunk to roughly sixty percent when I got hit by that stupid giant heat sword, and despite the amount of gunfire that had bounced off them, my shields - at least I was assuming that bar was representing my shields - did not really drop much, hovering roughly around where I had last seen it at: Sixty percent.

Huh, I thought to myself. My engines and shields are pretty powerful.

Actually, I had no idea how well my engines and shield compared to the baseline in this weird corner of the universe. For all I knew, I was up against the equivalent of a Corolla. But I desperately wanted to be optimistic, especially when - for just a moment - a wave of green light from the aurora borealis grazed me arm, there went a cold shiver down my spine, and my arm felt weird and bad and wrong.

I looked down at the lumb in question, just in time to see it ripple. I could somehow see my arm through the gauntlet it was enclosed in, and the gauntlet, and the void beyond, distorted over each other like a reflection in choppy water.

The gauntlet was fine. It was built for this. Probably. Maybe. My arm though, somehow simultaneously protected and suddenly vulnerable, twisting in place, a string plucked by an unseen hand. I couldn't stop it, or even move my arm at all. I could barely feel it moving to begin with, for all that my eyes were telling me. Then, for one horrible, gut-churning moment, it was just gone. The panic receded sharply as the arm came back, crazed vibrations finally stilling, and going back to being a normal-ass arm.

Oh, I thought with a kind of fear that was different from my blind panic of a moment ago, watching as my arm slowly still from where it was wavering through what passed for time and space here. Oh. This must be the voidwaves.

I'm so royally screwed, I thought, helpfully.

If I didn't get out of here soon, I was going to melt through a wall or something. Or through the fabric of the universe, more than we all already had. Could that happen? Because, at this point, it really felt like it could happen If I didn't kill these enemy Empyreans in front of me, and fast, I'd be dead.

I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to wake up in this strange place with no idea what was going on, only to spend days for people to try to kill me with bullshit sci-fi weapons. I didn't ask to be messed with by a space Roomba, to be shot at with space missiles, to escape by the skin of my teeth only now to have my body at the mercy of some reality-warping space bullshit. I didn't ask to be shoved into a suit of sci-fi armor so I could kill other sci-fi armors and a ship that had been trying to kill us ever since I saw it.

I was pissed.

So maybe, maybe it was understandable that I focused on a vindictive thought, and suddenly the engines of my Empyrean were propelling me at brain-melting speeds at the four enemy Empyreans trying to close in on me.

My charge, a change from flitting around just trying not to die, must've surprised my pursuers because the four of them suddenly split up, darting in different directions. No matter; I was closing in fast on one particular Empyrean, its speed almost painfully slow compared to how fast my own engines were throwing me across space. As I closed the distance, the Empyrean before me was no longer just a flitter of glowing red thrusters leaving a fading trail of light, but a humanoid shape, a person whose four limbs were elongated by long, slender pieces of armor.

Gunfire crisscrossed around me. That didn't matter either; at this speed, most of it trailed uselessly behind me, and the few lucky shots that did land weren't enough to burn through my shields. One or two rounds were not even causing the bar at the top of my vision to dip discernibly. The part of my brain that still wants to apply reality to any part of this situation is annoyed by the lack of any measurement more granular than that.

Most of me, though, was focused on closing in on my chosen enemy Empyrean, miles between us vanishing in seconds. I swiveled and spun - first left, then right - to avoid her desperate gunfire. I felt like an actress for some old martial arts flick, despite being about as aerobically accomplished as a cardboard box and never having flown a plane in my life. I hadn't even been able to last more than a single round of dodgeball back in middle school. So whatever it felt like, I must have just been spinning around in a flailing, awkward circle,and probably not like some Chinese kung-fu master, dodging gunfire from a Japanese plane on a WWII battlefield or whatever the hell my mother said about it. But being able to move around by thinking made things a lot easier. And I was feeling pretty invincible, regardless of how uncool I looked. The other Empyreans were moving too slow; while they were more agile and less sluggish, they were nonetheless slower than the missiles that had tried to kill me all those minutes ago, the ones that I had been outflying. In fact, the one I was closing in on was already attempting to flee, choosing to fly from me instead of shooting.

Too late. The Empyrean was transforming from a distant stick figure into a real person. I could see the faded green of the Empyrean's wings and boots and gauntlets, the bright red trail of light spewing from its engines. I could see the person in the Empyrean, a woman in a weird skin-tight high-tech one piece swimsuit, showing off her skin where they were not encased by Empyrean gauntlets and boots. Brunette hair fluttered behind her as she twisted around to look at me with wide, fearful eyes, betraying the kind of panic of someone who had underestimated their enemy. Her ears were definitely non-human, instead fluffy and sticking out from spots close to the top of their heads, although examining that wasn't quite my top priority, nor was I given much of a chance to do so; seconds before I could swing my sword at her, she suddenly vanished, and I shot right past the place she should have been.

Confused, I willed the wings of my Empyrean to pulse and drag me to a stop, so I could turn around and look back at whatever it was that had just happened. Turning around, I could see the red contrail I'd left behind, complete with dramatically sharp turn to bring me to my current position. I followed along the fading trail, retracing my path, and...there. Sure enough, my opponent was now below me. She had, at the last moment, tucked herself into a dive, and I'd overshot her.

It wasn't that her Empyrean was faster; my reactions were slow.

My scowl was interrupted by a sudden and consistent series of loud zaps, and I yelped and also began a dive, throttling towards my opponent; in the few seconds where I had stopped to see what was going on, the other three Empyreans had retargeted me. I had been a sitting target for just a few moments, and a good stream of bullets had struck my shields. They were still holding, but the blue bar at the top of my display had noticeably decreased from my mistake. It was still holding over half, but not quite like the sixty-percent-ish area I had previously left it at. I could take a lot of hits, but I wasn't invincible.

Again, I started catching up from the Empyrean fleeing from me. This time, I was a bit more ready for those sneaky maneuvers when she twisted away from me. This wasn't to say that I was reacting on the spot, but now that I expected it, I actually saw her turning away rather than her suddenly seemingly turning invisible. Every time she banked away, my reaction times got faster; I turned almost as she turned, stopped overshooting her by too much, and for a moment - for just a heartbeat - she leveled out, maybe to regain her bearings, and I flew at her and swung my super long black high-tech space sword.

And felt a whole lot of nothing as I shot right past her.

She didn't dodge at the last moment. She had not escaped from the range of my sword. I simply missed: I shot past my opponent with less than a few feet to spare, and swung an entire second too late. Hell, I had been closing my eyes when I did it.

Okay, I admit it, that was embarrassing. Still, give me a break; I had never swung a sword or even played baseball at this point. You can thank my mom for that.

Didn't matter. I could try again. Once again, I caught up with my fleeing target, and as I did so, I saw the Fortune's Wings in the background. In fact, the gunfire directed in my general direction seemed to have faltered, as if the other three Empyreans were no longer shooting at me quite as fervently. I didn't have time to pay attention to that, though; after several seconds of an intense chase - if our swirling across space on powerful space engines could be called that, anyways - my opponent suddenly turned around to face me, her engines flaring with what felt like actual propellant instead of my energy whatever, and she was suddenly charging towards me, having drawn a sword from somewhere. It looked like a typical medieval sword, albeit one that was shorter and thicker than my own long, relatively thin blade. The blade was grayish in color, save for dark spots across its blade that looked like wear and tear, or even some kind of decay.

We were going to try to hit each other midair, then. Mid-space. Whatever. Compared to me just trying to hit a moving target, my self-defense instincts flared as I saw something darting towards me with a sword. Or, really, less "self-defense", and more "I'm actually trying to block a basketball flying towards my face instead of just trying to hit a flying pinata". It doesn't matter; we charged at each other, the distance between us disappeared, and we swung our swords at the same time, like something out of a Game of Thrones trailer at Best Buy.

And I was actually feeling pretty good about myself for that one split-second, as if I was for that one moment actually a really cool space samurai. At least, until the blade of my sword cracked upon impact.

It was one of those things that you felt more than you heard. Like swinging a stick against something, and then feeling that distinctive snap inside what is actually a solid object, the feeling of something not meant to split vibrating through your hands. Stunned, I was still for a moment, almost oblivious to the Empyrean flying right past me, gripping tightly onto my sword but kind of too afraid to actually look up to see if I had somehow shattered a magical space blade.

After a moment - too long a moment, honestly, considering that it took bullet-zaps to bring me out of my dread - I finally managed a look up towards my only weapon. The good news was that it wasn't actually shattered. The bad news was that there was a large spiderweb of cracks centered around the spot where I think it made contact with the enemy's own sword.

Are you kidding me? I thought, stomach dropping. Isn't my sword supposed to be super powerful? How in the hell did her sword put a crack in mine?

I had just completed the thought in my head when a voice spoke in my head: <Warning: Structural damage detected in melee system. Warning: Void-burst oscillator not active. Would you like to activate the void-burst oscillator?>

I knew what an oscillator is, but I had no idea what "void-burst" was supposed to mean, other than the void being the green glowing aurora borealis space around us that was supposed to eat us. On the one hand, under the circumstances, activating it seemed like a really bad idea. On the other hand, under the circumstances - circumstances being "I'm being friggin' shot at again" - I was out of anything resembling a good idea. "Activate void-burst oscillator!" I shouted.

Lines of green light began to run down the blade of my sword. I watched, startled, as light seeped through the seams of the recently-formed cracks, and I suddenly started fearing that this sword was going to just explode in my face.

Which was of course what happened, except not in the way I expected.

There was a burst of intense light, and I screamed as I shielded my head with one arm, too shocked to even have the presence of mind to throw the exploding thing away from me. Not that it would've mattered if it had literally exploded, but it took me a moment to realize that I wasn't dead yet. Then it took me another moment to slowly turn an eye towards what I had been sure was a sword-shaped bomb.

My sword that was now super long and glowing right now.

Some kind of powerful green energy was bursting from the hilt of my sword, volatile and waving, not at all unlike the licking of flames or the flow of a river, but largely streaming away from the sword's guard in a straight line.. A giant straight line, thick enough that I could no longer even see the cracked blade of my sword within this flowing beam, long enough that I couldn't quite see where it even ended. I tried staring down the flowing green streams of light; it momentarily struck me that the stream looked almost startlingly like a concentrated aurora borealis, like the voidwaves around us multiplied by a thousand. Distance was almost impossible to judge here, but my absolutely unsubstantiated guesstimate put the pillar of light in my hands at half a mile long.

Then I paused. I had a different sword. I had energy coming out of my sword. I had half a mile of energy coming out of my sword.

Okay. Let me correct myself: I have a goddamn lightsaber.

Screw the Fortune's Wings and its knockoff heat sword bullshit. I had a real goddamn giant lightsaber.

I turned towards my enemies, only to realize why I wasn't being consistently shot at throughout the time I was marveling at my new weapon. The Empyreans were fleeing from me, except not in the way they previously scattered; rather, they were now seemingly in full retreat, flying back towards the Fortune's Wings. So that's why I previously saw the ship; the enemy Empyreans were leading me back towards her.

In the meantime, I had another concern: The voidwaves around us were very obviously getting brighter. Previously, I could see the stars past its glow, but now, it was nothing around me but a haze of green with shades of blue and purple that hid any hint of the night sky around me. Furthermore, the aurora borealis was beginning to consolidate into noticeable shapes. Where the voidwaves around me had previously formed an indistinct haze - like if I had been stuck inside a large, fluffy cloud - the light around us was beginning to move in something that really did look like waves. Formations not unlike the curtains of an aurora borealis began to form, dividing us across space.

Not that I knew the first thing about voidwaves beyond Scarlet having told me it was Extremely Bad Super Duper No Bueno Holy Shit, and that getting your arm stuck in one sucked. But this was becoming a very real concern, in part because while I didn't actually see my body ripple through my armor again, I could feel - deep in my guts, deep in my bones - reality beginning to shift around me. Something was happening with my innards, because I started feeling nauseous, like all the stuff in my body had started rioting. As if instead of my existence being plucked to ripple like a harp string, it was reality. As if I was stuck in something like an earthquake, except instead of the earth, it was the universe.

I probably wasn't describing things correctly. I've never really listened to my instincts. They've always been kind of shit. But right now, putting aside that I was having some kind of physical reaction to whatever was happening, my instincts were telling me that this was bad, bad, bad.

I'm not sure if the other Empyreans were feeling the same, but their machine guns fire had largely turned into potshots at this point, attacks of opportunity rather than an aggressive offensive. The Fortune's Wings joined in the fun by firing yet another wave of missiles; after having withheld its missiles, perhaps its crew felt safe enough to start shooting at me again now that their Empyreans were, by all indications, returning to the ship and out of the line of fire. The bright glow of bullets and missile contrails flew right at me, passing through one of those giant curtains of aurora borealis light...

...and then they disappeared.

And then, at precisely the same time, suddenly reappeared in a million other places at once. They traveled on at a million different angles and directions all around us for a moment, and then they disappeared again, only to reappear somewhere else.

The bullets and missiles being fired at me were seemingly being teleported at random all over the place. It was like watching some kind of epileptic fireworks display, except you were in the fireworks display, and instead of burning magnesium, it was bullets and missiles flying and teleporting in different directions. It felt like space itself was being fractured, that reality was folding on itself, that straight lines were no longer just straight lines, but bent across our surroundings like refractions from floating, teleporting mirrors.

A number of bullets bounced against my shield from different directions. A missile hurtled past me like a meteor on its way to end the dinosaurs. One of the enemy Empyreans was hit by a missile, disappearing in the explosion. Two more struck the Fortune's Wings, from behind, leaving burning craters of jagged steel in their wake. One of them flew right into the half-mile-long angry beam of my lightsaber...

...And vanished completely. No explosion. No teleporting away to somewhere else, not that I would've been able to tell. But it seemed to have simply vanished into the energy. Actually, now that I thought about it, in our little section of the universe where bullets and missiles were being teleported around like we were in some kind of funhouse mirror world, the fact that my lightsaber was completely straight and cutting through the bullshit was surprising.

I gave my laser sword a swing. I have expected parts of my blade to just scatter, for parts of the giant line of energy to suddenly reappear in other places.

It didn't. It remained a straight, giant, long-ass line. And the missiles that had just so happened to be in the path of my energy blade completely disappeared.

I gave out a startled laugh. Actually, I couldn't tell if the laugh - just two sharp breaths that came out of my throat - was a weak laugh of relief or evil sinister cackling. But after being shot at by guns, after being shot at by lightning, after being shot at by more guns, after being shot at by missiles, after being shot at by missiles, after being shot at by even more guns, after thinking I didn't have a chance in hell to survive all this bullshit with a sword...

I now had a goddamn lightsaber.

The Fortune's Wings was now giving off a white-ish glow in the distance before me. Its profile throbbed a little, pulsing with energy, and I wondered whether this was the effect of the voidwaves on the ship, or perhaps even something else. Still, the fleeing enemy Empyreans were starting to get close, and I couldn't have that. I had a lightsaber, and I hadn't even tested it on anyone yet. So I charged, blazing a path towards my enemy. They fired, of course, missiles and machine guns and everything else I had come to expect by now. But with the speed of my approach, the missiles were going wide, and what few machine gun bullets that did hit my shields simply snapped and evaporated, taking almost nothing off my shields.

Within a mile of the enemy formation, I brought my lightsaber into a swing. Actually, I wasn't swinging the lightsaber insomuch as I was kind of holding it out and letting my forward velocity take care of everything else. It was good enough, though; when I passed the Fortune's Wings with half a mile to spare, the beam from my lightsaber caught one of the enemy Empyreans. And as I flew away from the enemy, there was no explosion, no debris, no nothing. Just empty space where my giant lightsaber passed through.

I laughed. I'm pretty sure this one was an evil cackle. The sword had not failed me. I was close to untouchable. I could destroy them. I could evaporate these asshats. I swung around for another go, indifferent to the hail of enemy ordnance that couldn't hurt me. Again, with my sword outstretched, I gave the Fortune's Wings another pass, this time slicing through its hull. I misjudged its distance; instance of cleaving it in half, I merely cut a deep gash into the vessel. But that scar in the ship simply remained there for a moment before beginning to glow with red-hot light, then suddenly burst into flames as something exploded within the ship and fire erupted out of the scar, twisting metal along the way. The ship listed, its engines faltering a bit, although not quite going out yet.

"Yeah!" I laughed, pumping my fist, relishing in the sadistic victory over someone who couldn't adequately fight back. It felt like I was an adult beating up a child, given the disparity in power between our equipment. I didn't care; if this was a child, she had been biting my arm one too many times and deserved a smackdown. "That's what you get for trying to shoot me up, you bitch!"

My radio crackled. Actually, my radio had been crackling for some time, but in my adrenaline high, I had kind of filtered that out. "...temis...! Ar...Artemis!"

Ah, yes. In the chaos and confusion and ear-pounding blood, I had completely forgotten about Scarlet.

"Get back here!" shouted Scarlet over the radio. "The voidwaves are hitting the oversaturation point!" Her voice sounded garbled, something attributed to the increasingly concentrated voidwaves messing with radio signals.

Regardless, "voidwaves are hitting the oversaturation point" sounded really bad. As much as I don't like leaving the people who had tried to kill me alone - at least now that I had a means to fight back - Scarlet was still my only ally in this weird part of the universe. More than just the fact that she was my lifeline, I didn't want to disappoint her. Despite the fact that she couldn't fight back, despite the fact she could've fled whenever, she was still here. I really appreciated that. So I looked around, searched for the ship Scarlet was piloting. An icon on my UI allowed me to spot that moving blue spark miles away against the brightness of the aurora borealis, and I immediately turned off my lightsaber with a mere thought and began to make a beeline back towards Scarlet.

Or, at least, I would've had some strange force suddenly started pulling me to the left.

<Warning: Voidspace-reversion in progress.>

"What the...?" I muttered, trying to compensate for the fact that my Empyrean was drifting leftwards despite the fact that I was very much trying to get back to our avian-like ship. I looked to my left...

...And watched as the arkology - the giant space station I had completely forgotten about - began to stretch and shrink.

The voidwaves around us were beginning to visibly be pulled towards the center of the sword-like arkology. Streaks of green, blue, and purple - previously floating about almost idyllically in curtains of light - were now streaking towards the arklogy, which seems to become distorted as the arkology almost seemed to collapse on itself in what a misplaced three credits in a film class taught me was called a "dolly zoom".

Like a black hole, it was pulling me in. It was pulling us all in.

The Fortune's Wings seemed to struggle against the pull into the arkology for a few moments. Then, the glow that had encompassed it - the glow I previously saw when the enemy Empyreans were retreated bacek to their ship - swiftly grew intensely bright. Then, in the blink of an eye, the ship suddenly disappeared into a streak of blink-and-you-miss-it white light, a line that snapped across space for only a split-second, disappearing into the far reaches of the universe.

So yay. They went into hyperspace. Or something. Still, there was something irregular about that line, like the ship had tumbled into their jump in hyperspace. Maybe the damage I did to the Fortune's Wings meant something after all.

Still, I had more pressing matters on hand. Like how the distorted space surrounding the arkology was sucking me in, and I was suddenly terrified of the idea of being crushed into atomic matter or something. I pushed, willed the engines to go as fast as they could, going at full throttle. My Empyrean shuddered, its wings flicking this way and that against space turbulence. It's barely enough. My speed was slow compared to how I went to town on my enemies, and the Empyrean was getting slower as the suction of the arkology grew stronger.

I wasn't going to make it.

At least until I saw a metal bird-like spaceship slowly sliding into my field of vision, only a few hundred miles in front of me. Scarlet was struggling with the controls, seeing how our ship was bucking and shaking and fighting against space turbulence the way I was, but I could imagine her twisting the joystick. The ship was beginning to glow in the way the Fortune's Wings had done moments before it hit lightspeed. And as I watched, the ship slowly began to slide towards a direction that was right in front of me. The garage rig I had been jettisoned from was extended from underneath the ship, giving me a goal to fly for as I pushed the wings of my Empyrean as hard as I could, one arm stretched out to grab onto that garage rig and pull myself in.

"Get in!" shouted Scarlet over the radio, her voice tight with concentration as she fought against the voidwaves. I had one shot, as Scarlet seemed to suddenly kill the engines on our spaceship, and for just the briefest of moments, it began drifting towards me.

I flew right into the garage rigging with a scream escaping my throat. Mechanical arms instantly caught my Empyrean, locking me into place and trying to bring me back into the hull of the ship. The ship hit maximum luminosity as I heard the engines of our ship suddenly turn back on with a mechanical whine

Then, and a moment later, space around me was engulfed with light as I watched reality dolly-zoom before me for just the briefest of moments.

And just as I passed through the airlock, our ship blasted into lightspeed with a brilliant flash. Which was around the same time I finally passed out.

*****​

This finally brings us to the end of the Arkology Arc~ Sorry for taking so long, and thank you so much for sticking with me. >_<

 

[Kei]

IT LIVES

So a lot of the time, my patrons get to read this update anywhere from several days to an entire week early. As way of apology for this story taking nine friggin' months to update, this is going up everywhere at the same time.

im very sorry x_x

*****​

Chapter 7: Athabasca (I)

My bed, came my first thought as I began to rouse, is too comfortable.

And my ceiling too clean, for that matter, what with the slick grooves of white metallic plates forming the ceiling above. Which the ceiling of my apartment bedroom was very much not actually made out of. And glowing, albeit extremely dimly; even for someone who just woke up, the weak light was easy on bleary eyes.

I was feeling very much too physically tired to bother with any shooting-out-of-bed drama, even if I had wanted to. Besides, something like two weeks of craziness had probably dulled my capacity for surprise and shock and awe, maybe.

From where I was lying on my back, I looked to the right: A wall in that same style I have come to expect - sleek and elegant but less ornate, missing the golden paneling and such - and an empty nightstand. The latter seemed embedded into the architecture, part of the wall rather than a piece of furniture. It's fortunate that the ceiling was glowing just enough for me to make out my surroundings without forcing me to squint.

I looked to the left: A faceful of redhead foxgirl, uncomfortably close.

Scarlet wasn't just sleeping serenely with her face close to mine; she was also in her lingerie and clinging to me as she slept, her arms wrapped around my waist. Even in dim lighting and beneath the thin sheet of synthetic fabric, she was very pretty - without makeup, for that matter - where I'm incredibly plain. Which simultaneously made me feel a little jealous and embarrassed; waking up to a really pretty half-naked girl in bed had not really been on my list of priorities. Too bad I didn't actually swing that way. It's probably something I could lord over my ex-boyfriend when I got back, at least.

If I got back. The realization that I was in space - the corner of the universe where there were human girls with animal ears, in fact, who somehow conveniently speak English - had somewhat recalibrated my sense of the scale of my problem.

And the scale of the bed I'm lying in, for that matter. I couldn't really see over Scarlet's sleeping form without craning my neck - and I didn't really feel like it - but my guesstimate put the bed at queen size, if not bigger, which would easily make it the largest bed I'd ever slept in. The bedspread was made of the same kind of alien synthetic fabric as the sheet, startlingly silky to the touch but still completely foreign to me. Still, it was almost criminally comfortable to lie in; although my body continued to be very much sore, I felt rather well-rested.

My eyes had more or less adjusted fully to the dim lighting when the face before me slowly opened her own. Scarlet was clearly the kind of girl who was a morning person: Her eyes slowly opened and fluttered a few times, but within seconds, they focused and seemed lucid, looking like they were actually looking at me.

My embarrassment intensified at the whole pretty-girl-in-my-face routine, so I probably sounded incredibly lame as I weakly offered, "Um...good morning?"

Scarlet, for that matter, showed no sign of embarrassment at her proximity to me or her state of undress as she replied almost blandly, "I'm not sure what time it is."

I didn't really have a good reply to that. It's almost surreal how banal Scarlet's response was. Actually, I really couldn't get a bead on her character. This is someone who had nearly blown out my brains with a gun, then spent days trying to ensure that I survived from people with more guns, then actually fought beside, and now she was underdressed and clinging to me in bed.

I really didn't get people sometimes.

I could get even more worked up about my current situation in bed or pretend I had anything interesting to say. So I sighed and rolled away from Scarlet onto my back; she easily let go. "We're still alive," I muttered tiredly. "Yay."

"It was a close thing," Scarlet agreed as she pushed herself out of bed, and I averted my gaze and turned away a bit more as she swung her slender legs out from under the sheets and out of bed. I self-consciously wondered if there was a bit of mixed messaging there; you had fallen asleep clinging to me in your underwear, and now you were already rushing out of bed the moment you're awake? "I'm glad you remember yesterday."

"And that I didn't wake up asking what happened?" I snorted in an attempt at sounding blithe, trying to pretend I wasn't flustered as my gaze determinedly wandered around the blank and suddenly-very-interesting ceiling. I at least assumed that we were still in the spaceship we made our daring escape from. The architecture - though different from the giant space station we had escaped from - felt familiar enough, at least. Like it had been designed by the same interior designer, just with a smaller budget. I knew all about smaller budgets.

"There are worse outcomes," Scarlet replied agreeably before rising to her feet. I instinctively reached for the sheets to pull them up a bit to make sure that I was covered...

...Which also conveniently allowed me to notice that I was in a similar state of undress, stripped down to my underwear. That I had been spending all this time sleeping next to a pretty half-naked girl. Who had been curled up to me in bed. With me also half-naked.

I pulled up the bedsheet to my face. "Um...Scarlet?" I asked. When she turned to face me in her bra and panties, I asked from beneath the covers where I could better hide my blush and didn't have to look anywhere weird. "Where are my clothes?"

Impassively, Scarlet bent over to reach at the floor beside the bed, straightening with a crumpled pile of my blouse, jacket, and skirt in her hand. "Here," she said as she deposited my clothes onto the bed within arm's reach.

"Thanks," I muttered, tentatively reaching out from under my cover for my clothes. Honestly, I was kind of glad that I did not sleep in these clothes; after two weeks of wearing them in high-stress situations, they felt grimey and smelled like piss, and I actually cringed a little as I started putting them on again from where I hid under the sheet. I wasn't desperate enough to start running around in just my underwear, though, no matter how comfortable Scarlet was with that.

I suspected it was too late and pointless to helpfully inform Scarlet that I was straight. It was definitely too late and pointless to ask Scarlet whether she had been the one to undress me and put me in bed.

"How do you feel?" asked the girl in question; Scarlet was now bending over and picking up her own clothes from the floor, once again giving me a generous view of her milky, slender legs and panties that I was totally not actually looking at.

Like I'm questioning my sexuality, I wanted to mutter sarcastically. Then I realized that chances were good she was actually asking about the fight where I passed out instead of anything else. "I could be feeling a lot worse," I muttered awkwardly, trying not to let my mind wander to any other topic as I buttoned up my shirt and slipped into my frayed office skirt. "Thanks. Though. For asking." After everything we had been through, it was actually kind of strange how grateful I was for the completely banal gesture of asking how I felt. I got over it quickly, though. "How long was I out?"

"Just a night. You were in perfectly healthy condition when you returned to this vessel." She didn't quite turn around to look at me as she slipped back into her shirt. "I'm sorry for not calling you back sooner."

I blinked. "Calling me back...?" Then the events of the previous battle clicked into place. "Oh, you mean during the fight, when I was trying to run from the voidwaves of death?" Finally presentable - if stinking in clothes marinated in two weeks' worth of sweat - I emerged from the sheets and waved a hand blithely, trying to play it cool. "It's fine, don't worry about it. I was caught up in the moment anyways, so I probably didn't hear you. And there was interference, wasn't there?"

It was Scarlet's turn to blink, stopping as she pulled her trousers halfway up her legs. "Interference?"

"Radio interference. I had problems hearing you over the radio."

"Oh." Scarlet pulled up her trousers all the way before - in an odd gesture of vulnerability - self-consciously rubbing her throat. "No, I was missing my neck at the time."

I stared. "From...the voidwaves...?" I offered hesitantly, dreading the answer but knowing in my heart of hearts that this was probably the case; it wasn't as if I didn't literally watch my arm ripple across the fabric of reality. When Scarlet nodded, I muttered, "Well, that's great, I didn't need to sleep again, ever. What the hell is the void anyways?"

Scarlet gave me the kind of look that she always did when it felt like I had just asked something stupid. Characteristically of her, though, she sounded entirely patient and clinical as she replied, "No one knows for sure. We know that it is a separate plane of reality. We think that it is what makes interstellar travel possible. We think it's where the arkologies come from and where they disappear back into." Her expression turns a little grave. "We know we don't belong there."

Well, that wasn't unsettling at all. Strangely enough, though, her words also contextualized the sense of unease I was getting from her. It hadn't been something I registered immediately due to my own confusion and bewilderment at my own predicament, but there had been an undertone of discomfort to Scarlet's words and actions, one I had ignored due to how comfortably she had been snuggled up in bed with me. Now, though? Now I got the strange feeling of how "we don't belong there" could very possibly apply to this spaceship we were on.

That wasn't unsettling at all.

The light had, at this point, brightened to a level that I would've described as "normal lighting". Both of us were finally fully dressed: Me in my smelly office clothes, Scarlet in something that reminded me of special forces in Afghanistan or something. "Would you like a moment," she asked, "or would you like me to give you the rundown on things?"

"Oh," I blinked. "Um, sure." I climbed out of bed and found my shoes on the floor beside it. "A rundown sounds nice."

Scarlet nodded and waited for me to slip into my shoes before gesturing for me to follow her out the door: "Come on."

Hesitantly, I followed her to the door, noting to myself that this was only going to be the second time in two weeks that I stepped out of an unfamiliar bedroom and into an unfamiliar hallway. The surroundings were certainly more cramped and less ornate, but it still enjoyed a sort of pristine cleanliness to it despite having been abandoned for - how long did that voice in my head say it had been? - five thousand six hundred twenty-seven years, two months, and eighteen days ago. Or had that been in reference to the suit of armor I had flown yesterday?

Maybe I was just a bit tired and more than just a bit apprehensive about waking up in unfamiliar environments. Still, taking a deep breath, I followed Scarlet out the bedroom and took one step into the corridor...

...And nearly slipped and fell as something shot right under my foot before I put it down.

With an audible electronic shriek that almost sounded adorable if it had not carried a clear hint of panic, the space Roomba - completely heedless of either myself or Scarlet - shot down the corridor perpendicular to the bedroom door, slipping right underneath the sole of my foot at the very last second. I actually flinched and bounced backwards to avoid stepping on the Roomba purely out of reflex; it would've been nice to grind a heel into it after all the trouble it had caused me. But my sense of vindictiveness was temporarily delayed as I watched the Roomba charge full-speed into a T-intersection, slam against the wall, bounce off it, spin listlessly for a moment as if it had suffered a concussion...then shriek once more as it took off down another hallway, disappearing around the corner.

I should've felt pretty good about that, staring down the corridor where the Roomba disappeared down and thinking about all the times it made me slam into a wall. Unfortunately, I was mostly just feeling concerned, if not alarmed. "What's wrong with the space Roomba?" I asked hesitantly.

"It's been like this since we left the arkology," Scarlet replied; she, too, was staring at where the space Roomba had rounded the corner, although her look of concern was substantially different from mine. Precisely how, though, I could not say.

"I...guess that's not normal?"

"We don't see servitors very often, much less catch them. And they don't remain active when removed from their arkology. I don't know why this one is still...awake." She took a deep breath. "I don't know what is supposed to be 'normal' for it."

As Scarlet marched down the perpendicular corridor in the opposite direction the space Roomba just went, my gaze lingered a little at the intersection it disappeared around, wondering if I should check on it. I decided to let it go, turning around and following Scarlet. I could afford to let it panic for a bit longer; I was sure it deserved it.

With the kind of familiarity with her surroundings that I'd come to associate with this redhead - she just had this kind of aura of dependability about her sometimes - Scarlet led me to a familiar-looking manhole, complete with a ladder, one that seemed completely obsolete; without hesitation, my redhead companion stepped into the hole, and instead of falling down, a faint bubble of light seemed to form around and "catch" her, and she floated gently downwards as if sinking in water; I awkwardly followed suit with a bit more hesitation in my step - my own experiences on humble little Earth had conditioned me to avoid falling down holes - before being momentarily consumed in a semi-familiar-but-mostly-alien feeling of semi-weightlessness. Swiftly but gently, I floated down the light and was deposited onto the floor of the deck below where Scarlet was waiting.

My full sense of weight returned, not that it stopped me from tapping the ground twice with a shoe just to make sure I wasn't going to go floating off. "So, um," I said to Scarlet, awkwardly pointing back at the magical manhole we just descended down, "stupid question. What's this called?"

It was somewhat annoying to me that Scarlet managed to say with a completely straight face: "A lift."

Right. Because it lifted things. That's so funny. I mean, technically, it lowered things, but I had a very strong suspicion that I would float upwards if I stepped back right under the manhole. Lift. Whatever. It's funny. Did I mention this was funny? No, I'm not being sarcastic at all.

Looking around, I realized that I was in the cargo hold again, the basketball court-sized belly of this ship Scarlet had sent me to yesterday, near-empty but for the high-tech garage rig at the very end. And suspended in that garage rig was a familiar sight: A sleek suit of armor with its backpiece and mechanical wings and elongated limbs. The same suit of armor - the Empyrean Guard, I was reminded - that I flew in just the day before. Rows of lights flickered on as Scarlet and I walked towards it, reflected in the polished sheen of the Empyrean. Despite all the firepower and missiles and giant fire swords I had put it through yesterday, the Empyrean looked almost disturbingly untouched, like a sports car that just rolled off the factory line.

I felt a strange sense of attachment as I approached the sci-fi suit of armor. As if there was a kind of affection a bank robber had for an old, reliable getaway car. Maybe that was the case for me; maybe this Empyrean Guard or whatever was my Millennium Falcon. I mean, technically, the ship I was on now would be a better analogue for it, but details. I hadn't managed to survive a crazy fight against Empyreans and spaceships and fire swords and voidwaves on this ship; I did so in that stupid Empyrean. That counted for something.

As the two of us stopped before the suit of armor, though, I was swiftly reminded that not everything had gone flawlessly. Beside the Empyrean was a familiar giant black sword, still ridiculously large for human hands. The blade, however, was slightly crooked, with a deep crack running across its midsection, surrounded by a spiderweb of thinner, latticed cracks. Taking a closer look, I could see what looked like damaged mechanical and electrical components under the crack, although I would've needed a closer look to tell what any of it was. Actually, I doubted that I would've recognized anything even if I had gotten a closer look.

I swiftly realized that this was the part of the sword that I had used to strike an enemy Empyrean yesterday, back when I had not yet realized that this giant sword was actually a humongous lightsaber. Whoops.

"The melee system was damaged in battle," Scarlet explained. There was no hint of scorn or chastisement in her voice - nothing approaching the kind of parental disappointment of "you just broke an expensive toy" - yet I still felt incredibly uncomfortable about this. "I...don't know if it's still operable. And I didn't want to try inside the ship."

The last and only time I turned on the lightsaber, the laser that came out of it was maybe half a mile long, which meant any decision to not turn it on inside this ship was a wise and completely understandable one. Tragically, none of my education and training had ever prepared me for the possibility that I would one day have to repair lightsabers.

As I thought back to the events of yesterday, though, it did occur to me that yesterday was the point in time in which voices started speaking in my head. They had allowed me to take control of the space station's defense guns so I could defend myself against all those bitches shooting at me, they had allowed the space Roomba to tell me to evacuate, they had allowed me to take control of this ship, and they had allowed me to fly the Empyrean Guard or whatever this suit of armor was called.

I had no idea if this was going to work, but what did I have to lose? So I looked up at the ceiling - as if there was some unseen camera or microphone hidden in those white-and-black panels - and asked, "Is the, uh. 'Melee system' still working?"

I was actually hoping - even expecting, maybe - something to reply to me, but that did not stop me from jumping a bit when a voice started forming words in my head. <Structural damage detected in void-burst oscillator,> came that calm, silky, helpful feminine voice. It was still a very strange sensation; rather than actually hearing the words being spoken in sequential order, it felt like these were actually fully-formed thoughts being shoved into my head. It was still a weird, alien feeling, something that had only happened since yesterday, and the fact that it was happening inside my head did not make me feel any better about it. Nor the fact that Scarlet was looking at me weird, looking clearly puzzled as to what I was doing and what was going on; I took that to mean that she couldn't "hear" what I was going to assume was this ship's computer. <Several key diagnostic synapses not responding. Conclusive assessment of void-burst oscillator operability not possible at this time. Possibility of successful activation based on incomplete data stands at 27%, but may result in localized dimensional collapse, and therefore not recommended until serviced by a certified Trisic-level repair and maintenance team.>

Right, got it. Hit power button, possibly get caught up in more reality-bending BS. Do not turn on. "The voice in my head says we shouldn't try using it again until it's repaired," I told Scarlet before instantly regretting my choice of words. I really couldn't blame her for looking at me with a really muted, well-concealed hint of "I'm talking to a crazy person".

To her credit, she took my reply in stride, just as she had taken everything about me in stride thus far. It was admirable; I could almost shed a tear. "Okay," she nodded impassively. "Unfortunately, this means that this ship has no combat capabilities."

In a space universe where everything seemed to be shooting at us, this was not a good development. "None at all?"

Scarlet shrugged. "I still have my submachine gun."

I winced. Not that I hadn't been saved by Scarlet's shooting on foot, but I imagined it wasn't going to do us a lot of good in a space battle with fighter jets and space armor. "Sorry," I said sheepishly. "I didn't realize the sword was actually a lightsaber."

Scarlet blinked. "What's a 'lightsaber'?"

Yeah, it's hard pretending to be surprised that Scarlet didn't know something that just seemed so culturally ubiquitous to me anymore. "Oh, it's just a kind of energy sword. The voice in my head called it a void-burst oscillator or something."

"A void-burst oscillator?" Scarlet's eyes actually widened at this in a muted mix between awe and terror. "That's not an energy sword. That's a void-burst oscillator melee system."

"Um, okay. So...what does it do? I mean, it melts people with energy, right?"

"It creates a chain of explosions that generates an unstable tunnel to the void. Anything that gets caught in the portal passes through."

I blinked and stared at this redhead with fox ears. "The void."

"Yes."

"The void that melts people into walls and randomly abducts my arm and your throat."

"Among other things."

"Who makes these things?" I demanded in a raised incredulous voice.

"The Antecessors did."

Right. The "Antecessors". That was a name that had come up multiple times in our conversations by now. "The ones who built that big-ass space station."

"The arkologies."

I lazily waved a hand in agreement. "Right, the arkolo..." I began before trailing off, noticing the plural form of the word there. "...Wait, there are more of them?"

"Hundreds more, maybe."

I stared. I stared some more. Then I felt a migraine coming on. Cradling my face in my hand - or, if you were less charitable about this, "facepalming" - I muttered, "Right, you know what? I'm not even going to try and think about it." So I tried to not think about the possibility of hundreds of incomprehensibly large space stations out there with people on them trying to kill me. I slowly felt better about it as I instead thought of the fact that I still had no idea what was going on or what I was even supposed to do in this situation now that I had confirmed that I was lost in space. By which I mean I still felt like complete and utter shit. "So what do we do now that I managed to wreck our only way of fighting back?"

I had been with Scarlet for some days now and she still remained very difficult to read. She wasn't quite so impassive, however, that I couldn't recognize a mixture of both anticipation and dread on her expression. "Let's hit the helm," she suggested.

I obediently followed along. We floated - were lifted - back up through the hole in the ceiling to the floor above, and navigated two of those pristine white corridors. I still did not have a good idea of what this spaceship's layout was like, but I had this weird feeling that I'd have to learn it, and soon.

The double doors to the helm slid silently open, and the dull lights inside the familiar triangular room gently brightened. Computer consoles brightened with dozens of graphics that I had no idea how to read. Blue holograms began to project themselves, including a digital interpretation of our immediate surroundings in space. I couldn't help but notice that the icon representing our bird-like ship seemed to be orbiting a sphere-like hologram that looked very much like a star. I glanced out the window into the night sky of outer space, and sure enough, an orange-ish star burned beyond it, rippling in a sea of fire.

So that's what stars look like, I mused. Actually, looking out the window towards the star, I thought it would be a lot brighter. Then it occurred to me that maybe the windows were darkening the view outside, acting like sunglasses to prevent the star from cooking us alive.

"So," I sighed as I stopped before the holographic map at the center of the helm, pretending I had any real idea of what any of it meant, trying to keep the tone light, "we're not lost in space are we?" I mean, I was. I, Artemis Chan, was now very far from Earth and very much lost in space. But Scarlet didn't need to know that. No pressure, right?

"No," said Scarlet reassuringly as she crossed her arms and stood beside me. "We were low on fuel, but I kept the ship near the local star for our star scoop. I wanted to discuss our options with you."

"Our options?" I repeated, totally clueless and mostly wondering what a "star scoop" was; I couldn't quite get the image of our ship shoveling fire from a star out of my head. I had already seen a ship extend an arm to whack me with a fire sword, so maybe the stupid imagery in my head was not as stupid as it could've been, under the circumstances.

Scarlet at least looked admirably calm as she sucked in a deep breath. "We are two people on an Antecessor vessel with no registration or support. Even if we could dock anywhere, we'd probably be killed for this ship." She pursed her lips before concluding, "So we need to talk about our next move, put our heads together and figure out what we can do."

Half of that flew over my head, and I was entirely ready to admit it. "Look," I sighed truthfully, because I was a very truthful person, "I have absolutely no idea what's going on, where I am, how I got here, or what to do. I barely understood your explanation just now, but getting killed is very bad. I don't know if you have any great ideas or not, but that's better than nothing, which is precisely what I have."

Scarlet regarded me for a moment before nodding in a way that seemed almost anxious despite her best attempts to mask it. Her fox ears literally flattened as she whispered, "Athabasca. I...know someone at the Athabasca shipyards that can help us with camouflage and registration. But..." Scarlet pursed her lips again, and her hesitation seemed a lot more obvious this time, which certainly made me nervous, "...it would've been nice if you had other ideas."

"Are the, uh, Athabasca shipyards bad?"

"No, not really," Scarlet admitted in the kind of way that made me think she was trying to appear less uncomfortable about the proposition for my sake. "Unless..." she trailed off, giving me a concerned look. "You...haven't ever crossed the Congregation, have you?"

"I'm...assuming that's not a gathering of aging suburban soccer moms with nothing better to do with their lives."

Scarlet gave me that impassive look that I'd come to associate with her thinking "what the hell are you talking about". "I'll take that as a 'no', then," she said mildly. All things considered, I was impressed at how well she could pretend that she wasn't thinking about how I was a complete dumbass to my face.

There was a moment of silence. Scarlet looked pensive and thoughtful while I looked like I was busying myself analyzing all the pretty holograms around me. After about thirty seconds, I finally gave up; my anxiety was getting the better of me. "So...?" I started, hoping that Scarlet would fill in the blanks somehow.

Scarlet closed her eyes and sucked in another deep breath. "Alright," she finally allowed as she exhaled. She gave me a look; and when I gave her a kind of awkward, lopsided, forced, "hell if I know anything" smile - or what passed for a smile under the circumstances - she nodded and moved towards the helmsman's seat. As she slipped into comfortable leather furniture, holograms popped up all around her, presenting her with what I could only assume were interfaces and readouts and options. "Athabasca it is."

I was not filled with a sense of confidence when it took her about five minutes to actually awkwardly navigate through those holograms and set us on a course to Athabasca.

Past the windows of our ship, outer space stretched and lit up before sending us into a tunnel of that devilish, infernal light of the void.

 

[Kei]

it only took three months but updated

god i hate me

*****​

Chapter 8: Athabasca (II)

"So explain to me," I started, pointing out the "windshield" of our spaceship, "why the void is bad but this void is good."

We didn't actually talk much on our way to this "Athabasca" place. As light outside the window flowed past us at blinding speeds, as our ship soared through a tunnel of green energy, Scarlet remained glued to the helmsman's seat, rarely ever taking her eyes off the holograms around her that presumably provided her with information from a hundred different sources. I, meanwhile, had taken a seat on the other side of the triangular room. Holograms surrounded me too, but I had no idea what any of it meant, nor the significance of this chair I was seated in. Was the person sitting here supposed to fulfill some important role on this ship? Co-pilot? Radar? I had no idea. I just wasn't ready to spend an entire hour standing around as we hurtled towards Athabasca at speeds of "faster than light".

Some smartass in high school once told me that traveling faster than light was theoretically impossible but was a thing in sci-fi stuff. I told him that I wasn't some high-tooting physicist; I was going to a community college to learn how to be a mechanic, so he could stop showing off how smart he was and shut up. In more polite words.

We hadn't actually spent all our time in the void. There were points where we dropped out of the tunnels of green light, spending hours cruising in the dark expanse of what was supposed to be "normal" space. I couldn't tell why we were doing it; maybe I should've listened to that smartass sci-fi nerd. The point was that Scarlet's reticence felt like a combination of trying to actually focus on important things and trying to give me space and trying to figure me out, whereas my reticence stemmed almost entirely on trying not to look like a completely crazy dumbass, something I had thus far been doing such a good job at.

Scarlet didn't look up from her holograms, but neither did she sound annoyed or distracted as she pointed out, "I'm not an expert."

Yeah, well, until yesterday, I had never been dragged off into outer space. Normal outer space, even, not the void or whatever, which everyone and everything had thus far been trying to tell me was very, very bad. What I actually said, though, was, "Me neither."

Scarlet nodded readily at that, accepting this; I kind of wished she was less immediately accepting of the fact that I was a massive dumbass. "The way I've always had it explained to me was like skipping stones across water. That the void has different...depths. When a wayfinder opens a path through the void, the ship doesn't go too deep into the void, where it stays at a...shallow depth." She gestures with her hand as she draws upon an analogy: "It's like skipping a stone across water, where you're using the surface of the water to bounce to stone on, where you're trying to keep it above water and not let it sink before you get where you need to go."

Honestly, as far as analogies went, that was actually pretty understandable. Granted, I still didn't know what the void was or how it facilitated what seemed to be faster-than-light travel, but at least I knew now that we weren't going to start losing body parts to reality-bending alternate dimensions or whatever.

One of the computers surrounding Scarlet's seat made a beeping sound; I had enough pattern recognition skills to figure out that this was the jingle that played every time we were about to exit the void light tunnel and back into reality. Scarlet turned most of her attention away from me as she fiddled with her holograms. She seemed like she was becoming increasingly familiar with what she was supposed to do every time she sent us hurtling through the void, but there was still a hesitant deliberateness to her actions, a clear hint of unfamiliarity...or a clear hint that this was something with a low margin of error. Probably both.

I wouldn't claim that I wasn't still nervous, but I did feel a bit better about it. At best, Scarlet was still inexperienced about this kind of thing, but had the prerequisite knowledge to manage with just the right amount of cautiousness. At worst, she was actually some kind of genius who had managed to figure all this out on the fly. I certainly would not be able to step into the cockpit of an airliner and fly it with no prior training.

"We're leaving voidspace," Scarlet announced as she placed her hands on the joystick, speaking aloud in a way that seemed like it was more for her benefit than mine, "in three, two, one..."

With a thwump sound, the entire ship seemed to shudder a bit as a brief flash of light transformed the tunnel of void light into the darkness of outer space. "Darkness" here was a relative term, though. Colorful, glowing clouds hung against the backdrop of the blackness of space, giant puffs of nebula floating at what were probably mind-boggling distances. The stars out here shone and twinkled in different vibrant colors. It was actually a really pretty view of outer space, albeit one that made me a little nervous. I remembered what happened the last time outer space got too colorful.

For a few minutes, our ship seemed to simply cruise through space. After those few minutes had passed, I noticed that one of the stars ahead of us out of the windshield twinkled just a bit harder than the others.

A few minutes later, I realized that it wasn't a star at all.

I had actually seen it first as a hologram at the center of the bridge, a three-dimensional representation on a display I had recognized as the space version of radar or whatever. It was still floating in midair at some distance in front of that glowing representation of our own avian-like spaceship. The dots in my head had not connected then, but they were connecting now: Our radar had already detected this artificial structure when we exited the void. And now that it had grown from a twinkling pinprick to a marble-sized entity, I now realized that we were approaching what Scarlet had called the Athabasca shipyards.

I had actually been part of jobs that took place in our local shipyard before. Nothing actually related to ships, though; we had been there to fix a truck. And my boss had really just sent me there with "real mechanics" - ugh - to do paperwork and look pretty. My memories of those shipyards looked nothing like the space station floating in space that I was now staring at. Slowly growing in size right before my eyes, the best way I could describe the Athabasca shipyards was three giant metallic boxes connected by a network of three-dimensional lattices. It was as if three boxes or cargo containers were held together by the bars of a jungle gym. Except - even though we were apparently still at vast distances that made it difficult to tell just how large Athabasca was - the "cargo containers" were starting to look like they were actually the size of stadiums. Not nearly as huge as the "arkology" we had fled from the day before; in terms of manmade structures, the size of the arkology had been of a mind-boggling size. This one was significantly smaller, certainly more comprehensible to mere human minds, but certainly larger than any other artificial structure I had ever seen.

A beeping sound came from the cockpit where Scarlet was seated. She hurriedly fiddled with a few holograms before she did something right, because a moment later, a feminine voice was audible through the speakers: "Unidentified vessel, this is Athabasca Control. Halt your approach, and state your affiliation and intentions."

This sounded suspiciously like the kind of technical jargon that air traffic controllers would engage in. Not that I had ever heard them in person before, but I have watched movies. This was certainly nothing that puzzled Scarlet, who stopped our ship and replied through some microphone tucked away somewhere: "This is Scarlet, daughter of Qtesphon."

"Gesundheit," I muttered under my breath. I quickly noticed Scarlet quietly giving me a confused look, and I suppressed my embarrassment as I frantically shook my head and assured her, "It's nothing." Seriously, though, how did the name "Scarlet" come from a parent named "Qtesphon"?

Scarlet continued to regard me with that strange look, and I definitely felt kind of embarrassed by it, but that didn't stop her from continuing to speak to the voice on the other end of this phone call, presumably someone inside the space station that was growing alarmingly larger and larger beyond the windshield. "I'm requesting camouflage and new registration for a newly-acquired ship." She took a deep breath before adding, "I am vouched for by Miss Citrine." Then, in words that I instantly recognized as a kind of code or password: "'Inaction is the absence of action, not the absence of choice.'"

There was a moment of tense silence. Then: "Welcome to Athabasca. A flight plan has been sent to you: Land at Dock 2. There are no outgoing ships, so you should have a straight shot in."

Scarlet exhaled a sigh of relief, which by contrast made me nervous; I realized that this exchange just now had some kind of worst-case scenario that we just avoided. Probably something that involved more guns. "Flight plan received," my redhead pilot announced after her computers made another beeping sound, and our ship began to soar through space once more, flying closer towards Athabasca. "Thank you, Athabasca Control."

We were now within a sufficiently close distance to Athabasca that I could really kind of register how big it was, compared to the previous notion of "big" distorted by the vastness of nebulous distances. Scarlet was guiding our ship along some kind of preplanned flight path that brought us close enough that I could see light filtering out from lines of windows along the crisscrossing and interconnecting beams and pillars and lattices that looked increasingly like they were giant, multi-floor corridors. The three giant cuboid structures they connected were tiny compared to the arkology, but still dwarfed our own spaceship or any manmade structure I had ever seen, looking like they were at least three, maybe even four sports stadiums in size.

Still, it wasn't just in size that Athabasca would never have been mistaken for an arkology. The arkology had been designed with a luxurious but minimalist grace, with pristine white plates shielding a black substructure, adorned with golden decals. When seen from the outside, its shape kind of resembled a giant winged sword, surrounded by golden halos, almost like if a giant space sword had been on the receiving end of an angelic promotion up in heaven. Athabasca, on the other hand, was bland in an almost utilitarian manner, unadorned and uniform in a simple steel-like color that tryhard dudes with too-loud mufflers liked to call "gunmetal gray". There was almost something familiar about it compared to the arkology, as if I had returned from the surreal architecture of heaven and was now back among the more comprehensible infrastructure of the projects.

With her white-knuckled hands on the joystick, Scarlet decelerated our ship and flew us alongside one of the giant metallic cuboids for a bit before making one final turn, putting us on course with two parallel broken lines of lights inexplicably floating in space, leading to an open set of giant double sliding doors large enough to admit spaceships far larger than ours. These were almost certainly holograms and reminded me of runway lights at an airport. The double doors led into a large empty "room" that easily admitted our ship before ending abruptly in another set of heavy metallic sliding doors. This was probably a giant airlock that could probably admit ships that were at least twice as large as ours, a hypothesis that was quickly confirmed as Scarlet pulled our ship into a full stop inside the airlock, rotating lights along the walls began to flash and spin red, and - presumably - the double doors behind us silently slid shut as the airlock began to pressurize, with steam-like gasses beginning to blast into the chamber through giant vents.

It was in that awkward, almost tense silence that Scarlet suddenly spoke up from the pilot's seat, her words quiet but carrying a worrying amount of gravity. "I don't need to tell you this," she murmured without looking over at me, her gaze instead focusing on the double metallic doors ahead, as if steeling herself for what was beyond them, "but this is the dragon's den. The Congregation is dangerous. Do not provoke them."

Inwardly, I wondered just what about my behavior over our past week-or-so together had been interpreted as "provocative". Outwardly, I gave as serious a nod as I could muster, replying, "I'm not in the business of making enemies."

If Scarlet was skeptical about this, she didn't show it, merely nodding in acknowledgment as the double doors of the airlock in front of us made a loud, abrupt, metallic clanging sound, slowly sliding open moments afterwards. Scarlet waited for the doors to open wide enough before slowly gliding our ship through the airlock and into Dock 2 proper.

Just as Athabasca looked nothing like the arkology we had escaped from, the interior of this shipyard was completely different from the colossal dock where we had first found our ship. For starters, the dock looked deceptively smaller from the inside than the outside. Part of it was probably the existence of some kind of support infrastructure that comprised the outer "hull" of the dock, like the airlock we just passed through. The walls on both sides were obscured behind long aisles of cargo containers and warehouse racks where metallic crates were shoved away. The ceiling was similarly barely visible behind a network of metallic lattices and support beams, from which rows of powerful spotlights functioning as the primary source of illumination for the entire dock hung.

But it wasn't just the gunmetal, utilitarian layout of the dock that distinguished it from the arkology. The interior couldn't even be described as "spartan", in fact. There was a lot of scaffolding along the walls, along the cargo containers and warehouse racks, along the support beams up above, and most of them looked haphazardly thrown together with whatever was on hand with little regard for workplace safety. Signs of ad hoc repairs - replacement parts of vastly different materials and colorations and textures - could be spotted here and there. In contrast to the neatly-stacked containers back on the arkology, the crates and containers here were arranged in a fashion that could only be described as semi-orderly, as if the people responsible for maintaining these wares had understood the importance of categorization but couldn't be bothered to actually tuck them away properly, prioritizing ease of access and convenience rather than neatness. And the seemingly hundreds of tools and devices of all sizes scattered across the dock couldn't even lay any claim to organization, instead looking like they were left sitting around wherever anyone had last used them.

Beyond the arrangement of all the furnishings of a terribly colossal garage, however, the whole dock just had a very wear-and-tear look about it. Old sections of metal sported signs of rusting. Smears on the ground betrayed where grease had a tendency to spill, having since formed permanent stains no amount of cleaning could remove. Visible steam periodically leaked and spewed from aging, clattering vent coverings. Smaller sources of light at ground level to compensate for the shadows cast by the spotlights hanging from the ceiling rigging did little to alleviate that dark, dank look in aisles and corners. There were half a dozen of what looked like spaceships - either of similar size to ours or smaller - that also looked like they were aging and scuffed up, sporting burns and dents and scratches. And even before then, most of them looked pretty rugged, like they were aging military surplus stuff rather than the sleek sportscar look of our spaceship.

The whole setup was hardly dilapidated, but it was just a little run-down in a way that was somehow almost comfortingly familiar. The whole place had a very lived-in feeling, like this was somewhere people actually lived, rather than a surreally pretty, unnaturally sterile space where space Roombas actively erased any sign that I was actually there.

And speaking of lived-in: There were people here. For the first time in what felt like forever, there were scores of people here, doing their own thing. Better yet, they weren't shooting at us.

I actually got up from my seat and scurried over to the windshield to get a better look out of the ship and at the people scattered about. The inhabitants of the docks moved to and fro, busying themselves with all the machinery about, from tools to equipment to a handful of smaller ships in the corner of the dock. Almost all of them wore stained clothing of rough materials, covered in smears and moving with a kind of practiced, businesslike swagger that I was all too familiar with, the kind of "I work with machinery that can tear off limbs on a daily basis" attitude that belonged to so many mechanics. They didn't wear the kind of armor Scarlet did, the kind of armor that the people shooting at us on the arkology did, so I could clearly see all that all of them - like Scarlet - sported those weird animal ears and tails that I was still struggling to get used to. Didn't matter, though; they still looked human enough, and I appreciated the presence of company, even though a few of them were clearly carrying guns on their person, something I was increasingly allergic to.

The whole place was dank and dirty, but I definitely preferred a place like this over the clean, convenient, and hauntingly lonely atmosphere of the arkology.

Someone on the floor of the hangar was waving two flashing safety batons in a way that reminded me of ground crews at airports trying to direct taxiing airplanes. She was clearly performing a similar function, because Scarlet carefully hovered our ship over to the space directly in front of this air traffic controller before touching down; I could feel the floor below me tremble just a bit upon landing, but only just barely. The soft whining of our ship's engines slowly swiftly died off in the distance as Scarlet powered them down, the redhead in question exhaling deeply as if relieved that she had successfully landed without crashing into anything. Still, the tension did not seem to have entirely left her, as if we had only overcome one trial and were about to face yet another. After a moment in which she seemed to be emotionally resetting herself, she stood up from her seat, removed her gun holstered at her side and placed it on the pilot's console, looked over to me, and said, "Well, time to face the music."

That was deeply encouraging. Still, I nodded quietly and stood up myself. No use in backing out now. I certainly had no better ideas at this point.

The two of us left the bridge and worked our way through the corridors of our ship, navigating through a semi-familiar path that we ran through yesterday in our mad scramble into this ship. We soon found ourselves before a set of doors in what seemed to be the aft of the ship, presumably our way out. Scarlet messed around with some kind of hologram on the wall, struggling with the interface for a moment. Then...

<Breathable external atmosphere detected,> announced a familiar voice in my head as the doors before us hissed and opened, as did a second set of doors beyond them; we had our own mini-airlock, after all, one that was apparently smart enough to know when it didn't need to do any serious depressurization. <Warning: Airborne contaminants may pose mild impediment to normal respiration. Filters are advised.>

This actually didn't surprise me as the atmosphere hit me with a soft blast of odors and sound that caused my hair and clothes to softly flutter. It came with the territory; garages, factories, and other such shops almost invariably smelled like gasoline, dust, mold, the carcass of a dead rat rotting somewhere, and unwashed sweaty dudes. And while the dock was humongous enough to not really qualify as an "enclosed space" where any sufficiently loud sound was overpowering, our surroundings were still filled with the cacophony of mechanical equipment, the rumbling hum of infrastructure, the chorus of shouts. It was all very familiar somehow, save for the smells here largely been unfamiliar to me (not surprising, I didn't think spaceships ran on any gasoline I had ever come into contact with) and the surprising amount of feminine voices echoing around (very surprising, something I'd almost never heard after graduating from my community college).

The rear set of doors collapsed into a ramp, the same ramp Scarlet and I had scrambled up amidst excitement and missiles and explosions the day before. We made our way down, quickly noticing a group of about a dozen making their way across the dock to meet us. Almost all of them looked like dockworkers and mechanics, all of them with a bewildering assortment of non-human ears and very non-human tails. I could easily recognize fox ears and fox tails - mostly from having hung out around Scarlet for days now - a few combinations that wouldn't have been out of place on cats or dogs, but I was pretty lost beyond that. It wasn't as if I had ever owned pets before.

At the fore of this formation was a notably better-dressed young woman, a brunette sporting a bobcut and - perhaps most noticeably - a pair of cat ears and a cat tail. She wore a short, sleeveless, form-fitting black dress made out of some synthetic material over a pair of thin, nearly translucent black tights, a combination that reminded me of some secretaries that either tried a bit too hard or starred in porn. Still, I had a feeling that this was what passed as business casual here in these shipyards.

"Are you Scarlet, daughter of Qtesphon?" asked the cat-eared girl, stopping within polite conversational distance with the dockworkers loosely forming a circle around us. When Scarlet replied in the affirmative, she smiled and bowed her head a tiny bit, and I instantly decided that I disliked her. I recognized the air of a venal, self-important customer service agent whose cautious professionalism stopped her from saying what she really thought about you, but who very clearly thought you had just walked into an establishment that was far beyond your class and means. "Welcome to Athabasca. I am Jasmine; I will be taking care of you today. I understand that you want camouflage and new registration?"

I liked to think that Scarlet was actually pretty sharp, although she showed no signs of recognizing Jasmine's character. The redhead kept a totally impassive expression as she nodded and answered, "I do."

Jasmine nodded and looked over at our ship, sizing it up and making quick mental estimates. "This looks like a Lodric-scale luxury vessel. New registration will not be impossible, but it will be difficult. Do you want camouflage for just the shell or the inside as well?"

"Both."

"It'll cost you. I'm thinking...fifty million crowns or its equivalent, based on Imerisu rates. That's a conservative estimate; depending on the details, difficulties of fabricating registration in practice, what we find in the ship, it could easily be eight or ninety. I can keep it under a hundred. We have a wide variety of options for payment. Subject to negotiation, of course."

Scarlet nodded, but she didn't seem to actually be listening as she looked around the dock, as if searching for a familiar face. She did at least do Jasmine the courtesy of letting her finish before asking, "Where is Miss Citrine?"

Jasmine's perfect smile twitched just a bit, betraying what she really thought: That Scarlet wasn't nearly important enough for her to care about "I'd like to speak with your manager". "Miss Citrine is preoccupied at the moment, I'm afraid. Congregation business, as I'm sure you understand. I assure you, I am more than pleased to come to an arrangement with you."

"Scarlet," came a voice, and although it was soft and sonorous, it carried across the loud, spacious dock with all the clarity of a keen blade, dividing the crowd as if they were the Red Sea. "What did I tell you about swiping luxury ships?"

Up to this point, I had seen two sides to Scarlet: Mostly kind and helpful in a stoic, understated manner; and a compartmentalized coil of desensitized, unemotional murder. But as the dock around us quieted down at the presence of this voice, a voice whose owner sauntered easily over towards the two of us, I saw a third side to Scarlet. She looked like a nervous student being called before the principal at a Catholic girl's school, head bowed a little and shoulders hunched a little. Her hands were even clasped in front of her in an almost girlish manner, which somehow just seemed a little ridiculous given what I had seen her do since we first met. Her fox ears were drooped back, her tail lowered. I had no idea if the body language of foxes were in any way close to the body language of dogs, and certainly not when they were on an otherwise humanlike person, but I recognized submission there, something that made me feel intensely uncomfortable.

The redhead still managed to speak clearly, though: "Don't do it: Too conspicuous, too easy to track, the previous owner is probably connected." Then she added, in assurance, "It's not a luxury ship, Miss Citrine."

Compared to the small crowd of similarly-aged young women, Citrine was a cat-eared, cat-tailed middle-aged blonde looking like she was in her forties or fifties. But time had been kind to her. It wasn't that she was younger than she looked - faint lines were already forming under her eyes and cheeks, and her high cheekbones accentuated the slight gauntness of her features - insomuch as how she had aged very gracefully. The years had not taken away from her classical beauty and sharp eyes and fine features and thick locks of long hair, and I would've been delighted if I could age half as well as she did. She clearly knew this, too, dressed as she was in a shoulderless dress with high slits and a thick fur scarf, confidently showing off her long, slender legs without reservation. There was a very classy style there, like a veteran singer at an upscale bar of some sort back in the Roaring Twenties, a sharp contrast to her current industrial surroundings. She even had a long, reed-like pipe in between her fingers, the kind you smoke out of. In spite of her sharp visage, there was a kindly air to her, the impression you get from a somewhat distant aunt who nonetheless has you over sometimes and sneaks you some money so you can buy snacks without your mom knowing about it.

"Oh?" Citrine raised an amused eyebrow as she came to a stop in front of Scarlet, a full head taller than the redhead. As she did so, her free hand lazily reached out for Scarlet's face, like an aunt caressing the cheek of her favorite niece. Citrine's fingers did brush up against Scarlet's face, but then it went up and back to those fox ears, scritching behind them as if Scarlet were a dog. It was weird enough watching a humanlike person do this to another humanlike person; it was even weirder to watch Scarlet's reaction, her face mutedly twisting with the slightest hints of uncomfortable and vulnerable...and feel-good at the same time. There was a soft blush there too, as if Citrine were doing something inappropriate to assert dominance.

I had to fight down my own blush; watching this go down as I stood right next to them suddenly felt incredibly and intimately intrusive.

Citrine glanced over Scarlet's shoulder at the admittedly luxurious-looking ship we came in on before returning her gaze to Scarlet, smiling in the kind of way that somehow communicated "it's cute that you're lying to my face" and "well, you probably wouldn't lie to my face that blatantly". "Well," she announced, finally dropping her hand from Scarlet's ears, and my companion actually allowed herself an exhale after that, as if she had been holding her breath all this time, "I'll take your word for it." She took a whiff from her pipe, blowing smoke into the air, and then turned to me. Her smile seemed friendly enough, but I still struggled not to flinch at the attention. "Who's your friend?"

Scarlet had quickly composed herself in the few seconds I took my eyes off her, answering, "This is Artemis. She helped me with my previous job."

"I thought your previous job was with the Laswyn Consortium."

"They broke the first rule of arkeology."

"Ah," Citrine clucked her tongue, sounding almost a little surprised. Then she shrugged. "I thought they were better than that. Tells me what I know." She returned her attention and her matronly smile to me. "Artemis, was it?" Her hand came up to my face, as if to touch my cheek in place of a handshake. "I'm Citrine, daughter of Calea, a Praetor of the Congregation."

I didn't dare slap the hand away, but almost entirely by instinct - without really even thinking about it - I took an abrupt step back, my muscles tensing warily as I did so. Even without having seen what I had seen, I wasn't a very touchy-feely person, and wasn't used to that kind of physical contact. Or maybe it was a bullheaded pride overriding my good sense; I didn't like being condescended to. Either way, despite my throat locking up a little, I forced every bit of respectfulness I could muster into my tone as I gave a deep nod of my head and replied, "It's nice to meet you."

Scarlet was looking over with an unreadable but alert expression. Jasmine looked more openly stunned, staring at Citrine from over her shoulder as if expecting orders. The crowd, too, watched with bated breath. But despite a moment where her eyes widened slightly in surprise, the cat woman merely laughed, no hint of malice or threat in her voice. If anything, she sounded almost teasing as she dropped her free hand back to her waist, cooing, "Ooh, touchy." Her laughter faded off, and that friendly smile returned to her face as she said reassuringly, "You have nothing to fear. The Congregation treats even exiles well."

This was the second time the word "exile" had been mentioned since I first arrived in outer space - Scarlet had mentioned it a lifetime ago - and I had no better understanding of what that meant. But I was sure that I had plenty to fear, no matter what Citrine said, no matter how friendly her words or kindly her air. I wasn't just being prickly and standoffish because she was getting all inappropriately touchy-feely with Scarlet - whom I didn't really know but kind of looked up to a bit at this point by virtue of her having risked her own neck to save my life a few times now - or whatever. I didn't know the first thing about mobs or organized crime or whatever, but you don't survive around neighborhoods I grew up in without at least having that gut feeling of who was in one.

It wasn't as if I didn't already have my suspicions when Scarlet first mentioned the Congregation, but I was sure now that they were basically the mafia. And Citrine was the mafia donna. The boss lady.

...Or maybe she was the local mid-level boss? How far up the totem pole was "running a shipyard" around this part of the universe? Actually, that part was kind of unimportant. What was more important to me was that Scarlet - who up to this point had seemed like a pretty good decision-maker - had run to the mafia for help. In fact, she seemed to already know them to begin with. That seemed like a really bad idea. Why did I throw my lot in with her to begin with?

Oh, right, because on a space station full of people shooting at me, she had been the one person who didn't. Life sucked.

Lazily half-turning towards Jasmine - who bowed her head without even being directly looked at - Citrine asked, "How much did you think providing camouflage and new registration was worth, Jasmine?"

"Forty million, Miss Citrine," the sleazy cat-eared saleswoman quickly replied. "No, thirty-five million, perhaps. No more than sixty."

That hadn't been what you said before, you little bitch. Still, business here still seemed dependent on knowing the right people. This was just the first time it had ever been done in my favor.

Looking back at Scarlet, Citrine smiled indulgently, "Whatever happened with the Consortium, I do hope you at least got a bit of the cut."

Scarlet hesitated, forcing every bit of meek respect into her tone as she murmured, "I...have another arrangement in mind, Miss Citrine. One that I think you'd be interested in."

"Do tell."

"Respectfully, it would be easier if you started camouflaging the ship first."

Citrine raised an eyebrow. I could tell that she was skeptical, but that the gears were running in her head, like she was balancing a whole bunch of different things in her head, weighing her options. After a moment, the complicated expression disappeared from her face, and she merely smiled. "Is that so?" she asked rhetorically, again reaching out to stroke Scarlet's hair; Scarlet, in turn, bowed her head meekly at the gesture. Turning to Jasmine, Citrine commanded, "Get your girls started." And as Jasmine bowed and began barking orders at the dockworkers nearby, Citrine almost cooed to Scarlet, "You must be tired after everything. I promise our crews won't take long. Would you like to use our lounges? Robin misses you."

Scarlet nodded, whereupon Citrine gave one of the dockhands nearby a small nod, and the mere gesture was enough for the dockworker to give a quick bow before gesturing for the two of us to follow her towards one of the distant doors an entire ballpark away leading out of the dock. The two of us had barely taken more than a dozen steps when Scarlet looked around, noting with muted surprise that Citrine had not moved, her back still turned to us, looking our spaceship up and down as her crew of dockworkers began embarking through the rear ramp. "Will you be staying here, Miss Citrine?" she asked.

Citrine lazily swiveled her head just enough to give Scarlet a sidelong looked, and the corner of her lips tugged into a smirk. "I have to see what kind of deal you're offering me, do I not?"

The dockhand didn't need to lead us too far. Our journey took us to a set of double doors at one end of the dock, depositing us into a metallic corridor that were probably the aforementioned beams and pillars and lattices connecting the larger, boxier, Dock-2-ish parts of the Athabasca Shipyards. The worn nature of the shipyards here didn't stray too far from the dock itself: Aged stains on scuffed metal, pipes running across walls and ceiling vibrating with hums and the occasional rattle, large sheets of tapestries hung up irregularly here-and-there as if in an attempt to personalize an otherwise deeply industrial space.

The corridors were sparsely populated; this was not some kind of bustling spaceport. Not that we were actually taken very far past the dock's doors. The dockworker leading us had made it a few dozen feet before depositing us through a sliding door and into what's supposed to be a lounge about the size of a high school classroom. There was obviously a much more committed effort at decorating this place: The walls were colored wine-red, curtains and even more tapestries of similar colors hung from the walls, the room was furnished with a plethora of cushions and low couches and low tables, and the entire place was lit by the dim but warm glow of a small chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The whole setup had a strangely Middle Eastern vibe in broad strokes, like something out of an old adventure cartoon. Only in space this time, so infinitely more surreal than all of the starched white passageways in the world.

I let a few seconds pass after the dockworker closed the sliding door behind us before exhaling: "That went well, I guess?"

"It could've gone worse," Scarlet allowed with a nod, moving over to the cushions on the floor and settling herself onto them as if she was on a couch, stretching her legs in a way that almost seemed like she was half-reclining on the floor like a bum. Still it, she seemed sufficiently relaxed even as she simultaneously looked tense, as if she was forcing herself to calm down. I, in the meantime, remained standing, partly because I was still a little anxious myself - Scarlet's own visible trepidation wasn't helping - partly because the lack of real chairs disincentivized sitting. Sure, I've sat on my mattress before and have had to sit down on the floor against a wall when my community college lecturers ran late, but it didn't mean I had to like it. I preferred chairs. Low seating was weird.

"So," I allowed after another moment had passed, pacing the lounge a little and noting that one of the larger tables had plates of food. Possibly snacks, by the looks of it, not that I could identify any of it. Still, I was feeling hungry enough that I gravitated towards the area around the table, casting glances at anything that looked palatable to my poor, humble, Earthling tastes. "You didn't tell me that the Congregation was the mafia."

"What's a 'mafia'?"

"Mafia? You know, organized crime?"

"They're a syndicate."

Was that supposed to be an euphemism? Or was this just the official terminology here? "Fine, 'syndicate, whatever. How was it you got to know Citrine?"

Scarlet visibly hesitated for a moment. "She has...helped me out before," she allowed after a moment. Another moment passed before she suddenly saw fit to add, "Also, this room is bugged."

I blinked. "Oh." Suddenly, this moment of innocuous, relieved conversation didn't feel so innocuous or relieving. I supposed it was good that Scarlet told me about this so that I wouldn't say anything completely stupid, although now it felt like we had just shown our hand to whatever listening devices or secret surveillance cameras were hidden in this lounge. "Should you, uh...be telling me that? Out loud?"

"Miss Citrine knows that I know."

Well, good enough for me. "She seems to like you," I offered.

Scarlet's nod of polite agreement is a bit slower and more deliberate this time. "She believes that I'm a good investment."

Certainly, I had some doubts about Scarlet's judgment now that I was aware of her associations with the mafia - "syndicate", whatever - but it's not like I was any position to even pretend being better-informed about the situation at hand or the madness I had been thrown in ever since I woke up in a space station one day. "Well, for what it's worth," I shrugged. "I think you're good." Then I quickly clarified, "Uh, a good investment."

For what it was worth, Scarlet took my compliment at face value and said simply: "Thank you."

I nodded and elected to let the subject drop; I wasn't a touchy-feely emotional sort of person that dwelled on beats like this. In fact, I was incentivized not to, having hovered around the low tea table with dishes of snacks on them. The foods still looked alien, and it's not like I was super comfortable with eating food being offered by a cartel - "syndicate" - but at this point, food felt like it was going to be a very nice distraction. I wasn't famished, but I felt like I could use something in my mouth. "So the room is bugged," I said to Scarlet, pointing at the snacks on the table, "but, uh, is this...safe to eat?"

"It's not poisoned," the fox-eared redhead assured me. Then, less reassuringly, "If they wanted to kill us, it wouldn't be now, it'd be in a few minutes."

I supposed that was a mixed blessing. One part of that reply probably warranted more attention than the other, but my brain was prioritizing my craving for food at the moment, and I suppose it was better to die with a full stomach than without. Besides, of all the plates with alien foods that I didn't recognize, one dish resembled steamed meatballs - the kind of dish that you'd maybe find at a dim sum or whatever - except they were a bit redder than anything I was familiar with and looked like they were glazed over with...well, something.

There weren't any utensils, so I decided that this must be finger food. The meatballs weren't sticky to the touch as I feared, thankfully, the glaze having hardened. I popped one into my mouth and was pleasantly surprised at the taste. There was definitely a bit of weirdness to it, a taste and texture that I couldn't recognize, mushy in a way that was reminiscent of dried paste. Which normally would be alarming, like I was eating rotted food or something, but it also had a nice sour-and-spicy flavor to it, a bit like hot and sour soup in meat-paste form. I helped myself to another meatball, and another. I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to try the other, less-recognizable dishes, but if space cuisine was going to be like this, then it wasn't going to be an entirely miserable experience after all.

It would've been great if the moment had lasted. And I was admittedly a bit distracted by food, content on postponing the inevitable subject, if only for a minute or two. But in between bites, I decided to ask Scarlet the pertinent question: "So you said they may try to kill us?"

"Yes," she replied in a matter-of-fact manner.

I really couldn't bring myself to be surprised about this anymore. Still, I nodded almost blithely and asked: "Will it involve guns?"

The lounge's only door slid open with a hiss, and to my great anxiety but not to my great shock, a stream of people flooded in, all of them dressed in the kind of combat gear Scarlet sported, the combination of semi-futuristic-looking tactical catsuits combined with a select choice of plates from a knightly set of armor. Oh, and all of them were carrying guns, of course, which they pointed at us as they swiftly formed a semi-circle around us, ready to riddle us full of holes.

And it was after all her lackeys had filed through with guns that the familiar sight of Citrine marched in, her auntlike, seemingly unflappable composure twisted into an expression of confusion and anger and horror and shock, even as she demanded, "What. The. F...!"

 

[Kei]

You know, I don't even have anything meaningful to say about how long it took to write this or how I'll try to get better at this. So here you go, Chapter 9 and the end of the Athabasca Arc. Sorry.

*****​

Chapter 9: Athabasca (III)

It had been two weeks since I first arrived in outer space, and that had been two weeks where I had guns constantly pointed at me. A change of setting, it seemed, was not actually going to break this pattern.

Actually, sneaking a glance at Scarlet, I wasn't entirely sure what to feel about Scarlet looking entirely unsurprised by this development either. I mean, clearly, she expected this to happen, and might have actually set it up this way. Still, couldn't we go just another day without being under threat of being shot at?

After spending all of our time together being a suave, confident, sexy middle-aged lady, Citrine now looked positively livid, standing as she did at the door of the lounge behind her row of about a dozen goons pointing guns at us. Thrusting a finger in the direction of the hangar - or at least the direction I suspected was the hangar - she snarled, "That is an Antecessor ship."

Scarlet nodded with all the gravity of someone confirming the weather outside: "It is."

"Explain. Now."

"I have a proposition. One that will benefit all of us."

Citrine's eyes narrowed. This was not a woman who enjoyed being in a position where someone else was in-the-know and she wasn't. But I somehow also knew that this was a woman who wanted more, wanted a leg over others, played all the angles. This was someone with ambition, and wasn't going to be too torn up over who she needed to step on to get there. She was far too pragmatic and reasonable to not give Scarlet a chance to explain herself. "Go on," she said in a dangerously even tone.

Although there was still a hint of submission there - as if to telegraph that she was very much not here to cross Citrine - there was a bit more backbone to Scarlet now, as if she was also trying to communicate that she was negotiating from a position of some kind of advantage. "It is as you say: A 'luxury vessel' attracts too much attention. If this ship isn't camouflaged, sooner or later, someone will realize that this is an Antecessor vessel. Word will surely travel back to the Empires, something that no one wants. If camouflaged, though, we can operate off the ship. As arkologists, as freelancers. In return, we send you technical data of the ship. You get to understand how Antecessor technology actually works, for the low price of camouflaging our ship and letting us do what we do best."

Citrine's eyes narrowed. She hid it well, but it wasn't that hard to tell that she had taken the bait, that the wheels in her head were spinning. She was still running the odds in her head when she coldly asked, "You want me to let you walk away from my doorstep with the discovery of the millennium."

"Is it the ship that's the discovery of the millennium? Or the ability to build more ships just like it?"

There was a spark that was dancing between Citrine's eyes now. I wasn't sure what was going on, but something about Scarlet's terms excited her. That didn't stop her from demanding, "Explain to me why I need to play your game instead of torturing you for the information you know."

"It wouldn't do you much good," Scarlet explained coolly, which was very good, because I very much did not like the phrase "torturing you for the information you know". "The ship is keyed to Artemis' essence. It's useless without her." Which was the most bullshit thing I had ever heard of, but Citrine's eyes narrowed like this was complete normal, and I realized after a moment that my personal worth had just gone up astronomically.

I wasn't actually sure this was a good thing.

"Besides, you want her - us - out there with the ship. If understanding Antecessor tech was as simple as disassembling its parts, everyone would have been able to replicate it by now. What we need is technical data, how Antecessor tech works when it's actually running. Who better to collect the data than us? Two freelance arkologists with no affiliation to the Congregation? You get all of the benefits with none of the blowback."

Citrine was doing her best to maintain her poker face, but whatever Scarlet just said - and I understood very little of it - it was obvious that my fox-eared companion who had gotten me into all this trouble had hit the nail on the head. It took Citrine only several moments of quiet contemplation - moments that we spent on the receiving end of pointed gunbarrels - before asking, "What guarantees do I have?"

Scarlet bowed her head, some of that deference she almost naturally seemed to show Citrine coming back. "You're the Congregation," she murmured. "I would never cross you."

Citrine's eye narrowed a little as she observed, "This ship changes that equation quite a bit, doesn't it?"

A moment of awkward silence ensued, even as Scarlet's brow furrowed ever so slightly. Which annoyed me a bit. Citrine was obviously tugging at the bait, someone who was clearly interested but playing coy. She was trying to sound difficult so as to maintain the upper hand in negotiations - an upper hand that she did not feel that she enjoyed despite literally having a dozen goons who were still pointing their guns at us - but it really wasn't too hard to tell that she was interested, that she was posturing, that she just needed one last, tiny push to sign onto a deal that I clearly didn't actually understand, but was somehow the deal of the century. Millennium. Whatever.

So I took a risk, mustered what little bravado I had remaining, and sighed explosively: "Fine, what do you want?" And once I was certain I had everyone's attention - a muted but startled look from Scarlet, an alert look from Citrine in what felt like a combination of surprise and suspicion - I continued, "I mean, you're not dragging us to some dark room right now, which means you think Scarlet has a point about us being your patsies. You like the idea, but you want to make it work." I slumped my shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. "Fine, how do you want to make it work?"

There is again a tense moment as Citrine regarded me, her grim countenance changing very little as she stared at me, Scarlet trying very hard not to look like she's tense and nervous. Then the moment passes, Citrine recovers some of her cool, and she tilts her head slightly towards Scarlet as she wryly remarks, "Your friend is blunt."

Scarlet clearly felt that this was not the worst of all possible reactions, because she seemed to relax just a hair and allow, "She...has her moments."

Hey, Citrine actually seemed like she was buying my angle; hook, line, and sinker. Didn't I deserve just a little bit more credit?

The cat-eared lady quietly considered everything that had transpired thus far, looking between Scarlet and myself as if trying to detect any sense of falsehood. Then she reached out with both her arms and gently pushed down the guns in the hands of her two nearest lackeys, and just like that, the room full of security guards were no longer pointing their guns at us. I actually exhaled a very obvious sigh of relief. It wasn't good for negotiations, but I couldn't quite help it. It was great not being on the business end of the barrels of a bunch of guns.

Citrine had the grace to ignore my obvious outburst, instead producing her reed-like pipe from her belt, and using some kind of device to light it. It took her a moment to blow a mouthful of smoke into the air before declaring in a matter-of-fact manner to Scarlet: "I get to put one of my own on your ship."

Scarlet looked Citrine in the eyes and nodded agreeably, replying, "We could use an engineer as long as she acts like crew. Knows to obey orders."

"I will have bugs installed on your ship. I'll tell you where some of them are. Not all of them."

"For technical data only. No audio, no video, nothing that can track us or spy on us."

The pipe went to Citrine's lips again, and I got the sense that she was maybe not all that entertained by this back-and-forth negotiation. "You're pushing very hard," she observed; it was a simple remark, devoid of any hint of hostility in her tone, but there was just something about this middle-aged woman that successfully conveyed a sense of intimidation.

Thankfully, Scarlet held her ground, admirably juggling between submissiveness and assertiveness where her dealings with Citrine were concerned. "You want technical data, not information on the odd jobs we pick up," she said politely, but her position wasn't any less firm. "If you do this, we won't look very hard for the bugs you don't tell us about. We won't take any jobs against the Congregation, of course. At least, not any job we know is against the Congregation."

Citrine made a show of considering these new terms carefully, but I had a feeling that - aside from any final details to be hammered out - this was a done deal. Indeed, the cat lady turned her head once more in the vague direction of the unseen hangar with a distant, absentminded look and noted, "She looks like a Lodric-scale ship. A crew of three will be stretched thin."

Scarlet nodded and - in an exchange that clearly relied on subtext I didn't understand - promised, "I will ensure anyone else we take on remains silent."

There was a moment of thoughtful quiet before Citrine glanced at one of her goons and cocked her head towards the door. Immediately, the dozen-or-so lackeys in space tactical gear quietly filed out of the lounge. The door automatically slid shut behind the last of them, leaving us along with Citrine. "The rest of the Congregation doesn't need to know about this arrangement," she said sternly, her voice dropping in both volume and tone. "Not until I'm ready to tell them about all the technical data we've pulled. No need to complicate things"

"I'm not familiar with anyone else in the Congregation, Miss Citrine."

Even if I wasn't familiar with the inner workings of the mafia, I had been around the block. I knew workplace politics when I saw it. I was certain now that Citrine was middle management for the mafia - upper-middle management at best - not its boss. Whatever Scarlet was offering her, Citrine was trying to use us for her own prestige inside her own organization, and Scarlet was banking on this. Honestly, I was almost impressed. I wasn't entirely sure if Citrine was dancing in Scarlet's palm or we were dancing in Citrine's, but this was pretty cool. At least, cool in the sense of "this would make a really impressive story, I'd like to survive it and never have to go through it again".

The cat lady in question nodded in an almost absentminded manner, as if she was actually preoccupied with adjacent concerns. Her pipe was produced from a pocket, and she lit it once more, inhaling on its aromatic fumes. Then, with a smoky exhale, she turned towards me and asked, "What about you, Artemis? You've been quiet all this time, but it seems like you've been the one doing the work behind the scenes. Is this arrangement satisfactory to you?"

I was doing work behind the scenes? This was news to me. Still, I didn't see the need to correct her preconceptions. I would let her make her own educated guesses. "I owe Scarlet a debt of gratitude," I replied simply. "And I trust her judgment."

Citrine regarded me for a moment, presumably trying to get a read on me, trying to figure out my angle. Which would've probably been more useful to her if I actually had an "angle" beyond "boy, I'd like to not get shot anytime soon". She remained passively contemplative - schooling her features and suppressing any expression that might give away her thoughts - before allowing, "We don't have the resources for an extensive camouflage, not here in Athabasca. We'll do the preliminary work, enough to fool basic scries. I will arrange for a contact in Anaffa to handle the rest. She will be...appraised of the situation."

For her part, Scarlet bowed her head deeply, and I found my survival instincts kicking in as I hurriedly mimicked her motion. "Thank you, Miss Citrine," she replied humbly. "I couldn't ask for more."

Some of Citrine's amiability had returned, as if a degree of normalcy had reasserted itself. Whatever it had been, the initial shock factor was gone, and the middle-aged cat lady was now contenting herself with calm puffs of her pipe, even if the easy, auntlike smile had not yet returned full force to her lips. "We'll spend the next few days discussing the details of this arrangement as my girls look through the ship and figure out how it works," she declared, turning towards the door that automatically slid open upon her approach. Unsurprisingly, I could see some of the armed guards still waiting outside. Citrine herself largely ignored them, although as she made her way out of the lounge, she stopped at the doorway and paused for a moment before quietly allowing what passed for a respectful nod to Scarlet, "That was...very impressive. Keep...doing what you're doing."

Scarlet bowed her head in what was supposed to be a gesture of acknowledgement and gratitude. Citrine merely nodded before walking past the doorway, and the door slid shut behind her, leaving Scarlet and I alone in the lounge once more.

I immediately slumped to the cushion-filled floor, an explosive exhale escaping my lips. It didn't take me too long after that to reach over to the low table and grab another one of those meatballs. I didn't even care that its texture was kind of paste-y in my mouth. I just wanted to eat something after all that tension, even though my stomach was doing somersaults. It was probably just comfort food syndrome kicking in. For her part, Scarlet didn't react quite as dramatically as I did, but she definitely seemed a lot more relieved, if her deeply-slumped tactical pauldrons were any indication.

I let the silence stretch out just long enough to start to be awkward before venturing, "Well, we didn't get shot. Good job, us."

Scarlet nodded lightly in what seemed like polite agreement. "They'd take us out of here to do that," she informed me helpfully as she, too, slumped down into the comfort of the cushions, "to somewhere easier to hose down after."

I wasn't sure what to make of how calm she was at this prospect. I wanted to say that it was unnerving, but I was getting startlingly accustomed to this side of Scarlet at an alarming rate: Fatalistic and compartmentalized. "Right," I allowed after giving my thoughts a moment before giving up on that. "Good. You're the expert on being shot at, I guess."

"I would prefer to be an expert on other matters," Scarlet replied with a straight face. I wondered if that was the closest she came to a joke. Not that I had too much time to ponder on the subject: I heard the hissing sound of an automatic door sliding open and a small chiming sound. Not the same door the two of us and Citrine and her goons had used. Instead, a smaller entrance on the far side of the room slid open, a side door hidden within the wall that kind of reminded me of a maintenance hatch that I had not previously noticed, admitting two girls.

The first of this pair had dogs ears and a tail of some breed that I would have recognized had I been a dog person, although I admit that wasn't quite the first thing I noticed about her. She was short and slender in an ephemeral way, the insubstantial, clinging fabric of her aggressively short, translucent negligee-like dress revealing far more than it hid. Behind her was a second girl: A little taller, a little tanner, a generous figure made all the harder to ignore due to the similar attire. And "attire" is a generous word here. Cat ears were perked up on her head with a matching tabby tail gently swaying behind her.

Both of them looked like they'd gotten lost on the way to a modeling shoot, and very much not the family-friendly kind.

"Hello again, Mistress Scarlet," the doggirl said with a bow and a curtsy - not that she had much in the way of fabric to properly curtsy with - giving a mischievous smile as her body squirmed and fidgeted in an almost offensively and excessively feminine way.

"Robin," Scarlet greeted. She was obviously distracted, but she managed a smile for the girl anyway. It was apparently all the invitation Robin needed, because in an instant, she had crossed the room, settled down beside Scarlet, and half-climbed into her lap, clinging to her in a way that made me very much start to think of excuses to leave the room for a little while. Unfortunately, this distracted me from the true threat to myself.

A wave of perfume hit me before I heard her voice. "Hello, Mistress Artemis," the catgirl said as she wormed against my side, and not particularly modestly. With not even a little bit of dignity, I shot to my feet, barely missing bumping heads with her.

"Uh...hi?" I managed, looking down at this mildly-startled catgirl clinging onto my leg. Somehow, being this close to her didn't help matters, not when I had an ample view of the catgirl's cleavage under the loose, tiny, shoulderless top that resembled a thin piece of frilly fabric tied across the chest. Which was a silly thing to pay attention to because we're all girls, a thought that was severely undermined by the giggle that Scarlet's companion let out to the right as Scarlet's hands reached somewhere that I vaguely registered as "deeply inappropriate". Robin's hands, for their part, were gently undoing the straps and buckles fastening Scarlet's armor plates to what was otherwise a relatively overdressed combination of tunic and trousers and boots.

Which was really as far as I got in terms of paying active attention to them. Later, I was going to have to reckon with the fact that a space lesbian foxgirl had apparently shared a bed with me and then brought me with her to a space station run by the gay space mafia. Right now, the only thing I could really focus on was how inexplicably tongue-tied I was about the attention I was receiving.

"I'm Rowan," my new companion introduced herself with a smile and a very fetching tilt of her head. The little bell on the collar around her neck jangled again as she did so. Because she was a cat, I vaguely assumed somewhere in the back of my distracted head. Things were distracting. "I'm here to help you relax, courtesy of Mistress Citrine."

I didn't immediately do anything beyond nod dumbly. Maybe it was my frozen, oblivious stare, or my lack of either a tail or ears - I saw her eyes flick between my waist and the top of my head more than once - but something seemed to cause the smile to get just a tiny bit strained for the shortest of moments. It took me a few, and I was pretty proud that it took me only a few given the circumstances, but I abruptly recognized it as the expression of every cashier I'd ever seen listening to a middle-aged customer's joke about how debit readers keep changing. I say "every cashier I'd ever seen" because I couldn't exactly have seen my own face.

She was working. Of course she was. What did I think was going on here? This still made things awkward, but it helped, weirdly enough. As if a sense of distant normalcy had been injected into the situation.

My mixed feelings were compounded as Rowan rediscovered her best customer service face as she beamed and sultrily asked, "We do have very nice baths available, if that sounds nice to you?"

I was both relieved and horrified. On the one hand, I'm glad I wasn't so off-putting that Rowan was having second thoughts, and there was a rational reason why she was staring at me. On the other hands, the rational reasons were not really of any comfort to myself: My clothes were filthy, my hair was a nightmare, and the closest I'd come to a shower in days had been splashing water on myself from the sink back on the spaceship in lieu of a chance to seek out a shower. I wasn't just some weirdo she was expected to fawn over, I was a gross weirdo she was expected to fawn over. Customer service truly was a universal hell.

"Oh, uh...sure," I allowed, trying not to visibly cringe, trying to play it cool, trying not to blush, except...dammit, I was already blushing. "That sounds good. A bath, I mean."

I tried to ignore the relieved set of Rowan's shoulders as she softly took my hand in hers - much to my surprise - gently pulled me in the direction of the lounge's main door, and said: "Please follow me, then."

That would mean leaving Scarlet, the only person I actually knew on this space station. One spare glance at her, though, was additional motivation to enjoy a nice shower. Scarlet and her scantily-clad dog-eared companion were already whispering sweet nothings to each other, and although I had come to enjoy the typically taciturn Scarlet's company, I really didn't want to be in the same room as that.

The hallways Rowan led me down were the familiar surroundings of industrial corridors personalized with decorations and adornments, mostly in the vein of tapestries, trinkets hanging from threads strung up from the ceiling, and even the occasional graffiti. This was a prettiness I was getting pretty used to pretty quickly, actually, like decorating a workshop as a living space. We didn't have much in the way of company, though, and the corridors were mostly empty. The dockworkers were probably working at the docks, and security was probably doing their security things. We did pass two people separately - a wolf-eared woman who passed us and paid us no mind, and a younger fox-eared girl who grabbed at Rowan's ass playfully, even as the catgirl pouted and pointed out that she was keeping me company.

"Don't worry, Mistress Artemis," my chaperon was telling me as we continued on our merry way. I was wondering if she should be more worried - I was about ninety percent certain after that ass-grab that Rowan wasn't wearing anything underneath that aggressively short and tantalizingly loose microskirt - when she finished, "We're used to seeing people work long hours before they've a chance to bathe."

Oh. Well, that...was possibly a comfort? And a good segue away from any potential conversation about underwear or lack thereof? "I'll...take your word for it," I allowed.

Looking at me with a twinkling gleam of curiosity in her eyes, Rowan asked, "Are you an arkologist too, Mistress Artemis?"

"Something like that?" I allowed hesitantly. Scarlet had certainly dropped me enough warning signs about talking too much here, and it was probably easier to just let people assume things about me without actually volunteering everything.

For better or for worse, Rowan actually seemed to regard me with something akin to admiration - like I was the modern-day Indiana Jones or something - as she wistfully sighed, "It must be quite exciting when it isn't just for work. Sailing the stars, exploring arkologies, discovering hidden artifacts..."

"Getting shot at," I muttered under my breath, mostly for my own benefit.

"Well, you're still alive!" declared Rowan happily in a tone that was meant to sound impressed, but mostly startled me. I had not actually intended for her to hear me say that. I wondered if having cat ears meant that she had better-than-human hearing as well, something I needed to keep in mind in the future. "You must handle yourself very well."

"I guess," I allowed vaguely, trying not to think of all the times over the past week in which my life was saturated with screaming and running away and wetting my panties.

Okay, so I didn't actually wet my panties, but.

The walking didn't take that long. A sliding door opened automatically upon Rowan's approach, and I was swiftly hit with a wave of pleasantly warm steam. The room inside seemed like a completely different world than the one outside. Old, worn tiles made an effort to chase itself around the floor and up the walls in brightly-colored mosaics, like an artist working with a limited palette but doing his best. The air had a pleasant, steamy quality, enhancing the soft lighting. The steam came from a large pool and a surrounding constellation of smaller tubs in the center of the room, surrounded by columns, all of them raised slightly but still built into the floor itself. The whole thing was evocative of a Roman bath or a Japanese hot spring. Not that I had ever been to Rome or Japan, but regardless, this hadn't been what I'd expected when Rowan had suggested that we go to "a bath".

On a shipyard that had seen determined but ad hoc efforts to personalize a workspace as a living space, this seemed like a particularly extravagant effort, like someone had been trying too hard. Not that I was complaining.

I was still gawking when I felt Rowan's hands come in from behind me as she pulled my shirt up over my head. It was, fortunately, already unbuttoned enough for this to work. I'd like to say I took this coolly, but that would be a lie. I gave a sound something like an alarmed squeak, taking a step back from her in shock. "I can take them off!" I said, eyes wide. I was still trying to go with the flow and pretend I knew what I was doing and not make a scene, but I was not accustomed to total strangers trying to undress me.

She raised a hand to herself and laughed demurely. "Spacers usually aren't this shy," she said. "As you wish, though, Mistress Artemis."

Which, of course, meant that I had just low-key agreed to undress now, with her in the same room as me. I'd changed in front of other girls before, but that had never been under precisely these circumstances. I averted my eyes from the smirking catgirl, and set about stripping in the most utilitarian way possible, before proceeding immediately to the hot, inviting water. Going into it felt so good that for a few wonderful moments, I forgot all about my audience, until that wave of perfume struck me again.

Startled, I realized that Rowan was sitting on the edge of the tub, settling a tray with bottles and soaps down beside her. "Why don't we start with your hair, then?" She didn't actually wait for me to respond before using a bowl to scoop up the hot water, and dumping it all over my head. Then her delicate hands were lathering something that smelled vaguely pleasant - scents I could not identify and could be space herbs for all I knew - into my tangled, filthy hair. "Just relax," she purred. Actually purred, which was, uh...a thing.

Once the painful part had passed by, I did actually just let myself relax, though. It was nice, soaking in the hot water, having someone else take care of my hair, occasionally remarking about how pretty and dark it was in a way that I hoped wasn't entirely fake. In fact, I had almost begun drifting off when I felt those same hands begin to guide something warm and soapy over my arm. My eyes snapped open, seeing that Rowan had finished with my hair, and had moved on to gently scrubbing my skin with a soft sponge. She laughed at me again. "Relax!" she said. "I'm not going to bite you. Except by request." And only laughed again as my cheeks heated.

Inch by inch, I forced myself to relax and accept Rowan's gently teasing care. What was the worst that could happen?

...After everything that had been happening to me, I was not sure I should be tempting fate by asking that question.

*****​

We ended up staying in Athabasca for about four days. We were well-treated throughout, at least. I got to sit in on several meetings between Scarlet and Citrine where they hashed out details of their deal, talking about a few dozen things I really didn't understand, but felt compelled to nod along anyways like I totally understood what they were saying. The relationship between the two seemed, at the very least, more constructive. Of course, I was working from a baseline of "being threatened by guns", so maybe my standards were a little skewed, but we had returned to that weird dynamic where Citrine was the doting aunt and Scarlet was the demure niece who knew not to piss her off.

Aside from that, we were given guest rooms for the duration of our stay, along with the lounge that always seemed to be stocked with relatively nice things to eat. Robin and Rowan kept us company too, and after a while, it was really easy to forget that they were consorts whose company was part of their job and whose job probably also included reporting anything we said to their boss. At least, that was what Scarlet said. Regardless, putting aside Rowan's initial caution towards me, she turned out to be good company for someone who had been cooped up in an abandoned space station for weeks. She was honestly actually kind of sweet and talkative about a bunch of inane topics, which I otherwise would not have given the time of day for under normal circumstances, but which became a bit of a welcome distraction.

Granted, the whole "clinging on me while nearly naked, even while sleeping" part was a distraction in and of itself, but I was swiftly becoming accustomed to not paying too much attention to the details.

We weren't, strictly speaking, confined solely to our guest rooms and the guest lounge, and I had the opportunity to wander around the shipyards - albeit under the watchful eyes of armed guards - but there wasn't actually much to see. Or, at least, there wasn't too much to see that I understood or was of interest to me. Besides, I was taking the opportunity to learn a few things.

First, the internet didn't exist.

Or, at least, they didn't exist in the way I was familiar with. The Congregation grunts of the Athabasca shipyards, at least, were not glued to their smartphones in the way the modern society I was familiar with back on Planet Earth were. Certainly, they had devices they carried akin to smartphones or tablets - "ostracons", they were called - but they did not seem to be connected to a network larger than what was available on Athabasca. Sure, I eventually just asked some indirect questions - questions that were plausibly absentminded instead of "I'm a complete idiot" - but even cursory observations of the people around me suggested an almost workmanlike attitude towards their cons. It wasn't as if they were somehow more primitive or less technologically advanced, what with functions like holographic displays and what looked like calculators for what looked like high-level engineering math or whatever. But it didn't seem like they were constantly on their cons to check on social media updates or watch cat videos. Rather, they were simply used as tools. People called each other when they didn't have time for a face-to-face. Holograms and scanners provided what seemed like functions akin to digital rulers and voltage detectors. Otherwise, though, the cons felt more like flip phones or Blackberries at best - yes, I was old enough to remember those - than iPhones: Powerful and convenient tools that provided plenty of functionalities that nonetheless had not yet taken over many facets of daily life for whatever reason.

Second, I was probably being called an "exile" because I didn't have fox ears or cat ears or whatever ears. Or a tail.

I mean, I obviously had human ears underneath my hair. And on a space station populated by people with animal-like appendages, there were - at first - a few people who actually looked like they were normal humans, like me. They were a minority, but I could soon recognize the faces of four or five of them after spotting them a few times. It was a few days into our stay in Athabasca, however, that I was daring enough to approach one of them, and I realized they didn't just lack animal-like ears, they lacked ears, period. All of them had hair that covered over significant scars where their ears were supposed to be, a choice of style I strongly suspected was meant to deliberately hide those disfigurements, and I wasn't exactly in a hurry to pull down their pants to see if they had similar-looking scars where their tails were supposed to be. All four or five of them struck me as either excessively meek or standoffish to a fault. Given the connotations of the word "exile", I had a suspicion that I was operating at a distinct social disadvantage here. No one was treating me poorly, thankfully, although I wondered if that was just my status as Citrine's guest offsetting any other problems.

For the most part, aside from a few opportunities where I took a longer look at the odd curiosity - this was a workplace, after all, and I knew as well as any mechanic the loathing we have towards someone watching our work over our shoulders, so I never tried pressing my luck - the days passed uneventfully. Granted, we were also on the territory of a space lesbian mafia, so I was on my best behavior in terms of not causing trouble, not giving anyone reason to think I was thinking about causing trouble, and remembering Scarlet's warning about how parts of Athabasca were actually bugged. I spent most of the time with my aforementioned fox-eared companion, and the two of us spent most of the time being accompanied by Robin and Rowan. For what it was worth, they were almost embarrassingly good company. It was actually kind of impressive how they repeatedly made me forget that they were, in fact, working girls who were "on the clock", so to speak. I wasn't sure how comfortable I was about being doted on and fawned over by a barely-dressed catgirl who worked for the mafia, but Robin and Rowan just seemed...genuinely really friendly with the attitude of "this may be a job but it doesn't mean we can't enjoy it".

It didn't stop Rowan draping off my shoulders nearly-naked any less embarrassing, but that would be nitpicking.

Our stay eventually came to an end, however, and Scarlet and I were lounging in a lounge when a dockworker came in to tell us that our ship was ready. It didn't take us long to prepare for our departure from Athabasca. As much as we had settled in on the creature comforts of furniture and friendly company, we really had not brought much with us beyond the clothes on our backs. Mercifully, fresh changes of clothing had been provided during our stay. I didn't think they were new, and the space station didn't look like it had a clothing store, but the loose-fitting elongated tunic, pair of tights, and poncho were at least clean. Granted, the tights in question had a hole in the back where a tail was probably supposed to go, and this felt really weird for someone who didn't have a tail, but I wasn't going to complain too much about clean clothes. Besides, my worn, secondhand clothes that I had arrived here in had even been washed without warning one day by what presumably passed for the shipyards' laundry service.

"You'll come visit again sometime, right?" asked Robin from somewhere behind me. She was standing on her toes, pressing into Scarlet with her arms thrown around her shoulders; I was picking up some kind of synthetic fabric bag of my laundered office clothes and pretending I didn't see them being all disgustingly lovey-dovey.

"I'll try," replied Scarlet in a cool, noncommittal, but affectionate manner as she scratched Robin behind her dog ears, to which Robin made embarrassing noises. "You know how Miss Citrine is, though."

Rowan, for her part, waited for me to stand back up with my bag of clothes before sliding up to me, similarly openly affectionate in her forward yet submissive way. I tried not to think too much of her soft, smooth skin as she said, "It was nice to spend time with you. Even if you're very mysterious."

"I'm not trying to be," I grumbled a little. It was true. I was too confused at everything and too wary of saying anything particularly incriminating that could be used against me on a space station run by people with guns. I had not been trying to be mysterious as much as I had been trying to be careful about every single word said.

Rowan, thankfully, merely giggled at this and planted a gentle kiss on my cheek. "You're very gentle and nice," she whispered just slightly above my reddening ears. "Please take care of yourself. I'd like to see you again."

We extracted ourselves from our customary company over the last few days, leaving the lounge and returning to the corridors that would lead us back to the docks, guided along by the dockworker with her overalls stained with grease. Our short journey was mostly quiet, but I saw fit to fill the awkward silence with an attempt to tease Scarlet as I managed to force a playful smirk and asked Scarlet, "So...girlfriend?"

Scarlet blinked in what seemed like genuine confusion. "Who?" she asked, before my joke seemed to click for her. "Robin? No, she's just company."

"Didn't look that way to me." After all, Scarlet got really handsy with Robin in a way that communicated real chemistry. It was hard to imagine that Robin was just some stranger Scarlet was instantly willing to get intimate with.

I was hoping for a more embarrassed, flustered reaction out of my fox-eared companion, but she instead looked at me in muted bewilderment, which only reinforced the idea that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. "I enjoy her company," she said carefully, "but she belongs to the Congregation."

"Okay, right, sorry," I muttered, trying to pretend this attempt to tease Scarlet never happened. "Never mind." I guess it made a modicum of sense. How realistic was it to start a relationship with a hooker who belonged to a gay space mafia?

Thankfully, I didn't need to dwell on it long. The doors soon opened to the familiar setting of Dock 2, with its open industrial spaces and collection of spaceships. And it was then that I finally - after days of lounging around and trying to forget about why we were here in the first place - laid eyes on our spaceship.

When the term "camouflage" had been mentioned when we first arrived at Athabasca, I had not been entirely sure what that meant. Actually, throughout my entire stay, I had not been sure what that implied. Now that I was staring at what was our spaceship, though, I vaguely understood what Scarlet and Citrine had been talking about.

Our spaceship had been a sleek vessel of white and grays with a few gold outlines, a smooth vessel with an avian shape to it, a graceful work of art not entirely unlike some kind of abstract artwork of ceramic pottery resembling some kind of bird with outstretched wings. Whatever the dockworkers had done to our ship, though, it was now - at a glance - a deeply different vessel. Any hints of white sweeping hull were masked under rugged cafeteria-green armored plating, cut in harsh lines and sharp angles, complete with scratches and scuff marks. The graceful, filigree-like panelings in black and gold - some of which actually stuck out like fins or feathers from the ship's hull - were hidden under gunmetal superstructures that resembled the boom lattice of an industrial crane. Our spaceship now looked like it had more in common with the Fortune's Wings we had fought a few days ago instead of something we had taken from the arkology: Old, weathered, and beaten up.

In other words, they had taken a modern Porsche and converted its appearance into something that looked like a Toyota from the eighties or nineties. I guessed that was what they had meant when they were talking about "camouflage". Still, staring at the sorry state of our spaceship compared to how we had first boarded it, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry.

We were swiftly, curtly, but politely informed that Citrine wanted a word with us before we left. For better or for worse, Citrine was not the kind of person who deliberately made us wait to establish who was actually in charge of the relationship. She arrived within two minutes of us being informed that she would speak with us, wearing another sexy dress, complete with some kind of fur scarf around her neck. Her pipe, predictably, was still lodged between her fingers and her lips.

"You'll request permission from Anaffa Control to dock at Dock 7," she declared when she arrived, getting right to business. I was actually kind of glad that she did, rather than engage in useless, condescending posturing. "Tell them that Cerys, daughter of Wynna, has an arrangement with you, and that you are willing to remain in a holding position until she is available. After that, identify yourself to her with my passphrase. Cerys will take care of the rest."

For her part, Scarlet bowed dutifully and replied, "Thank you, Miss Citrine."

Citrine regarded us for a moment, and for that moment, she seemed almost...apprehensive. Then, with almost religious solemnity, she declared, "The void grant you safe travels. I am looking forward to profiting from this."

That second part sounded suspiciously like "this had better work out or else". I was thus very relieved when - minutes later - Scarlet and I were back on the bridge of our spaceship, flying back into the vastness of space out of the docks of the Athabasca shipyards. From my familiar co-pilot seat (or whatever kind of seat it was), I quietly watched as Scarlet carefully handled the joystick as she guided us on a path leading away from the space station we had become so familiar with over the past few days. Minutes later, when we had put appreciable distance between us and Athabasca, the stars outside the window flickered, pulled into lines as space before us formed cascading cosmic waves in our direction, and then we were once again barreling through a tunnel of brilliant green light that I had been assured probably wouldn't be stealing our arms or throats anytime soon.

For better or for worse, all of the refurbishing and "camouflage" had been done to the exterior of the ship. The inside was still the usual pattern of pristine and futuristic whites. Hints of bootprints from the dockwokers inside the ship - presumably getting all the technical information they wanted and planting bugs on the ship - could still be faintly seen on the floors, but our space Roomba was already hard at work cleaning everything up by gliding right over the stains. It wasn't freaking out, running and screaming across the ship, so I guess four days was enough for it to acclimate to its surroundings.

"So..." I allowed after a long, awkward moment of silence had passed, guessing at our next destination based on really obvious existing context. I wasn't actually "guessing" as much as I was just trying to make casual conversation to fill in the void. "Anaffa?"

"Yes," Scarlet nodded agreeably without volunteering much more.

"Is that another space station?"

"It's where I'm based out of."

Oh, so it's Scarlet's home space station. That was...nice. Probably. "It's not run by another scary space mafia, is it?" I asked cautiously, wary about all the colorful people I had become acquainted with over the past few days. Then, upon Scarlet's confused look, I corrected, "Sorry, 'syndicate'."

"Anaffa? It's...complicated."

"Ah," I muttered sourly. "Of course. Wonderful." Because clearly, after everything that had happened thus far over the past two weeks, more complicated scenarios in which I remained a complete idiot was exactly what I needed.

At some point, I was going to have to own up to me being a complete ignoramus from another planet with no experience with outer space and spaceships and the void and all this other bullshit, and simply ask Scarlet to explain everything to me. Today was not that day.

For a long moment, both of us just quietly stewed in our thoughts, appreciated still being alive, watched the tunnel of light from the void stream past. Okay, that was just me, but I could project myself onto Scarlet. Who - after that long moment passed - suddenly remarked with a straight face, "So I didn't see you sleep with Rowan."

I sighed. This was going to be a long trip.

 

[Kei]

IM ONLY THREE DAYS BEHIND SCHEDULE BUT HERE WE ARE

*****​

Chapter 10: Anaffa (I)

Anaffa, as it turned out, was an asteroid, a giant rock floating in space.

Well, it was a bit more than that.

The trip from Athabasca to Anaffa took only two hours-long trips through the void. We then dropped out of the void for one final time and started flying - sailing, whatever - through space, and it then took several minutes for me to reacquainted with the realization that the star ahead of us was not, in fact, a star.

Actually, correction: The stars ahead of us were not stars.

I at least expected Anaffa to eventually grow large enough for even my humble little eyes. It looked like every asteroid I had ever seen in my elementary school textbook: Large and rocky and with a rough surface peppered with little craters. Large bulks of metal were grafted into it, like superstructure protruding from a substructure. As we got closer, different colorations turned into a combination of plating and surface structures. Razor-thin lines turned into pylon-like structures. The asteroid flickered with blinking lights that served no purpose I could discern beyond lighting itself up against the darkness of space, but at least it looked pretty.

The other flickering stars - these drifting around and winking in and out of existence - slowly grew until they materialized into gentle trails of spaceships sailing in and out, leaving exhausts of light in their wake. Like fireflies, dozens swarmed in front great distances in a dance of light before falling into relatively neat lines, what I could only imagine were flight paths. In the distance, the occasional burst of ethereal green light - either a sudden flash, or a flash preceded by a distant flicker growing brighter and brighter for several seconds - told of ships jumping out of the void on arrival or jumping into the void for departure. Even if I had not watched our own ship jump in and out of the void several times already, I could easily watch icons of ships on our holographic radar thingy wink in and out of existence at the same time.

"Lots of space traffic," I observed, trying to sound as blithe as I possibly could.

"Anaffa is one of the larger Firmaments in the Hintersea," Scarlet explained casually. I told myself to remember that "Firmaments" are possibly what space people called their space stations. I had no idea how idiotic my observation sounded to Scarlet, but even though both of us were still kind of cagey with each other and polite enough not to prod, she seemed to have accepted over the last three weeks that I was an idiot, and that there were some things she should probably just explain without prompting. "Hundreds of ships come and go each week with bellies full of cargo."

Admittedly, the only thought I could think was that I hoped the days lasted for twenty-four hours and weeks lasted for seven days.

I am not going to lie and pretend I knew how many miles away from Anaffa we actually were when we were hailed. Close enough, I guess, that I could tell it was a rock in space, but far enough that it was a very near thing. Regardless, the computers at Scarlet's console beeped, Scarlet fiddled again with buttons - with a bit more confidence than last time, thankfully - and a feminine voice declared over hidden speakers: "Unidentified vessel, this is Anaffa Control. You are flying Congregation colors, but we are not picking up your registration. Halt your approach and state your intentions."

As instructed, Scarlet stopped our forward acceleration towards the asteroid, and we were adrift in space. "I am requesting clearance for Dock 7," she replied over the radio. "Cerys, daughter of Wynna, has an arrangement with me. I am willing to stay where I am until she is available."

There was a pregnant pause that followed, too utterly silent and devoid of even ambient background noise. I interacted with customer service - acted as customer service, for that matter - often enough that I could tell we were being put on hold, and that some kind of important discussion was happening on the other end of the call. Then...

"We will attempt to contact Cerys. Stay there."

Nothing to do but wait, then. Both Scarlet and I remained quiet as I watched the ships flying in and out of the asteroid. The smaller ones disappeared into giant airlock doors akin to the one we flew through in Athabasca. The larger ones - too large to pass through any reasonably-sized airlock - either deployed shuttles into smaller airlocks or used large clamping arms to latch onto what I can only assume to protruding struts for that purpose; some kind of structure like a jet bridge - you know, those tubes that connect airport terminals to the actual planes so people can get on and off - then extended to the hull of the ship, presumably to fulfill a similar function.

Some ships passed us close enough that I could have a good look at them. Presumably, they did not have any identification issues. They came in all shapes and sizes, but all of them resembled the Fortune's Wings - you know, that big stupid barge that tried to kill us - and the assorted smaller ships in Athabasca's hangar: Rugged, scuffed, and industrial, looking more like your grandfather's pickup truck that has barely survived from the sixties and less like a Carrera GT. I did spot one that broke the pattern: A small ship with sleek, elegant lines that made it look like a luxury vessel. I had a feeling that the aesthetic was inspired by the arkologies - the ship actually kind of looked like a flying sword - but the hull was not as pristine or smooth as our own vessel. There was just something about it that made it look like some amateur mechanic tried really hard to make a knockoff sports car in their own garage. An impressive effort, but still obviously kind of cheap and fake.

After about four minutes, Scarlet's console beeped again before a new voice made her presence on the call known: "This is Cerys, daughter of Wynna."

"I am Scarlet, daughter of Qtesphon," Scarlet replied, all business. "Miss Citrine says you're expecting me. 'Inaction is the absence of action, not the absence of choice.'"

"One moment." There was a long pause before Scarlet's console made a different chiming sound. "I'm giving you clearance for Dock 7. Sending you a flight plan. We have an outgoing barge leaving the dock; she should be clear of the airlock before you arrive, but watch your approach."

"Thank you, I will," Scarlet reassured Cerys. Our ship quietly rumbled for a bit - so quiet it was nearly soundless - before Anaffa started growing once more out the window. We were continuing our approach. Scarlet was once again tense, her jaw tightening, although not as badly as before, as she carefully piloted our spaceship towards what I presumed was going to be our designated airlock. It wasn't as bad as when we had been trying to dock at Athabasca; she was getting used to flying a ship that "handles like a dream". Some more ships passed us, rumbling right by, but we didn't seem to be in any danger of midair - midspace, whatever - collisions. Scarlet had things under control.

We were close enough to the asteroid now that I had a better understanding of its size. It was certainly massive, maybe even as large as the arkology I escaped from. Nothing as elegant, of course; it was still just a rock with a bunch of metal on it, nothing like the white plating and black metals and golden highlights of the arkology. Still, it was weird seeing objects this large as we flew over its surface, following our flight plan that also granted us a nice closeup view of Anaffa. How large was it? Ten miles across, maybe? Not that I had any idea what ten miles even looked like, but...

Then, suddenly...

"All vessels, all vessels, all vessels," came a terse voice over the radio, and I was instantly alarmed. In my experience, nothing good ever came out of someone repeating themselves three times. "This is Anaffa Control hailing on all channels. An Imperial cruiser has arrived in this region. All vessels not already docking, hold position until further notice."

I had no idea what that meant, but it didn't sound good. I glanced over at our holographic radar, looking at the different representations of the ships in our vicinity until I noticed one that was clearly represented as larger than everything else around us. It was long and had the angles of rectangular blocks, resembling a flat, blade-like structure being propelled by further blocks of engines that formed its hilt. The whole design screamed "military", somehow.

How large was it actually? Was it the size of the Fortune's Wings, or bigger? I couldn't exactly tell from the hologram, and it wasn't like I had access to a window that would let me see.

I looked over at Scarlet; she didn't seem too alarmed, but there was a slight stiffening of her posture in the pilot's seat. That wasn't a good sign. "Is that a problem?" I asked.

I wasn't sure if Scarlet was actually even more nervous or if she was just too busy trying to fly the ship to care. All she could say expressionlessly was, "I hope not."

We soon found ourselves facing a giant set of metallic doors that ground open, revealing the airlock inside. Scarlet breathed slowly as she guided the ship through, then exhaled in relief as our ship came to a stop. Gas blew from vents as the airlock sealed, and a minute passed before the second set of giant doors before us ground open, revealing Dock 7 inside.

Dock 7 here at Anaffa was a bit smaller than Dock 2 back at Athabasca, and the layout was different. Otherwise, though, there were obvious similarities: The industrial aesthetic, the assorted spaceships parked at different spots, the gunmetal colors, the scaffolding, the equipment, the messiness, the effort to personalize their working space with decorations of all sorts. And again, there was a dockworker with two flashing safety batons leading us to our parking spot.

It took a minute, but Scarlet managed to land us safely in between two other ships, exhaling in relief as she powered down our own spaceship's engines. It took her a moment to collect herself, but Scarlet seemed less nervous about dealing with the Congregation here than she had been when dealing with Citrine. With a nod to each other, we left the helm and worked our way through increasingly familiar corridors, making our way to the back of the ship and to the airlock that would allow us to leave.

As we reached the airlock doors, Scarlet gave me a quick look up and down before remarking, "You should keep your cloak on. The hood, too."

Ah. So I guessed my poncho wasn't actually a poncho, but a hood and cloak. Maybe. I wasn't exactly a leading expert on high fashion. Regardless, I did as told, throwing the hood over my head and straightening the cloak around my body. Maybe it made me more presentable. It was easier to trust Scarlet in general.

<Breathable external atmosphere detected,> came a familiar announcement from a familiar voice inside my head as our mini-airlock began to open. <Warning: Airborne contaminants may pose mild impediment to normal respiration. Filters are advised.>

The doors opened, and we walked down the extending ramp down to the floor of the dock, where someone was already standing there to meet us. "Cerys?" Scarlet greeted.

It was not difficult locating our contact even if she had not literally been standing in wait behind our ship and before our airlock doors. Amidst the group of mechanics with grease-stained work clothes, Cerys was the fox-eared, fox-tailed lady looking just a bit older than Scarlet and I, maybe late twenties or early thirties. Her attire was nothing quite as provocative as Citrine's dress - shoulderless and with high slits giving her plenty of leg - but still alluring and giving the impression that she was the boss surrounded by more roughly-dressed dockworkers.

Cerys gave a businesslike nod as we closed the distance with her. "You must be Scarlet," she noted before turning her gaze up towards our ships. She stared for a moment before murmuring, "So this is the ship."

Scarlet nodded. "Miss Citrine said you will be able to complete the camouflage for us."

"That we can. This looks like it's a Lodric-scale. We'll need at least...two weeks."

"That won't be a problem."

Cerys nodded, although it seemed like an absentminded gesture; her eyes had not stopped scanning our spaceship. She sounded almost a little breathless - a bit in disbelief - as she asked, "This really is an Antecessor ship?"

"It is," Scarlet confirmed.

"Void be damned," Cerys muttered, even as a shrill shriek came from within the ship.

We turned just in time to see space Roomba sliding up at alarming speeds, sliding down the ramp before skidding to a stop at our feet. It swiveled left to right in place for a moment, as if looking from one face to another, before shrieking again and retreating back up the ramp and through the airlock and through the open door and disappearing into the ship's corridors.

Staring in bewilderment for a moment, Cerys could only manage to make out, "And that's..."

Scarlet almost looked a little awkward as she nodded and answered, "A servitor, yes."

Cerys continued to stare for a moment longer before she took a deep breath and expelled it. Then she looked around before flagging down a nearby dockworker. "Tanya," she called out, and a girl with dog ears wearing grease-stained overalls and little else came over. "Send the hirelings home, tell them they won't be coming in for at least two weeks. Our people only until we're done with this ship, understood?"

Tanya made a face. "They won't be happy," she said in an accent that I couldn't identify but somehow sounded exactly like the kind of rough dockworker accent I expected from a girl like her. "We promised them contracts."

"Pay them off if you have to. This takes priority."

"Yes, ma'am," Tanya bowed her head before marching off, presumably to carry out Cerys' orders.

Cerys, for her part, beckoned for us to follow, leading us towards the corner of the dock, up the stairs, and into what I could only describe as a foreman's office. It was an elevated structure with windows that provided a second-floor view over the rest of the hangar. The interior was messy, full of documents and equipment and trinkets and a desk at the far end with high-tech computer stuff. Three old long couches flanked a low rectangular tea table, and we found ourselves settling into them for what proved to be an impromptu business meeting.

"Miss Citrine gave me the broad strokes," Cerys explained even as she served us what I could only presume to be tea in metallic mugs, "and I can probably tell the rest on my own. We need to reinforce the exterior camouflage, install scry-defeating armor, remodel the interior so that any passengers you may have are none the wiser. Registration too, of course. Your ship is also unarmed?"

"As far as we can tell," Scarlet replied, taking a sip from the mug. I did too, just to feel like I was included, somehow. I was never really a tea person, and I had no idea what leaves they were using, but it didn't taste too bad. Mildly bitter, but also with a twinge of sweetness. "We have an Empyrean, but I would like more options."

Cerys nodded, rubbing her chin in thought as she presumably ran the numbers in her head. "We have a shipment coming in in a week. There should be an extra rotary cannon. Missile launcher too; it's meant for another contract, but I know the client. I'll smooth things over."

For about fifteen minutes, Scarlet and Cerys seemed to talk shop, going over technical details that largely flew over my head. I, of course, remained quiet and nodded along when it seemed appropriate for me to nod along, but otherwise said nothing. Cerys, at least, seemed to regard me with respectful looks a few times, as if maybe I was the brains behind Scarlet's operation - imagine that - but otherwise kept her attention focused on my fox-eared companion.

I felt totally useless. I mean, they were talking about mechanical stuff, right? Wasn't I supposed to be the idiot who graduated from a community college to become a general mechanic? Big load of help I was being. What was I even doing here?

It was after the two others had finished going after the technical details - as our little meeting drew to its end - that Cerys declared, "I've been told you're based out of Anaffa, but if you require accommodations..."

"We have our own, thank you," replied Scarlet, which was nice to know. Not that the Congregation hadn't extended some very nice hospitality towards us, but it was nice to know that we would be putting just a bit of distance between us and the gay space mafia, and whatever bugged room they have prepared for us. Although not too much distance, it seemed, for Scarlet continued, "Would it be inconvenient if we were to drop in to observe work from time-to-time?" And then when Cerys narrowed her eyes ever-so-imperceptibly, as if finding some offense in that suggestion, Scarlet quickly added, "Just to understand how the work is coming along."

Cerys considered this for a moment before she seemed to relax, her shoulders lowering just a bit. "I'll have my girls expect your inspections. If there is nothing else...?"

Scarlet shifted for a moment - perhaps a moment of discomfort - before observing, "Anaffa Control spoke of an incoming Imperial cruiser."

"I know as much as you do about that," Cerys muttered with a grimace, clearly unhappy about the state of affairs, whatever they were. "You know how it is. Lay low, and it'll pass." When Scarlet nodded in acceptance of this explanation, Cerys rose to her feet from the couch, and we did the same. I made a point of quickly draining my mug of its remaining contents, at least. It felt only polite. "I'll walk you to the elevator."

Cerys led us out the door of her office and down the stairs, back to the floor of the dock. The space was largely emptied of dockworkers now, and aside from the familiar ambient rumbling of industrial equipment, the place was largely quiet. It was unsurprising; Cerys had only just told a subordinate to send what I could only assume to be temporarily hired help home.

The place wasn't entirely empty of occupants, though. As we made it to the bottom of the stairs and turned so that our camouflaged spaceship came back into view, we saw someone new.

She stood furtively at the bottom of the ramp leading up to our ship, looking up inside, edging closer and closer, reminding me of a curious chipmunk exercising caution but still trying to figure out if the old lady at the park was going to feed it. She was small and petite, too. I wasn't exactly tall by any stretch of the word - I was actually just slightly shorter than average compared to all the other girls I've known in my life - but this girl would probably, depending on how you looked at it, maybe reach my shoulders. "Depending on how you looked at it", of course, because she also sported a pair of bunny ears coming out of the top of her head, giving at least another foot to her otherwise tiny height. They were perked up in interest and white in color, the same as her shoulder-blade-length hair and just a shade lighter than her otherwise smooth, pale skin.

Smooth pale skin that I got an eyeful of, because she wasn't wearing very much at all. A strip of loose cloth was tied around her chest like a ribbon, baring her shoulders and waist. And her skirt was honestly not much more than a loincloth-like duo of fabrics that fluttered teasingly in the subtle shifts of air in this dock. I could practically see the sides of her...well, backside. A collar, too, was wrapped around her neck, reminding me all too awkwardly of Rowan and Robin back on Athabasca, the two working girls who had kept us company back then.

Where I was too busy pretending I wasn't blushing or staring, and where Scarlet was as inexpressive as ever, however, Cerys was clearly displeased. Her angry footfalls gave the bunnygirl just enough time to turn around in alarm as the fox-eared manager crossed the distance between them, raised her hand, and snarled, "You little whore!"

The hand struck down at the bunny-eared girl, who cowered and backed up a little to the side - away from Cerys and the ship - and raised her arms to protect herself and whined, "I'm sorry!" She wasn't actually running away, though, and Cerys managed to get a few slaps in, most of them intercepted by the girl's arms but a few that struck her face. There was something uncomfortably akin to a child terrified of being beaten by her parents and reacting out of fear but knowing better than to actually outright run away. My mother had rarely ever beaten me as a child; she had wielded guilt better than she had ever wielded a cane. But I had grown up around broken families. I knew what these things looked like. It didn't help that the barely-dressed bunny-eared girl was just kind of small and diminutive. She was almost certainly only a few years younger than me, but her size still made it difficult to watch.

Grabbing the girl by the back of her neck, Cerys practically tossed her away from the ship. It was difficult while wearing slippers, but the bunnygirl somehow managed to recover from that throw, stumbling almost two whole yards before finding her feet and scampering off. "Go, get back to where you belong!" Cerys snapped, scowling and watching the target of her ire retreat to wherever she was meant to go. It took a moment before our fox-eared associate sighed, schooled her features, then - in a much more civil tone - looked at the two of us and said, "Apologies. She's a disobedient girl, that one."

I'm not sure that was precisely something I wanted to receive an apology for. Scarlet, on the other hand, remained stoic and seemed almost largely disinterested at the whole show. "I don't mind as long as she doesn't break anything," she replied with a half-shrug. I chose to hold my tongue.

It didn't take much longer for us to be guided to the elevator at the far end of the dock. No "lift" here that flipped the bird at gravity and floated us to wherever we needed to go; if anything, it was almost comforting to see the metallic double doors creak open, revealing a large elevator car not at all unlike a factory's cargo elevator, kind of ugly in that utilitarian industrial way, complete with a bit of rust and a lot of stains. The whole thing was probably large enough to fit a dozen SUV's, but we had the whole thing to ourselves. Scarlet hit a button that would presumably take us wherever we needed to go, Cerys gave us a curt nod of farewell as the doors closed, and the elevator creaked and groaned with a start before settling down to a more tolerable mechanical duet of whirring and humming, seemingly traveling upwards, if at a slight angle.

Now out of the lion's den, Scarlet seemed to relax a bit. The slightly forced impassiveness eased a bit into...well, more impassiveness, but of a more relaxed nature. Her shoulders, too, seemed to slump just a little. I tried to lighten the mood by wryly asking, "You have a pretty business-like relationship with the Congregation, don't you?"

"It's better that way," Scarlet said with a nod, and then added little else. It only served to remind me that I had somehow been roped into what seemed like a tightrope walk. Or maybe this was really just the best survival strategy we had given our circumstances. All I knew was that our spaceship was a Big Deal, that it was simultaneously a source of great opportunity and massive danger, and the alternative was the possibility of being stuck in that arkology while being turned inside-out by reality-bending bullshit.

Gravity shifted not-so-subtly along the way. They weren't nearly strong enough to throw me off my feet; I mostly just had to shift my balance a little and overcome weird feelings of vertigo and maybe even take a slight step to make sure I didn't fall over. It basically kind of felt like having to catch yourself just a little as a monorail train sped up or slowed down a bit, except the shifts in gravity felt like they tugged in several more directions than just front or back. Or just up or down, in this case. The elevator car also stopped twice to admit more passengers, presumably from other docks. A few dozen people flooded in each time. There were a few people who looked like dockworkers, but many of them wore clean, casual clothes that didn't look like they were for work, sporting fashions I didn't recognize. Regardless, I kept close to Scarlet and kept my silence as the elevator filled up. Having just one person take note of my complete ignorance was probably enough. I probably didn't need to draw attention to my alienness in a confined, congested space filled with dozens of people.

The elevator slowed to a halt one final time. The doors opened with a hiss, and a slight blast of wind swept through the elevator, not nearly strong enough to blow my hood off, but enough that it was a bit of a surprise. As the first ones on, Scarlet and I had backed up into the corner of an elevator, so we had to wait for the people in front of us to disembark first, but we followed the crowd out of the large double doors, out into whatever laid beyond.

My eyes tried to adjust to the new lighting, tried to focus. Everything outside looked...off. Like I was nodding off and trying to stare at a wallpaper with weird patterns. It took me a moment to realize that my eyes weren't just trying to compensate for the difference in brightness, but also trying to focus to adjust for distance. I blinked a few times, even rubbed my eyes.

That's when I saw it. Saw everything.

We were in a gigantic cavernous sphere within the asteroid. How wide was this massive space? Five miles? Ten? I had no idea how I could even begin to guess. It was enormous either way. But it was within this sphere - that I watched buildings rise from every surface. I watched a symphony of multi-colored flickering lights dancing across every corner of the interior of the asteroid, like rainbow moonlight against the choppy night sea.

This wasn't just some asteroid space station. It was a city; no, a metropolis. What was the mathematical formula from calculating the area of a sphere again? Four times pi times radius-squared? The whole place must've been a few hundred square miles large. And all of this inside an asteroid?

Wide streets of stone and steel stretched out under hundreds of walkways, snaking across the landscape and leading into the "sky", illuminated by warm lights reminiscent of campfires. Colorful banners flew from blocks of colorful buildings that reminded me of Asian temples and Arabic mosques and European townhouses stacked on top of one another until everything was just a dizzying blur of architecture. Tiny little ships - drones, maybe? - darted through the sky. Flashlights shone at me across vast distances, until I realized they were powerful advertising searchlights akin to neon signs. Stalls lined the streets like a giant farmer's market, selling everything from trinkets to food, manned by merchants cheerfully shouting for attention and patronage. The air wafted with the smell of smoke and spices and food and perfume.

And the streets were full of people, walking and running around, going about their day. Scarlet and I navigated the crowds as we walked down the streets, packed with far more people than I had ever been accustomed to, reminding me of pictures of the streets of Hong Kong. People dressed in a cacophony of colors in fashions I had never seen before, from fancy dresses to short skirts to flowing robes to the sort of tight leather suits Scarlet wore. So, too, were there scantily-clad girls on the street, wearing little more than strips around the chest and waist, shaking their hips alluringly, and I awkwardly looked away from those bunny-eared girls. Indeed, everyone here seemed to have a bunch of different animal ears. Aside from the aforementioned bunny ears, I could also recognize fox ears, dog ears, cat ears, and maybe wolf ears? I didn't know, I wasn't a friggin' vet. I'm stupid. All I knew was that this was beautiful. I'm not a sentimental person. I actually like to think of myself as pretty jaded. This, though...

...This took my breath away. For the longest moment, I could do nothing but stare and feel my heart thunder in my ears, like a child seeing Disneyland for the first time.

This wasn't like Athabasca, a private lived-in workplace. This was a proper city. People lived here, brought with them their needs and their cultures and their eccentricities. What did the population count even look like? Definitely at least a few million, surely. And this was supposed to be just "one of the larger Firmaments"? There were even larger space stations?

This was, of course, all very amazing, and I spent many minutes just staring and taking in the sights. Kansas, this ain't. But as I continued to stare, as I continued to observe everything around me, there was just one slight problem, one tiny detail that I couldn't help but notice, something that nagged at the back of my head.

"Uh, Scarlet?" I asked after spending about a minute trying to figure out whether I should be voicing my concerns in the first place.

"Yes?" replied Scarlet without even turning around to look at me. Which was impressive, considering that we were snaking our way through congested streets, slipping in between little gaps in the crowds. I was not accustomed to this kind of population density. It was actually kind of dizzying.

"I...may have missed something along the way," I conceded. I was stupid, after all. "And, uh....sorry if this is a stupid question. But, uh..." I took a deep breath, almost dreading the answer to come, before asking, "...where are the men?"

With a straight face, Scarlet swiveled her head towards me with her usual lack of expression, blinked, tilted her head slightly to the side, and asked, "What are 'men'?"

*****​

lets be honest u saw this coming

The Anaffa Arc will cover a lot of stuff and provide a lot of explanations that have been a long time coming, so it's going to be pretty long. It's going to conclude a lot of setup for the main body of the story, though, so I hope it'll be exciting to read.

now time to write next on the road to elspar update in just four days lol