“Fucking useless piece of…” Sam spun and gave the junction box, filled as it was with delicate optical fibers and sensitive electronics, a whack with their hammer. Abruptly, the overhead lights came on, and one by one the row of terminals chirped into life. “Yeah, that’ll show you. Hey, Juno! Drone ops is up.” If I had a head, I’d have shaken it and sighed. Sam was very much a member of the “percussive maintenance” school of engineering.

“Woozy, I’m not—” “I wasn’t talking to you,” the normally cheerful ferret snapped at me, then stalked out of the room. No, I supposed they weren’t. I wasn’t sure what to do with this new information. I already knew the interface that was letting me control the ship was built from Ransom’s old hardware. It made sense that it would be drawing on some echo of their memories of how to do those things.

It felt good to have my fabricator online. Like a part of myself I hadn’t even known was missing had been restored to me. It felt like pure, unrestrained possibility, waiting only for me to call on it. “That should do it,” Sam said unnecessarily. “How is it looking on your end, skipper?” “This should do very nicely,” I answered through the wall speaker. “You’ve outdone yourself today. Both of you.

“First of all,” Pepper began, “you need to understand that I am not a psychologist or neurologist. As ship’s doctor, my role is to keep people going long enough to reach a port with proper medical facilities.” “I’m not asking for miracles, Doctor,” I said. “Just your best guesses.” They nodded. “I do necessarily have some training in those fields, because I need to judge whether someone is fit for duty.

I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic as 08 approached the Hurricane. It was pretty clear the wreck was in bad shape, seemingly having suffered an internal explosion that became very rapidly external through the ship’s bow. Hurricane was a human-built ship. The network didn’t have deck plans, so I racked my brain trying to recall the basic layout of the Fearless. It was so strange the things I was still blanking on.

Maintenance Drone 09 arrived at the CNV I Told You Not To Touch That first. Or, at least, what was left of it. Even as it closed in on the wreck, its optics didn’t show me much more than the King’s Ransom’s powerful telescopes had. The ToldYou looked like some giant had taken a bite out of it, compartments and corridors open to space, glowing feebly in infrared as they cooled off in the darkness of space.

The six of us all sat together in the main room of the medical bay. Pepper was effecting some sort of alert slump at their own desk. Frill and Len were perched together on the examination table, Sam and Juno had both found chairs, and Woozy was fidgeting about, never staying in any one place for more than a minute. And, of course, there was me, immobile in the corner.

At the sound of their name, Woozy exploded out of bed in flying mess of fur and syllables. “What? What happened? I’m awake! What broke?” I found myself just staring for a moment. Sure, I’d probably startled them, but Woozy really did put two hundred percent into everything, even waking up. Under other circumstances, it might have been endearing. “Settle down, Woozy, nothing’s on fire. Yet.” They already had one toolbelt over their head by the time I even got that out.

Sleep is an odd concept when you’re disembodied. Pepper assured me that I still need it, and everything I knew about human biology agreed, but some part of me felt like the life support system in the MMI should be taking care of that for me. For all I knew, maybe it could. The ferrets never did explain how they got it, but I did know that this wasn’t their technology, and had inferred that they din’t know everything about it.

As electricity flowed through the kilometers of functional superconductor that still crisscrossed the ship, it began to wake up. Systems that had lain dormant since the disaster came out of their forced hibernation one by one, eager to inform the shipmind of their capabilities and all too pressing needs, ready to play their part in making the corpse of the CNV King’s Bounty live again. It was intoxicating. I could feel the whole ship around me.