I took a few moments to work out my appearance. I wanted an image of my old human self to show on the screen when I spoke to the prisoners who had been my bridge crew. I had to construct it from memory, from having seen myself in the mirror. My interface had a program for doing that, though; the ability to construct realistic human faces by combining features from a library of them was so old no one knew when it had been developed.

I had my doubts about the plan, but I wasn’t about to undermine Sam by saying as much, not when I didn’t have anything better. I knew Marcus to well too let myself think they’d be easy to convince, if it was possible at all. Pepper was right. I’m not sure I’d have come around if my circumstances had been different. My old Imperial prejudices that I’d spent a lifetime learning would probably have won, if they hadn’t come back to me at the same time as a lifetime of memories spent in a Commonwealth that was completely unlike everything I’d ever been told.

Sam half-slouched in the command chair, calling out the checklist. Pepper had declined to be present for engine restart. It was a formality, but it still stung. However good their reasons, and I had to admit they were some good reasons, my captain and I were not speaking, and the captain/ship relationship is one that is built on trust and communication. If we had been anywhere else, one of us would have had to be relieved.

“That went better than I thought it would,” Woozy finally said. “Me too,” I admitted. “Pepper’s reaction was very close to what I expected. I don’t think they’re ever going to trust me again.” “They’ll come around, beep. Pepper’s always done what’s best for the crew, you know that.” I emitted a little chuckle from my speaker. “Listen to you, all upbeat all of a sudden. It’s good to hear you happy again.

It didn’t take long to assemble the crew. Even without my network, there were so galaxy-damned few of us that it didn’t take Pepper and Woozy long to make the calls. I spent that time thinking about how I wanted to handle this. Despite what I’d told Woozy, I had my doubts about how this might turn out. These were good people who wouldn’t normally rush to action, but we’d all been through something so terrible and so recently that being confronted with the person responsible for it might push them into something hasty.

Pepper wordlessly excused themself. When someone asks in that tone, you know that the conversation to be had will be a private one. “What happened?” Woozy asked. They’d felt the emergency shutdown just the same as everyone else. From the way they were panting, they must have run here. “Hi, Woozy,” I said. Woozy’s breath caught as they heard my voice. The voice they’d known for years but had been missing since the disaster.

No, no, that wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. My crew weren’t slaves, they were my friends, my colleagues! As shipmind I had rank, but outside of the Navy we were equals. And Woozy! How could anyone think Woozy was my slave? They’d bent the galaxy itself to come and be with me when I’d given them every chance to walk away, and I loved them all the more for it.

I jolted awake as the alarm sounded. No time to grab my uniform, I’d just have to go to the bridge in my shipsuit. Long practice and endless drills saw me already out in the hallway, clipping my helmet to my belt as I moved, when the announcement followed the alarm. “Code delta! Code delta! All crew to combat stations. Keep right in the hallways, secure all hatches and volatile equipment.

I had been sweeping my one working high-gain radio antenna across our path, and it had found something. It was faint, but the pattern was unmistakeable. “Crow,” I asked my comms ferret on the bridge, “does that look like a lifepod beacon to you?” They grinned, the first outward display of emotion I had seen them make since waking up in the infirmary. “It does.” “All hands,” I announced, “we are diverting to pick up what appears to be a working lifepod.

Woozy had left the bridge shortly after Pepper did, while I was reviewing the records. They hadn’t gone far, though. I could see them on a camera one deck down. I projected my synthetic voice through the nearest wall speaker. “Woozy,” I said. “I know I’m not your favourite person in the world right now.” Which wasn’t at all my fault, but I wasn’t going to mention that. “But I’m afraid there’s something I need to talk to you about.

Pepper excused themself from the bridge with a minimum of ceremony. Quicker than I would have liked, but they’d been clear that, even now, they felt that the medical bay, not the bridge, was their proper place. Pepper was the commanding officer by rule, but had de facto ceded the position to me, given my experience with the role. “Captain’s off the bridge,” Crow announced. Well, at least someone still cared about protocol.

“The brainwave patterns are quite conclusive,” Pepper said. “You were asleep. The technical term is REM sleep, which is the phase you experience dreams in.” “I was definitely dreaming,” I agreed. “But Lem tells me that I was carrying on a coherent conversation and operating two drones at the same time you were recording those patterns.” “As you say. Truthfully, Captain, I don’t know how that’s possible. The best I can think of is that the interface is allowing part of you to remain awake.

If sleep is an odd idea for the disembodied, dreaming is doubly so. I was on the bridge of my old ship, sitting in the command chair in the center, where I belonged. From here, I could easily see every station and every person operating them. Every face was a blurred mess. People I knew yet didn’t know. Every voice a low murmur just below the edge of recognition, yet somehow the words entered my mind like I’d thought them myself.

“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.

I opened my eyes and stretched. Maintenance Drone 08 retracted the protective covers over its optical pickups and ran a quick self-test on its actuators. This was it! I had a body again. True, very different to the body I was used to, but after three hours as a disembodied brain in a jar, being able to operate a drone like this felt like precious freedom. Not that it was truly anything of the sort, but it was the closest I was going to come.

I’d discovered I could watch what Frill was doing through the camera in their voidsuit’s helmet. They moved through the dark, airless, weightless corridors with a speed and grace I felt no one on my old crew could have equalled. As they rounded a corner, they reached out, put their hand on a grab bar fixed to the bulkhead, and came to an abrupt halt. It was immediately obvious why.

“Status report.” “No, you said that out loud again,” Woozy chittered. Thinking at a device is not something I’d ever had to do, at least as far as I knew, and it was proving a little challenging. Either I’d just think to myself and nothing would happen, or it’d come out of my voice synthesizer. Frustrating. Status report. Oh. That did something. I was suddenly filled with an awareness of something.

“Well,” I said, “that apparently didn’t work. How long was I out?” “You were unconscious for about three minutes,” scolded Pepper. “I warned you that you were pushing too much, too fast.” “Yes, Doctor, you did in fact tell me so.” I hadn’t honestly expected any better, but I had still felt that it was worth a try. If my Mind Machine Interface could be plugged straight into the ship’s main network, at least as much of it as still existed, it would have sped things up enormously.

The first sensation was one of falling. No, not falling. Weightlessness. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything else, but the familiar grip of freefall was there. No lights. There should be lights. The hum of a living starship on the edge of hearing. But not even that. Not a good sign. No, wait. I did hear something… “Try that. Can you hear me now?” “Yes!” My voice sounded wrong. Mechanical, almost.