“Whoa!” Ashley exclaimed. The other two prisoners were similarly startled. “Agameg?” She asked in an excited, hushed whisper.
He took control of himself and brought his appearance back to a semblance of the fellow he had been imitating. “Shh! I want to stay hidden until the rest of the crew are delivered here. Then I can release you all when they're not looking.”
Ashley hopped excitedly.
“Be calm! I cannot pretend if you're distracting me,” he said woefully.
“Okay, okay. Your ear is a little, well, on your neck actually.”
“Thank you,” Agameg said with a smile. “I will watch for people coming on this deck, please help me with my disguise?”
Ashley nodded. “You've got it.”
Docking Procedures
The Clever Dream broke atmosphere and Alice couldn't help but sigh with relief. “Scariest delivery ever. Remind me to screen future drop offs for beings who like to eat humans.”
“That was an intimidating fellow. There's little information available on his people. Even the Hart News database only contains a few entries with regards to raids and I don't think you'd want to see the footage. It is too graphic for them to broadcast during regular programming.”
“I'll pass. I think I'll have a couple nightmares as it is.”
“There's a large vessel coming around from the other side of the planet,” Lewis stated.
Alice looked at the navigation screen and saw it right away. “There's no transponder signal.” She said to herself as she started to activate the cloaking device.
“It's launching fighters.”
“So they probably saw us. I'm going manual, activate all weapon and defence systems. Patch the tactical computer into my optical implant.” Seconds after Lewis heard her orders they were carried out and she came about so they were headed towards the nearest moon. It was over five hundred thousand kilometres away.
Three missile launchers and five guns deployed as the combat shielding came online. The cloaking systems remained on standby, the ship's thermal output was far too high for them to be effective.
“I have compared the capitol ship's silhouette to our database and found it almost matches a Vindyne design.”
“It's the VCS Malice, Meunez's ship. I haven't seen it since we stole Jonas's stasis tube. I thought we might be off the hook after Vindyne went under.”
“Incoming communication.”
Alice saw that the fighters were still well out of effective weapons range and nodded to herself. “May as well put him through to cockpit audio.”
“Alice Valent, it's been a long time,” said Gabriel Meunez. She would never forget the sound of his voice. For years she received message after message. He tried every tactic possible to get her to respond just once so he could trace her location or at least have an active dialogue with her.
“You know, just when you think you've shaken a stalker he just comes right back to haunt you.”
“That's no way to treat your owner,” he replied with a chuckle.
It was hard not to cut communications right then, even harder not to fire every weapon she had in his direction, even though she knew it wouldn't make any difference. The moon was still a great distance away and the fighters were still out of effective range. There was time to kill.
“That's right, I bought your file and several other hidden commodities from Vindyne before they could go up for public liquidation.”
“I am no one's property,” Alice said through her teeth.
“On the contrary, your software was redesigned by a captured fugitive, Jonas Valent, and you were born, so to speak, using our systems. The body you use is actually our property as well, a prisoner who was being rehabilitated for our workforce.”
“Her brain had been ravaged by your machines when I found her. All she had left were fragments of her worst memories, the ones she had the hardest time forgetting. Your systems even marked her as brain dead, but there was a spark left, one your computers couldn't have seen.”
“You caught her before we started trying to implanting new, better memory fragments. That body's purpose was coming, her brain death was intentional, a new full wipe procedure we were developing. What you used that mind for could only be described as art. The birth of a machine consciousness in a human brain. No one we managed to interrogate had the slightest idea that you were once a computer program. You should have seen the look on Bernice's face, she just couldn't believe it.”
“You didn't,” she said quietly as she eagerly watched the range count down on the fifteen fighters behind her.
“Don't worry, we only took them into custody for a couple weeks. After that they were completely unaware of the programmed response we had left in their subconsciousness. They're alive and happy.”
“Bruce. You did the same thing to Bruce and that's how you found me.”
“I'm surprised it took you this long to realize.”
“What do you want?” Alice asked as she turned all the weapon safeties off.
“I want you to tell me everything you know about how you became what you are. I want to look into your mind and experience the union of the machine and biological mind. You are the only one of your kind in the universe, and I would worship you if you'd only give me the opportunity.”
“And subject me to invasive scans and neural connections.”
“Don't answer so hastily, power down and we can consider this together. I bought your file to protect you, to keep you to myself. I have told you before, my mind has had implants that are as much a part of me as my very soul. What do I have to do to for you to see that I only want to join with you, to communicate on a level that only you and I could. I only want to protect you and learn about all that you are.”
The fighters came within range and she locked onto nine of them. “Here's my response,” she cut her engines, turned the nose of her ship towards the incoming fighters and launched all missiles. As the nine warheads moved off at incredible speed she opened fire. Her neural link with the cannons allowed her to fire on several targets at once, the two pulse cannons fired on one target while the three chain firing gauss guns each raked the others.
Her hands operated the manual controls as she rolled and strafed, hurtling backwards at the moon behind. Five of the missiles hit their mark and seven fighters were cut to pieces by gunfire.
She ceased fire, changed her trajectory with her thrusters just enough to make tracking her a little more difficult then engaged the cloaking device. Just as she was about to cut communications and make herself nearly impossible to trace several ships appeared in orbit around the moon. They immediately began pelting the area around her with high velocity flack rounds. There was debris in her path for tens of thousands of kilometres in every direction. She turned her cloaking device off and redirected the power to shields. “Did you ever think that I might be the one you shouldn't catch? I can tell you right now I'm way too much for you to handle.”
“I'll be the judge of that. Care to power down and allow one of my ships to dock?”
“You know what? I've had to put up with you sending me thousands of messages, hiring hunters to go after me, kidnapping my friends and you know, I could get away right now, but I'm done. I think it's time you learned your lesson. Go ahead and pick me up. I won't stop you,” she declared as she shut down her engines and retracted all her weapons. “Come get me.”
The Luck Bucket
Frost's friend had delivered. Unknown to the Captain, Frost had come to know Aragesh when he did some work for him as a cutter in a group of ship thieves. The reputation he had earned on Ao Katamari was well deserved
