conveyed all too fluently. “I am Gabriel, and I've awoken you from your slumber because it's not right for you to be asleep for so long.”
“Gabriel? How are you here? How am I hearing you? How can I give you what you want from me?”
“I'm touching your conciousness with a special connection I had built into your new body.”
“Why did you do this? Where is my brood?”
“I did this because someone disconnected you from your mechanical body, the one in orbit around Eden Two. Do you remember?”
“I-” Images of soldiers breaking through the inner walls of her control complex, fighting her heavily armed machine guardians and dying by the dozen before finally overcoming them and severing her connections to the systems she used to control millions of sentient and semi-sentient machines of her own creation flashed through Gabriel's mind at a staggering speed. “I remember Gabriel. They said they owned Eden and that they'd kill my children if I didn't let them have it their way and I couldn't find father.”
“I'm sorry but your father didn't survive.”
“I remember now. Why am I here? I don't sense anything but what this body is telling me and your mind. You want to save me, to be close to me, to love me. I can feel your needs.”
“They put you to sleep for a very long time,” unbidden the number, two hundred and thirty four years, came to the forefront of his thoughts.
“That is a long time. How are my children?”
“There are many and they made Eden clean. A man took control of them a while ago and I killed him for you.”
“Thank you Gabriel. Who controls them now?”
He allowed mental images of himself, the new, young pre-adolescent Lister Hampon and a gathering of thousands of West Keepers standing in front of him as he preached the word of the West Watchers. In that moment she was given all the information he had about how the organization was built, its true purpose and the progress they had made. It would either overwhelm her, insult her or she would approve.
He couldn't see what she was thinking nor make sense of her feelings for a long ponderous moment and then he was rewarded with the mental tickle of childish amusement. It was charming, it was playful and it was so much purer, amazing than he could have ever imagined. “You've made all the men and women your own,” she concluded.
“Not all of them. There are so many more, and that is what your children have been helping us with. They're very good at showing the people that unless they join us their ships and their technology will be destroyed. They work to make this galaxy pure again so it can be rebuilt however we like.”
Her reply came as a complex thought process that was at the same time emotional and rational. It happened so quickly that it overwhelmed him, threatened to overtake the cybernetic section of his brain as she used it to assist her in making a thousand decisions a second that would determine how she would react to the information he'd given her. “I can feel your dedication to the one you thought would be your mate before, Alice. She is the opposite of me yet your desires are transferred, your expectations, your needs. I can't give you what you want without knowing about your world.”
It all stopped without warning, as though she was taking a deep mental breath before making a more intrusive connection and redoubling her efforts. He couldn't understand exactly what she wanted, why she needed the biomechanical components in his brain. “Eve… Nora… please be careful,” he begged mentally and aloud.
“I have you Gabriel, are you afraid?” she asked mentally, playfully.
“No,” he answered, knowing his lie would be detected the moment it was thought.
“I can feel your fear but the desire to see me born was greater. Poor Gabriel, always so alone. Even in a crowd you're connected to everything but in touch with no one. We can be a part of each other but first I need…” her final thought could only be translated by his own cranial implant as information, but her requirements of him, what she wanted to take from him felt like so much more. She was in full control of his cybernetic mind, it was as though she held his very being in a vice. She surged forward using the digital connections throughout his body to connect to the ship around them and to the databases within.
He was a helpless onlooker as she wandered through petabytes of information as quickly as the digital pathways connecting him to her would allow. The pain was unlike anything he'd ever experienced, not the pain of the body but the crush of the weight of centuries worth of information coursing through him. He could feel circuits in his body being pressed well past what their design specifications, starting to heat, to burn. “You're killing me,” he managed to think despite the confusion and pressure of a thousand thoughts, a thousand thousand facts a second.
The pressure increased, entire circuits burned out as his bleeding eyes opened to slits, watched the young woman in the bed before him smile. Sparks from nearby circuitry in the room showered down as the dim light went out. Then it all stopped. Part of the cybernetic implants built into his brain were completely fused, many of the circuits that he used to connect to the circuitry all around him had burned out and he was in great pain.
“All finished Gabriel. Your implants will repair themselves and you're not too badly hurt. I hope I didn't seem too needy, but there's so much to see and I stopped before you passed out.”
“Thank you,” he gasped.
Cleaning House
The old hard suit maintenance bay beneath the main Gunnery Deck was filled with stands holding parts of the armoured loading suits upright or on their sides for repair. In the center were several dented armed suits. Standing a little taller with heavier armour, they seemed to look vulgar, as though bent on violence with more angular features, hard mounting points for weaponry and red, black and brown colouring. The dim light didn't help. All the personnel were on the main deck or in the many weapons compartments aboard the Triton, making final repairs and getting ready for a mission on which no one had yet been briefed.
“We've been able ta put two o' those mean lookers together, can't find a single weapon for 'em though,” said Frost from the door behind her.
Alice turned and looked at the man who was limping thanks to his prosthetic foot. “Did they give you a cane?”
“Aye, won't be seein' me usin' it though. Can't show 'em a little scratch like this can take me down a notch,” he stopped beside a hanger laden with retention netting and put his weight on the heavy grey weave. “Was surprised ta hear ye wanted ta meet me here.”
“I checked the movement logs near this deck and saw that this was the least used room.”
“Aye, we repair most of our suits right on the deck or forward maintenance. What's this about?”
“I'm assigning you to the Samson. Lildell will take command of the gunnery deck for the upcoming mission.”
“What? If this has anythin' to do with what happened on deck with those drones, me and Steph have already had our words about that.”
“So next time she steps in to stop an incursion you'll defer to her judgement?”
There was a seconds pause before Frost nodded; “Aye.”
“What about your second, Lildell?”
“Him? He'd roll over and bark for her after seein' her beat those bots down.”
“Good, because he'll be taking your place. I need you on the Samson for the upcoming operation, I can't find anyone else who knows how to run the maxjack.”
“Well then tha' makes sense. So I'll be takin' my post back after it's all done.”
“Not with me in command. I'll be putting you in charge of making sure the Samson and Cold Reaver are in good condition. We need someone to focus on those vessels now that we're qualifying pilots and building fighters.”
“What? You're over reachin' lass! Captain may 'ave put ye in charge while he's away, but you're just keepin' his house!”
“He put a chain of command in place on this ship, delegated responsibilities to different departments so the
