Lana looked away. “Then what're you going to do with me?” she asked in a small voice.
He sighed. “Drop you off at the next stop. Like I should've done right at the first.”
She craned her head back in his direction, eyes widening in shock. “Would that work? What if I try something else? Are you really willing to risk that, after what I did?”
Ali spoke up gently from behind her. “Like Aiden said, you seem to have been brainwashed specifically for the purpose of infiltrating this ship and aiding in its destruction. As long as that's no longer an option for you, it's possible that you may be able to live a normal life once we kick you off. Provided we make sure you can't find us and come after us again.”
Lana felt a curious sinking sensation. The Last Stand and its crew were all she knew. Her entire life, such as it was. What would she do without them? How could she survive on her own?
What would she do without Dax?
Dax! Numb despair crept through her, dragging her down lower than she'd ever felt. “What about my relationship with Dax?” she whispered. “Everything I felt for him, everything we shared together. Was any of it real?” She wasn't sure she could bear to know that the love she felt for the young man had all been part of her treachery, some trick to make herself less suspicious in her infiltration of the ship.
Ali seriously considered the question. “I think so,” she finally said. “He would be an unlikely target for seduction, if that was your programming's goal. Especially since the Captain showed interest in you and would've been far more useful for manipulation. Not to mention it would've given you more opportunities to assassinate him, which I'm sure was at least one of your brainwashing's priorities.”
Lana should've felt relief at that, but the leaden weight in her gut didn't budge. “Can I talk to him? Tell him how sorry I am?” Say goodbye, if it comes to it?
“You could, if he wanted to talk to you,” Aiden replied. “He's barely even come by to check on you in the last few days you've been unconscious.”
The leaden weight doubled. Of course. She'd tried to kill the man, betrayed his love and his trust when she was the first person he'd ever allowed himself to feel those things for. How could he ever forgive her for what she'd done?
What she was?
“Don't be too hard on him,” Ali said, sounding sympathetic. “He's shaken by what happened and might not be ready to talk to you about it. But even though he didn't visit you in person, the ship's logs report he was monitoring your condition from his workstation. He spent nearly every second, on and off duty, watching over you in his own way. He barely slept, barely ate.”
Aiden cleared his throat. “Speaking of sleeping, we're going to put you back under now. I just wanted to talk to you in person, explain the situation and maybe get your side of things, assuming we could trust it.”
“I understand,” Lana said dully, blinking as her vision blurred. She couldn't remember ever being so miserable, although of course she could only remember the last few months. “Will you wake me up before kicking me off the ship, so I can at least say goodbye to everyone?”
“We'll see.” The captain made some sort of gesture at the corner of her vision, and Ali leaned over her. With a flood of coolness moving through her veins unconsciousness washed over her once again, and she was grateful for it.
Although she very much feared that when she woke up, she might not be aboard the Last Stand anymore. That she'd never see her friends, never see Dax, again.
But then, maybe that was for the best if she was just going to try to hurt them, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Epilogue
There
“Sir, we've confirmed the Vindicator's remains have been found,” his comms officer said, sounding nervous. “They, um, appear to have engaged the Last Stand and lost.”
Rear Admiral Novan Granoss ignored the woman. He was staring intently at the footage Administrator Jeres had relayed to him, from the scouting drone Movement Intelligence had sent leapfrogging to all the coordinates the Last Stand had jumped to since the Dormant planted the beacon, in its search for the secret HAE base Thorne had unwittingly led them to.
What he was seeing left a sick feeling in his gut, but he couldn't look away.
The comms officer seemed to sense his mood, because she sounded even more nervous as she continued. “We're still trying to recover useful information from what remains of the ship's computers, but thus far there's no indication that they triggered the Dormant.”
Of course they did, he thought distantly, impatient at the continued distraction in the face of vastly more important considerations.
Unless that leaky exhaust port Dalar had somehow managed to seize back control of his ship, there was no way the Vindicator would've gone into that engagement without using such an obvious advantage. Bresac had been far more competent than her predecessor, so much so that Granoss suspected she'd been responsible for most of the ship's previous successes while serving as its XO, while Dalar reaped the glory.
But none of that mattered now. The loss of a light cruiser, the escape of the pirate vessel they were hunting, none of it mattered. All that mattered was the enemy base. The terrible, terrifying things the drone had discovered there.
It was like something out of a horror full immersion dive, a nightmare humanity had collectively shared since first conceiving of the idea of artificial intelligence: a ship colossal enough to devour entire planets whole, with more vessels waiting to refine the raw materials and fabricate void knew what with them.
Although it was an easy guess that the robots would make more robots, growing
