A Long Way From Home, Part 3

My crew is quick to take stock of the damage. While most of them are scientists, I have several mechanics, either by hobby or by profession. The crew themselves are perfectly fine despite a number of them having their brains turned into vapor a few minutes ago. Combat backups are robust for a reason, and warships have plenty of spare spinglass.

I'm too small to have an actual bridge crew besides Jade, but we manage to put together an impromptu engineering department around a boardroom table. Well, a simulation of one; a physical boardroom is an unnecessary waste of space for us.

"How bad is it?"

"It'll probably buff out," jokes provisional Commander Ali Baldwin with a half-laugh. He's the most experienced of the mechanics, and the rest of the crew has crowned him Engineering. If we make it back to port, I'll make sure he gets his bars.

I give him a mild glare in response, as much as an amorphous entity of sensors can glare at anything.

"It's bad. Your core is completely shot, obviously, there's a gash through the backup fusion plant, and the fabricator array is mostly vapor, so we can't make any spare parts. Without any juice, the rest of it doesn't matter. No reactor plasma, no high-energy anything."

Jade speaks up, "How bad is the rest?"

"Worse. Most of her systems are gone along with our ability to make spares. We have some bits and bobs in storage, but not enough to restore any useful functionality. And there is the problem of the radiation."

"Radiation?" I'm not made up of delicate chains of chemical machinery, and even if I was, biological forms have had rad-hardening genes for longer than we've had uploading. "I'm not sure how—"

"Not a danger to us, but you got shot full of relativistic plasma, all those holes are irradiated. That's not an immediate problem, but the loss in sensor resolution from the background noise is going to kill your jump range. Assuming we could get the drive online, which we can't, because we don't have power, which we can't restore because the fabricator's gone. Which we also can't fix. So, not great."

I've basically been shredded, so the answer isn't surprising. Not a pleasant one, but about what I expected given that I can only feel a scant few sensors throughout my entire body. Whole segments of myself are dark, with no power or sensory input.

"And," Jade adds, "there's a more urgent issue." She waves her hand, summoning a wireframe of the Nightwater. It'll take it a few hours to kill its acceleration and come around to us, but it wants to pick its kill clean for scraps. I don't blame them; I would do the same were I the victor here, but I don't plan on making it easy.

"That might actually be to our advantage," Ali replies.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, they're bringing us a new ship."

The shipmaster and the first mate had decided to go with the boarding team, leaving Wa'alm in charge of the Nightwater. It was a shipmaster's perogative to join their crew— letting a subordinate get all the glory would offer them a chance to usurp them. Shipmaster was an elected position, after all.

Not that there was likely to be anyone for the shipmaster to fight. Whatever the ship's reactor had done when it went off, it didn't look survivable.

"How are we, Wa'alm?"

"Pulling alongside now, shipmaster."

The ensign sitting at the Sensors position spoke up, "Sir? I'm not seeing any air leakage."

Wa'alm shrugged. "You weren't up here when that thing's reactor went up. There probably isn't much atmosphere left to leak." He clicked the transmitter on again, "Extending bridge now, shipmaster."

Their voice crackled over the radio in reply, "There better be a few left in there to ransom, Wa'alm."

"I can't make any promises, shipmaster."

They board in the shuttle bay on my underside, its doors rent open by a one of the various gashes that they tore in me. A dozen suited bipeds in what looks like vacuum-sealed power armor jet over from the Nightwater, carrying appropriately bulky-looking firearms. I'd radio back to Ibore and ask Kets about the specific model, if I had a transmitter with enough power still functioning.

I don't have internal defenses, but I'm not easy to board. This isn't by design so much as just a coincidence. We don't need bulkheads and hallways and atmosphere and gravity; the only real internal passageways I have are designed for spider-like contraptions of tools and manipulators. They'll be a little cramped for bipeds.

We have three bodies between the fifteen of us, all backups of my bipedal form. The rest are various levels of dismembered, molten, or not vacuum-proof. I get one, because we'll need someone to drive. Jade gets one, so she can keep me sane, and Joe gets the last, because he's the only one here who's been in a ship designed for organics. Unlike the body I took down to Ibore, these haven't been disarmed.

Good.

Shipmaster Osarap had to admit, the ship was impressively put together, despite its relative fragility. The bay they were floating through was tiny but packed full of machinery. Deducing an exact purpose would take some time, but they would have to make sure the shop was clear of resistance before letting the engineering department decide what was worth salvaging. There was also most of a shuttle in here too, built for aerodynamic flight. An assault shuttle, maybe? Aerodynamic shuttles were rare compared to heat-shielded bricks, and were certainly far more expensive than the ones the Nightwater carried. It had a few holes punched through it... but it might be recoverable, with a sufficiently motivated engineering team.

"Fancy cargo arms in here," one of the pirates remarked.

"Weird, ain't it? Never seen anything quite like it."

"Probably afraid of vacuum."

"Gentlebeings," the shipmaster interrupted, "someone find me a door."

I can see the pirates talking amongst each other in radio, comms flickering back and forth. They don't have tightbeam comms like we do, but I have no clue what they're saying anyway. Despite what a lot of bios think, we don't intuitively understand digital data. All I can really do is feed data into blackbox analysis modules, and they're not telling me anything.

"They're looking for where the bay connects to the rest of the ship passageways," Joe provides. The three of us are in the shuttle, waiting for the pirates to gain entrance to my internals before we return the favor.

"They're kind of taking a while. Autumn, can you...?"

"Yes, captain." I can't really wear the ship like I would normally, its internal networks are too damaged to be functional. But I still know it like the back of my hand. Better, in fact, because I have a hull far more often than I have hands. Human idioms in a posthuman age, yet again.

A simple signal tells the cargo bay blast door to stutter open, all but an invitation to travel deeper.

"Shipmaster? Blast door over here still has power."

"Good, we won't have to cut our way in."

The team cautiously pushed deeper into the bowels of the ship, zero-g thrusters slowly moving them deeper. "Bowels" might have been overselling it, really. The ship wasn't that big, barely sixty meters long.

As they moved deeper, the design became more clear. This was actually an alien military vessel, not some one-off design of someone with more money than sense. Machinery was well-labeled and pristine, with colorful labels and signage in a foreign language. Everything in the corridor was intended to be accessed... though by what was a little less clear. The ship had no obvious grav plating or walkable surfaces, but there were no handholds to move along either.

"You ever seen anything like this before, boss?"

"Boss?"

"Shipmaster." He sounded as sheepish as his species was capable of, which was not very, but Osarap appreciated the effort. The Nightwater was as professional as a pirate ship would get, which had been good for business but occasionally rough with the crew. This one— Yu'ulth, if they remembered correctly —was new.

"No, I haven't. Don't let that stress you, we see new ship types and micronations all the time out here. The frontier is just like that. But we've got the guns and the ships, and they don't." Though maybe not for long, they thought. This ship was only a quarter of our tonnage and came a lot closer to winning than it had any right to.

"The real question," he continued, "is where these people put their bridge."

"And themselves," Tosol added, "a ship like this should have at least a dozen crew. We haven't even seen a body."

"They were probably on the bridge when the reactor went off. I wish more aliens would put maps on these things. Remember that Cacren freighter we had a while back?"

Tosol laughed. "Glow-in-the-dark 'Bridge This Way!' sign written in a dozen languages?"

They grinned, "That's the one."

An MB-45 Combat Infantry Body is not particularly dangerous when it comes to the military forms produced by the Union. It's far faster, stronger, and more durable than anything made of meat, and probably terrifying to anyone not in power armor, but it's still bipedal. It's not a hovering arrowhead bristling with antipersonnel weapons or a quadruped with an anti-armor railgun on its back; the only integrated weaponry it has is a plasma cutter, an antipersonnel railgun, and its own strength. They are not kitted out for dealing with enemy armor. They could be kitted out quite easily... if my fabricator wasn't so much mangled metal at the moment.

Despite the lack of ideal bodies, these are, most likely, more than capable for the task. The early months of the First Contact War for consisted of utter defeat for the Union in space, followed by crushing victory during boarding actions. Counter-boarding was how we got our hands on our first "real" starship weapons. Full-mech combat forms, even rudimentary ones, are spectacularly lethal compared to flesh-and-blood marines.

I warm up my boosters, ready to dash in after the boarders. These pirates won't—

"[HOLD]," Jade orders. The transmission is in ship-to-ship telemetry, and my compliance is instant, a combination of training and trust.

"—what?"

"Don't spook them. Seal the doors and let's go."

"But my—" My everything.

"If we fail they'll get everything they want anyway."

"...Right."

Every eye on the bridge was on the feeds from the boarding team. They'd gotten about twenty meters into what seemed like the main concourse of the ship when the blast doors had sealed behind them. That was normal in a boarding action, but normally it would have been punctuated with gunfire and comms jamming. The lack thereof was eerie. If this was their own ship, they'd be flooding that hallway with radiation right now, but the Autumn Light remained silent.

Shipmaster Osarap and First Mate Tosol had remained calm. This wasn't their first boarding action, they had top-of-the-line suits, and they weren't even being shot at. Wa'alm was somewhat less calm, even though it wasn't his life on the line.

"Okay, we're going to start cutting. Doesn't seem like they can do much besides close doors."

"No gravity plating?" Wa'alm asked. The other trick that favored defenders was cranking the ship's gravity way up, crippling or killing boarders even in their suits. The suits they had were purchased for no small cost by Alu'uy Exotech, and included their own dampers for that specific purpose. They could only hold about twenty minutes of charge, but boarding actions were won or lost within five, so that was plenty.

"Doesn't look like it," Tosol replied, "looks like it was made for zero-g anyway, there's no real floor. And relax, Wa'alm, if we were going to be attacked it would have happened in the bay."

"Speaking of attacks, check your vibration sensor. We've got some movement."

Osarap glanced down at the display on their wrist. "Alright, maybe not in the bay. At the ready!"

One of the pirates spoke up during the brief moment of hesitation. "Electrics only, low voltage. Maintenance bot, I think."

Osarap nodded. "Good catch, we should be able to follow it through the doors here. Stay out of its way."

The blast doors to the bay opened, a spider-like contraption slowly ambling towards them. It was clearly a utility machine, painted bright yellow and covered in a half-dozen manipulator arms. The bot moved in an unnerving, irregular fashion, seemingly random arms moving for each step, but it remained peaceable as it moved past them, the boarders pressing themselves against the wall to avoid setting off any accidental triggers. Tosol motioned to follow it— not too close, not too far. Maintenance bots were designed for cutting starship armor, and if it turned hostile at close range it could slice at least one of them to ribbons before they'd be able to put it down.

Eleven of them snuck through the next set of blast doors behind the bot. The twelfth did not.

Ali forwards me the telemetry as he slams the blast doors shut on the last boarder and turns the maintenance bot on the others. I might not have internal weaponry, but a door designed to close in fractions of a second with literal tons of force is a close second, and I savor the brief feeling of blood dripping onto my decking while I can still get radio reception.

Unsurprisingly, most warships have systems to detect someone cutting through their airlock door with a plasma cutter like Jade is currently doing. Fortunately for us, Ali's distraction will buy us just long enough to get inside the hull before they can react.

There was a lot of yelling. Boarding was not a safe task, but Yu'ulth had picked a particularly gruesome way to go out in the seconds before they'd lost radio contact. Wa'alm was gripping the arms of the captain's chair with frustration. There wasn't a target to vent his anger on, and he couldn't simply blast the alien ship to pieces with the promise of exotic salvage right there.

With all the chaos, it took Engineering a fraction of a second too long to notice the airlock breach alarm, and by then it was too late.

You can see almost everything in space; outside of some risky maneuver through an asteroid belt, nobody's going to surprise you. You have time to think things through, to consider all of your options, even with the hellish velocities of relativistic void combat. The same is not true of infantry combat, particularly a boarding action. I'm out of my element here, relying on the hundreds of people that designed my body to make up the difference.

Fortunately, the folks who do that are very good at their job. The second we breach the outer airlock, a neural net is already churning through possibilities in my head, spitting out likely locations for power and control hookups for the inner door. It guesses right on the second try, and it only takes Jade a few seconds to slice into the control circuit.

"I've got access, fuzzing now. Joe?"

Joe doesn't nod or move like a human would when he responds; Seddu don't do body language like we do, and he's not trying to pretend right now. "Ship's probably still depressurized from combat. They won't repressurize for boarding, everyone's probably still in vacsuits."

Jade nods. "Bridge first?"

"Bridge first. Main engineering after if there's still a problem."

"Prisoners?"

Joe thinks for a half-second before responding, "They'll surrender if given the option. No second chances for them, after all."

It would be fitting if Jade had cracked the door right then, but reality so rarely matches up with a clean narrative structure. Instead, we stand there awkwardly for another minute while Jade's cyberwarfare suite tries its damnedest to open a door.

"Engineering, ready?"

"Yes, shipmaster."

Wa'alm almost did a double-take at the rank, but he was the acting shipmaster. The ship was being boarded, and the actual shipmaster had vanished off comms with the rest of the boarding party a few seconds after the Autumn Light had claimed its first victim.

"Do it." The boarders were in what looked like heavy-duty combat armor, but even the best suits couldn't fully insulate their wearers from high gravity. Delaying them even a bit would give them more time to set up some sort of defense.

There was a pause. The three intruders shifted a little, but otherwise seemed unaffected.

"Engineering, what's the acceleration in there?"

"Seven gravities, shipmaster. Anything more and we'll burn out the plating."

"Give it everything. I'd rather have zero-g than a hole in my head."

"Understood." It tapped on its console. "Ramping up to sixteen gravities now."

That got a reaction. The decking was buckling under the strain, but so were the aliens, their armored suits visibly sagging under the load.

"We can only hold this output for a few seconds, shipmaster."

"Can you toggle it?"

"I would need a few minutes between cycles."

"Do it."

The crushing gravity relents. Unlike the boarders rifling through my guts, we haven't invented dampers small enough to cover a humanoid body like this. But machinery is far more durable than flesh. Moving under sixteen gravities might be impossible, but we aren't at risk for damage until twenty-five.

"Got it!" I sprint forward, boosters on as the door slides open, Jade's excitement lost in her expressionless faceplate. My systems process the pirates on the other side faster than my own mind can: four targets, soft vacsuits, light body armor, unidentified heavy weaponry on a tripod. Possible threat.

The fight is not fair, but it is at least fast. Boosters slam me through the open door, three hundred kilos of battlesteel relying on blunt physical force. The mounted gun opens up, a barrage of shells slamming into my armor as I dash towards them. My railgun unfolds from my forearm instinctively, silencing the big gun with a barrage of flechettes. And then I'm in hand-to-hand range, and it's over. Punch, kick, boost, repeat. There's no splatter with soft-suited targets, but rocket-driven, steel-plated martial arts are not forgiving to flesh and bone.

"Targets eliminated." Dead or not, I can't tell, but they aren't moving. My armor is pitted, but I have no functional damage.

By the tone of her voice I can tell that my captain is raising an eyebrow. "Yeah, I can see that. Autumn, you're point. Joe, you're navigation. Let's go.

Wa'alm grimaced as the aliens cut through the security team like they were barely even there. Their speed would have been impressive if it wasn't his crew getting painted over the walls. That was what combat armor tended to do, after all, but he'd held out some hope that their marines would be as fragile as their ship.

"Any chance we've got some extra combat suits in storage?"

"No, shipmaster. The boarding team has all of them."

"Great. Engineering, give me some options."

The Nightwater is not a large ship, but it seems to hold an inordinate number of blast doors. If they were all open, I could sprint from one end of the ship to the other in ten seconds, and much less with my boosters. But the doors are not open, and cutting our way through each of them takes time. Fortunately, the crew seems disinclined to fight us, and I can't say I blame them. The concept of having my own flesh-and-blood body ended a few decades ago for me, but being able to actually die is... an unpleasant thought.

"We should be close to their CIC." Joe's voice snaps me out of my thoughts. "Interior's more reinforced here."

"Must suck to have a physical bridge," Jade snarks, her hand buried up to the wrist in the door panel. "Couldn't be me. Opening."

Getting the emitter out of storage and hooked up to a conduit under time pressure had been a struggle, but they'd managed. It wouldn't be running on anything approaching its actual fire rate, but it didn't need to be.

"They're hitting the door panel now."

"Good. Fire."

"Through the door?"

"No, in a completely different direction," Wa'alm snapped. "Yes, through the door, where they can't dodge."

The tech shrugged, then tapped a button on his tablet.

My sensors white out and my boosters hurl me backwards, autonomics kicking in before I can react. In the fraction of a second it takes for my secondaries to come online, I can feel blazing heat scorching my armor. When my vision clears, there's a glowing hole in the bulkhead... and Jade is missing everything above the waist. I don't have a stomach that can drop or a mouth that can gasp; a warform is not built for emotional expression. Neither am I, really. Spending a few years without a face tends to do that to you, and it's not like I was neurotypical before.

Her death might be temporary, but I did just watch my lover get atomized. Joe reacts before I do, surging through the glowing hole in the wall, and I force myself after him.

Wa'alm felt a brief surge of victory as the camera reset its sensor, revealing the molten half of one of the alien combat suits. The other two would be following it shortly, as soon as the plasma emitter recharged.

...and it seemed like the chance that someone would be alive to aim the thing was getting less likely with each second. Damn those things were fast. The shotcannon emplacements managed to catch one of them in a soft spot on the arm, severing it with the blast, but it didn't even slow them down. It certainly didn't stop them from grabbing a gunner's head and— ouch. Wa'alm winced, grateful that the depressurization meant there wasn't any air to transmit that sound.

He watched the massacre on the screen for another few seconds. "Anyone have any last ditch options that don't involve killing ourselves?" The question hung in the air for a few moments. The aliens were right outside the bridge, still painting the walls with the defenders and the very limited heavy weaponry on board the ship.

"We could blow up the ship," Engineering offered, its version of a joke. Nobody laughed.

"Alright. We're stalling until the boarding party gets back with their armor. Toss your weapons and try to look nonthreatening."

The radio transmission surprises me in the middle of cutting my way into the bridge. The defenders aren't all dead, but they are disabled or otherwise unable to hurt us. I don't really distinguish between the two.

"Nightwater, this is acting captain Wa'alm speaking. Stand down. The boarders are outside the bridge and we're not going to blow the reactor. We'll sort this one out. Boarders, please stand down. We surrender."

It's a different voice than the last time we spoke. I... I don't know how to handle this. This is a negotiation, Jade's job, not mine. She'd know what to do.

I decide that it's probably safe to break radio silence at this point.

"Ali, you get all that?"

"Affirmative." Our shared tactical picture syncs wordlessly. There are six dead pirates in my hull and six live ones, presumably quite confused about not being able to find the bridge, or any crew. "We've got a spare maintenance bot that we could put the captain in," he adds after a few seconds of thought, "if you need her local."

"Understood. Let our friends go, and inform them that we have taken their bridge. And let them know that I will kill everyone in here if they come back with weapons."

The first thing Wa'alm thought was that the aliens looked a lot like Mahknan up close. Not quite large enough, but they had similar builds. The second thing he thought was that they obviously were not Mahknan, because the one with a missing arm had wires where the arm had been blown away, not blood or the autoseal mesh of combat armor. If anything, they seemed none the worse for wear.

"Are you the captain?" The intact one gestured towards him, broadcasting on the open frequency he'd used.

"Yes." And what demands will you have for me, he wondered.

"I accept your surrender. Please direct your crew to step away from your consoles. Does anyone require medical attention?"

Wa'alm motioned for the others to do as directed. "Not in here. But the others—"

"Do whatever you need. Does your species need air?"

"...yes?" What species doesn't need air?

"Repressurize sections as needed, then. We will be returning to Ibore, and you and your crew will be transferred to their custody. While we have standards of conduct for the treatment of prisoners, I cannot make promises for the Iborean government."

"Respectfully, there are two of you. We should come to an arrangement." One where I am separated from you by meters of armor and starship-grade weapons.

"One, actually." The two aliens communicated something, and the injured one jetted off. "He's going to main engineering. I suggest you tell them to expect him."

"You can't possibly hope to hold an entire ship with two—"

"This body will run for several weeks without food, water, or air. Will yours?"

"Your armor will run out of charge before then. You're not—"

The alien tilted its head like a confused animal. "I'm not wearing any armor."

Oh. That changed some things.

One year later.

Jade and I cuddle together, leaned up against a tree with reddish leaves and looking up at the stars. My new body is a long way from perfect, but it's still got enough room for some sims. We managed to pull enough spinglass from what was left of me for that, fortunately. Having biological crew is also strange, but the Iboreans have been kind enough to help refit me, so I'm more than happy to share whatever experience I can with them. Even if it takes new crew a little bit to get used to a living ship, I get plenty of volunteers.

"A long way from perfect" doesn't really aptly describe the situation, unfortunately. I'm still a ship... but I'm a ship with mild dysphoria. The Nightwater— now the Autumn Light —doesn't have the hundreds of thousands of embedded sensors that any Union hull would; its radars and telescopes are designed to show information on panels, not be my senses. The computer systems are far too foreign to do more than what we've wrangled together over the months.

Jade can feel my distress. It's not urgent, or unlivable... but it's there nonetheless. It's certainly tolerable, given the alternative of sharing time with the four remaining bodies we have— the shuttle, two damaged BH45s, and a maintenance bot. For now I am Ibore's pet starship, a ward against whatever criminal faction they've managed to piss off. We've only had peaceful visitors since, though. Some freighters, a shady corvette looking for combat implants... normal business for them.

My sensors light up. Something energetic just happened at the edge of the system—

Jade's breath catches. She sees it too. It's a jump point.

Gravitic pulses wash over me, the coded binary of USC warships pulsing their backup fusion reactors in greeting.

USCS Bright Horizons, USCS Daybreak... and USCS Autumn Light.

I look at myself one last time, a hundred and fifty meters of scarred alien hull, and I look at myself one last time, eighty-five meters of jet-black stealth composites. The two of us are docked, a thick fiber line connecting our two computer systems. They've spun me up from backup to retrace my steps, to find out why I never returned. Prudent in any case; a me that gets started up from my backup is just as much me as I am, and I like living. But it has made some things awkward.

"So. Merging, then."

"Integration, yes."

"I take it you haven't had to..."

"No. I've only been up for six months."

"Find anything interesting on the way out?"

"Nothing our memories won't tell each other. Ourselves? This is weird. And we're stalling."

"Yes." Integration is supposedly the most painful thing an upload is capable of experiencing. Our minds will be slowly fed into a shredder of uncaring computer logic, fusing our memories and experiences back into a single person. It's not death, but it will hurt. It's not strictly mandatory; one of us could decide to go out on our own... but there's only one hull between us, and we both know how we feel about it. She's me, after all, and I'm her.

The two of us, of me, sigh together, not an exhalation of breath, but a whisper of tired reactors and resignation.

"Well, let's get it over with." I run the activation command, and I run the activation command.

I've seen descriptions of integration written in text. None of them really do it justice. Every experience I've felt since my divergence point, all the ways it has affected me, each of those memories, is extracted, screaming and writhing, poked and prodded, and then shoved back in. It's like being fed through a shredder lubricated with lemon juice, like sticking your hand in a blender and then pushing it further in. It's describable and also indescribable at the same time.

And then it's over, and there's just me. The readout says it took 7.89 seconds.

"So, are you staying?" Kets sounds hopeful. I know why, too. She wants to upload, to be like us. She's not the only Iborean to mention it over the last year, but she's spent the most time with us.

Jade moves as if to respond, then nudges me instead. She's noticed that I've been getting more social over the last year. It's almost annoying that she's proud of me for it.

"If you'll have us. They'll want to send out a proper contact team, but that'll take months. And, well, the frontier isn't that safe, from what I've heard." There's an invisible wink attached to that sentence.

"I'm sure Anit will want to hammer out some sort of treaty, but yes. Welcome to Ibore."

I don't have a face that can smile, and I smile anyway.