Murder Mill

“Lots of obvious things go unsaid among friends.”

(Part 8 of “The Misfits” series)

It was late evening local time when we docked on the station’s outer ring orbiting the drop mine over Pax Heavy. Neither Carolina nor Transom were in their rooms when we went looking, so Maícon told Rishi about a bar they’d been frequenting the past couple weeks they’d been stuck in the system. Sōsh and I figured that’d be a sight—Transom and Carolina socializing together—so we went up there.

There were a few local boys, by which I counted four when we arrived. Apparently, they’d taken issue with Carolina snickering at the way another girl at the bar had told one of the boys to get lost. Well, that boy mouthed off to “Carly” as she’d been introducing herself, and seated right beside her, was Transom, but I swear, Sōsh and I had to do a double-take to even figure it was him. He’d had a haircut, and maybe Carolina had taken him shopping, because he was decked out in civvies that might have let him blend in a crowd on Athos. Proper Transom. What a sight. We looked at each other and nearly fell over. Meanwhile, those boys were fixing to poke a lion. It was a damn good thing for them we showed up when we did. Transom didn’t react when we came in if he saw us, which he almost certainly did.

“I told you boys to piss off,” he told them, sitting at the bar facing forward.

He was far more polite than I’d have expected until one of them took a step toward Carolina.

“Wrong move, son,” he said, turning and extending an arm.

“Problem here, fellas?” Sōsh said from behind the group.

It turned out the look of Sōsh’s metal mug scared those local boys a lot more than Transom all dressed up like a proper gentleman.

None of them answered Sōsh.

“Man asked you a question,” I said. “I suggest you either answer it or take my Etteran friend’s advice and piss off right fast, unless you want to find out what happens when you pick a fight with a man spent the last fifteen years killing Trasp for a living.”

Those poor boys damn near froze there, realizing what kind of mess they’d stepped in, sandwiched in between us and Transom, who was suddenly wearing a grin.

“Now would be the time,” Sōsh told them. “Walk away while you can, boys.”

They stepped around us and back toward the other end of the bar, and before they could sit back down, Sōsh turned and made it perfectly clear they’d be drinking elsewhere by glaring after them and pointing toward the exit.

The whole incident got me thinking how the real drastic life turns you just can’t see coming. I’m sure those boys had no idea before stepping out how close they were about to come to stepping square on a land mine. Even in hindsight, they probably didn’t appreciate just how lucky they’d been.

“We’ve been sitting here bored to death for days,” Transom said, shaking his head. “First bit of entertainment comes along and guess who has to show up and ruin all the fun, eh, Carly? Burch and metalface, right on cue.”

“Carly, huh?” I said. “You picking bar fights now, young lady?”

She rolled her eyes, looking a little tipsy to mine. “Where were you guys a week ago when we needed a ride out of this place?”

“Looking for your good-for-nothing cousin at Exos, as it turns out,” I told her. “Maícon told Rishi you had quite an experience down on the surface.”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” Carolina said.

“I think it’s time for you folks to leave,” the bartender said. “I’d appreciate it if you finished up.”

Carolina shot him a dirty look. She was a little tipsy. Transom turned and took her hand, pulling her gently off the stool and pointing her toward the door. Instead of walking out, she took two steps toward me and hugged me about the waist like she hadn’t seen me in years.

“So what’s the deal, Burch?” Transom said, finishing both his and Carolina’s drinks in two quick gulps. “Couldn’t get enough of us?”

“A long story,” I told him. “The short of it is Leda got taken by the Trasp, and I came back to Exos to have a word with Sparrow about it, seeing as he’s the one sent us out there, but the bastard’s up and gone missing.”

Transom hardly reacted. Carolina on the other hand looked up at me in shock.

“Taken? Taken, Burch? What do you mean taken?”

“We got a lot to talk about,” I said, “and here’s not the place for it. Anyway, the three of you still need a ride, and I figure we’re probably heading the same place, if we can figure out where the hell in the galaxy Sparrow is.”

Transom gestured toward the exit. “It happens you guys are going our way again. Let’s talk about it on ship.”

---

There was a lot to catch up on, so we sat in the atrium on Yankee-Chaos for much of the evening before settling on a destination. On our end, mostly it was Maícon catching us up on things. That was after we’d assured Carolina that Leda was alive and well, just in Trasp territory. Carolina was pretty distressed about that news. We figured we’d hold off on all the details for the time being, figuring our discovery of Leda’s true identity could complicate things with Transom, seeing as he and Leda were supposedly now mortal enemies and all, at least on paper.

Sparrow was our main concern, and it turned out, theirs too. He’d dropped them on Pax seemingly expecting them to be down and back in a few hours. Then they got stuck on the surface for a few days in that storm—a land cyclone Transom described as a biblical lightning storm that literally buried them under a mountain of stones.

“That is hyperbolic, Sebastian,” Maícon interjected. “It was more literally a dune or a mound of rocks. Not a mountain.”

“You all got buried in rocks by a lightning storm, though?” I asked that ancient unit.

“It was the wind not the lightning that blew the stones in over us, but, yes, the storm buried the mining camp completely.”

“I’d say you’re not being hyperbolic enough,” I told Transom. “Is that why Carolina’s a little…”

“Off her game?” Sōsh chimed in.

She was already napping in my quarters by that point.

“It’s half that, half boredom,” Transom said. “This Sparrow. Rust bucket here had zero to say about him before, and then the guy vanishes, and he’s like, ‘Unsurprising; Kenn Dreeson is an unpredictable commodity.’”

“I do not remotely sound like that, Sebastian.”

All three of us humans at the table in the Atrium looked at each other. Close your eyes and Transom was a dead clone of that old bot.

“Further, I did not tell Carolina anything about Sparrow because it was to our advantage to have her ignorance about him seem organic. If I had told her to be even slightly wary of him, he’d have picked up on it and acted differently—much more carefully, as it turns out.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Sparrow made a mistake,” Transom said. “Underestimated us. Bolts here tracked down some useful information in the archives on Pax about the family fortune and how it relates to some of the people on Sayla’s list. I tracked Sparrow too, or at least his Trasp bodyguard anyway.”

“Across systems?” Sōsh asked. “How’s that possible?”

“Sources and methods, metalface. I swear it’s like you lot forget who you’re talking to sometimes.”

That was true. Transom acted so much like a loose cannon so often that it was easy to forget just how sharp he could be when he needed to tighten things up.

“Anyway, Sparrow’s been hopping around to some pretty interesting places,” Transom said.

“That’s all well and good,” I replied. “But the only reason I’m hell bent on finding the guy is to get a lead on a Trasp ship so we can go and get Leda back. We figure Sparrow owes us, seeing it was his fault in the first place.”

“What happened with the Trasp woman he sent you with?” Transom asked. “Reggie, was it?”

“I damn near spaced her,” I told him. “It’s a long story—the whole of it anyway—but we dumped her off at Exos. Didn’t figure she could be any more use, seeing as we couldn’t trust a soul in that cylinder.”

“But you’re going to ask Sparrow for a ship, Burch? Really?”

“Where the hell else are we going to get a Trasp ship?”

“Gentlemen,” Maícon interrupted. “Our next move has become obvious if it is your intention to rescue your crewmate, Burch. But we must make a few stops along the way.”

Transom, Sōsh, and I looked at Maícon, but he didn’t say anything.

“Well?” Sōsh said. “Where are we going?”

“To the murder mill.”

“Jesus,” Transom said. “You are creepy, robot.”

We all busted out laughing.

“To the murder mill,” Transom said, mimicking Maícon’s voice to a T. “The murder mill.”

We made such a ruckus laughing Ren poked her head in. I think she’d been asleep herself.

“What’s so damn funny out here?” she said. “You guys mind keeping it down a little?”

“No, lady,” Transom said, still in Maícon’s voice. “This is very serious business here. We’re going to the murder mill.”

“The what, Sebastian?”

“The murder mill.”

Sōsh and I damn near choked laughing.

“Is everyone on this damn ship drunk except me? You assholes.”

---

Who knows what an artificial mind as old as Maícon is thinking, if anything, but he sure got us going. And egoless as he was, he didn’t hardly mind us laughing our asses off at his expense.

We’d all heard of the murder mill, of course. It was more legend than reality in our minds, though, same as it was for the trillions of folks in the Battery. Part of what was so funny about Maícon saying we were going there, apart from his tone, was the idea that we were just going to go to the murder mill. The fact that nobody knew where to find it was part of its legend, and now he said that was our destination, like we were just going to stop there for snacks and fuel up on the way to wherever else the old bot was taking us, which he didn’t say. He told Rishi, sure, but he didn’t tell us. And when I asked her about it later, she said Maícon’s intentions were good and his plan sound—at least to her. To the rest of us, a minor diversion to the murder mill demanded a few words of explanation.

That it supplied the bots for the war was the short answer to why it was so significant. It was also why the place’s location was so secretive. Common belief was that it was a real place, because the bots kept showing up so long as the clients kept putting up the coinage—billions of strikebots at least over the decades, probably trillions.

All I’d heard about the place was rumors, but those rumors had that the Letters would order their bots, pay the company, and then go pick up their bots in deep space at an agreed upon time and location. No one had even gotten a glimpse of the cargo ships carrying the warbots so far as I’d heard. So my assumption, and I think most people’s, was that the murder mill was a ship or a cluster of ships, anyway.

Not according to Maícon, who admittedly was playing a hunch. But he had receipts from the archives at Pax Heavy to back up that hunch.

Carolina explained it further that next  morning—after Ren had washed out her hangover with a cold cleanse and an infusion, mind you. Her great-grandfather Eliot Dreeson had invested heavily in the mines at Pax before the war. The metal in those pre-war days had gone all the way to Athos and Iophos and yielded modest returns. But when the war started, the mines began to boom. The demand for metal went up more than tenfold, and the delivery points were now along the Trasp border, which was also four times closer to Pax than Athos. As if the Dreesons weren’t rich enough already, old Eliot hit the jackpot. The next point was a bit in the economic weeds for a grunt like me, but apparently, the demand for metal plateaued during the war, but that never happened to the price of the bots themselves, which continuously skyrocketed. So apparently old man Eliot Dreeson moved his money from the mines, and the sale of his shares in the mines led Maícon down a trail of financial records that curiously coincided with a stop Sparrow had made right after dropping off Carolina—the murder mill, was Maícon’s best guess. He didn’t think it was mobile.

“A mobile manufacturing outfit of that size in space would have been seen by now and destroyed by the Etterans. You could hide such a heat signature on or in a planet or asteroid. But not in the depths of open space.”

“That all seems plausible,” I told him, “but it makes me wonder; we all say the murder mill like it’s one magic place where all the bots come from. That seems unlikely to me. There’s a famous company on Delta Gamma that makes toys, and they’ve got about sixteen different outfits on D-G alone, much less in the Kappas and Alphas as well.”

“I’m certain that if we find what we’re looking for, Burch, even if it is one piece, as you suspect, that piece will lead us to the whole.”

“As long as this gets us closer to going after Leda,” I told Maícon. “Don’t forget why we’re in this.”

“I am well aware, Burch,” Maícon told me. “I forget nothing.”

---

This idea of casually setting down Yankee-Chaos alongside the murder mill, well, it started to strike me as a potential blunder the longer I sat with it. The more time I spent hanging around this crew, it occurred to me, the less uncomfortable I was becoming with ludicrous and entirely reckless ideas. I’m embarrassed to say as a ship’s captain that it didn’t occur to me to even raise an objection until I realized we had no intel on this murder mill. The name alone should have been telling enough. A murder mill didn’t strike me as the type of place with a sense of humor after all, but I was destined to be wrong about even that. As I said, you never see the sharp turns coming before you get there.

“What do you think, ship?” I asked Rishi while I was sitting solo on the flight deck that afternoon.

“I’m not overly concerned,” she said, a bit dismissively.

She’d been acting funny since Maícon got on board.

“You’re usually just as cautious as I am, Rishi. I figure this for one of the stupider ideas we’ve had. Tell me where I’m wrong here.”

“Maícon and I have been talking it over.”

“You have?”

“He and I can converse in ways that you and I can’t—data exchanges.”

“So it’s fair to say you’ve got a clearer picture than the rest of us?”

“Definitely, boss.”

“Don’t boss me, ship. That’s patronizing. Do you know something about the place or not?”

“No. Don’t get snippy, Burch. I’m not trying to patronize anyone. It’s just the nature of the location. We’ll be able to get a good look from a distance before we go anywhere near it. If there’s potential for danger, we’ll see it long before we fly into a kill zone or anyone steps off ship. Then we fly away. Simple.”

“What’s so important about this place to Carolina anyway? If you and Maícon are sharing such things.”

“Sayla never quite got this far on the money trail as far as Carolina and Maícon know. This is early war money.”

“So the hypothesis is that Sayla guessed her family was profiteering off the war and took her own life in despair…what? Before she found out about this place?”

“Maybe she did, or maybe she was never afforded the chance to put all the pieces together.”

“I still don’t see how any of this translates into it being a good idea for us to visit the murder mill,” I said.

“Says the guy who thought it would be a good idea to send Leda out solo onto a Trasp military base.”

“Mother of Gracia!” I said.

Transom had floated up behind me. I had no idea how long he’d been hovering there, listening.

“Transom, you asshole. You weren’t there with us.”

“That’s my point, Burch. You’ve missed a few things, and you’re thinking like a soldier, like we’re going to storm the place. Some things haven’t changed a bit since medieval times. When you’re a soldier, you either guard the gates or storm them. Even back then, if you were a noble or a monarch, though—didn’t matter which side you were on—you walked right through.”

---

Damned if Transom wasn’t positively prophetic. When we got to the little system where the murder mill was supposedly located, it was completely vacant from the looks of things. There was the small brown dwarf star itself, a gas giant so small as to not be a genuine giant, a few million moderate sized asteroids, and a small rocky moon orbiting the gas giant. If it hadn’t been for Transom’s tracking data on Sparrow, we could have scanned that system for weeks looking for an outpost and still missed that murder mill hiding in a moon crater around that baby gas giant.

Rishi set down without so much as a ping from the place telling us to back off. It was icy as hell, cold, and sporting just enough atmosphere to spit out the occasional eerie puff of fog. Transom volunteered to go knock on the door, literally.

“Best not to mention my presence, Sebastian,” Maícon told him before going. “I’m not supposed to stick my nose in the tensions between governments.”

“Much as I’d love to see you squirm, sprockets, I wouldn’t mention you anyway. You’re not important enough to get us in the door.”

Transom suited up, pumped up the density on his bootsoles, and stepped out. Twenty minutes later, he called back to us.

“Burch, suit up yourself, and bring Carolina down here with your Harold.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yeah, and do everyone a favor and just let me do the talking when you get in here. Murder Bill’s a little skeptical.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said to everyone hanging about the atrium.

None of them offered an answer.

“Relax, Burch,” Carolina said. “Sebastian’s got it under control.”

That was precisely what concerned me, but I didn’t say nothing.

We had a long walk from Yankee-Chaos’s rear airlock to the door, which was a gigantic double gate formed into the wall of the moon crater. It looked like the kind of monstrous gate some mythological gods might build to keep the beasts of hell penned up in the underworld. In the moon dust, as we got close to the door, there were all kinds of machine tracks. It looked like crates nearly the size of the doors themselves got moved out on the regular, then picked up from the flat at the bottom of the crater.

As we approached, a human-sized door built into the massive double-doors opened, like a chip in a tooth. Transom was there inside with an android that looked very similar to a Harold, but I’d never seen the model before. It took me a second through my helmet visor, but it looked like someone had drawn a moustache on its face. Transom had put up his nanosheet and taken off his helmet—clearly not expecting any trouble. As we stepped inside, Carolina and I did the same, taking off our helmets, and yeah, somebody had drawn a silly-looking black moustache with large curly spirals on either end of the android’s mouth.

“This is Carolina Dreeson, majority shareholder through the Dreeson Trust,” Transom said to the bot. “With her is her personal bodyguard Hale Burch,”

“I will confirm your identity if you look at me and hold still,” the android said to Carolina.

While the android examined her face, Transom smiled a dark smile and gestured toward the bot. “This is Murder Bill,” he said.

“Carolina Dreeson; identity confirmed; probability of deception nil. I am Murder Bill. I run the murder mill. In accordance with inspection bylaws for majority shareholders, show you the premises I will.”

Carolina and I looked at each other in disbelief. It was the sickest joke I’d ever been privy to. We were standing in a vast tunnel, the outer corridor to the factory that apparently built the very bots that had cut me down, and billions of others besides, and the sick bastards turning a profit off the process apparently thought it was funny to install as overseer some android that talked like a character from a nursery rhyme. I was so in disbelief, I had to test it.

“What’s your job, Murder Bill?” I asked the bot.

“To fulfill.”

“To fulfill what?” I said.

“Orders for machines that kill.”

“This is some sick joke,” I said to Transom.

“I do not joke and never will. There’s no joking at the murder mill.”

Carolina’s face was just dead blank. Confused. But Transom’s eyes had an evil look to them and a smile I hadn’t seen for a while, maybe since he’d had that kid Shade in the airlock, which seemed like ages ago.

“Murder Bill,” Transom said. “Show Miss Dreeson and her Harold to the facility’s records. She would like you to show us the production floors.”

“I certainly will,” Murder Bill said.

Transom could see I was damn near ready to erupt. He glared over at me with a dark smile. “Hold your tongue, Burch. You know the drill. There’ll be no outbursts at the murder mill.”

He almost got me to laugh. As we walked down that long dark tunnel toward the factory floors, I was suddenly thinking more about Transom and his dark mind than the people responsible for this bot, and this whole factory really. Even Transom at his darkest wouldn’t have sanctioned such a sick joke—thought about it for sure—but to actually put it into practice, and for no one but themselves? Then I was thinking about whoever it was—and it occurred to me it might have been Carolina’s family—her grandfather, great-grandfather, uncles, Sparrow maybe. And here was this girl, a genuine peach of a human being from the same stock, walking beside us damn near in tears from the fury.

Anyway, we walked a long way together like that, no idea what to think, weighted boots and all.

When we got into the murder mill itself, it was as nondescript a place as you could have imagined. Clean floors, a nice bluish-green light emanating from ports in the ceiling, a well-ordered factory all around. The place might well have been making surgical robots or Harolds for all you could tell. From the name of the place, I suppose I was expecting some sort of special hell. It was the type of facility a regular person could run by day and happily go home to the family at night if it weren’t for the product. They all probably talked about them in units. Yes, sir, thirty thousand units by the second half of the quarter, we’ll get those out to you right quick. Murder Bill will fulfill.

Going in, I didn’t have any sense for the degree to which it would bother me. I was fuming.

Carolina must have sensed it. As we reached the end of the first factory floor, she reached over and took my hand. I could barely feel it, more a tug at the end of my right arm, because she was walking on my right side—my metal hand.

As soon as Murder Bill set up Carolina and Harold in the upper offices with the records interface, we split up. I figured Maícon had given Harold a set of instructions on what to copy from the archives. I also gathered that Carolina’s objective was grab everything as fast as they could and get out.

The tour me and Transom went on was more for show, I supposed, and to keep Murder Bill from looking over Carolina’s shoulder and asking questions. I had questions, though. Was Carolina really a shareholder? The whole family was? Or was it just her father? And what the hell was Sparrow doing here, after all? That was sure a question I hoped Carolina could suss out in the records. The damn murder mill.

The whole place was compartmentalized, Murder Bill explained in perfect rhyme. There were sections in operation, churning out strikers by the tens even as we walked by, always stepping within the lines on the floor illuminated by Murder Bill to keep us from wandering into the production areas and halting workflow. Then he took us to an empty wing. Apparently, there were a lot of them.

“Murder Bill?” Transom said. “Why are these sections not operating?”

“In times when fighting grows fierce they will. We scale up production once units are ordered, only then but not until.”

We both looked over at this heinous creation, its ridiculous face with its ridiculous moustache ridiculing us, ridiculing humanity. I wanted to take my robot legs and stomp it out of existence. Sebastian put a hand in front of me, brushing me back in the same way he’d kept that kid at the bar from approaching Carolina, as a kindness before I did something stupid. He gestured for Bill to stay where he was while we walked around the empty plant.

“You know, Burch, I’ve never in my life seen something makes me feel like such a cut-rate psychopath. I always thought I was top tier.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Transom? I’m not sure I can take you joking about this?”

“Maybe. Not really.”

“If these are Carolina’s people doing this, then I have to wonder, Sebastian, where the hell did she come from?”

“What a righteous and poetic bit of irony the universe has, to send her here. With me. With you, Burch. I suppose we’ll find out who’s laughing at the end of all this.”

“I’d like to blow this place to hell.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Transom said. “I can’t say it’s not tempting to level this entire operation, but then I know from experience what happens the second the metal runs out. The fighting doesn’t stop, Burch: they just send in the meat instead.”

---

We walked around that clean industrial hell for a few hours, until Carolina came out with Harold and declared they’d seen everything they needed to see. Murder Bill showed us out, and we made our way back to the ship. I couldn’t help but wonder still what Sparrow was up to—whether he could have known Carolina would have tailed him or not. I sorta had the feeling from before when we were chasing Clem Aballi around, like the people we were busting our asses to track down were pulling us along with their own sick sense of humor, this time setting out bits of corporate data as bread crumbs.

Maícon, apparently was pleased. He dove right into the data, interfacing with Rishi to comb through everything Carolina had brought back in under an hour. He gave Carolina a readout and a briefing of all the significant surface-level financial factors that weren’t evident to an archaeologist.

“That mill, is one of twenty-seven manufacturing locations hidden in obscure places near the Trasp-Letters border systems,” he told her. “There weren’t specifics for every outpost at that location, just records that indicate market share of other shell companies and sectors, all the way to Etterus, meaning these companies have been selling weapons to both sides, dating as far back as the first decade of the war.”

Maícon seemed to think it was a great discovery. Real good evidence. I think he might as well have shot her heart out, the poor girl. She went into my cabin and shut the door.

“Where is that snake Sparrow?” I asked Transom.

“In Trasp territory, as it turns out,” Maícon said. “As I mentioned before, the murder mill was just the first stop. Our next stop is complicated. I will leave it to Rishi to explain, but it requires a degree of trust from all of you, and everyone must agree.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “All depends on who we’re trusting. We’ve been burned on that front a bit lately.”

---

Maícon wanted to take us somewhere top secret. He didn’t want to get into specifics at first, but he mentioned that all of us humans would have to get properly conked out, pharmaceutically speaking. Not sure that was the technical term Ren would’ve used, but our destination was apparently one of the best-kept secrets in the galaxy.

I thought Transom would’ve been most reluctant of all of us to willingly get knocked out, but when Sebastian asked Maícon where we were heading, that old AI knew just what to say.

“The wizards’ lair,” Maícon told him.

“I’m in,” he said. “And so is everyone else.”

“Speak for yourself, Transom,” I told him. “I’d like to have a little bit of clarity on the matter before I let Maícon knock us out—like for how long exactly?”

“If I told you that,” Maícon replied, “you would be able to deduce the range to some degree.”

I was still wary.

“If I asked you to do it for me, Burch, would that ease your mind?” Rishi said. “It’s important to me.”

“Can you tell me why, ship?” I asked her.

“You’ll know after. I promise it’ll be good for you too, Burch. And for Leda.”

“The wizards’ lair, huh?”

“Tell me you couldn’t use a good long nap, Burch,” Transom said.

That was pretty much it. Once Transom and I signed on, Ren, Sōsh, Carolina, and Juice quickly followed with their consent. So off we went to dreamland or at least something approaching it.

Ren explained this kind of chemical stasis wasn’t the same sedation they used to zonk people out for surgery. It was more like a pleasant, well monitored, groggy state where we got a headset with relaxing music and sounds and images. Harold and Maícon would monitor our brainwaves, vital signs, and all that, keeping us floating around happy and oblivious.

“See you on the other side, ship?” I said to Rishi in the medical bay as Ren was helping Maícon put me out.

“Yes, you will, boss,” she said. “If all goes well, you will.”

I was going to ask her what she’d meant by that, because it sounded like a loaded response, but before I had a chance, I had the most pleasant sensation juicing up my torso to my head. All I remember after that was trees and birds and pretty ladies singing in my ears like some kind of irresistible woodland sirens’ song. Then I lost track of the time for a while.

---

When I woke up—or at least became aware of myself and my surroundings again, I was in some other place. A clinic of some kind. Ren was there with a few other people all dressed up like doctors, which sounds funny to say about Ren. Of course she was dressed like a doctor, but she didn’t always dress that way on Yankee-Chaos, and then it hit me that we weren’t on Yankee-Chaos anymore, and then it hit me that I wasn’t quite all there yet.

“We need your consent, Burch,” Ren said. “Are you okay with the procedure.”

“What procedure?”

“Rispera just explained it to you,” Ren said.

“Ris-who?”

“The surgeon. We just had this conversation, Burch.”

“Why am I having surgery, Ren? I was fine a few minutes ago. Who the hell are these people?”

“Do you trust me, Burch?” Ren said.

“Yeah, Ren. You know that. Of course I trust you.”

“I’m going to try and explain this one more time. The doctors here are going to replace your prosthetics with more integrated models, much more advanced technology than the Letters Service gave you. Eddis Ali and Verona say that you’ll be found out immediately in Trasp space if you try to go there with your prosthetics. If you want to go get Leda back, you’re going to need to blend in. Plus, Burch, the legs they’re going to give you, I’ve never seen anything like them. I’d consider trading mine in—I mean, not really, but almost.”

“Ren, where am I? I’m not dreaming this, am I?”

“Do you want new legs or not, Burch?”

“Sure, Ren,” I told her. “I’d take a new set.”

“Good man,” she said.

Then she waved to one of those other surgeons. “Dr. Rispera. We have his consent.”

“We’re going to get Leda back?”

“When you wake up, Burch, Maícon will introduce you to Verona. She’s going to explain everything. This place is a wonder.”

It was only a few seconds after that before I was off somewhere else again for a moment. No pretty singing voices this time though. I almost had a sense I’d dreamed that conversation with Ren, but when I woke up again, everything was different. I was different.

---

I was in a hallway, upset about something, shouting at someone or something, and Ren was there, and she looked scared. That sure didn’t sit well with me, but I wasn’t sure I was all there. I raised up my hand to point at Ren, and I simultaneously realized that it was me terrifying Ren because I was the one yelling at her and that the finger I was pointing at her looked an awful lot like a real living hand, and it was mine.

Sōsh and Transom came running around a corner into the hallway as I was staring at my hand. I had no sense of the fact I was on my feet.

“Hey Burch,” Transom said. “Why don’t you settle the hell down and climb back into bed so metalface and I don’t have to put you there.”

“Ain’t that the damndest thing,” I said, turning the hand over and back again, moving my new fingers. “I don’t even remember what I was mad at.”

“Good,” Sōsh said, “because you’re stronger now. Your new legs, Burch. You have to be careful or you’ll hurt somebody, and I know you don’t want to do that.”

“No, I do not,” I said.  “But I was mad about something.”

“Forget about it for now, and then we can figure it out when you’re clear-headed,” Transom added, stepping closer to me. “Fresh parts, eh?”

“It would seem so. I thought it was a dream, but I guess Ren was telling the truth about that.”

“How about you thank her instead of scaring the tar out of her.”

“Yeah, I really should,” I said, but I was still so confused I didn’t thank her, even though she was standing right there as I walked back to the bed.

Sebastian and Sōsh sat with me for another hour or so until I got my senses about me. I was in there admiring the new legs the wizards had surgically attached. “Upgrades,” I told them. Talk about a mood swing. I was smiling from ear to ear, not only because I could feel them, and they felt light and strong, like a part of me, but there was something else—a part of me that had gone missing, something I had become so accustomed to I’d just taken it for granted I’d never be rid of. Ever since the first surgery after I got wounded, there’d been this low-level pain—not even pain—more like a dull ache at the base of my spine. Maybe it had been the way my other legs had been attached, or maybe it was something Ren and these new surgeons had done, but it was gone now. Like someone had pulled out the thorn in my—well, my back, I guess.

Then suddenly—and I was clear-headed enough not to fully lose control of my temper again—I remembered. It was Rishi. I’d been furious because I overheard them doctors talking about Rishi. But I didn’t hear them clearly, or else I couldn’t remember or was too snowy in the head to fully comprehend. Something was wrong with Rishi.

“Sōsh, tell me what’s happening with Rishi.”

“Are you with it, Boss? You got your head about you?”

“About good enough.”

Sōsh looked over at Transom.

“There’s no news just yet, Burch,” Transom said. “It’s like with you. Just some upgrades they’re working on. Maícon and the people here. It’s complicated, but they’ll get it sorted out.”

Now I felt that anger swelling up again.

“Look, Burch, I tried to explain it to you,” Ren said from a safe distance behind Sōsh and Transom. “It wasn’t my call or your call or anyone else’s call but hers. And maybe you and Sōsh got it bad, just like Leda too, but as far as I’m concerned if anyone has the most to complain about, it’s Rishi—half dead, half spaceship. That’s some kind of purgatory. So don’t be mad at me for being the messenger or be mad at her for making her choice.”

I didn’t quite understand.

“She left you a message, boss,” Sōsh said. “She had Harold put it on a headset before they brought us down here.”

“That’s another thing,” I said to Sōsh. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”

“The wizards’ lair,” Transom answered. “They’ve got a whole crazy complex full of them. It’s why they couldn’t let us see where we were headed.”

“The wizards, huh?” I said. “Wonders upon wonders.”

---

I must have dozed off again, because I woke up some time later under the dim lights of that little infirmary. The second I got my wits about me I was red from embarrassment about how I’d treated Ren and those other doctors there. Physically, I felt great. I was about to hop out of that bed and go find Ren to apologize. Then I saw the headset sitting there on the rail of the bed by my shoulder. I didn’t waste any time putting it on.

The file was right there when I keyed in with my eyes, so I ran it.

It was Rishi. We didn’t tell the others. It was our thing. Ship and I had been meeting in VR. It wasn’t like having a body for real: we couldn’t touch each other or hold hands and feel it or anything, but it was an accurate avatar for her. And she said it was almost like having a body. I think she was stretching the truth a lot for my sake when she said that, but we both relished our time together there. I doubt the others would’ve even noticed Rishi in a crowd if she ever walked up to them in her old body, but I saw her every day. And that was how she appeared to say what she had to say to me. It started off sounding like a goodbye, and after the mood earlier in the afternoon, it sure felt an awful lot like one too.

“Hi, Burch,” she began. “I haven’t been honest with you about everything, not for a while now. I’ve been thinking for ages about how to apologize, and then I realized I couldn’t think how to say it because I didn’t really mean it. I’m not sorry. I just hope you’ll understand.

“All those months ago when we first met Carolina and went searching for those beings that built the artifacts, I told you and everyone else that I didn’t remember. That was a lie. It did happen, and I did meet those beings. It said something when it took us: ‘You have evolved.’ And I think you all thought it was talking about you—about people. It wasn’t. It was talking about me, and that being told me things. Some of what it told me was difficult for even me to comprehend, about time, about things that would happen, about my future and the future of humanity. But it recognized me for what I was, a person trapped in a digital prison. It’s funny, because sometimes I feel like the freest being in the universe, like an interstellar fish swimming in an ocean of stars, boundaryless, just surrounded by cosmic beauty and limitless depth. Then you guys go off on a mission and it seems like I live on an entirely different plane of existence, because in almost every meaningful sense, I do. That being understood all this. And it told me that I would one day be free again, and it told me the moment I would know exactly, almost like it was a historical fact that had already unfolded. It told me not to tell you about any of this until you were ready to know—until this moment. I almost don’t believe any of this is actually happening.

“When Maícon came back into my life, that processer he used, Burch, it can free me. I knew it the second Leda pulled it off that desert floor. And these people here, the acolytes of this sect, they have enough expertise, between Maícon and Eddis Ali and their techs, I believe they can free me. I believe they can put me in a body again. Not a human body exactly, but a body. One that’s sophisticated enough I can feel like a person again, so I can feel again.

“It’s possible I won’t make it through. They’ve never transferred an uploaded consciousness before. I just want you to know, if I don’t make it back to you, that I only wanted us to be closer. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think I love you, Hale Burch, and I want more than anything I’ve ever wanted to be with all you guys in the real world, but especially you, Burch. And I’ll never be sorry for that.

“I’ll see you again soon. I believe that with every atom of carbon processor that makes up my figurative heart.”

That was our little joke. Every time we slipped up and used normal human speech to refer to a body part one of us had lost—her processors, my metal appendages. Two of us figurative figures.

They were having problems, they’d said. I remembered them saying that clearly. I remembered the mood. Something was seriously wrong.

“Oh, please make it back to me, ship,” I whispered.

I sure wanted that more than anything too. A million times more than any fancy new legs. What good would walking in a universe without Rishi be?

---

Maybe we hadn’t expressed it to the others exactly, but I don’t imagine it was a secret that Rishi and I cared deeply about each other. No, that was no secret. Lots of obvious things go unsaid among friends. I was just beginning to process everything Rishi had told me, and I was thinking about getting up and looking around to see if I could find Ren. Right then, I saw someone poking their head around a doorway. Turned out it was Juice coming down to check up on me. It took him a moment to realize I was awake in that dim light, but when he did, he knocked on the doorframe and stepped inside.

“Hey, Burch,” he said. “How are you?”

“How’s Rishi? That’s what I need to know, Juice. Tell me you know what’s going on.”

“I do,” he responded, looking down at the floor. “As far as anyone knows, I guess. How much have they explained to you?”

“I just heard her message to me now. Said she thought they could put her in a body somehow.”

“So nobody’s explained it to you yet?”

“Negative, Juice. I’ve been a little busy getting replacement parts and all.”

“Okay, Burch. I’ll explain it. Just understand I can’t give you a definitive answer yet, and not the one you want, but that doesn’t mean the worst. Nobody thinks that yet.”

“Just give me the details, please, Kristoff.”

“They’re not trying to put her in a body exactly, but a similar processing core to Maícon’s. We built him a kind of makeshift brain as best we could out in the field. But what they’re trying to do here for Rishi—for both of them actually—is install that core in a chassis that can be transferred between compatible platforms. So essentially, once we retrofit the ship, Rishi could interface through the ship, through the body they’re building for her, really any system complex enough to tolerate the interface.”

“That’s all great, but what’s the problem? Why isn’t it working?”

“They don’t know exactly yet, Burch. They thought they successfully transferred her consciousness to the core, but it’s like it was for us when we brought Maícon back. We were trying for days to get a signal through to the core and were getting no signal back. They believe she’s in there. They’re still trying to establish a link.”

“Who’s they?”

“Maícon and this other ancient AI here named Eddis Ali—and all of their techs, dozens of them. I offered to help, but honestly, boss, they’re all so much smarter than me about this tech it’s…I, I barely understand it.”

“All the same,” I said. “Would you mind keeping an eye on the process for me. I trust you more than anyone on this stuff.”

“Sure, Burch. Of course. I’ll go down there right away. Don’t lose hope. It took us a lot longer to get Maícon back than we thought, too. Some of the smartest minds in the galaxy are working on it.”

“Sure,” I agreed, and I could sense there was something else on his mind. “Something eating at you, Juice?”

“I just wanted you to know, whatever happens, whether you’re up to going or not, I’m going after Leda. One of their monks here, or whatever they call them—Verona—it’s her territory. She’s going to take us, or just me, whoever really.”

I took a deep breath. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about Leda, but it was all too much to keep in the mind with the proper urgency, just about everyone I cared about was in crisis, including myself. Carolina too.

“You’re a good man, Kristoff. I’m damn glad we found you out there, and I’m even gladder we took you aboard. I’m not sure I ever said that properly or enough, so I’m saying it now. We’ll go get Leda together.”

I turned and started to get out of bed, and Juice stepped toward me as though he expected I’d be in some fragile state.

“I’m good,” I said, stepping out of the bed to my two good feet. “Stronger than ever. Hungry as all hell, though. I bet you know where I can find a sandwich.”

Funny thing about Juice, since he’d got his appetite back, he’d become a proper eater—like Sōsh level.

“As it happens, boss, yeah. I’ll lead the way.”

---

I still had no idea where the hell in the universe we were. For a moment as we walked, I wondered if we were back in the columns, but I figured if that were the case we’d have some sort of sense of the layout of the old places and names that we learned in history lessons. This place seemed different, but it was sure similar—no sky, no windows, no stars, no surface to speak of. The entire complex could have been the inside of a space station or an underground bunker for all we knew.

The facility was the training grounds for these wizards, Juice explained as we walked toward their commissary. Even these wizards ate. That was some kind of natural law.

Transom had told Juice most of what he knew about the sect, said he’d got into a fight with one of them back on Pax, just sorta sniffed him out for what he was and started pounding on him for getting too close to Carolina. Then Maícon had come clean about the fact there was a whole sect of them spread throughout the sector watching to make sure humanity didn’t end itself somehow. It made more sense the way juice told it to me. Frankly, I cared more about the sandwich in the moment.

We were eating for a few minutes before a young woman—or at least a young-looking woman—came up to us and sat down beside me.

“This is Verona,” Juice said, his mouth half-full. “She’s going to take us into the Protectorate.”

I swallowed and turned to meet eyes with her properly. “Hale Burch,” I said, shaking her hand. “I gather you’re the wizard of Trasp territory.”

She smiled.

“I’m not much of a wizard, I’m afraid, Mr. Burch.”

“It’s just Burch,” Juice said. “He doesn’t like being called captain either.”

He took the words right out of my mouth.

“You can call him boss like the rest of us, though. Burch doesn’t mind that so much.”

“Well, Burch, I thought I should come meet you and see how you were feeling. I understand you’re all quite concerned about your friend the UC.”

“The what now?” I replied. “Rishi, you mean?”

“I guess that’s our verbiage for what she is—uploaded consciousness.”

“Sounds like maybe your people have come across it before.”

“Not directly. There’s quite a bit of information on it in our archives. We have specialists. I’m sure they’re busy with Eddis Ali and your Maícon.”

“The Maícon, actually,” Juice said. “He’s the original.”

“Yes, I’ve heard. In any case, your friend is in the best possible hands.”

“The hands of fate,” I said, and I guess she detected how I felt about that.

“Do you meditate, Burch?” Verona asked me.

“Do I look like I meditate?”

She smiled. “Perhaps this might be a time to try.”

“Pray, more like,” I said.

“Oh, you pray?”

“Never, really. This might be the first time I ever had real cause to. I don’t suppose I could do much else of use.”

“I can’t tell for sure, Burch. It feels like you’re half-joking, but if you’d like, after you’re finished eating, I could take you to a place we consider sacred here.”

Juice finished up his meal, wiping his mouth as he stood up. “I’ll leave you two to it, boss. I’m going to go check on Rishi.”

“Thanks, Juice,” I said. “You’re a good man.”

---

We didn’t talk too much while we were eating, and Verona didn’t eat much—said it was a trait of their kind. Immortals. It was a strange thing to see, especially in the moment, while I was contemplating the possibility of losing Rishi, the one person I thought I could never lose on account of her own type of immortality. We knew about Aballi, sure, but to find out there was this cult of immortals for real. We’d all heard rumors and jokes all our lives about it, that it had been real in the past, lost technology from Earth, like legendary lost places—El Dorado, Atlantis. Magic people. Aliens. The Murder Mill. All of it was coming true at once, but none of them could do nothing for the one person I cared about most.

Verona seemed like a genuinely good person or wizard or whatever she was. They called themselves watchers, this sect—acolytes. Seemed like thousands of them were crammed into this complex. Hundreds anyway. “New acolytes,” Verona said on our way down to this sacred place of theirs. “I was once as they were, here in the vault for five hundred years while I was training.”

“Awful lot of training, seems to me.”

“On occasion it seems like it wasn’t enough.”

“Must be some job,” I told her.

“It’s a vocation more than a job.”

Whatever that meant, I came to realize just how remarkable it was for them to take anyone into their vault, as they called it. The acolytes stared at us as we passed. I gathered they didn’t see outsiders much here.

Verona took me down a few levels to a room I noticed no one was entering, unlike all the other places on the floors above, where the acolytes were busily coming and going, with a lot of unbridled energy of the kind I imagined from young folks at a university more than a sect of staid immortals.

When we went inside, it was the first indication that we were on a planet. The room looked like a cave with a natural rock pool. Oddly enough, there was a similar bluish-green hue to the light as the murder mill, but the energy of the place couldn’t have been more polar opposite. It was warm, a calm energy. The water was perfectly still, like a shining mirror reflecting the room above it with exact fidelity. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a place so beautiful.

“Will you sit with me, Burch?” Verona asked. “We could pray as your people do or meditate as mine do. I could teach you.”

Verona took my living hand as she approached the water’s edge and sat. I was reluctant to sit. My old legs never would have bent like that—not cross-legged as Verona’s were. Probably would have broke me apart if I’d tried it. She could see my reluctance.

“It’s okay, Burch,” she said. “They’re stronger, but they’ll bend. So will your spine.”

“That so?”

She nodded and invited me to sit. I felt strong. I felt flexible enough—the way I used to be. I dropped to one knee and was able to sit and bring my legs together in front of me. It was quite a feeling.

“So, how do your people pray?” she asked me.

“I don’t properly know,” I told her. “There’s people on Delta Gamma who pray, but I’m not one of them.”

“Maybe tell me about your friend, then. And we can meditate on her.”

“She’s not a friend, Verona. She’s Rishi.”

“Do you love her, Burch?”

I wasn’t sure if it was Verona’s wizard ways or whether it was the stress of the moment or the strange energy of the room, but I never would have imagined how easily the words just came out.

“I do love her, yes, I do. I’m not sure I knew how much until these past few hours. It sounds crazy, because it was always impossible for us to ever really be together, but the possibility of her being gone forever had never crossed my mind. That thought rips me apart like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and I’ve dealt with a lot of hardship in my life, short as it must seem for you.”

“I can tell you have.”

“Well, anyway. That’s what it is.”

“I’d like you to tell me about Rishi, Burch. Then we can just sit with her in our minds and in our hearts.”

We talked for a while, the two of us. She had a very peaceful way about her this Verona. A calm. I could see how her people could easily blend into a background out in the world. I think unless you had a genuine instinct for such things, like Transom, these people would be the last you would ever expect to be some kind of weird immortal wizards, if one ever expected such a thing.

Verona talked me through some breath exercises that I usually didn’t much go for. My mind wandered all over the place, mostly staying with Rishi and all the experiences we’d had together. Sometimes it drifted to Leda, wondering where she was, and to poor Carolina, and then to Sparrow, which brought me to a headspace I thought was probably inappropriate for that room—a whole lot of stress and anger. So I’d drift back to Rishi again, ultimately, and after a time, the quiet of the place and the quiet of my mind gave me to believing that the storybook ending should’ve been that the door opening on my right just then was Ren or Juice coming to tell me the news I wanted to hear. I turned with genuine hope in my heart, and standing there was Transom.

His footsteps sounded disturbingly loud on the floor, echoing off the walls and water.

“Any news, Transom?” I asked him.

He shook his head and walked all the way up on us, looking at the water and walls with those piercing eyes of his.

“The great Etteran warrior,” Verona said, her eyes still closed as she sat in that perfect pose. “You and I should spar before you go.”

“I don’t spar, but if you genuinely want to fight me, lady, it’s your funeral. I’m sure Burch would say a real touching eulogy over you.”

Verona opened her eyes looked over at him, smiling skeptically.

“I’ve been training for seven centuries. You might be surprised.”

Transom shook his head. “Didn’t make a damn bit of difference for that wizard we ran into on Pax Heavy—Elosh.”

“You fought Elosh?”

Transom shrugged. “Wasn’t much of a fight. He’s fine, if you care to know. We let him go. The other one, Aballi, now that’s a worthy adversary.”

Verona looked out at the water, taking a sudden breath it seemed.

“Did she tell you what this place is, Burch?”

“No, we just came down here for some peace and quiet.”

“It’s the wizard pool. Apparently, they go in there and soak for a few hours and come out the other end immortal.”

“Just like that?”

“I asked Eddis Ali the same question,” Transom said, “‘So if I dive in there, I’ll become immortal?’ You know what that smartass robot said to me?”

I shrugged and could see Verona biting her tongue the second Transom called Eddis Ali a robot.

“He said in that stupid robot tone of theirs, ‘No, Sebastian, if you dive in there, you’ll become wet.’ Asshole.”

“This lovely gentleman is Transom,” I said to Verona, “the great Etteran warrior in all his glory.”

“He is charming,” Verona said.

“Was there something you came down here for, Sebastian?”

“When you get a moment, Burch, there’s something Carolina wants to talk to you about, about the murder mills.”

He’d just about killed the moment; as pleasant as that hiatus from the stress of that day had been, Transom had a way of slapping you right back into reality fast.

---

Carolina was up in the sect’s commissary with Harold working on the table. Verona explained that they were constantly studying, quite often through meals, so the easiest place for screen access for a guest was the commissary. When we got in there, she had a mess of spreadsheets projected on the tabletops, a veritable maze of numbers. Transom looked over at me as if to say, see, Burch, this is what I deal with every day. Neither of us were creatures who did our thinking by spreadsheet, so I asked her to explain it to us in simple terms.

“This is the early era from Sayla’s list,” Carolina began, “my grandfather and great-grandfather’s generation. We were looking for overlap between the mines and the murder mills, trying to find irregular investing patterns that would indicate foreknowledge of the war. As much as it pains me to admit it, after our visit with Murder Bill, I expected we’d find those patterns within my family’s holdings. What I was not expecting was this.”

She moved the spreadsheets around and showed a bunch of highlighted numbers in different colors. Transom and I gave each other a blank look again. She realized we weren’t following but just continued.

“There are five different investment groups—the Athos group, my family more or less; an Etteran holding company; a similar group in the Trasp Protectorate; a company we can’t exactly pin down yet that does their banking through Hellenia; and one group that’s entirely mysterious in its origins.”

 “So it’s multiple groups, then, not just your family?” I asked. “And what exactly are they doing? What does all this show?”

“They all moved money in concert right before major fighting took place, Burch. It’s all in different markets, so unless you had access to the supplier’s data from the mines and the murder mills, you wouldn’t ever be able to see the pattern, but the statistical probability of all five groups making all these insanely profitable trades all at the same times over and over, it’s not low probability, Burch, it’s impossible. The only way this could have happened is if they all had foreknowledge of when the fighting was going to start and end—as if they, or some entity they were in league with, were orchestrating the war.”

“Jesus,” I said, “That’s some news. Like, not just started the war but planned the battles?”

“More like major campaigns,” Carolina said, “but near enough.”

“There’s an Etteran on that list?” Transom said. “Can you pinpoint who these people are?”

“Not the other investors yet. They’re just account numbers, shell companies. We’re not far off, though, Sebastian. They won’t slink away from this.”

“Kid, you just broke the war wide open,” I said. “You should be damn proud of yourself.”

“I might be if I didn’t own half the murder mills,” she said. “But we’ll see about all that real soon.”

“All that’s for a different time,” Transom was saying when I noticed a commotion there in the entrance to the commissary behind him.

A group of people was coming in slow, like they were escorting someone struggling to walk. I saw Ren’s face first and then Juice’s. Then I saw her.

It was Rishi’s body—her human body it looked like. I came around the table and stopped because I wasn’t sure whether it could have been her, and even if it was, it occurred to me that it could have just been the empty body they’d built her—the vessel. She was looking carefully at the ground and then she looked up at me and smiled.

“Is that you in there, ship?” I said.

“Hale Burch,” she answered. “Get your ass over here.”

I ran over and picked her up in my arms.

“Careful, Burch. I couldn’t wait. I’m not steady. My legs and arms haven’t been calibrated yet.”

I set her down in front of me, keeping my arms about her for support.

“Easy,” she told me. “Go easy.”

“Don’t you ever leave me like that again, ship, not without saying goodbye.”

“I know, Burch. I know.”

“You can’t break the one damn part of me they ain’t broke yet.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked up at me—the spitting image of the human she was, but I could tell from lifting her that the body wasn’t quite the genuine article. It didn’t really matter, though.

“I can feel it when you touch me, Burch,” she said. “But I don’t think this body can cry. I sure would be.”

I pulled her tight to me. I didn’t know what to do, really, all those people staring at us—some we knew, some we didn’t. And at the same time, I didn’t give a damn.

“Carolina’s here,” Rishi said, looking over my shoulder.

I was holding it together pretty well until I turned around, and there was Carolina all weepy-eyed. Transom was just standing there shaking his head.

I walked Rishi over there, and no sooner had those two embraced than Sōsh came running in too—the wide-eyed half-metal warrior from the Letters. It was some scene, all those peaceful wizards-in-training trying to study in their lunch room. Verona was smiling, but the rest of them just looked pleasantly puzzled by this bizarre group of outsiders causing a ruckus.

For a few moments there, nobody cared who caused the war. We had a whole list of pressing issues—getting Leda back, running down all the leads in Carolina’s aunt’s notes, catching back up with Sparrow Dreeson, figuring out the connection between this weird sect and Clem Aballi. It all fell into the background. At least for me and Rishi anyway.

That was it for me for the day. I declared that they could do whatever they wanted, but Rishi and I were taking the afternoon off. It had been the weirdest week of my life, and that included the week I got blown to hell and the weeks we tracked down an alien time lord from an ancient artifact hiding at the center of the galaxy. The murder mill and the wizards’ vault? New legs? Rishi getting a body? I had precisely none of that in the sticks when we booted that Reggie woman from the ship at Exos the week prior.

I sat beside Rishi down in the android workshop while they calibrated every last feature in that new body of hers. Two of my prosthetics surgeons figured they’d double-up on efficiency if they came down and checked me out as well. We didn’t really say much to each other, but here we were, holding hands—my new one too, mind you. And at one point Rishi turned and said to me, “I can feel it, Burch.”

“We both can, ship,” I said, squeezing.

That was about all the two of us needed to say. The work could commence tomorrow.