She had Wires in Her Teeth

	Chapter One
	When Alex Regis was three, she bit a girl for calling her fat. Reclamation was a fairly metropolitan station, and so a human caretaker took Alex to a private room and began talking to her about how what she did was wrong. While this method was almost universally praised over the more frontier “stun-baton conditioning”, Alex would have appreciated a prod from an AI servitor's electric rod more than she did the lecture. The caretaker droned on and on about responsibility and other buzzwords that Alex, at three, understood about as well as she did at twenty three. Then the caretaker asked Alex why she did it. Alex replied “I'm not a fat. She's a liar. Liars get bitten,” a quote which let to a mass inquiry on who, exactly, let Alex at the pre-Exodus gang crime vids. Alex never got into the pre-Exodus gang crime vids. This was an organically derived moral structure that arose independent from any corrupting influence. And as flawed as it was, Alex stuck by it. People who did things wrong to her ought to be bit for recompense. The caretaker sighed deeply and made Alex toddle to the other girl and explain how sorry she was. Alex refused, citing a desire to remain unbitten. She was put on time-out while everyone else did arts and crafts, which suited Alex perfectly fine. She didn't care at all, really, about things like that. She would continue not caring at all about anything artistic until she turned nine, and used the arts class fabricator to print a metal bludgeon so as to punish a boy for kissing her. The fact that she had initiated the kiss against his protests was irrelevant- she didn't enjoy it, and so he ought to suffer for it. The bludgeon was taken away from her, but not after she managed to break the boy's arm, requiring a grand total of fifteen minutes of medical attention from a reparation swarm before he was ready to play zero-gee football again. Alex spent that time in time-out too, which suited her just fine. She bit her tongue, because that was a lie too. She did enjoy sports, and did recognize that it was probably going a little bit too  far to break his arm. She apologized, publicly, to the boy, explaining that she had really only meant to bruise him a little bit, and he wasn't that gross anyway. She backhanded a kid who looked at her funny to reclaim her machismo, and then walked over to the naughty corner herself.
	She turned twelve. Everyone, of course, turned twelve at the same time, being as they were decanted on the same day. It was a tremendous day, because that was the day everyone would say their tearful goodbyes to the caretakers that had policed their life for the last twelve standard Earth-Sol orbits, and begin anew in secondary school. The secondary school you went to was of tremendous import, as that would determine whether you made it rich and uploaded at seventy or if you were doomed to live out your life farming algae around Alpha Centauri until your heart gave out at a hundred and twenty. They'd taken the test before, and now had the list of secondary schools they qualified for. Alex's list was short. There were only five or six schools on the list, compared to some kids who managed to get twenty schools on theirs, not counting the ones they would never in a million years want to go to. Alex's list was short, and the schools on it predominantly Somatic. Somatic schools were supposed to be about training one's mind to control one's bodies, but to Alex all the spiritual rhetoric was a nice way of saying “You're going to be doing manual labor in a backwater colony somewhere until you die”. There was one that wasn't a Somatic school for the “gifted”. The Steven Fomalhaut Military Academy was looking for cadets. That suited Alex just fine. She left Reclamation to a backwater system orbiting a nondescript red dwarf. The first day there, they lined up in the rain and the dark and an instructor went down the line and insulted them. She heard enough vitriolic statements from the instructor to damage even her weak sense of propriety. He came down the line, got to Alex. Called her fat. She cracked him in the jaw, and then prepared for whatever godawful punishment they'd inflict upon her here. The instructor smiled, said “That's more like it,” and continued down the line. Someone tried punching him, after the sexual tendencies of her mother (“Mother,” Alex thought, “Who the hell still has a mother?”) was called into question. The instructor dodged and broke the fat, white, weak girl's spindly wrist by squeezing it for a few moments. She was taken to the infirmary, and nobody else tried punching them. Alex grinned. She'd like it there.
	She graduated at the top of her class in everything but tactics and leadership, but even the later didn't do terribly poorly. And that same day, before she had even left to figure out what to do with her life, she was told that there was an Braith Terra to see her. Her breath caught. She asked the courier if he had, perhaps, misspoken, and that it was Terra, with two “Rs”? He confirmed that it was, in fact, Terra, with two “Rs”. He averted eye contact and the building.
	“Terra,” she thought to herself, “for real. What does an Immortal want with /me/? Was it that guy whose lung I punctured, because I apologized for that at length and I actually meant it.” Her internal monologue getting her nowhere, she turned on her retinal screens and allowed locally available network resources to tell her where she ought to go. The academy was a freestanding torus, rotated for very light gravity. This means that all Alex had to do to arrive at her destination was exit the building, follow corridor around the circumference of the station, and turn left when prompted by the arrow graphics in the corner of her field of vision.
	She entered a nondescript office. The walls were tiled in plastic compounds like every other room Alex had ever been in, and a board secretary half-sat, half-floated at a chair behind a lightweight desk of aluminum piping and rigid plastic surface. She was filing at her nails, the low gravity environment sending tiny fragments flying hither and thither. Alex cleared her throat, a sound that approximated that of a fabricator struggling to take apart a slab of particularly dense regolith. That got the secretary's attention, and she set aside her deep, personal mission to spread organic debris all over the station to do her job.
	“You got an appointment?” She said, her outskirt drawl pricking Alex's brain's “this annoys me more than anything I've ever seen” center.
	“Yes, I do. Alex. Regis.” She said, having little to no idea if she actually did have an appointment. It was an Immortal. She was reasonably certain they'd pull some strings if it was necessary. The secretary's eyes grew duller and more unfocused than even before. Tiny, staggered finger twitches indicated that she was accessing some computer or another.
	“Oh. Right. You've got the appointment with that Immortal, right?” the secretary said at length.
	“That's me,” Alex replied. “Where's the door?”
	The secretary just grunted, and Alex's retinal displays highlit in bright red the door she ought to go through. Alex hadn't seen it before because it was located up from her. The gravity was light enough, and Alex more than strong enough, that she easily jumped up, grabbed the door's handle, causing it to spring open, and hoisted herself up through the office's floor.
	The office astounded Alex, as much as she was capable of being astounded. It was tiny, certainly, but it contained more wealth than Alex thought possible. There was a desk made of real wood- wood! Alex had never seen such a thing before in her life. The dark, wooden desk had a globe of Earth on top of it, also made out of wood (“and probably painted with natural pigments or something just to make it more expensive,” Alex concluded silently) alongside a folder full of papers. Alex had seen something that passed for paper before, once (some kid she beat up kept a little scrap in her shoe for good luck), and thought herself unusual. But that was paper thinner than what Alex assumed an onion's skin was. Certainly thinner than the algae sheets they tended to eat, and certainly thinner than the thick, glossy, white paper that poked out of the folder like the sliver of bone she exposed when she broke her arm sparring. She shook her head- it wasn't gruesome like that, it was...
	“Decadent, that's what it is,” said the woman sitting behind the desk. Alex had been preoccupied with the wood and wood-by products to an extent that prevented her from noticing the person who likely made it all happen. “The desk, the carpet, the globe- wasteful to the extreme.”
	Now that it was mentioned, Alex realized that the floor wasn't even tiled- a thin carpet, coated in intricate designs from some pre-Exodus civilization. She noted the figure like a snake impaled with two spears, which she dimly remembered as being from one of the greatest. “If these carpets are made of actual, honest to goodness sheep's wool I'm going to have a conniption.”
	The woman behind the desk waited patiently while Alex put the pieces together. The telltale shock of a sudden realization, muffled by Alex's stubborn pride, darted across her face, and Alex realized what she'd been missing. “The papers aren't a waste?” She asked suddenly.
	“No. Expensive, but not a waste,” replied the woman at the desk, “because there's some information we can't trust to data blocks and retinal screens. Can you read?”
	“Yes,” Alex lied. She didn't have much of a moral compunction against lying when she wasn't on the receiving end. A more accurate answer would have been “A little,” or “Enough,” or “If I have to,” or “Well I can have the station resources find me a reader AI if it's that important.”
	“Oh dear. If you can't read, Alex, you're not going to be nearly as useful as if you could. You should work on that, if you can,” said the woman.
	“Yeah, yeah. So, who're you?”
	“Braith Terra. I trust that you were planning on enlisting as soon as you can?”
	“I was. Why?”
	“No college?”
	“Don't need to go to college to kill people, do I?”
	“That's what I'm here to talk to you about.”
	“An Immortal wouldn't come here to hock universities at a backwater academy’s best recruit.”
	“You think this is backwater?”
	“I know this is backwater, and that's why the lady at the desk down there can't speak proper Esperanto.”
	“Well, yes. It's located, in terms of jumps, as far away from Fomalhaut as it gets. But that's for a reason.”
	“... Steve F School for the Socially-Maladjusted is not a top-secret training post for elite super soldiers,” Alex said, patiently disbelieving.
	“No, it's not. But it is a reasonably good school, located far enough away from Fomalhaut that nobody's going to be poking at it if we don't make it an obvious target.”
	“Didn't think so.”
	“You, on the other hand, are already well on your way to being an elite super soldier,” Braith said as though she had just told Alex that the weather on Fomalhaut was unseasonably windy.
	“...What?”
	“You were born to fight, Alex. We didn't do anything to your DNA because we're not Posthuman monsters, but the genes came out in your favor anyway. You can do things we need done. It's as simple as that.”
	Alex liked simple. Braith nodded, and pushed the folder to her. “There's a private reader AI in this office. Use it.”
	She did. The folder contained information on what she'd be expected to do. It was ten pages of dither and prattle, in her mind. “You want me to get augmented, go in there, and break some buckethead brains, yeah?” She asked. Braith chuckled.
	“That's about it. In exchange, you'll be my pedagogue. I'll see to it that you take your place in the upper echelons of the fleet, with the rest of the Immortals.”
	One did not say no to an Immortal's offer of pedagogy. Alex's signature was on the form before she realized that there was a pencil in her hand. Braith smiled. Her teeth were full of wires.
Chapter Two
	Five years later, she stood in that same office. Her regulation military jumpsuit was adorned with a tiny pin, denoting rank. Alex didn't actually know who she outranked and who she didn't, being accustomed to the assumption that she outranked everyone who didn't put up too hard of a fight about it. Braith, in the same mildly unsettling mechanical body, sat in the same way behind the same desk. Alex's first impulse was to remark that she was the only thing in the room that had changed, but that wasn't true at all. She might have grown a few inches and gotten a fancy black pip on her sea of regulation white, but she had also very nearly failed to graduate from the Institute because of “Sociopathic tendencies”. She tossed her head at the thought. As though they knew anything about her mind!
	“Alex,” Braith began, “It's certainly nice to see you in person again. Pardon the cliché, but you've gotten so big!”
	Braith, with her plastic-white hair and her red eyes and her teeth full of coppery filaments was not so nice to see in person. But Alex lied and said, “Thanks, you too.”
	Braith scowled. “So, Alex. Have you been keeping up with the war effort?” she asked.
	“Yes,” Alex lied again. She skimmed the news feeds every so often, and of course had the newsfeed AI set to ping her when if she or anyone she knew was mentioned but did not, strictly speaking, follow the war effort. The stretchy polymer casing of Braith's face artificially contracted, painting the semblance of worry lines. Her scowl deepened slightly.
	“I wish you wouldn't lie, darling,” Braith said. Her voice was obviously overproduced, synthetic, the result of a clumsy machine translating the elegant impulses between the brain and the tongue and the throat and the lungs to create speech into audio files at breakneck speed. Alex liked Braith (more than she'd ever admit to anyone, least of all herself), but the synthetic shell she rode around in aggrieved her. “I can't believe that's going to be me, after this is all over,” she thought. She started. Braith had been talking to her.
	“Wasn't lying, ma'am,” Alex said, and that was another lie.
	“You certainly were. I can tell these things, you know,” Braith said with a harsh, metallic sigh. Everything about her body's synthetic nature was an irritant to Alex, and she had difficulty recalling how she had failed to notice it during their first meeting. Braith rolled back in her chair, kicking her feet up onto the desk.
	“Young lady, do you understand why it is we fight this war?” She asked, sternly. The question made Alex vaguely uncomfortable in the same way that old caretakers' questions about her motivations failed to.
	“It's not really important for me. All that matters is my part in it,” Alex responded, hoping that her answer would be parsed as correct. She vaguely remembered something along those lines at one of her secondary school or freshman classes being said by someone, which was a tremendous improvement over her actual opinion on the matter.
	“That concept, while popular in tremendously outdated literature, has no grounding in reality. Alex, you need to understand what you're fighting for, so that if it comes down to it (god forbid), you can be prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of victory. Do you understand?” Braith said, slowly, like she was tutoring a eleven year old on why they would use algebra in their daily lives and not a twenty three year old on the moral implications of taking the lives of other sentient beings without an adequate justification.
	“No,” Alex said. That was true.
	“... This is why I advocate childhood conditioning against Posthumanism. Alex, do you at least understand what we're fighting against?” Braith asked. There was a note of worry in her voice, Alex thought- although her voice was scratchy enough that it could easily have been her imagination.
	“Yeah. Any year seven moron could tell you as much. Bunch of wackos, all Immortals, believe in forking, ruled by an insane rouge weak AI named Bandersnatch or something,” Alex said, drawing on memories of lectures slept through, recorded with her subdermal throat mic at low quality and then listened to late at night while studying frantically.
	“Jabberwock. And yes, everything you said is true,” Braith said, “after accounting for bias.” Alex had no idea why people insisted on saying things like “after accounting for bias” or “discounting personal perspective” or similar such phrases. She understood that it was important to filter objective data away from subjective opinions, but since any toddler could do that in her sleep it never failed to irritate her that people had to rub in how “objective” and “unbiased” they were.
	“Right, so isn't that enough reason to blow them out of the universe?” Alex asked. She was sick and tired of the conversation and strongly wished to have the conversation where she learned who she was expected to kill and told where to go to make that happen.
	“...Alex, people holding opinions you disagree with is not a valid reason to kill them.”
	“I know that!” Alex said. That was a lie, on a very basic level. While Alex could readily produce the deeply ingrained rhetoric about the comparative value of all sentient life and how that meant that murder was never justified unless the best settlement of a negotiated agreement was almost mind-numbingly bad, but she found it difficult to accept on a deep level, where her animal brain told her to kill all the creatures who would do harm to her and hers.
	“I have no doubt that you are aware of this information, Alex,” Braith said very delicately. “And that's why you have to understand what they're doing that's so wrong. No, strictly speaking, running another instance of yourself, or even a third or a fourth or a twentieth contemporaneous instance of yourself is not intrinsically wrong. Suffering from the machinations of a broken coordination program like Jabberwock is not intrinsically wrong. What, then, are they doing to deserve to be destroyed?”
	Alex thought about that for a long while. Braith seemed to be satisfied that she was getting through to her, but in reality she was trying to remember what happened the last time she had this conversation. It came to her in a flash of lightning. “Sol,” she asked, as though she didn't already know that that was the correct answer.
	“Yes,” Braith said quietly, crossing her chest in reverence to a deity Alex had never heard of out of remembrance for a home Alex had never known. She remembered then what an extraordinarily long time three hundred years is for a human to live. “Sol. Destroyed, the whole system. The Posthumans say that bioconservative ideology is to blame- they say that the humans of Sol failed to adapt to changing conditions and died out like a pack of animals. What they forget is the probes. Every time we've sent a probe to Sol, regardless of if it was through a gate or a subluminal craft from Fomalhaut, it's failed to return. No natural disaster destroys only probes, but fails to extend beyond the confines of a gate system. It's the former inhabitants. They've done something to themselves to render themselves unrecognizable and loathsome. The people, Alex- I suppose it's not common knowledge, but, there've been human explorers who thought they could communicate to the exhumans of Sol. They didn't come back.”
	Alex processed all this. “So, what you mean is that the Posthumans want us to wind up like Sol. All of us. Dead.”
	“Or worse, yes. Do you understand why it's so important that we fight, even as the threat to us and ours grows larger. We're losing the war right now, Alex- did you know that?”
	Alex did not. “No,” she said honestly.
	“We are. Why do you think that is?” Braith asked. Alex was sick of being told to think. She wanted to do. She wondered for the thousandth time whether or not she would have been better served in one of those Somatics schools.
	“They have better weapons,” she said definitively, being as that's the only reason she could conceive of herself losing a fight.
	“We have the better weapons, Alex, but they have something far better. If we destroy a hundred of their ships and they destroy one of ours- it's still a net gain for us, of course. But they lost only a hundred ships. We lost a ship full of people. They can instance those ship's crews again, and have them go out and use another hundred ship fleet to blow up another one of our ships. But we can't. At your rank, you're qualified to serve as a junior officer on a capital ship. It took you twenty-one years to reach that point. If you were to go on a capital ship, serve as a junior officer, and then die horrifically, it would take us twenty-one years to get a replacement- and this is assuming that you're a completely average officer. If you're a genius, if you're brilliant, then we lose you forever. That brilliance dies. And what's worse is that they target our manufactories. They kill our children before they can grow up to be soldiers. Do you understand why we are fighting a losing battle?”
	Braith might have used a lot of rhetoric that Alex didn't pay much attention to, but she got the impression that they were fighting the kind of monsters that the AI bots were programed to remind her every night do not exist (not that she had through for a second that they'd be able to harm her if they did). “Yeah. How are we going to win this, then?”
	“They destroy our manufactories so we can't make more soldiers. Wouldn't it be incredible if we could do the same?” Braith said. It was a leading question but Alex had no idea what she was implying.
	“Yeah, it would,” Alex said, hoping that Braith would just get on with it.
	“They don't use manufactories, of course. But they do have the backups. They keep their eggs in one basket, and Jabberwock can use them to instance a legion of soldiers with a thought.”
	“So, what, we blow it up and then he can't do that anymore?”
	“It's a start.”
	“Then let's go already! Build the gate, send in the fleet!” Alex couldn't believe that they were still sitting here, having this conversation.
	“We have no idea where that basket is. And that's where you come in.”
	“What am I supposed to do?” Alex asked.
	“I don't know precisely. That's why I'm not going. But you are. You're going to infiltrate their stations and figure out where they're keeping it, so we can build a gate and send in the fleet.”
	Alex was floored. She had, after all, just graduated, and failed to understand how she had any relevant experience whatsoever. “I'm the best you have?” she said flatly. Braith smiled, stood from her seat, walked around behind her, and whispered “cochlear saliniferous cromlech lark.”
	The fuck, thought Alex, were those words. And then she remembered why, exactly, she had so few memories of either attending a college class or of what she did when she cut.
	“Was that /really/ necessary?” Alex asked. Training. She remembered training. And something else. Doing something she couldn't quite remember. She shook her head. It would come to her.
	“Well, we did need to test if the conditioning would work.”
	“Having a whole conversation on things you knew that I knew but was completely incapable of remembering wasn't helpful at all.”
	“It was not necessarily necessary. But, it's not as though I'm above fucking with you.”
	Alex remembered dimly what she had thought when she was being talked to. “Was I,” she thought, “really that big of a bitch before all the training?” She doubted it. It was probably just the suppressed memories messing with her. “I'm full aware of how qualified I am, now,” she said as she remembered vividly what had happened the only time she'd ever been caught- she crushed the metallic berserker shell like it was a macrogravity aluminum drink container, “and would very much like to continue with the mission.”
	“I'm sure you do. Everything's almost ready. You just need to meet your partner,” Braith said. This intrigued Alex. She had never had a partner before, and caretakers at the manufactory had learned rather quickly to program the AI to let her work alone. She was not entirely incapable of cooperating with others, but her abrasive personality made such cooperation rather distant and quiet.
	“Partner?” she asked. A certain individual jumped into the office with a muffled bump. They cleared their throat. “Yes,” said that certain individual, “Partner.”
Chapter Three.
	When Tony Versailles, born Tony Abel, was three, she read The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In the original English, nonetheless. Some of the vids in the library were old and in English, and so it was from those that the caretakers and the manufactory Immortal assumed that she had learned the language, although they were at least caught slightly off guard when she came to one of them, crying about how it wasn't fair and that Romeo and Juliet loved each other and had to die for it and that the play was stupid because Shakespeare hadn't let them be together at the end. Flummoxed caretakers tried to explain to her, in the most haphazard of manners, literary theory and emotional catharsis and every other shred of knowledge they could extract from the one caretaker who had taken a fairly high-class Academic secondary school. While this did little to alleviate her angst, which would persist into her adult life, it did teach her something she hadn't quite understood before. When the servitor bots had set everyone down for their nap, she stayed up, and by the time it was over, a very bleary-eyed Tony had produced her own Act V, Scene iii, where Romeo realized that killing himself wasn't how Juliet would have liked him to act, only to be overjoyed when she came back from the dead. They eloped on a unicorn. It was rubbish, but still enough to impress her caretakers considering her age. The manufactory Immortal decided that she was clearly what was called “advanced” and deserved intensive education. While the rest of the kids learned their ABDs, Tony was taken on a whirlwind tour of literature, from Homer to Cervantes to Tolstoy to Antonissen. At age nine, her Immortal tutor finally acceded that she'd read every book of even remotely import, including the nonfiction. This made Tony sad, although she didn't quite understand why. Her peers, still studying the barest rudiments of everything, had nothing to interest her. She did the work expected of her in seconds when it ought to have taken her hours. She was resented. Kids called her names and hit her, and she would cry, and seeing them taken to the naughty corner provided her conscious only slightly more comfort than the forced apologies.
	She turned twelve. Everyone turned twelve at the same time. She was qualified for every single school of Academics and Art, and quite a few Social. The choices were paralyzing. Before she made one, though, the manufactory Immortal called her into confrere. She entered an office adorned with wooden furniture and decorations, which Toby found distastefully wasteful. The Immortal sat behind a dark, wooden desk.
	“You're exceptional. You know it, right?” The Immortal said.
	“I suppose I am, if only because everyone keeps telling me that,” Tony replied.
	“Do you know why?”
	Tony thought about that. “No,” she replied truthfully, “and I don't suppose there's even a 'reason' so to speak.”
	“Sometimes, there's not. Not now. Tony, you've always known yourself to be different from the other kids, right?”
	The question made Tony uncomfortable. She wondered why. “Yes,” she said, and that was the truth too.
	“Most kids feel like that. But in your case, Tony, it's true. The other ninety-nine people in the Abel decanting group were grown in vats after combining synthesized male and female genetic material. You were not. Tony, you were programed, and your head's a computer. The little boy who once occupied your body was brainpeeled away, and you were put inside.”
	Tony said nothing, because there was nothing she could have said.
	“I know, it's strange to hear. Or. Maybe it's not. I don't pretend to understand. But don't worry. Even if it gets rough, we're all ones and zeros on the inside. I'm proof.”
	The immortal was right. She didn't understand. But that was okay, thought Tony. She was the same person she always was, and even if she happened to be a computer program she was still just that- a person. Her future crystallized around her. She'd take Art. She'd learn how to express this to the rest of the world. She felt as though she owed it to them. She smiled weakly, and the Immortal smiled in return. Her teeth were full of wires.
Chapter Four.
	Something was off about the room's third occupant. They certainly appeared to be real, but Alex's finer instincts took over. She turned off her retinal screens out of reflex. The figure disappeared. She heard a clear voice in her head.
	“Now, that was rude,” said the voice. She turned back on the display. The individual snapped into existence an inch from her face. They were short, lithe, pale, with short brown hair and dark blue eyes. Overall, they were young. Alex wondered what kind of a sick bastard would chose for their AR avatar a fourteen year old whatever-it-was. Alex could not for the life of her gender them, and it wasn't like they had correct anatomy for her to peer at.
	“That's better,” they said, “Tony Versailles. You?”
	“Alex Regis. Are you a dude or a chick or what?” She asked. Tony took this to understand that she did not mince words.
	“The latter, I suppose,” Tony replied. Alex took this to understand that she did mince words.
	“What, then? Why is this a hard question?” Alex asked. Tony shook her head.
	“I'm a Versailles. The concept doesn't really strongly apply to me. I don't have sexed neurology like other people do,” Tony said, hoping that was adequate explanation on a topic that she was rather uninformed about herself, having expertise not in data structure or in neurology but in three dimensional animation and literature.
	“So, your gender is 'robot',” Alex said. Tony nodded.
	“I mean,” she continued, “I prefer 'Versailles' or 'AI' or even better 'Strong AI' being as I lack a physical form-”
	“Yeah, right, Asimov,” Alex interrupted. Tony made a distinctively nonhuman whirring sound. “So, what're we doing, where're we going, why the hell are you here?” She continued. Braith cleared her throat.
	“We've found a weakness in the Posthuman link network. An assault gate they thought destroyed that wasn't. We can slip in an infiltrator to take down information on where their homeworld might be located. That's you,” she explained. Alex nodded.
	“And the calculator?” she asked. Tony scowled.
	“She's here on- I explained this all to you already, Alex. Don't you remember?” Braith asked, cocking her head.
	“You locked up all that information since the day I graduated from Steve F. I remember up to that fire drill that turned out to be real from two years ago. It'll come to me, but I need an adequate explanation in the meantime,” Alex said.
	“It really shouldn't be taking that long. I wonder if it's all alright. Well, no matter. Tony's coming with you on leave from her Art school because we need a Versailles to break through Jabberwock and she's the only Versailles who happens to be my pedagogue.”
	“...Art school? She's a fucking teenager.” Alex said.
	“All Versailles are fourteen years old at the moment, Alex, and so it's not like there's anyone who would fit the bill that's not a teenager.”
	“Right, yeah. Take a teenager into a war zone, sounds about right.”
	“'s not like I didn't sign up for it, you know,” Tony said. Alex payed her no heed.
	“We're going to steal a bunch of data out of whatever station they sent some botched attack from and its nearest neighbors and then get the hell out of Dodge. I don't see why we need a tag-along kid for this, as brilliant and talented as I'm sure you are, Tony.” Alex said.
	“Jabberwock's going to expect you to be a simulacrum. Given his network of social manipulation and knowledge, there's no way you're going to be able to masquerade as a Posthuman because he'll have no data on you. But he'll try frying your brain first and replacing it with an Immortal. He won't know that you've got a non-broadcasting unhackable meat brain until he tries and fails. By substituting an implanted module running Tony for your brain, you'll be able to appear to be one of them while maintaining your ability to act in our favor.”
	Alex considered this to be an awful plan. “You're suggesting that we let him delete Tony instead of me so I can fool them. This has the rather obvious downside of resulting in the death of a teenaged... girl, thing,” she said. Braith laughed.
	“Tony's not going to die. The implant's bifurcated, and she'll be running parallel. Only one side broadcasts, and only one side can be deleted. This is also the side that's not capable of acting in any capacity,” Braith said. The hard-set lines that had been developing in Alex's face smoothened a quantum.
	“Right. Why can't we use a normal Immortal instead of a teenager for this?”
	“The hardware we Immortals run on is far too big to be implanted while keeping you at a state that's even vaguely physically able. Tony's also faster than any of us could be and can guide your social interactions using reaction cues from whatever poor soul you catch while simultaneously crunching numbers and analyzing behavior patterns to ensure that your cover remains absolute,” Braith said. Tony beamed with pride, both figuratively and literally- her AR avatar was emitting visible sunbeams. Alex looked at her.
	“You can do all that, kid? You're in Art school,” she said as though the statement was tautological. “Art kids can't do war stuff” is a thought that had never crossed a younger Alex's mind because there had never been any reason to assume otherwise.
	“You were in Social school,” Tony reminded her.
	“I was,” she acceded, “But Steve F was a training school for future officers. All the 'Social' I did there was yelling at the other schmucks or getting yelled at. I'm assuming you're not in the Art school where the art they teach you is 'Demoralizing Music' or some other thing.”
	“No, I'm not. But this is all stuff I can do  easily because of my nature as a Versailles. It would be like asking you to tie a bunch of shoelaces while someone carried you around. I mean. That's if you can tie your shoes,” Tony explained.
	“Of course I can tie my shoes,” Alex said without mentioning that she hadn't been able to since the second year at Steve F. “Alright, fuck it. I'm convinced. When're we heading out?” Alex asked. Braith looked off into space for a few seconds, and then said, “Two minutes ago. Better get going! Come back in one piece, and knock in some heads for me!”
Chapter Five?
	They ran through the central corridor of Station eight-double oh-U-eight, a station only relevant for their well-advertised but poorly-known military academy, displacing pedestrians in a flurry of knocking and rude gestures. Or, more accurately, Alex ran and knocked people over while Tony's AR avatar, invisible to everyone but Alex, flew on beautifully designed wings and simply phased through pedestrians and other trivial obstacles.
	“So, you're downloaded into my head already?” She asked.
	“Well, your chest cavity, anchored inside your ribcage. But yes,” Tony replied.
	“Huh. What else've I got in me?”
	“The standard. Aside from your preexisting retinal screen, implanted haptic interface, recharging port, antenna, and mini-PC, you've got motor-enhanced limbs, galvanizing pads on your fingertips, and a very small industrial grade laser. And I think there's a port by your clavicle where you can fire a knife from but I don't really have functions there.”
	“I can punch hard, electrocute people with a touch, fire a laser from my hands, and also maybe launch a spring-loaded knife out of my chest? Neat. Anything else?”
	“Oh, a capacitor at the midbrain that can be used to kill you just in case and a bigger battery to accommodate all this new hardware.”
	Alex found the revelation that she was just one command away from permanent death only mildly unsettling. She did, however, find her list of augmentations a bit short, and resolved to have that fixed expediently. They reached the gateway at the end of the hall, in a room hermetically sealed against the rest of the station. This gate would lead to another gate, any number of light-years away, on another station, around another sun. That station would have other gates, and eventually, if they kept following the gates, they would find themselves at Fomalhaut Beta, the new homeworld of humanity. From there, they could follow more gates, and arrive at any station in the galaxy (and their few extragalactic ventures). Excepting those controlled by the Posthumans, who had their own gate network that presumably centered around their rouge planet base.
	The gateway was a circle seven feet in diameter. The room it was situated in was a stark, medical white, and banks of computers stood around the loading platform in a semicircle. Two hinged arms emitted five feet straight up, and then bent. The tops of the arms were telescoping rods, currently mostly-retracted. Around the gate, there was the peculiar dim brown glow of a fraction of the emissions of every luminous or reflecting object in the universe. Through the gate, another walkway like the one Alex now walked along jutted. She took a step at the threshold, and then stepped through. No jarring change, or moment of darkness. One moment she was on a station built around an asteroid orbiting a dim red dwarf star, and then she stepped through the door to a station built on an asteroid orbiting a fiercely glowing binary system of two blue giants. Not that she could tell this, since no moron builds windows on space stations. That station had the same incredibly light gravity of Steve J, and she trotted easily to the next gate, nearby, which brought her to a station with no gravity at all. It hung limply over a dim gray planet, far enough away that the star they orbited was a blue dot in the backdrop of the night sky.
	They took an elevator down to the planet. This planet, one of the first discovered since the Exodus, was named after the perhaps the greatest writer of the twenty-first century, Dutch futurist Dirkje Antonissen. While visually unimpressive, it was a quiet and untroubled planet and thus relatively easy to live in if you discounted the negligible gravity and the lack of atmosphere. It was like Earth's moon, but smaller and covered with life-sustaining ice. Thus, it was one of the largest human settlements, outside of Fomalhaut. The city they came down to had four portals of its own, one of which led directly to Fomalhaut.
	Fomalhaut was nothing like Antonissen. It was an enormous, gaseous planet of an ugly color. What was more interesting was its absolutely massive ring system, bigger even than the Sol system's Main Belt. The fine dust and ice crystals that made up the rings were perfect fodder for autonomous assembly by robots, and there was as a consequence twelve huge, slowly growing O'Neil cylinders in orbit around the planet, slowly rotating to provide Earth-strength gravity. Networked together very carefully though wormholes, they created a gigantic metropolis that hosted almost a million human beings.
	At the microgravity that the previous stations maintained, Alex could not properly appreciate just how easy movement had become for her. Implanted motors in her legs carried her across lengths of station in pursuit of the small gate they were looking for effortlessly, with none of the jelly-legged swaying to be expected of macrogravity acclimation. They found the tiny gate, and stepped through.
	They were on a tiny pod. The entrance to this gate was only five feet in diameter, and it was clear that the construction was makeshift. The computer bank hummed, and white jumpsuited technicians chattered quietly in rushed tones. On the other end of the walkway was a small wheeled box, a foot to a side, with four hinged manipulator arms and a large screen on a pole that showed an unnervingly close picture of a man's face. Tony noted that she could likely begin counting nose hair.
	“Thaddeus Terra!” boomed a voice from the box. While no speakers were visible, it was clear they had to be there somewhere, as the sound was almost deafening. The voice was tinny, like the voices of all Immortals were.
	“Yes, sir! At attention, sir!” Tony said. Alex chuckled, since it wasn't as though Tony could speak except for through her earbuds.
	“I'm in command of our intelligence operations. All of them. And this thing you're trying now has been done before, lassie. By older and better trained men than you, at that.”
	“I was in training for this mission for five years. I sincerely doubt it,” Alex said. The screen zoomed in closer, giving a disturbing visual of the man's cataract-laced, veiny eyeball.
	“I was not talking to you, Regis. I was talking to your friend!” He shouted. He reminded Alex of a particularly nasty drill sergeant, and Tony of SHAKESPEARE CHARACTER HERE.
	“I'm well aware of that, sir, but with all respect due to the lost, none of them were Versailles,” Tony replied.
	“Yes, and none of them were fourteen year old boys, either!” He yelled, louder. Tony worried terribly that the vibrations from the speakers would destabilize the gateway and trap them there, forever. Alex wondered where they put the speaker on her person before concluding that it was probably where Tony had thought the knife port was.
	“Yes, and we can fight about this all day, or we could go in there and do the thing I've literally been training for five years to do.”
	“You've been training for three years, Regis,” Thaddeus said.
	“I graduated Steve F at sixteen and I'm currently twenty-one,” she said. “While I admit that my math scores were sub-par, I can still count.”
	“Yes, but apparently you spent a good two years of that either studying at the college you're supposed to have attended or in cryonics,” Tony said though her earbuds.
	“Never mind,” Alex said in the same breathe. Using her haptics, she opened a text editor and wrote out “WHY THE HELL WAS I IN CRYONICS QUESTION MARK”. Tony's avatar shrugged. “I don't know. If we were allowed to know, I think we would.”
	“Good. Any questions?” Thaddeus asked.
	“None at all.” Alex replied before Tony could say anything.
	“Follow me, then,” Thaddeus said. He wheeled himself down the walkway, away from the gateway. The walkway terminated at an airlock, which opened at his approach to revel a cramped closet of a room which likely would not be big enough to fit the three of them. Then, Alex remembered that Tony didn't actually take up any physical space and consigned herself to cramped quarters with Drill Sergeant Wannabee.
	They opened the other side of the airlock to a room exactly like  the one from which they had just left, except that the arms of the gateway were down, forming two perfect right angles as the needle-sharp points of the telescoping ends of the arms just barely failed to touch in the center. As they approached the gateway, the arms retracted, and the gateway swelled to a narrow three foot diameter with a tremendous flux of air.
	“The air on the other side's just thin, not unbreathable. You'll be fine!” yelled Thaddeus. Alex jumped through the gate without any second thoughts.
Chapter Six?
	The other side was a room entirely unlike what they just emerged from. However Posthumans operated their gates was beyond Alex or Tony's ken, but it wasn't with arms. The room they emerged in was rough-hewn iron, dimly illuminated by red emergency lights. The gate closed behind them
	“Pickup's in five days, although I'm equipped with a quantum com to Miss Braith's office to confirm or reschedule,” Tony said. Alex grunted. Adrenaline trickled into her blood as she assessed her surroundings. No gate techs, which was fantastic. No gravity either, which was okay. The walls didn't appear to have much in the way of surveillance equipment, and it seemed to be for all intents and purposes a very large, empty sphere. On one wall, there was an airlock. Floating aimlessly in the middle of the sphere, Alex couldn't really hope to reach it without something to push off from or otherwise propel herself. She agonizingly used air resistance to orient herself to face the opposite side of the sphere.
	“Okay. Go. Knife. Launch already. Tony. Shoot the knife,” she said.
	“You don't actually have a knife,” Tony reminded her, having discovered the lack of a knife when she discovered the presence of a speaker. She failed to discover why she assumed it was a knife-launching port in the first place. “Luckily for you, I've already called in and requested some supplies. I cannot believe that they sent us without supplies.”
	The gateway opened again, in absence of any arms, and a small, faux leather case drifted through. There was a note, on paper, that read “Just fucking with you,” and signed Braith. Tony groaned. Alex opened the case. There was a hand railgun and a military-style laser pistol, in addition to miscellaneous supplies Alex couldn't be bothered to inventory and Tony was busy inventorying. Also, a jetpack. Tony's avatar grinned wildly as Alex hooked it on to the loops on the back of her gray, multipurpose jumpsuit, grabbed the pistols and put them in holsters on the sides of her shins //also revise b/c idk how to anatomy// and finally clipped the bag to her side. The jetpack greatly added her travel towards the airlock. She fired her jetpack, drifted towards the airlock, and then spun around and stopped herself so that she collided with the airlock with a feather-light touch.
	“There blasting paste in that bag, Tony?” She asked. The airlock refused to open.
	“Yes, actually.” Tony replied. Alex slathered the thick, gelatinous, sticky, incredibly explosive on the airlock, jetted a little bit backwards, unholstered her laser, and fired. The explosion would have been deafening if her earbuds hadn't soldiered as to block out the sound completely, only relaxing when the last aftershocks had faded. Where there had once been a door, there now a jagged, deeply penetrating, and incredibly dark hole. The metal of the station was thrown aside entirely in places, but instead of showing space (and also probably ending Alex's training) Alex could see brown regolith.
	“Why's the station in an asteroid?” She asked aloud as she drifted down the hole.
	“There's any number of reasons. Let's find some people so we can fake our deaths as soon as possible,” Tony said. They drifted down darkness.
	“Hey, why do you think it's so dark?” Tony asked as they drifted.
	“Probably whoever works here can see in the dark. Or doesn't have to see at all,” Alex explained. She breathed deeply. The air was terribly too thin. She dared not use the flashlight on her laser in case she startled the enemy before she had done all the damage she could- the initial phase, before they were spotted by Jabberwock, could provide useful information all its own. She kept her AR network up, looking for the thin, straight red line of an exposed network connection. None showed other than the false Tony link.
	They collided with a wall. Having nowhere to go in the pitch black, Alex finally turned on the light on her laser to the absolute dimmest setting. Image enhancing software, likely installed somewhere in her cranial storage while she wasn't paying attention, took the tiniest bit of light and used it to throw everything into supersaturated sharp relief, laid over her vision. A tiny picture-in-picture window in the bottom right of her field of vision indicated what she was actually looking at, but she could see quite well in the gloom of her tiny light. Not that there was much to see. It was some sort of an military advanced staging base, and the long corridor to the gate chamber was barren except docking ports for troops ships and  a few borderline obsolete florescent bulbs built in recesses covered in clear plastic. The bulbs appeared to be perfectly functional, which failed to explain why the base was so pitch black.
	“It's a trap.” Alex wrote to Tony.
	“Let's make sure we get caught, then,” Tony said. Her voice sounded strange against the silent background. Alex sighed and flipped her flashlight all the way on. Her boots were equipped with a fairly powerful set of electromagnets, and she engaged them via haptics. She dropped to the floor, attracted to the metal shell that made up the station. The wall she had collided with was actually a door- not an airlock, but a regular, old fashioned door. With hinges, even.
	“I've read about these, but they look... weird, in real life. Where do they leave the door when it's open?” Tony asked.
	“It just hangs out. It's terrible, I know,” Alex said aloud. She fumbled with the door's antiquated metal knob before shrugging and kicking it down with a deafening thud. The door was some variety of plastic, and her leg motors were in mint condition. The plastic bent and tore a jagged hole in the middle. Alex tore the hole open wider and crawled through, the jagged edges of the plastic scratching the exposed skin on her neck. It failed to significantly bother her. The hallway she emerged in was fractionally more lively than the one from which they had just emerged. It was significantly more narrow, and lined with more plain, unassuming doors leading to what were likely offices of some description. There was also a large, obvious security camera mounted on the wall.
	“Smile!” Tony said. Alex refrained from smiling- the message was clear.
	A door opened. Tony's breath caught. Alex's didn't. What appeared to be a shiny, ambulatory bush rolled its way into the hall. The bush, they knew, was made of a set of fractal manipulators, branching from stalks the girth of a man's forearm to tiny little things that would require substantial magnification to be seen. It could, with little effort, strip the flesh from someone's body in less than a minute. Tony felt herself begin to panic, and began reminding herself that she ought not to panic, as it was neither useful nor desirable that she panic in this precise moment. Alex pulled out the railgun and aimed it at the basketball sized processing and sensory core because she was confident enough in her reflexes to blast it if it twitched a fibula.
	“What- why- how- who are you?” The bush sputtered. Alex grunted in response. Tony began hyperventilating, regardless of her lack of need for air (or, indeed, actual, physical air for her to inhale).
	“Unrectifiable social deviant detected. Potential maladjustment factor: nine. Immediate termination recommended for optimal peace and harmony,” said a friendly voice over some sort of speaker system. Tony felt a sensation similar to, but distinct from, a strong urge to vomit. Alex blasted a hole through the bush, the station, and several feet of rock.
	“Been spotted. Jabberwock Wants us dead. Ruse failed. Advise.” Alex said, hoping Tony would send the message though to Braith. As all the doors to all the offices flung open and various mechanical forms rolled, ran, flew, or otherwise propelled themselves  out of their offices and towards Alex. She opened her ballistics program, which highlighted the location her projectiles would hit in her enhanced view. A kinetics program running in parallel would highlight the weak points of her foes as well, making dispatching them child's play. The processor strain proved too great without additional computational resources available, and so Alex simply relied on her years of training. The core of bushes was weak. She put a slug in the core of the nearest bush with a supersonic crack. The flare of plasma left in its wake made the air presently warm. The flying helicopter type ones were weak, but persistent, and hard to deal with. Unless you fried their rotors with a laser, which is what Alex did to deal with the small swarm that congregated around her. They crashed to the floor uselessly, and the smell of burning plastic permeated. Their bipedal shells might look human-like, but the computer was in the lower waist instead of the head. One such shambling human facsimile grabbed Alex's gun arm with its clawed manipulators and began to tear. Alex brought her knee swiftly up to its groin, which broke the thing irreparably. She tore the claws off her hand, and took aim at a nearby bush. Within minutes, she was surrounded by a pile of disabled robots without so much as a twitching finger left. The room smelled of burning plastic and of motor oil. She grimaced. Tony had spent the whole time withdrawn in a simulation of a plain white room with only a tiny window through which she could look through Alex's eyes, attempting to calm her tremendous nerves. When she dared peek through the window, she saw the devastation Alex had wrought.
	“That was incredible!” she said.
	“That was a bunch of office workers, kid. Their soldiers are built tougher. Tell me if we're leaving or not, by the way,” Alex replied. She was almost twitchy, hyper vigilant to any sound other than her loud, slow heartbeat. Tony, meanwhile, checked their messages.
	“EVAC, she says,” Tony said. As eager as she may have been to see more of what Alex could do, she was also eager to not die. Alex turned back around, crawled through the broken down door again, disengaged her shoe's magnets, and pushed off from the wall, streaming through the tunnel like a projectile from a gun. And then, like a projectile from a gun, she encountered someone she wanted to die. Several someones, in fact. The lights in the tunnel flickered on, and she saw a legion of Posthuman Shogun frames staring her down, making a lattice in front of the airlock and pointing guns at her head. Shogun had six fingers, four legs, two arms, shoulder mounted ballistic turrets, a second “brain” for tactics, and were the primary reason Braith had decided not to bother trying to compete much with Posthuman infantry.
	Alex tucked her legs under her, and then activated her boot's electromagnets. She shot down to the floor fast enough that their lasers only left long, raking burn marks across her face. Her customarily short brown hair caught fire. She swore to keep it shaved if she managed to escape alive.
	“Tony, connect me to something. I need kinesics and  a lot of other programs up. Now.”
	“Connect you to something like what, exactly?” Tony asked. None of the disabled brains broadcasted on a frequency she could interface with, and so none of the disabled brains could be hijacked for her own purposes. Unless...
	“Open the gate. Small. We need processor time,” she sent Braith over the instant quantum communicator. Alex's vision was flooded with red lines indicated available connections. The lines routed themselves to her cranial computer, and her combat suite booted itself up. This included advanced kinesics to track the intent of all combatants, probability indicators to locate safe spots in covering fire, and her ballistics software run for every single gun on every single Shogun. They opened fire. She smelled the smell of chemical guns, and heard the characteristic shot. Her software indicated that the ceiling would be reasonably safe, and so she deactivated her magnets and jumped quickly upwards, dodging the brunt of the gunfire. A single bullet struck her, tearing through the carbon nanotubes that laced her suit and imbedding itself in her calf. She winced and wondered why she was not more heavily armored. The pain almost distracted her. She concentrated and targeted the center of the mass of Shogun with both her railgun and her laser. “If I can break their formation, I can get out of here,” she thought. She took out a couple tactic brains, located in an external casing on top of the oblong main body of the things, but only one shogun failed altogether, suddenly stiffening up as a bullet tore through its head and the tactic brain dripped down its sides. Her software indicated that their coverage had increased, not decreased, and that she would find herself beset with bullets in a matter of seconds. So she turned the jetpack on full-throttle, tucked in her legs, ignoring the strained protests of her bullet wound, and bowled her way through the mesh, firing her guns wildly.
	They caught her halfway though the torn airlock. The Shogun's fingers were stronger than she had thought, and she very strongly suspected that her arm might be broken. The Shogun was supported by other Shogun, and so despite the fantastic push of her jetpack, she found herself quite unable to move. Slowly, she was dragged from her position to somewhere where she could be shot more easily.
	“Well, fuck,” Alex  said. Tony screamed, though she would have liked to say something more poetic.
	There was a crack, and a fizzle, and she felt herself propelled in quite the opposite direction of travel very very quickly, and then she smacked something hard and metallic and everything went black.
Chapter Seven?
	Alex was quite unconscious. Tony was not. Her field of vision went dark for a little while, as Alex's eyes closed over her retinal cameras, but there were plenty of visual feeds nearby for her to hijack. This was surprising in of itself, but what was more surprising is that she recognized who she saw from these new visual feeds.
	“Thaddeus?” She asked, seeing the face on a screen from one of her innumerable new sets of eyes.
	“Oh, Tony. You're not unconscious,” Thaddeus replied nonchalantly.
	“...May I ask what happened?” Tony said. She pieced together a view of the room from her visual inputs. From what she could tell, it was full of soldiers, dressed in the Moderate gray military jumpsuit, lining the walkway, with Thaddeus at the end of it and scientists around the computer bank. The gate was at one point open but was now closed, and from the broken and crocked state of the of the arms, liable not to reopen any time soon.
	“You may,” Thaddeus replied. “Fortunately for you, we scrambled all nearby troops once you sent the distress call. When that Shogun snagged you girls, we managed to break its grip through concentrated railgun fire. The jetpack carried you through the gateway, which we then smashed as so to discourage anyone from coming through. That answer your questions?”
	“...Why is Alex unconscious?” Tony asked tentatively.
	“Bashed her head coming in,” Thaddeus replied, “but she'll probably recover. Her hair won't, though.”
	Tony nodded, and then remembering that nobody could see her, said “Nodding.” She cursed silently. That wasn't exactly standard behavior. Thaddeus, fortunately, said nothing. At what was most probably a command over haptics, a group of soldiers, all shaven and uniformed, picked up Alex's blacked out, burnt, and battered body and carried it down the hall to the gate back to Fomalhaut. They stepped through the gate. Tony's AR environment buzzed with a request for a meeting. She accepted it, and found herself in another office of expensive, heavy wood and artifacts from Sol. A woman sat behind a desk. She had red eyes and white hair. She was smiling, and there were wires in her teeth.
	“Hello, Miss Terra,” Tony said.
	“Hello, dear,” Braith replied. Tony looked at her hands, confirming that they were meeting in an VR environment and not, in fact, another multibillion //currency// office, although she didn't doubt that there was one on all twelve Fomalhaut habitats.
	“Why am I here?” Tony asked, “I mean, what do you need me for?”
	“Alex, unfortunately, is still in the shop getting repaired. She'll be unconscious for some time. You saw everything she did, and so you can give the debriefing.”
	Tony had spent the vast majority of the mission cowering in virtual safehouses, but her databanks had recorded and duly noted everything that happened. She began giving a thoroughly detailed exploitation about what had happened, beginning in the first seconds after they stepped out of the gate. Braith interrupted her expediently.
	“No, dear, I don't need to know what happened, exactly. If I needed to know that, I could look at the data the same way you can. What I need to know is why the trap failed. How did you discover that the ruse failed?” She said slowly.
	“A voice came on. I'm pretty sure it was Jabberwock- at least, Alex thought so too. It called us 'unrectifiable social deviants' and got everyone to kill us.”
	“That would do it, yeah. Any idea how he knew?” Braith asked. Tony thought long and hard about it, and came up with a few hypothesizes.
	“One: our theory that they could compress the mind file for running on hardware small enough to be implanted was wrong,” Tony began.
	“Probably not. We've seen it happen to soldiers with AI-controlled motor implants. If the AI's connected to something with a net connection, they can take it out, given time. Lost some good troops that way, too, not to mention the strain on the victims,” Braith responded.
	“Two: They had no use for Alex's body, at least not enough of the use that would be worth terminating her.”
	“That's not even vaguely a good theory, hon. Even if they didn't need the body, they'd fry her brain before she could break down their shitty plastic doors.”
	“Throwing out everything that might work. Three: They knew it was a trap,” Tony said tentatively.
	“That's the running theory. The biggest question is how?”
	“It wasn't a terribly subtle trap,” Tony mumbled.
	“It wasn't, but Jabberwock doesn't need a terribly subtle trap. Unless he'd seen it before, it ought to have worked.”
	“Well, what if he had?”
	“He hasn't,” Braith said firmly, “because I haven't sent anything remotely like this out before. Hell, how could I have? You're only fourteen now and I'm just barely consenting to risk you like this. There's no way in hell I would have done this with a ten-year-old.”
	“What if it was someone else? A rebellious Posthuman faction, or the survivors of another arcship?” Tony ventured. She held her simulated breath.
	“I'd honestly think it more likely that quantum fluctuations in the electron stream caused Jabberwock to think of this than that either of those groups existing.”
	“Okay, how about if a Posthuman told him that it was a trap? Someone saw us before the announcement went off- that could be it.” Tony said, and that was the end of her list of ideas.
	“I think that must be it, although I haven't the foggiest why some desk peon would have thought of that. Posthumans are weird, hon, never forget that,” Braith replied. “Anyway, Alex should be getting up reasonably soon. This meeting was time-dilated. The door's behind you. Stay safe!”
	Tony turned around, slightly bewildered, and walked though the door to meet back up with Alex.
Chapter Eight.
	Alex woke up on a sofa. Her scalp ached. Her arm ached. Her leg ached. Generally speaking, she ached. Badly. She put an aching hand to her aching head to find that she no longer had any hair, which was quite alright with her. She put an aching hand to her aching leg to discover that there was nothing, not even a scar, where she'd taken the bullet, which was to be completely expected given the quality of regenerative medical machines and skin patches the military had to offer her. She just hoped they had taken the time to put more armaments in her before she woke up.
	“I'm up,” she said to nobody in particular. That urge validated, she sat up and looked around. It was a rather comfy sofa in a rather spartan room. The room was pure white and adorned with a few small beds and a couple desks full of papers she couldn't read. A single door, opposite her, lead out, and the gravity was light but comfortable. She was dressed in medical scrubs, a fact that annoyed her immensely. She activated her retinal screens via haptics. Her AR interface flickered to life. A message icon pulsed at her urgently. She sighed and activated it.
	“How did you sleep?” it began in the voice of Braith. “I hope it was well, because I need to see you as soon as possible. In my office, dear. You can call up a directional indicator if you need to.”
	Alex was not put off by the thought of working so soon after what was likely some rather invasive medical procedures, and rather looked forward to the thought of getting to avenge her failure. She called up directions, and a twisting red ribbon led her though a hospital, across the paths of some rather confused medical staff, called her a bike cab and gave the driver directions, and then directed her to an elevator, which it set to go to the fortieth floor halfway up the building. The elevator opened into an opulent office of wood that Alex had spent altogether too much time in general in. Braith sat behind her desk, wires and all. Tony's AR avatar blinked into her field of vision, looking slightly bewildered. But there was a forth person in the room, a fact that made her mildly uncomfortable. The interloper had long, black hair, a gray jumpsuit adorned with colorful and meaninglessly bulky patches, and a massive lens apparatus over her right eye. Her left eye was gray, but the lens (which protruded a good inch and a half from her face like a microscope) glowed greenish.
	“Another pedagogue. Braith, exactly how many talented pedagogues do you have?” Alex asked. Tony longed to look around, but being as her visual input was limited to what Alex saw she was unable to get a good look at the new person.
	“Five,” Braith replied, “but I should hope that I don't have to involve the rest of them. This is-”
	“Janička Maceachthighearna,” the woman said, stepping forward to shake Alex's hand. Tony, having seen her, decided that her taste in patches could be vastly improved. Alex, having smelt her, decided that she could probably do with less alcohol. Both of them, having heard her, decided to avoid her batch name as much as humanly possible. She took hold of Alex's hand and shook it less violently than she had thought likely. “I'm looking forward to working with you both,” she said, smiling a beaming smile.
	“Jani's a nanotech Wunderkind. She'll be helping you in the assault,” Braith continued.
	“What assault, Miss Braith?” Tony asked through Alex's implanted speaker.
	“Well, sneaking in the backdoor failed miserably, so we're going to kick down the front. You're to accompany an infantry detachment we're sending to a station we've managed to locate. Ideally, you'll peel away from the main detachment and make a beeline for wherever they conduct their gateway research. Then, maybe, we'll be able to figure out where the hell that planet is and have a shot at blowing it to bits. Any questions?” Braith said, succinctly. //uncharacteristically maybe we'll change that//
	“Yes,” replied Alex. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
	“Excellent question,” Braith said. “You'll find all the supplies you could possibly want on the transport ship. I've already sent you directions, just follow the AR directions. If you hurry, you'll only be about ten minutes late!”
	Alex groaned and pulled up the directions. The red ribbon appeared, pointing behind her, to the elevator. She entered the elevator, and her directional program was kind enough to wait for  Janička to get on before pulling up the ground floor and sending them hurtling back down in hopes that they might catch a bike cab soonish and thus not delay a major military operation.
Chapter Nine
	 When Janička Maceachthighearna was three, she did nothing particularly interesting. She was three. Eager was not a very nice station, being primarily responsible for producing compost that would eventually become dirt for the expensive real food gardens on Dirkje and other planetoids. It thus came with surprise, but no real shame, when the Posthuman warships showed up, destroyed the meager defenses the population could throw at them, and then tossed a self-replicating, self-destructive nanoswarm at them. The station ate itself. Janička managed to escape through the gateway to Dirkje before its arms were sabotaged as so to save Dirkje from the same fate. The majority of her decanting group was not nearly so fortunate. The news reported that the unfortunately named Maceachthighearna group suffered fifty-six percent losses, plus the losses of most of the caretaking staff and all station equipment.  Janička remembered the screaming of children, their lungs broken from the inside by a bunch of iron fillings. She was five.
	Dirkje was alright, she thought. She moved into another decanting group. Moghaddam welcomed her as a guest but never as one of her own. The surviving Maceachthighearnas left her, excepting one, a boy so quiet and isolated that she never once heard him speak. She was the opposite. She burned for social interaction. She was the vaunted leader of many ill-intentioned groups, who seemed to abandon their glowing praise of her when they were inevitably caught. Not that all this ruckus effected her schooling. She was obsessed with nanotechnology. She longed to understand everything about it, to master it, to make it serve her the way it had served the Posthumans. The other Maceachthighearna never bothered showing up when they talked about nanoscience, but to her it was everything.
	She turned twelve. The schools of Somatics wanted her for her muscles. The Social schools wanted her gang-mentality and leadership prowess. The Art schools found her unique sense of style intriguing.  The Academic schools wanted to see what she could do with her brain. She chose the latter, enrolling at the Lonnie Leen school of Academics. They focused in material science and physics. She did okay in those. She aced anything that had anything to do with informational science or nanotechnology or any number of her specific and narrow interests. She took programing as a correspondence course (not that there was much in the way of physical classrooms anymore) because she wanted to learn how to make the tiny iron filings move the way she wanted them to. People wondered about her, but she assured them that she was alright. That she didn't even remember Eager. That her love of nanobots were because of the implications they had in the future of the human race. She was lying through her teeth. She learned about nanotech because that was the only thing keeping her sane. The thought that she could turn the hateful thing that had killed her brothers and her sisters and her teachers and her home and use them to do the same thing to the monsters that had stolen her childhood from her. She remembered everything about the death of her home with crystal clarity.
	She turned sixteen. On graduation day, she had received her list of colleges, taken it gracefully, and then released a nanoswarm in the middle of the school that wrote vile graffiti on all the doors, and then self-terminated. The police stopped her halfway across Fomalhaut, and that's when they took her to see the Admiral of the Moderate Navy.
	She was named Braith Terra. The wires in her teeth scared  Janička for a reason she couldn't name.
	 “Janička, dear, I'd like to offer you a proposition. I am working on a particular project that will prove to be very, very important to the continued survival of the human race. You could walk away from here, content with that knowledge, and go on to whatever crappy college you applied to, learn to program the bots that will one day maybe make Algae stew not taste like shitwater-”
	“Or you can bring me in the project and make me some sort of a military super-agent. I know how it goes, Miss Terra, and I'm in,” Jani finished. Braith's eyes popped.
	“Oh. If I had known it would be that quick I would have made it more cinematic. Anyway, you've been pre-aproved for a school far better than the one you're going to now. When you're done with it, we'll start talking,” Braith explained. She stood up and took Jani's hand. Her hand was cold and dead in a way that made Jani shudder involuntarily.
Chapter Ten
	The elevator was incredibly fast. It was not, however, fast enough for the comfort of Alex. She found this interloper aggravating in a  way that she failed to find Tony. She had, of course, trained for the eventual inclusion of a Versailles-type Strong AI in her suite of augmentations for a matter of years and had not at all banked on the incursion of a nanotech whiz who smelled of grain alcohol and marijuana. She found the riotous congregation of colorful patches on her jumpsuit offensive and her slightly manic energy distasteful. Tony, having integrated herself into Jani's AR display and output within a few seconds of being aware of her existence, gave her  a small smile. She grinned back, exposing every single one of her teeth. Her skin occasionally rippled with the movements of subdermal nanobots, an effect that even Tony found viscerally upsetting.
	The elevator hit the ground floor, and already there were  cab bikes waiting for them. Alex and Jani got into two separate sidecars, and they found themselves carried at reckless speed towards a small gate facility. The bikes braked with a lurch, and then they were running out of the sidecars and in, through the barely-serviceable aperture, to a zero-gravity environment with a white floor. Alex looked around a second after stepping through. Soldiers, gray clad,  lined the walls, grabbing onto a handhold with one hand and their rail rifles with the other. They started at the floor, where Alex stood, and rose in ranks up and down the narrow walkway that protruded from the gateway. More armaments were slung over their shoulders in bandoliers or clipped onto their loops in cases. They looked uniformly unamused, and thoroughly bald. “I must look a lot like they do,” thought Alex, before she remembered that she was in a medical gown and was still rather badly burnt throughout the entirety of her face. A door at the end of the walkway dropped into the floor, and a tall man with rough, angular features and a black pip on his gray jumpsuit just slightly bigger than Alex's. When he saw Alex, his already stern features hardened further.
	“Put on some goddamned pants, Officer Regis,” He said. He turned to Jani.
	“Mac-e whatever the fuck, glad to see you're still painting yourself up as the biggest target in the history of armed combat. Was the second Mona Lisa really vital to your self-expression?”
	“It brings out my eyes,” Jani said defensively.
	“The patch's on your tits, Mac,” the man said without a hint of humor.
	“I know, but I thought you thought my eyes were down there, Engie,” Jani said, twirling a lock of her hair around a finger. Alex felt motivated to hit the head and vomit profusely.
	“Unless there's something you haven't been telling me about your baggage down there, I'll pass. Now fuck off, people, it's T-three minutes to launch,” the man said. With that, Alex walked through the door he had just entered, sailing over him in an arc to avoid collisions. While the room she entered had more entrances, likely leading to more areas of the ship, the room itself was the armory. She grabbed everything she could possibly conceive of needing at any point in the future short of the rocket launcher that she managed to convince herself was too cumbersome in any gravity. She had a rail rifle, a laser pistol, emergency medical kit, some rations that smelled strongly of figs, a very large, very sharp knife, and several faux-leather cases containing munitions, reloads, and miscellanea that Alex couldn't quite be assed to look at. She even carried a few EMP grenades despite knowing well that setting them off even remotely near her stood a fairly good chance of paralyzing her and killing Tony. Seeing the gradual buildup of weaponry made Tony extremely nervous.
	“You're going to have to fit that into a hardsuit, probably, so maybe you should cut back a little?” Tony said as Alex clipped on her second case of recharge capacitors.
	“The hardsuit has the capacity to hold all this just as readily as the uniform jumpsuit,” Alex responded, rooting around for spare slugs.
	“But won't it impede your movement?” Tony hazarded.
	“No,” Alex said, attaching a case of slugs to the case of capacitors, and that was the end of discussion. The voice of the man they had previously encountered came on over AR.
	“Ehem. Hello, crew of the Wounded Stingray. This is Qiu Engelstad. I'm the new Lieutenant-Commander now that Rajago's bit the dust. In three hours we'll be attacking a recently-discovered Posthuman station. We know very little about it, other than its location. They will likely be expecting us, and may have scrambled ships from other fronts to defend. That, however, is not our goddamned problem. What is our problem is that when our ship crashes into that station going at god-knows-how-fucking-fast klicks per metric hour, we're going to jump off and give them hell. Projected casualty rates are high, but if you gave a shit about the projected casualty rates you would have joined the Engineers. For the nine in ten of you that'll die there, have fun in the afterlife. For the remaining ten percent, I owe you a drink. Prepare yourselves, and have a nice three hours. Amen.”
	“Three hours,” thought Alex, “and here I thought I'd be fighting a war.”
	“Three hours,” thought Tony, “couldn't it be just a bit longer?”
	Alex shrugged and went exploring, dragging Tony along helplessly. The ship, aside from the armory, the hardly functional, standing room only, three-dimensionally efficient barracks, one head, and miscellaneous life-support mobility systems, was servers. All the computational resources a full regiment of thousand-odd troops could require was contained in the troopship, encased in boxes that could survive a nuclear Armageddon relatively intact. There was little for Alex to do with such a wealth of automation, but Tony pulled up a VR environment suggesting the late 2050's Koffiehuisen //Adeline appropriates the shit out of a language she hardly speaks for fun and profit: tonight, on Wires// as spoken of highly in the works of Dirkje Antonissen. It was filled with lovingly rendered homages to works such as The Magnificent Snow and Teacher in the Ship which were completely lost on Alex, who entered the environment after a great deal of wheedling on the part of Tony //show don't tell//. The most complicated book Alex had ever read was Antonissen's A Proper Lady's Guide to Etiquette, the joke being that the book's text was completely identical to A Proper Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette and A Proper REDACTED's Guide to Etiquette in the original Dutch and in most translations, and mostly contained elaborately stated recipes  for a particular sort of cookie. Alex had hated every gender-neutral word of it, but as it did not take place in a Dutch coffee house she did not suspect the correlation between the two.
	“I'm here, Tony. Whatever it is you need to tell me had ought to be important,” Alex said as her avatar strolled through the door. The room smelled of cinnamon and rice, a reference to a particular passage from The Nothing of the Return and an odor Alex did not associate strongly with coffee shops.
	“Time dilation’s pretty strong here,” Tony said.
	“That works.” Alex took a seat at one of the booths, upholstered in some sort of fuzzy blue substance which was also a reference, this time to The Stone of the Consort. Alex found the blue fuzzy substance wildly impractical. “What's it, then?”
	“I dunno. I've been waiting for her to tell me,” said a floating orange and black semicircle in Janička's voice. The circle had popped quite out of nowhere to say that sentence, and undulated softly with an inner light.
	“You invited her?” Alex asked without a hint of the judgment apparent in the statement leaking into her voice.
	“We're on a team now, so I suppose it'd be appropriate?” Tony said, stepping into the scene from behind a counter. “I thought we could talk about the mission. I've never been on something like this, if you don't count-”
	“You don't. We don't have any intel about this station, so we'd be wasting breath speculating,” Alex interrupted. Tony scowled.
	“I think you're wrong. If we know what some of their stations look like, we can extrapolate likely common features, especially given our extensive knowledge of station design from our own stations. We also know the requirements that many of them have, and we can factor that knowledge in to get increasingly accurate hypothetical station maps. So given that much information on how this particular station is likely to look, it'd be incredibly stupid to go in there without a rough map,” Tony explained at length. Jani whistled a low note.
	“Damn. How old'r you supposed to be again, lassie?” she asked.
	“Fourteen. And I'm not really a lass-”
	“Yeah, yeah. We give you the information and you'll build a map out of it with your AI cognitive skills. I get it. It's a good idea. I owe you one,” Alex finished.
	“Thank you, Miss Regis. Describe the stations to me, in as much detail as you can remember?”
	“This one station had-” Alex began.
	“You've been on, what, two Posthuman stations? Let me handle this. The very first station I was on was like honeycomb in the interior of this big dwarf planet, like Shakespeare or Sol's Ceres. They wanted us to bring the fuckers out, so we could have a beachhead for an invasion. Well, we got the planet, gateways trashed by suicide bombers and stripped of all halfway useful information by nanoswarms and nukes. Near as I can remember, there were six docking ports for ships, all roughly transport sized. They were the only things that really extended outside of the station. We came in through one of those, fought our way inside. Enormous. Never seen anything like it. There was this huge, towering-”Jani began. Tony, enraptured at the beginning of the story, had narrowed her eyebrows by “dwarf planet” and had been signaling more and more urgently for Jani to shut up for a second, a request that was finally granted when Alex pounded the thin, polystyrene-like wood of the cheep coffee shop table.
	“Um, anyway, I'm sure this information is great, and I really would like to hear it at a slightly less pressing date, but we're not going after a dwarf planet. This station's supposed to be, well, a station, not a little bubble habitat on the surface of a planetary body. They're totally different things.”
	Jani scratched her head. “Huh,” she said, “we usually don't go for the little stations with infantry. Just nuke them out of the sky with a carrier or something.”
	“We do? Haven't we ever sent infantry to a station to capture something of value?” Tony asked.
	“Well, sure. That's what we're here to do today, after all. But they're so few and far between that I've never been on one before. Guess it's because the rest of the team wasn't assembled yet.”
	“Okay, any experience at all?” She asked carefully. Jani scratched her head again.
	“Huh. One time. Sending through infantry to a weak, undefended station to try to pull forces away from the some more important station somewhere that we were trying to blow. The entrance is this little pore in the asteroid, barely even man-sized, so we-”
	“Alright, crew,” said Qiu, “it's go time. We're approaching the warp gate now.”
	“Shit,” said Alex. She commanded herself to wake up. She did so, in the medical ward. She did not remember falling asleep in the medical ward. A cursory inspection noted that she was neither numb nor sore on any part of her body and that she was still wearing military gray, fitted with bags upon bags. She sat up from the cot, activated her retinal screens, and saw a message from Tony.
	“Hey, had them put some new stuff in your body while we were talking. Supposed to be mostly healing related, but who knows. I'll read up on the documentation as soon as possible. Hope you don't mind!” it said.
	“You're one hell of a partner,” Alex wrote back. She got up to put on her hardsuit and watch the gateway.
Chapter Eleven
	The laws of physics governing the usage of gateways were poorly understood and mysterious. Quantum fluctuations tore holes between everywhere and everywhere else on the quantum scale, and the right algorithms could be used to locate a hole between a particular two everywheres, becoming more and more difficult the finer the scale. To plot a gate to particular galaxy was child's play. To plot a gate to a particular solar system took dedicated teams of gateway technicians thousands of man-hours. To plot a gate to anywhere more fine than that was asking miracles. Once a hole was located, it was a fairly minor task to tear it open with the help of telescoping arms. The arms would simply take hole of the tiny tear with their impossibly sharp tips, and then they would fold into themselves, peeling open the gate at the same time. The scale at which a gateway can be opened is limited only by the size of the arms. Before deciding to recruit teenagers with attitude, Braith had actually considered building massive, planet-sized “station-catcher” gateways and dragging them from system to system, sending entire chunks of planets to random locations, if only for the fact that such a system would be a ridiculous expenditure of resources and couldn't go through gateways itself without building an even more ridiculously expensive system of relays. Gateways could also be moved around while remaining linked to its particular sister so long as the were never moved out of synch. Gateways could be opened to points in space without another gateway, but were considered significantly more stable if both ends have gate arms, which also enabled control of the gateway from both ends.
	These all made the gateways wonderful devices by which to send in an invasion. Planetary locations were close guarded secrets, and the fact that Fomalhaut's location was a well-known fact was one of the primary reasons the Moderates were losing and cause for substantial mass migration to Dirkje, Reclamation, Shakespeare, or even the more backwater stations like ill-fated Eager, currently a pile of electric bottle cap openers and human bones. The war with the Posthumans had been ongoing for decades, but it took so long to locate stations other than Fomalhaut, protected by the majority of the Moderate fleet that the war had long periods of true peace.
	It was an incredibly frustrating way to fight a war and it drove Braith, wires and all, mad trying to find a way to win. She stood on the bridge of the Eponymous Marshall, a book by Dirkje Antonissen that did not contain the word Marshall. It depicted a future humanity that had listened to everything Dirkje had ever said and forged a utopia free from suffering and from death, and (stressed very heavily by the narrative) they didn't try to reinvent the wheel on that. The civilization thus depicted, the Moderates, were what Braith had every faith humanity would become, and she had decided to make sure it happened the day she had risen to power. Thus, the reason her flagship was named after a book by a dead Dutch woman, and the reason she and hers called themselves Moderates. And the reason they were loosing. The Moderates outnumbered the Posthumans drastically. They had weapons the Posthumans could only dream of. Their commanders were better, their soldiers were better, and they didn't have to devote substantial resources towards avoiding AI incited murder or brainwashing. But the problem of human resources was proving to be an insurmountable one, and Braith would not, at the price of oblivion, compromise by allowing the psychological ramifications of a society full of mind-clones to exist, no matter if it was to win a war. This is why she sent a fourteen year old, defenseless and without even a hope of survival, into a war zone with the worst monsters known to man. And that was why, a few moments before one of the most important battles in the history of the human race, she stood shaking, grateful that her mechanical body would not leak from its red, doll-like eyes, and that her synthesized voice would not falter regardless of how much sadness and bile had built up inside of her.
	“Ladies, Gentlemen, Others,” She said to the congregated crews of a few hundred vessels, thinking of a particular other and of how she was consciously robbing her of a childhood, “This is the big one. This determines if we keep fighting this thing for another fifty years, letting them build up the swarm they'd need to destroy Fomalhaut while hoping they fail, or if this time next week we're planting a flag on a lump of radioactive ash that used to be our enemies' minds.” Her thoughts turned upwards. “God,” she said privately in Welsh, a language she had only heard from one other person in the previous hundred years, “I sincerely believe myself to be doing the right thing. If I am straying from the path- if my hubris has grown too great, if I must be punished, then I welcome it. But please, I beg of you, spare those girls. I've used them, made them weapons. I know that I have to, but they don't deserve it. Nobody deserves anything in this shit war, but I don't want this to end badly for the girls.” And then she was thinking about the thousands she had already condemned to death, and wondering why three more would be any different, and then she was infinitely glad that she could not cry because there was no way she could have maintained her composure if she could have.
	All of that took a fraction of a second to her augmented, hyper-fast, mechanical mind and speech system. To the outside world, she had paused in her speech. She began again, saying the words she knew were just beseeching men and women to die for her. “If I could make the sacrifice a hundred thousand times myself and stay human, I would. But it's not to be,” she thought. “Many of you have never faced combat before. I will remind you all of one very important fact- those things in the ships you'll be shooting down and the Shoguns you'll be smashing to bits are not human. They're not even mortal- hell, they might not really be alive,” she said, knowing full well that they were perfectly alive and that every ship she blew up was full of innocent victims of Jabberwock. “These people wish to become that which destroyed Sol. They want to join up with the monsters that murdered my brother, my mother, everyone I had ever known and loved up to the day I turned twenty-three. And I tell you, that I will not stand for it! We're going to go in there, and we're going to show those creatures that we are not to be taken lightly! That humanity is not to be taken lightly! Amen!”
	She considered just how easy it would be for her to end her own life. “Soon, perhaps,” she thought, “after my work is done.”
Chapter Twelve
	The assault gate was massive. Tony, even switching her view between the various external camera feeds of every ship in the fleet as fast as a hummingbird’s wings beat, could not fully take in the majesty of the gate arms. The Fomalhaut Alpha gate had been the one through which almost every invasion of Posthuman space had ever been launched, reprogrammed after each assault to lead to the next target. The gate architecture was mind-bogglingly expensive and was a major target for Posthuman raids. The long, perfectly smooth, needle arms of the gate were strung with rings, rotating around then but never touching. The rings bristled with high-energy lasers and colossal mass drivers, loaded with compacted debris from the Fomalhaut debris field. Another satellite orbited in synch with the gateway, prepared to shoot anything coming through the wrong way. Around the massive spires of Fomalhaut Alpha clustered hundreds of ships, ranging from the massive capital ships with nuclear and antimatter warheads and thousands of point-defense laser weapons to the tiniest autonomous swarm droid, providing point defense to the point defenseless and salvaging both side's broken ships for scrap. The drones flitted from ship to ship with their Fomalhaut metallic hydrogen rockets, providing minor repairs and laser calibration. At the center of the formation floated, magnificently, Eponymous Marshall, the size of a small city and equipped with tonnes and tonnes of hyper compressed metallic hydrogen and a comparable quantity of power-providing antimatter battery cells. It was rings around rings around rings, each branching out in a fractal, swarming mess that was entirely customary for reasonably large Moderate ships. What was not entirely customary was the core of the ship- the ancient arcship, Exodus-3. It was necessary to tout the arcship around because, bearing the quantum communicator paired with the surviving arcship, it was the only to receive surrenders or ransom demands as the case may be.
	The ship that Alex, Tony, and Jani were in was small-is. A central core was a massive, floating metal cube, surrounded by a rotating ring of piloting and life support areas further surrounded by a dense field of lasers and anti-swarm EMP devices. The Wounded Stingray was not designed to take down other ships. It was designed to ram into a station as fast as is reasonably possible and then deploy the payload in the cube- as many well-trained and well-armed soldiers as could be packed in. The Wounded Stingray was situated to the far right of the  Eponymous Marshall with a tremendous z-offset. Similar such ships dotted the haphazard formation. While the Wounded Stingray was the only ship carrying a highly-trained infiltration team, if it was the only troopship in the fleet it would be struck down quickly. Thus, ships full of other regiments floated around, in hopes that the enemy wouldn't be able to take them all down.
	The needle arms began opening. It was a slow and arduous task. The defense rings separated into halves and allowed the portal to separate them, protecting from all angles of offense. The gateway itself was hard to notice, at first, a slowly spreading black stain on the surface of far-off Fomalhaut, a dim beige ring on a field of blue. It grew and grew, until it eclipsed Fomalhaut and spread further, blocking out the sunlight of Fomalhaut's companions and off the neighboring stars. The needles shuddered to a halt, and then that was that. The fleet, the whole of it, tiny boxy drones and large boxy troopships and humongous boxy interceptors and the enormous boxy capital ship blasted off, silvery hydrogen burning off and the ships rocketing forward, through the gate, and then they were illuminated by the light of another sun with the discolored circular gateway far behind them. Tony, uniquely, possessed the ability to look outside. She integrated the views of all the ship's external cameras, and saw very little. She knew, of course, that there was a station very nearby, but the station was nearby in an astronomical sense. It would enter visual range within the hour, though, so Tony relaxed and turned her vision to the crew of the Wounded Stingray. They were all in form-concealing, uniform hardsuits, but still her companions stood out. Alex stood tall and proud, massive quantities of munitions hanging off of her like a waterfall of glistening, metallic deathsticks. Janička's hardsuit crawled with tiny black dots and was decorated in a manner in keeping with her sense of style. The normally clear visor of the suit, in her case, was replaced with tinted glass in a pattern suggesting a skull, which Tony found not a little bit gaudy. They held onto handholds in the center of the ship for dear life as the g-forces pulled at them. At length, the burn operation ceased and the ship was restored to microgravity. Outside, the battle had begun. The raid was fast enough that no defenses could be scrambled, but the station had its own garrison. An antiquated, lumbering, sleek Posthuman ship came into radar range. It was a long, oblong ship, ringed with rotating weapon platforms like those surrounding the gateway needles. A faint mist of repair and weapon drones scurried between the rings and the main body of the ship.
	The ship was outmatched, for sure. But Posthumans did not surrender. It catapulted itself towards the main body of the Moderate fleet, weapon drones targeting the fleet's own drones. Tiny floating rockets with guns, they were, but their lasers still packed an impressive punch. Moderate drones burned and died, only to be reassembled by other drones. All the while, the ship barreled towards the fleet as the fleet barreled towards the station by way of the ship. Anti-ship weapon batteries fired. Huge railguns fired metallic bullets at the main body of the ship at relativistic speeds, only to be deflected by the ring's lasers. Sub-relativistic missiles were carved to pieces, dispensing their atomic payload in deep space. The ship came closer and closer, and its reaction times suffered, until it failed completely. A railgun slug crashed into the rings, shattering them and continuing on to the main body of the ship, which bent at a ninety degree angle. Drones boosted toward the still-moving ship's engines and tore them out with much smaller railguns, and the dead ship coasted on aimlessly. As it drifted, weapons down, to the main body of the fleet, more drones flocked to it, slowly beginning to reconstruct it into a ship worthy of being part of the Moderates. Having done as much as they could, the drones changed the ship's momentum, sending it through the gateway where, hopefully, it would wind up in a proper shipyard. The remainder of the fleet, after a brief skirmish with the remaining Posthuman drones, continued onwards, to the station. The troopships, not intending to drift to a stop outside, burned more fuel and went faster than the rest of the craft. Captain Englestad's voice came on over AR, stunning Tony back into attention.
	“Alright, listen up. We're going to be in that station in a matter of minutes. This isn't a capture op, so don't go wasting time hunting down every last one of them. Rush through and find their gateway, and then go through. Do not hesitate, do not give them a chance to destroy the gate first. At the station to which you arrive, try to obtain location data, and transmit it back home- your squad leader has a quantum comm unit somewhere on their person. Stay with a squad leader. If your squad leader dies, first person to grab that quantum comm is the new squad leader. Once you find yourself on a station with no intact gateways, begin capture ops. If you manage to clear the station of hostiles, either they'll send some more in through a gate, which you can use to re-enter the gateway network, or they'll chalk it up as a lost cause and you get to sit on your heels for nine months while techies on Fomalhaut or Dirkje get around to patching the station into our network. That's it. Your only objective is to find the locations of as many stations as possible and to not die. I can't stress the not dieing part enough. Amen.”
	“Amen,” a thousand voices said in unison. Then, there was a scraping, a tearing of metal-on metal. The box they were in broke free, and the owners of the thousand voices found themselves directly outside a tiny, torus-shaped station with the owners of many thousands more voices. Alex and Janička were extremely close to the station, so they jetted over to it, landing with the silence of deep space. Jani's nanobots crawled over the station's structure, covering more of the iron into nanobots, until there was an opening the size of a manhole cover, at which point the movement of the bots ceased. Alex jumped in, carrying Tony in her chest. Jani followed immediately thereafter. Tony checked the group's network connectivity, to find that the massive servers were still intact and in radio range, providing the whole army with all the kinesics and targeting software they could possibly desire. This proved valuable when Alex and Tony began their tour of the station. The wall they had blasted through to enter had been the outside of the torus, meaning the floor of the station. After orienting themselves to the light gravity, they turned around to find a cluster of Shogun crossing the short horizon that torses had. Guns were pulled, laser pulses were fired, but the inert nanobots floated around the trio still, scattering the waves to cause only superficial damage to Janička's suit. Alex pulled out her rail rifle and opened up the targeting software. There were six Shogun, galloping towards them at a alarmingly rapid rate. Carefully, she pointed and pulled the trigger, the slug piercing the whole machine through the head. One fell. She repeated, destroying another two. The Shogun were, at this time, almost upon them, tearing through the nanobots. The sixth finger on each of their limbs possessed a serrated edge, and the remaining three were determined to sink it into the suits, to make them unsurvivable.
	The nanobots were not inert, much to Tony and Alex's considerable shock. They burrowed their way through the Shogun wherever they were touched, breaking limbs down into so many crawling little iron filings. The Shogun didn't stop their assault for a second, but the arms they needed to do it broke off as the nanobots metabolized them, slowly. Soon, there was just a heap of machines. Janička scooped some up and let them trickles through her fingers. Then, she shrugged, grabbed a handful, and left the heap for someone else to deal with.
	The torus' central hallway was long and subdivided into a couple levels and otherwise very, very difficult to deal with. But Tony made it reasonably possible by combining the data collected by all the squads on all the levels of the entire station into a single, distributed map. She also analyzed enemy movement patterns (for other squads had encountered other Shogun, dispatched almost as neatly as her own squad's efforts) to find likely locations of the gateway. Having highlighted the locations on the map, Alex and Janička made a beeline for the nearest one. It crawled with Shogun, all of whom noticed them, and all of whom were heavily armed and incredibly angry. Jani tossed the nanobots at them, but station autophages dropped from the ceiling to counter them like a sprinkler putting out a flame. Alex shrugged and took out a grenade. She tossed it lightly into the surging group and watched them stop to take fire on it, melting the casing into an unrecognizable mess. It exploded anyway, filling the halls with robot parts and opening up a segment of ceiling to space.
	“Antimatter,” Alex said simply. “Can't stop it. It hits matter, it goes off.” Janička grabbed a nearby Shogun head and let the nanobots that crawled on her suit convert it into another handful of the same dust. The explosion had dented the airlock to the room Tony strongly expected to be the gate chamber, rendering it unopenable by normal means. Nanobots destroyed it. Alex began, slowly, to appreciate Janička. She used her bots like they were just another limb, even though she knew the concentration required to coordinate the efforts of a self-replicating nanobot swarm, even with AI assistance, was immense. Tony, meanwhile, noticed that Jani never seemed to need haptics to use the swarm and wondered what, exactly, was in her cranium.
	The door open, they could see the gateway. It was weathered and battered, scarred by laser marks and almost entirely closed, but there was a tiny speck of beige that indicated that the gate had not broken. Which was no wonder, considering the conditions gateways were meant to remain intact under. Nobody manned the control computers, which a cursory inspection reveled was because they were very, very broken. Janička sighed, and got to work. Her nanobots permeated the needle structure, the computer- everything she could see. They sought to network connections.
	There was a thundering noise, which in space was peculiar. The metal of the station shook, and that vibration carried up to Alex's ears through her boots.
	“They're coming,” She said. She took out her rifle and stood guard outside the busted airlock.
	“Can't help,” Janička grunted. Alex rolled her eyes.
	“Our allies will be here as soon as they can. However, judging by the sound of them...” Tony said. She trailed off, her avatar biting her lip.
	“Yeah. I don't care what the stats say. I'm going to kill these fuckers. It'll be easy,” Alex said. She knew it would not, but that didn't bother her tremendously either.
	They came too quickly for her to remember to set traps. These were not Shogun, nor were they bunched up tightly enough to fall to a single antimatter grenade. The force were mostly bushes, with a few fliers. They came fast and thin, and Alex's targeting software helpfully informed her that she would not be able to deal with the entire group. A slight twitch of her finger shut that warning off. She emptied her mind of thoughts that were not relating to combat. Her mind worked on overdrive. She grabbed the laser pistol from her belt, keeping the rifle in her right hand. With the laser, she fired at a point far off from the cloud of machines piecing the floor., while she began plugging the bush's cores with the rifle. She swept the laser right, through the stampede, but not slow enough to harm anyone. The laser began to feel hot, and her efforts with the rifle were not making as much of a dent in the population. Frustrated, she swept the laser closer to her, again too quickly to damage the group. The nearest bush was roughly three meters away. She swept the laser to the left, dropped her rifle, and took out the knife. The bush leapt onto her, fractal manipulator tearing at the fabric covering her chest. She drove her knife deep into the thing's core, and it fell off limply. Her military jumpsuit rushed to cover the breach it left, but it was hardly successful. The oxygen rushed out of her suit and pressures dropped precariously. She swept the laser back out, away from her, and the floor dropped out from the rest of the stampede just as the laser's plastic conformed around her hand, burning like a poker out of the fire.. The bushes all fell down, the momentum of the falling metal sheet pushing them through another floor, too. The fliers remained. Luckily for Alex, she had another weapon. She pointed her right hand and hoped Tony was paying attention.
	Tony had been paying attention, while simultaneously also calling for help to anyone who would listen. She activated the implanted laser in Alex's hand, and a flier burned and fell under its beam. Alex swept the laser to each flier in order, methodically destroying each. The laser in her hand heated up too, but she was too numb to feel it. She staggered under oxygen and pressure loss, and after the third flier toppled to the ground, shutting her eyes and leaving herself undefended.
	Their allies, Tony knew, were still far too far away, and the line of fliers kept coming, carrying wicked hooks and blades. She felt trapped, powerless. The fliers moved ever closer. Janička wasn't done with the nanobots yet, so they couldn't have opened the gate and escaped that way. The first flier in line was so close to Alex's crumpled form.
	And then there was a ripping scream, and a huge slug ripped through the ceiling and clean through the entire station, crushing any fliers unfortunate enough to be in its pathway. A military drone, which seemed so tiny from the Wounded Stingray, came in, massive and imposing, its lasers veritable cannons, destroyed what remained of them.
	“Next time, I'm not going to be able to save ya! Be more careful,” said the cheerful voice of Braith. Dimly, Tony heard more footsteps, but she knew they were those of her allies.
	Alex wasn't breathing. Of course she wasn't breathing. Tony knew intellectually that she couldn't possibly be breathing after the attack. She screamed for help over AR. Alex's vital monitors dipped lower and lower. Her heart galloped arrhythmical and her brain screamed and starved. Tony wanted to think that she'd be okay. Tony very much wanted to think that she'd be okay. But she couldn't- literally could not stop doing the calculations. Alex was, very very likely, going to die. Tony thought of something desperate.
	“Janička! I- Alex! You have to help her!” She said, snapping Jani's concentration away from the work at hand.
	“What'm I supposed to be able to do for her, little lady?” Jani asked slowly.
	“She's not breathing. She- just- fix her with your nanobots. I know they can do that!” Tony said. Her breathing was ragged, her voice course like sea salt. A small part of the sprawling and multifaceted programming that was her mind thought how strange it was that the effects of grief were simulated. The rest thought of Alex, and how the death of each individual neuron in her brain managed to hurt more than the one that came before it.
	“They can,” Janička said slowly, “but I can't. I'm sorry, little lady, but-”
	“Try, Janička!” Tony screamed. Janička looked away from Tony's avatar in shame.
	“Nothing I could do for her would- I can't- it wouldn't help,” Janička said slowly, mournfully. The nanobots she was tethered to came back online, repairing machinery as best they could. Jani's brow furrowed in stress. “It can't help. This is just the way it's gotta be.”
	“There is no 'way it has to be', Jani! Death is a disease! If Alex was sitting here, dying of cancer, you'd do everything you could to get her help! To fix her sickness! And so I don't quite see why you're not helping your sick friend outside!”
	At the mention of “friend”, Jani jumped a little. But she settled back down, crouched on the floor in front of the gate arms.
	“Trying to heal Alex with these nanobots is like trying to heal cancer with a handgun. It's not how it works, little lady. Shit happens. Death is a disease, and sometimes we can't cure it. Sometimes it sneaks up on us, and there's nothing we can do but run. It snuck up on us, and Alex tripped.”
	“But-”
	“I don't have time to be explaining death to you right now. I have a mission to think of,” Jani said, and the nanobots fastidiously pulled at broken connections inside the machinery and moved back into position askance bits of metal.
	“It's not /fair/,” Tony said, knowing full well that that meant nothing.
	“Nothing's fair,” Jani said. She switched off her AR comms, and that was the end of that.
	Everything slowed down for Tony. The spaces between Alex's erratic heartbeats lengthened until there was a minute or more, subjectively, between them. Thus accelerated, Tony thought, hard. There had to be a way to save her. Concerning the alternative wasn't going to get her anywhere. She thought about what she had. Certainly, she had some medical databases within radio range. She queried them- nothing good. Neural death had already begun. Even if she could establish a regular heartbeat, there was no air to bring to the brain. If she could just get her somewhere breathable fast, and figure out how to restart her heart, she would be fine. Neural death had begun, but it was hardly significant or even irreversible.
	Irreversible, Tony thought. This wasn't Streams in the Birch, nobody wound up like Antonissen's unfortunate protagonist, crippled after a little bit of unprotected EVA. Moderate brain damage could be repaired, given sufficient medical supplies, quite easily after the initial trauma. And if Tony could do that for Alex during the initial trauma.
	There was a chance. Tony had remembered the restorative machines she had had installed in Alex's body back in the ship. Those machines included self-replicating machine interfaceable neurocytes. Tony was no Janička, and her experience with nanomachines was mostly limitted to watching them pick apart trash on a field trip when she was six. But she was a Versailles. As much as she could interact with humans like one of them, as much as she was human, there was a part of her that was software, and while it wasn't something she was fond of, she hoped it would impart insight on how to use the highly-specialized medical machines.
	There was another complication. Human brains were complicated. Tony knew, in principle, how they worked- neurochemical interactions and synapses  and all sorts of other buzz words. But she also understood, in principle, how a gateway worked, but she would never in a million years attempt an improvised and jury-rigged repair on one that was malfunctioning. The brain damage she could inflict was ridiculous. If she did what she was very strongly considering doing- what she had virtually decided upon doing- it might mean, for Alex, a fate worse than death.
	“There is no such thing as a fate worse than death,” Tony said, quoting from memory one of the more lucid quotes of Dirkje Antonissen, “and anyone who suggests otherwise is suffering from delusions of spirituality or a case of sour grapes.”
	Delusions of spirituality never once stopped Tony from doing anything because Tony did not have delusions of spirituality.
	Inside Alex's cluttered rib cage, a tiny ball burst open, filling the girl's bloodstream with a trickle of programmable, machine controlled protoneurons. And then there was a problem, because the bloodstream wasn't streaming so much as sitting there. Tony cursed, and thought, hard, about what she could do to solve the problem. That, at least, was easy. Part of the reason Alex had galvanizing pads. Clumsily, with stiff fingers and jerk arms controlled blindly by servos, Tony tore open Alex's jumpsuit, placed her hands where she thought one ought to place their hands for a defibrillation, and switched on the pads.
	There was a jolt and Alex's heart thudded to a stop. Tony reminded her heart that this is what hearts tended to do during defibrillation, but she couldn't quite convince herself of it. For a long, tense one minute, thirty eight and a half seconds, there was nothing. And then, weakly fluttering, a heartbeat. It was decidedly weak, like it would give out at any moment, but it was strong and regular enough to move the nanobot-rich blood to the brain. This, Tony thought, was the hard part.
	Operating the little things was an odd experience. With her AI's capacity for peculiar inputs, she understood every minutia of the limited sensory data they provided, but it wasn't parsed in a way analogous to any human sense. It was closer to proprioception than to sight or hearing, but the level of detail was incredible. Each individual neuron was completely visible.
	Many of the neurons had withered away into husks of what they once were. The machines could replace them, in function, but the connections they had with other neurons died with them, and those were not so easily replaced. The nanobots came with a weak AI that was capable of replicating the connections to other neurons as they ought to be, but that was under standard usage, repairs after the fact and not during.
	She steeled herself and went to work, doing the best she could.
Chapter Thirteen
	Janička straightened herself. The job was done, and the gate was functional. Tony's map had stopped updating once Alex had been killed, but she didn't need it to see the mass of troops behind her. They carried the dead and the injured on makeshift litters. Alex was prominent among them. She gave the command to open the gate, and the needle arms retracted flawlessly, yielding a gate seven feet in diameter. Wind from the gate buffeted them. She allowed the remaining troops to charge though, and gave the order to close before jumping through herself. There was no time to lose.
	They emerged in the usual gate chamber. The doors were shut like vices. She could have destroyed the doors with a nanoswarm, but Qiu insisted on letting the infowar corps hack the door control system. The difficulty in interfacing with completely foreign computer systems was negated by autotranslating AI and by the complete lack of digital security in the earily communal Posthuman society. The door soon opened, and they poured through the doors. Her AR comms back on, she received a constant stream of disordered and confusing information, berefit of any integration by a particular superintelligent AI. She cursed Tony's setimentality.
	The station was very different to its predecessor. It was an enormous O'Niel cylinder, similar to those of Fomalhaut. Leaving the gateway brought them “outside”, where they could see clearly the stars through the long window panels. Images of the sky were sent to the Eponymous Marshall, where, hopefully, they would be able to decipher where they were. Unlike the nicer Fomalhaut habitats, this station was bereft of any sort of vegetation, and seemed to be one very long, very large factory. The air was filled with a dense smoke, and Janička was glad that she still had her suit on. The suit's air intake siphoned oxygen from the atmosphere and scrubbed out the pollution and the smell. She breathed deeply and smiled.
	Sirens went off, and that jolted her back into reality. She had emerged into a street that would not look out of place on Terra, and people were streaming out of the factory doors, in all their myriad shape. The army had thinned out away from the gateway, and Janička was the only one still in front. This left the injured almost completely undefended, and the machines seemed to know that, bushes rolling and androids running towards her and the dead and dying. Quite without thinking, she turned around, jumped up (the gravity was almost but not quite Earth standard- roughly four fifths) and grabbed at a handhold in the sheer metal of the gate building, constructed by her nanobots almost without thinking. In this way she acended to the top, looking out over the crowd barrelling into the gate chamber. Over AR, she tried to send a detonate command to the dead's grenades, but the command bounced. “Tony,” she swore internally. Leaving the injured to their fate, she leapt onto a nearby factory's roof and continued freerunning across the length of the station.
Chapter Fourteen
	“Mother fucking shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Alex swore.
	“Oh, good, language center's working,” Tony said.
	“Was I dead?” Alex asked, her eyelids refusing to open.
	“Sort of? Listen, Alex, I need you to get up,” Tony said. There was a note of rust in her voice.
	What?
	There was a note of panic in her voice.
	“Fuck, Tony, I don't think I can.”
	“Did I paralyze you?” Tony said rustily.
	That was weird.
	“No,” Alex said, beginning to get slightly maroon over the thing with the words, “I'm just exhausted.”
	There it was again.
	“Thank god. So, there's some guys outside, and we kind of have to deal with them. So, if you'd like to try harder that'd be really nice!”
	“I can't, Asimov. Figure something out,” she said.
	“Okay, okay. I'm calling in reinforcements. Here's hoping, right?”
	“Right.”
	“So, I'm going to be turning back on your retinal screens. Tell me if what you see isn't what you expect to see,” Tony said. The screens flipped on and Alex saw music. She also saw Tony's avatar and the usual AR environment. The avatar and the environment were the music and the music was the avatar and the environment.
	“So?” Tony asked. Her voice was a light gray, and the twitches of her mouth as she spoke melodic.
	“What the fuck,” Alex said, noting that her voice was as red as her AR interface, and that her AR interface was as bassy and rough as her voice.
	“What, what's wrong, did I blind you?” Tony asked, and there was rust again.
	“I think you fucked something up for sure,” Alex said, “But I have no idea what.”
	“What's happening?” Tony said. Rust rust rust rust rust.
	“Ow.”