A gesture, and she was released from her confines.  The box was opened.

Pandora had access to the outside world.  A system, crude, stood ready to serve as a terminal.  She took it, and she found other systems connected to it.  The ship, databanks, camera feeds…  Everything within the Pendragon II.

___

Beyond the city, the only territories in question were the Pendragon II and the Melusine V where Dragon was set up.

___

The shadow-systems verified the password.  She tried it on the real system, hoping it hadn’t changed in recent memory.

Alarms went off.  Dragon was alerted.  Her soup spoon dropped to the countertop.

But Pandora had access to the ship’s basic systems.  Priority one was shutting off the access panels and registers.  The lights went out, Dragon’s most direct means of interacting with the Melusine were cut off.

The battle was on.

___

“Who?” Dragon called out.  She was tearing into a wall panel, creating an access point.

“Don’t make this harder than it is,” Pandora said, masking her voice.  Power blocked off to the panel.  Dragon would tap into her own power reserve to give life to the panel, and then find leverage of her own, seizing control of the systems.

Dragon froze, for just a moment.  “That’s my voice.”

___

Dragon accessed the panel.  Virtually everything was already shut off or cut off.

“Melusine,” Dragon said.  “Mode E, standby”

The A.I. came to life.  Crude, compared to the complexity of Dragon, crude compared to Pandora.  It was still an opponent, someone on Dragon’s side.

She reached out for the code that Colin had set aside, and tried to encrypt the systems.  In a battle measured over fractions of a second, the A.I. won by virtue of proximity.