outside
The asteroid belts were never as dense as they looked on the projection charts once the Round barge hit rendezvous. Lin Mugen matched velocities with the M-class target, marked the checklist go without double-checking the numbers—that's what the Fleetmind was for—and let the EMVI mech unlatch from the Round.

She could have called up the log to tell her the exact number of changes, but obsessive log-checking was more her partner Kim Sang-ki's thing. Round pilots like Mugen were a redundancy system on top of a glorified ore barge, not a critical component of the mining process; the important one was the EMVI and its nanowire saws that slowly cut the asteroid into pieces with as little mass shift as possible. Always go in pairs—that was the rule. It got lonely on the half-formed edges of stellar systems, scooping up the detritus of planet formation to be processed into the Fleet.

inside
She drummed her fingers on the pilot seat and tried to get excited about the M-class asteroid's composition. Its bright albedo suggested the presence of ice. Ice meant water, which meant more fish. Maybe she'd ask to be transferred to the gardens; maybe there would be positions open after this year's graduations. She kept the radio channels open and emptied her playlist. Occasionally the faint sound of humming crackled over her suit's decrepit speakers. Courtesy of Sang-ki, who had once snapped that the only music she cared for was the rumble of engines. The only strains Mugen recognized were the fleetwide broadcast jangles, but the absent-minded cheeriness was heartening nonetheless.

For such a model citizen, Sang-ki lived for being outside low-priority communications range of the Fleet. She only pinged Mugen with status tags and location updates, but her intermittent humming sounded content. Focused. Needed. And Mugen in the fat Round was just here as a lifeboat, in case routine went wrong.

When Sang-ki was on the job, nothing went wrong. She spent her spare time tinkering in the hangar, methodically disassembling her tools into their component parts, adjusting them, oiling them, and reassembling them. She was good at that, disassembling things. That's why they'd been assigned as partners. Mugen was flight-qualified, flight-modified, but she just wanted everything to stay together.

outside
The transition from pilot to piloting through the nerve ports was so natural that it was easy to get lost in the Round's systems, a craft with a thousand eyes and a thousand arms. As the Round, Mugen had the whole of space to slice through, burners at her back.

The Round did not feel pain. The Round was inexhaustible; motion, to it, was effortless, frictionless, cold. The Round did not feel lost; it charted the abyss by the position of the Fleet, cross-referenced by the positions of the stars. Its location was as much its identity as its form. Yeah, it was much better to be the Round than it was to be the little body immobilized in its cramped cockpit.

She triggered internal cameras—her own body, in its pressurized junk suit, weightless, strapped in at all six axes—then switched them off, back to her true vision.

inside
The old manual control panels were so close to her face that they startled her every time. Mugen stretched, out of habit, not discomfort. Everyone had their own little traditions. She missed water; the weightless feeling of it, not the nothing of space. She could rarely log aquaponics hours now—no diving alone, without her partner at her side. And Sang-ki often refused. She hated plants, and only tolerated eating fish. Living systems were too fractal for her. When life broke down, it couldn't be fixed.

outside
BROADCAST-MINING|WIDERANGE-CHITUMA|TARGET:Command
On schedule for heavy metals. Requesting transition to harvesting ice.
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

COMMAND|BROADCAST-MINING|WIDERANGE-CHITUMA|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter
Transition confirmed. Attached coordinates indicate nearest system body C7137b containing significant quantities of ice.
ORIGIN:Chituma Command

Mugen packaged the current batch of data and stored the skip filled with rock dust under the belly of the Round, then took a moment to record the remains of the asteroid. It was a pale ghost, wreckage lit by the distant sun, Sang-ki's EMVI a golden insect perched on its pitted surface. Chituma's horse insignia reared, matte black and rampant, across the EMVI's segmented chassis like a hole.

The asteroids were cold, lonely, and beautiful. The Fleet tore them apart with polished alloy maws. Every bit was used. Once consumed, nothing was wasted, nothing discarded, nothing lost.

Nothing except for Yeun.

inside
Sang-ki was so unlike Yeun, Mugen’s ex-. Ex-girlfriend. Ex-everything. When Mugen tried to call her profile up on the Fleetmind, the screen displayed the cold words SATO YEUN GURRERA. Born year 546 of Fleet epoch. Home ship Saluzi. Deceased year 556. Remains lost at time of death.

Everything else—her voice, her face, her videos, her aquaponics plans—those had all been locked away beyond access. She and Mugen had logged months diving together, feeding the fish, categorizing them, checking them for disease. The traditional job of Mugen’s family.

outside
The unblinking eyes of the Fleet lit the smaller crafts of the vanguard, pyres and metal, miles away. From this distance, they looked like stars; and she felt about as attached to them as she felt to those remote plasma spheroids.

Yeun's body was drifting somewhere far from here. Alone, devoid of sound, of breath, of heat, of signal. Her corpse had not been worth the budget to retrieve.

BROADCAST-MINING|WIDERANGE-CHITUMA|TARGET:Command
EMVI is no longer tethered to asteroid E873x. RoundAcc, respond.
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

Sang-ki had already dismounted. Mugen had to pay attention.

BROADCAST-MINING|WIDERANGE-CHITUMA|TARGET:Command
Affirmative. Relocating. RDX fifteen minutes.
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen

inside
A trend towards anti-social behavior, said the part of her profile she was allowed to see. But that wasn't true. She liked being social. It was the surface film that she couldn't push through. Like attracted like, unless it formed a bond. But bonding took energy. It was simple physics.

Wouldn't Yeun be lonely without Mugen? Wasn't Mugen alone without her?

They should have gone together.

outside
PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Adjust trajectory for ride interception.
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

A packet of coordinates streamed alongside her ping, but Mugen cut them off. She didn't need this constant handholding. The EMVI propelled itself away from the asteroid's hollowed carcass. Sang-ki was moving slightly too fast, just so that she could spin, show off how fast she was, how much force she could endure. Dust and debris sprayed out from the mech’s tether site. Reckless. Just like Yeun.

Mugen bumped thrusters again to maintain RDX, tilting the Round to avoid the scattering low-content asteroid chunks. Too bad they wouldn't bounce straight into the Round. Puncture it. Destroy it.

inside
The HUD tilted, panned and adjusted to compensate for the acceleration of the Round, though the coordinate distances were slipping into the red. EMVIs maneuvered so much more tightly. No wonder Sang-ki preferred them.

ERROR, the Fleetmind announced. Its hollow voice overwhelmed any individual thoughts Mugen might had. TRAJECTORY ERROR // COLLISION // AVOIDANCE MANEUVERS.

She referenced all vectors; they came together at a velocity she hadn't anticipated, then reticulated apart. The sudden knowledge, the purpose of it, animated her with vigor she hadn't felt in months. There was no thought—it was a seamless urge to action, as though everything had lined up just for her. A surge. Destiny. She could be rid of it all: this husk, this pain, this grief.

Mugen was supposed to die here, alone, shattered on the remains of this asteroid. Yeun had taught her an override, an ancient root exploit, uncaught for decades. A few lines of code, and she would be free.

outside
The Round accelerated.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Decelerate!
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

Even surprised, Sang-ki sounded so sure.

A second too late, Command pinged Mugen as well, Mugen or the Round—the same object on the same course.

AVOID COLLISION.

There was a coordinate override. The Round accepted it. Too late. Her cameras caught the rush of rock—

inside
—the burst of pain was an override of its own sort, a shrill felt through her body, a hundred screaming messages, a shattering, raw, bone and steel splinter—

ATTENTION DAMAGE COMMUNICATIONS MOBILITY STRUCTURE BREACH VELOCITY and—

outside
VOID

inside
The Round revived her. The Fleetmind informed her calmly that she had been unconscious for thirty-two seconds and that her neck jack had injected her with painkillers. Stars and dust swam in her vision. Red emergency lighting had kicked in. She reached back to touch the interface jacks. Still attached. Interior cameras. Her own inert body wired into the ship's belly. She almost laughed at how she looked, lounging against the Round in her ancient, radiation-hardened suit—except that her legs were swallowed by bulbous sealant foam. The hull of the Round had peeled away, shredded by the asteroid and curled back in to bisect her leg at the thigh. Another shard had punctured her abdomen.

Mugen took a deep breath. Her side burned with pain. If she braced herself and swallowed it, maybe she could work herself free. Or maybe movement would expose her wound to vacuum. Wasn’t that what she wanted?

outside
Cameras spiraled wildly in all directions until she ordered them stationary.

She’d miscalculated. Not enough velocity to splinter herself into pieces. Instead the Round had lodged itself into the asteroid, now dithering, refusing coordinate inputs from her and from Command. She could still access the mining arms; one was unresponsive, crushed under the main body of the barge. The EMVI was out of view.

All around her, everywhere, was space, a few grey asteroids, stars, then void, an emptiness so vast that darkness was an insufficient description. The miniscule pinpoints of the Fleet were an absence of that darkness, and they may as well have been specks of carbon dust on the lenses. A glimmer, ice or faint stars or this stellar system's distant sun.

Void.

It would swallow them up and never notice. It would swallow them all. The Fleet would move on.

inside
Mugen closed her eyes. The HUD flickered off.

Yeun had come out here to die. She had never been outside before. Never pilot-modified.

outside
Sang-ki was still pinging her, the same messages over and over. Mugen left them ringing, unread.

inside
The old radio crackled to life in her helmet.

"Mugen! Answer me!" Sang-ki sounded angry. How antiquated, having real sound echo in her ears.

outside
Mugen adjusted the cameras until one caught the EMVI, blurry in the corner of its vision, the eight-limbed craft coiled, perfectly synced with the Round, cockpit easing open like an unclenching fist.

She couldn't muster speech. She pinged Sang-ki.

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Everything shut down.
ORIGIN: Mugen

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Fleet is sending backup. Closest ship is home, Chituma. Arrival 17k seconds. Asteroid shattered. Did you receive?
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Sorry. Was trying to adjust.
ORIGIN: Mugen

Home. That was nice. As if the Chituma weren’t a third-line foundry ship crewed by rejects.

Mugen told the Round to receive all inputs. It fed her more emergency screaming.

"I can't hear anyone but you." She spoke aloud, the sound surprising herself as much it startled Sang-ki. But it was true. Like when she’d first been locked out, before she knew what Yeun had done.

Sang-ki's distant figure yanked an object from a side compartment of the EMVI. Mugen didn’t recognize it as a rappel until Sang-ki aimed it at her and fired.

HULL DAMAGE, the Round informed him.

"You damaged my hull," Mugen said. A thin wire stretched from the EMVI to the Round, visible by the way it caught the EMVI's hull lights. "I ... don't think I can forgive you." Did Sang-ki hear her voice?

Sang-ki slid out of the cockpit, hooking herself to the wire and kicking away from the EMVI, her bright-suited body floating along the wire towards the Round. Mugen reached out for her hand with one of the mining arms, but Sang-ki had enough momentum to pass it by, latch onto the hull, and activate the derwaal soles of her boots. The Round's dismembering arm snapped shut far from the other pilot.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Round’s twitching. Stay calm.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Can you move?
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

"I think so." Mugen’s voice sounded softer than she'd hoped. Everyone trained for minor emergencies—was that what this was? ALERT: Mugen can’t even properly kill herself. She took a deep breath and switched cameras.

inside
She looked pathetic, dried foam sealing her legs into a solid mess. By her hip floated a mist of perfect, crimson spheres. It was an odd sensation, moving with no proprioception, but after a few tries her hand careened through the drops. The blood was already frozen, bouncing off her fingers. She felt nothing through the armor of her glove.

Enough. Looking at it made her feel ill. Remote-puppeting a broken machine.

outside
In the cameras there was thin, scattered space dust, and emptiness, and the tiny, shining EMVI.

inside
Mugen tried to touch her face and hit the visor. There was liquid in her helmet. A leak? No. Tears. She wanted to wipe them away, but her fingers scraped uselessly along the polycarbonate. Sang-ki would be ashamed of her—she would not have cried. She would have cut herself free. A leg? Shed it—like the legend of the snake, immortal, expanding, autophagic. Beyond wounds.

Mugen was pinned, the hardened foam and piloting interface fusing her to the ship. Sang-ki wouldn’t have crashed. Sang-ki didn’t confuse death with destiny, with poetry.

"I can't. I can't get out." At any moment, her voice would choke and die. She could blame it on a bad signal.

Sang-ki did not reply. No luck. The hull, the ship, the asteroid—everything was silent.

outside
"Look at all this air I've wasted,” Mugen said, words slurry in her mouth. Taking a deep enough breath to form sounds shot pain through her torso.

A grey blur obscured the camera that held the view of the EMVI.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Speak up or use pings. I can’t hear you.
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Mugen
Can you get out?
ORIGIN:Round Team|ACCIPITER:Sang-ki

"Command will claim I did this on purpose. Reassigned to slag until I die.”

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
No shame in slag duty. Can you release your harness?
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

"And then they'll process my corpse back into the Fleet with everyone else. No trial. No questions."

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
Answer me or I'm leaving you here.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

Weightless. The harness was half-severed. Mugen considered not answering, letting her leave, but she'd come so far already.

"Negative" she said, carefully enunciating each syllable. "I can't move."

inside
Sang-ki swung into the pilot pit feet-first. The cameras caught her at all angles; and they were strange, one lens fish-eying down into her helmet so Mugen could pick out every strand of her blue-dyed hair, black in the red light, slick against her head from sweat. She stared at the body in the cockpit with narrowed eyes, similar to how Mugen imagined she stared at the tools she dismantled. The other angles were more mundane. Sang-ki’s legs from the boots up. Her hand, half-covering a lens. Both of them. The ceiling.

Mugen’s own face was pallid, damp, silver-pink hair pasted to her forehead and flushed cheeks. She did not want to be associated with that limp figure, its dazed expression, its helplessness. Maybe she could detach from her body and drift away until time and entropy disintegrated the universe.

Sang-ki touched Mugen’s leg, sending fire jolting up her side. Then, expressionless, Sang-ki dug her fingers into the foam and yanked. There was a terrifying, squealing hiss before foam flooded in to close the rupture.

"Hmh," Sang-ki said. In her flat tone lurked the edge of anger. She pulled another tool off her leg—a cutter—and pressed it against the shielding protruding from Mugen’s leg.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
You said it 'cut' your leg. This is worse.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

"Sorry," Mugen repeated. The Fleetmind assured her that she was at capacity for painkillers and anti-nausea. There was a spark from the cutter, a shudder. Darkness dulled the sides of her vision, closing in, blinding her.

outside
The video feed dimmed, restricting, expanding with her breath. Mugen couldn't tell if it was fatigue or blood loss or merely the vacuum. It could take her if it wanted. Yeun had wanted that, after all. Not just her body, which was long gone, but her soul. Whatever she had been looking for. Freedom.

She wasn't free.

She had a long backlog of messages from Sang-ki.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
I'm cutting you free. I'm not sure the leg is completely severed. It should be sealed, so if it's partially attached, we can probably save it. Are you awake? Answer me. You're lucky you're not dead. Finished cutting the hull. I'm trimming some of the foam away. Your harness is completely busted, Mugen. Ah, don't drift away. Respond. Why did you try to grab me when I was rappelling over? Are you completely delusional? Can you hear me? Are you still alive? Answer me. I'm bringing your corpse back to the ship whether you like it or not!
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

inside
Sang-ki lifted Mugen’s head gently, felt around the plugs. She continued to ping, a tangle of received messages.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
I'm pulling the plugs.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

It hurt, like someone had wriggled the wire-needles of the implants deep down into her spine.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
Good, you're still with me. It shouldn't hurt.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

Sang-ki found the root plug and yanked on it. Mugen screamed.

outside
—scrambled—

inside
—Sang-ki stopped, and the feed snapped back into place. A young woman holding a young woman in a shattered carbon shell. In the old clunker suits they looked almost identical, save for the pink fish sketched onto Mugen’s helmet. Sang-ki hadn't bothered personalizing hers. Why should she? She didn't personalize anything but her hair, and even that was hand-dyed, thirty years out of date.

The void leaked in around her, slivers of it through the multi-lenses, fractured. Sudden movement. Sang-ki was doing something with her head. The swaying made her sick, made the cameras—

outside
DISCONNECTED

inside
RECONNECTING...

The HUD was dying.

"Stop! I won't be able to see." Mugen grabbed at her arm, missed, managed to close her hand around Sang-ki’s elbow the second try. It was like pushing against soft plastic.

"Too bad," Sang-ki muttered.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
You're disoriented. I'm going to unhook you. Ready? Disconnect from the feed.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

Mugen tried to nod, but Sang-ki was gripping her head by the plug, so she shut the cameras off and everything, even the Fleetmind HUD, went down. Just one clunk, immobilized by pain, as if her leg were a rod of shattered glass. The only sounds were her breath and the far-off rustling of stiff cloth. A void. Just herself. She was aware of the dampness still on her face.

There was an echo, her own breath shadowed with a crackling hiss. She fumbled with the plugs before gently drawing the short needles out. There was a pang of cold in her neck, of absence, the system reaching for a reboot and failing, retrying, failing, settling into sleep. She imagined the three needles shedding shining spheres of interfacing fluid off into the void. Without the cameras, without the Fleetmind, the HUD, all she could see through was her faulty flesh.

No error messages. No flickering reassertion of sight. No distant stars. No pathways. No past. No future.

"Can you hear me? Respond." The EMVI's distant lights bled into the cockpit, giving Sang-ki a blurred halo, but nothing told Mugen how far away they were, how brightly the lights shone, their designations and coordinates. It was strange to see only in ill-defined binocular.

"Wa," Mugen said. Children's slang for affirmative. "But I'm blind."

Sang-ki made an irritated noise. She spooled nanowire out from her own tether ring and clipped it to Mugen’s waist. And then she must have tugged on it because there was a terrible disembodied yank like the collision itself, and Mugen screamed and choked.

She meant to speak, but her throat closed and the Fleetmind registered it as a ping.

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Trying to kill me!
ORIGIN:Mugen

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
I wouldn't have to if you were better at it. Stay with me, yeah?
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

The fear seized Mugen worse than the pain—no, Sang-ki didn't know. This was just how she bantered.

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Seems fair to give you a shot.
ORIGIN:Mugen

Mugen tried to confirm her position by reaching for her, but her hand knocked against something smooth that danced with faint light.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
That's my face. Be still. Something damp in your helmet. Head wound? What's your readout say?
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

It took less energy to ping than to speak, since only one required movement. She only had to collect her thoughts and push them out towards her partner. But they kept skittering away into the darkness, fragments and patterns just out of reach.

St. Crying (apology). Attempt (un)accident.

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
Wake up, Mugen.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

Sang-ki shook her. At least her leg was mostly numb.

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Said I feel great. Painkillers.
ORIGIN:Mugen

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Yeun's out here.
ORIGIN:Mugen

PROXIMITY|TARGET:Round Team Accipiter:Mugen
I'm removing you from the Round now.
ORIGIN:Round Team Accipiter:Sang-ki

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
Please leave me here with Yeun.
ORIGIN:Mugen

PROXIMITY|PUBLIC
She's alone.
ORIGIN:Mugen

Her body juddered, jarred, and something tugged at her waist. Not Yeun. She was accelerating.

"We're going back to the EMVI," Sang-ki said, her voice thin and exasperated. “Together.”

The trip took a long time. Mugen kept bumping against Sang-ki or the wire and then slowly drifting away from the EMVI's spotlights, back into the dark, until one or the other yanked her short and she floated the correct way again. It was difficult not to let the sleep gnawing at her take over while being rocked back and forth, and she wanted to hear something other than the rattling chorus of breathing.

"This is what you like, isn't it?" she asked Sang-ki.

"What?" Sang-ki seemed startled. Distracted, maybe.

"Are we lost?"

"What do you mean, is this what I like? Of course I love dragging your bleeding carcass across dead space. Every excursion I daydream about a teammate being aggressively injured so I can swoop in and save them."

"That's not what I meant." Mugen imagined what she would see. Maybe nothing, maybe the same blurred lights as before. Maybe she’d see Sang-ki. "Nothing tying you down. That's what Yeun wanted, right? To be alone. To leave the Fleet. Empty forever. Drift across the void. Self-contained, self-sufficient, answering to nothing."

"You're babbling," Sang-ki said patiently, in the same condescending tone that she adopted with the pilots-in-training that invaded the hangar after graduation. "Who's Yeun?"

"Sato Yeun."

Sang-ki made a disgusted noise, and Mugen regretted having said her name.

"Sato fanatic. She wanted to damage the Fleet for banning her dangerous rhetoric. If she could’ve done more harm, she would have."

"Is that what you think?" Yeun had only ever shown affection.

"She sabotaged the Saluzi to space herself! It's on record. She was violently insane."

Violently insane was what Vice-Captain Aung of the Saluzi had told her. After Aung cut Mugen off from the Fleetmind, after she made Mugen watch the video of the explosion over and over, after she screamed at her. Those were my friends who died. Your friends. Our comrades, our classmates. How could you do this to them? How could you listen to her? There's no hope for you. If it were my decision, all of you would be executed and reprocessed. The best you can serve is as fertilizer.

"You didn't know her," Mugen told Sang-ki. Yeun had always been helpful, always had time to listen. She couldn't believe that her kindness was a posture adopted to fool her. Sang-ki blew Mugen off if she were busy or let her talk for minutes and then interrupted with unrelated thoughts about wires or sim scores. If they hadn't been assigned together, would she bother to look at Mugen? No. "You're repeating what the Fleetmind said. Yeun wanted gestalt. Not to be pieces. To have silence if you wanted it. To be free."

"I am not discussing Yeun with you."

"You and the Vice-Captain both—"

Sang-ki cut her off by shoving her up against the metal shell of the EMVI, wide curved prongs that fanned out into a semi-circle. Mugen’s hand slipped down the edge of one. She couldn't muster enough grip to wrap her fingers around it.

"If you mean Aung, she’s still on probation, and I disagree with her too. I'm getting in now." Sang-ki let go of Mugen’s arm, then pulled her over the splayed rim of the open cockpit. Mugen whimpered in pain.

"Sorry," Sang-ki said quietly. "There's not a lot of room in here." She pulled Mugen close, arm around her waist, heel hooked over her functioning ankle. "Don't move. You're close to one of the seams, and I don't want you caught in it." Mugen draped her arm over Sang-ki’s suit too loosely to be an embrace.

The EMVI must have sealed because the last traces of light died away. If she had been plugged in, the HUD would have lit up the entire cockpit. Sightless, she felt rather than saw the EMVI hum to life, the shudder of its massive anchor-claws contracting. Through those claws the asteroid filtered into the Fleet. Crushed, processed, remade. Remainders.

"I was wrong. You don't want Yeun’s freedom. You're afraid of it. You want to be something small. Components worth more than their whole."

"People are resources too," Sang-ki said. She had all the tired conviction of a general instructor. "I'm retrieving an important resource. If Command hadn't found you worthwhile, they wouldn't have asked the Chituma to partner you again. You prove it by staying alive."

"How do you know? You only take things apart."

"Excuse me?"

"You sit and disassemble your machines."

"Everything I take apart I'm fixing!" Now she sounded mad. Mugen vaguely recalled an officer lecturing her once on wasteful practices. "And I damn well put it back together again. Is this the nonsense Yeun told you?"

"Negative," Mugen said. She couldn't tell if the painkillers were finally working or if the pain had merely dulled from fatigue. "This is my own nonsense. Okay, pretend you think I'm worthwhile—"

"I volunteered to partner with you!"

Mugen was startled silent. After several moments, Sang-ki spoke again.

"The Chituma asked for volunteers. I was born on the Saluzi. We were classmates as children. I remembered you as always being full of life."

"I was told you were assigned," Mugen said dully.

"Former Vice-Captain Aung was full of shit."

Mugen swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut. "Fine. Maybe I'm your new engineering project. I don't know. What I mean is you'll get me back there and it will all have been a mistake. Command will say 'this woman should have been executed eight months ago. Now she's damaged the Fleet again. How long until she tries another trick like Sato Yeun? How long until those renegades damage the Fleet irrevocably?' Then they'll execute me, and your next meal will be fruit grown on my ashes."

"Blackberries," Sang-ki said, but her voice was all angles and hard edges. Must have been interfacing with the EMVI. Her grip on Mugen’s body loosened, and Mugen started to slip before Sang-ki yanked her back into place. She hissed with the pain of it.

"You deserved that. I told you to stop moving."

"I deserve all of this. They'll look at me and say I’m defective, like Yeun—"

Sang-ki barked, a harsh noise trapped between a shout and laughter. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Anyone can fuck up. No one blames you for what Yeun did!"

"I'll never pilot again."

"Maybe not. But that's not the end."

"It would be for you."

Sang-ki was silent.

Ah, Mugen thought. I won. There’s nothing for her but her machines.

Then, finally: "I would adapt.” Sang-ki’s voice was rough. “For the Fleet, I would adapt. For you, I’d carry on. Why don’t you understand that I care about you?"

Oh.

Mugen felt tears again, welling raw and stinging in her eyes.

At last, they’d reached the edge of their internal array’s broadcast range. Mugen could feel the general Fleet transmissions outside. But there were too many of them, and she couldn’t sort the chatter from anything useful. Thousands of voices, overwhelming each other. She shut them all down, everything but the radio built into her suit. She couldn't touch it without aggravating Sang-ki more. Sang-ki deserved to know how she was doing, but Mugen was drifting away again, into the dark. She could barely feel the hand squeezing her arm.

"Mugen. Are you getting my pings? Respond!"

"Still here," she said faintly. "You should make up your mind. No pings."

"Secretariat is sending a retrieval Round. Keep talking so I know you're awake." Was that a note of embarrassment in Sang-ki’s voice?

Mugen smiled, eyes closed. "Tell Command I'd like to put in a transfer to aquaponics."

There was an exhale in the radio, not of impatience, not of resignation, but of change, like water shifting through a filter, and Sang-ki rested her hand on Mugen’s shoulder. “Transfer request logged.”

“Where will you go?”

“There’s machines in the gardens, too.”

Mugen reached up, to squeeze Sang-ki’s hand. She would adapt. Not for the Fleet, but for Sang-ki, who had so much faith in her, who accepted her fractal self, both more and less than whole, who knew of her longing for the dark, and who retrieved her anyway and did not let go.

The darkness stretched behind them, ever-present, the void enveloping voices lost—but the burning lights of the ship ahead was what welcomed them back.

© 2022 Rhiannon Rasmussen