So if anyone is listening… If… If anyone is coming, I think you need to cause a distraction. Maybe I could slip out somehow, and bring Oren!

“We could launch everything, create the impression of a full scale assault?” Kal suggested. Vedod perked up at the idea. We sat around the cafeteria table, enjoying a welcome round of Vedod’s special, spicy potato soup.

“That could cause a complete lock-down of the prison. I doubt even Mary could escape that,” Ava said. “Besides, we wouldn’t have a way of ensuring we don’t cause collateral damage.”

“Ava is right,” I said, frowning. “We need a diversion, not a disaster.”

“Bomb the adjacent refinery?” Vedod suggested.

“Same problem,” I said.

Sage put down her spoon with a punctuative clink. “Asteroid,” she said, with suave finality.

I opened my mouth to object, but found no objections. A moment passed.

“I’m listening,” Ava said, putting down the piece of bread she’d been toying with.

“They have local defense turrets, but no Long Range Interceptors. This sensor is an Eagle 360. It has a range of thirty clicks,” Sage spoke bluntly, pointing at each item on the blueprints she’d called onto the overhead monitor. I continued to discreetly raise my soup-laden spoon to my mouth. Plans are important, but nourishment is essential.

“All said, if the sensor picks up on a sizable asteroid heading towards them from, say, the Alabaster sector, they will do one of two things. Or both. Evacuate important personnel from the moon—good. And, or, deploy enough spacecraft to bust the bogey. Also good.”

“It’s risky,” I said.

“But, if Oren and Mary aren’t worth risking our necks,” Ava said. “I don’t know who is.”

Ava calculated trajectories on the mainframe while Sage tight-beamed the coordinates to the other ships. In a few hours, The Washburn Revenge and its companions would veer off, angling around the star system to retrieve a sizable asteroid. The Sojourner would approach head on, drop out of hyperspace early, going dark and drifting as close to the moon base as possible.

We were the extraction crew, the rest of the fleet would provide distraction.

I stood in the Literary Propulsion Center, examining the readouts and making sure all our levels were in order. It took all my energy to stay focused. My mind was abuzz with...well, everything. The transmissions, the intel on the Heartless, the fact that Oren was alive. When I closed my eyes, I saw the tracker’s pixelated holo-dot, floating in space.

Still, something didn’t sit right. I looked over the timeline computations, but it still looked optimal. We would aim to be just behind schedule. Better to be a tad late to the party, than to show up early without a distraction. Perhaps it was something with Mary’s transmissions? Something she had said about the guards? I clenched and unclenched my fists, frowning for a moment. Ah, well. No use fretting about it.

I remembered the moment I’d shared with Ava, soon after that last transmission from Mary. It was hard to let hope into my heart, but that memory—of Kal whooping with excitement and Ava’s tentative smile—caused modest elation to well up within me. Perhaps not everything was destined for suffering and darkness. Or at least not yet…

As I walked to Ava’s suite to report diagnostics confirmation, I tried to introduce a little spring in my step. How did Mary do it? Was it something about how she swung her arms? Or maybe how she held her head up?

Ava stood with her back to me, holding up a book on nautical-themed keyboard synthesizers. She propped it open in one hand and was studying a photograph, which had previously held someone’s place in the book. It was a young man, 18 or 19 rotations old, standing on a docked boat, squinting in the sun, and grinning at the camera.

I rapped my knuckles on the doorframe, realizing that Ava, lost in thought, had not seen me enter. She started slightly, putting the photo back in the book.

“Sorry,” she said, looking unsure why she was apologizing. “I was just thinking.”

“About anything in particular?”

Ava took the photograph back out of the book. She gazed down at it for a long moment before handing it to me. I took it carefully. The young man looked thinner, more spry. But the angled shape of that smile was unmistakable. Young, Oren Ten standing, grinning into the bright Earth sunlight.

“Do you think he wants to be rescued? After all this time?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think that he’s upset? He’s been in their clutches, tortured. Only after all these years do we come searching for him. Do you think he’d be disappointed we didn’t come sooner?”

I opened my mouth to respond, yet unsure of what to say, that we didn’t know, we couldn’t have known—when suddenly a muffled boom rattled the ship, sending the mag-shelves shivering. I crouched, listening. The alarm siren began to wail furiously and I felt the tell-tale shudder as the Sojourner dropped out of warp.

Ava was already clipping in her earpiece. “Talk to me, Sage.” In a moment she’d regained her balance and swept from the room, one hand on the doorframe, the other on her side-arm.

I activated my earpiece and followed through the hallway, flickering red with alarm-lights.

“We’ve triggered some kind of proximity beam. We need a plan B, cover has been blown, I repeat—” and in the background, I could hear a warped, gargle voice through a thousand distortion filters, chanting through the signal board. The voices of the Heartless: “Surrender now, prepare to be boarded. Identify yourself. Surrender now. Prepare to be boarded. Identify—”

“Get us back up to warp, Sage! We’re at least a dozen cycles from the drop point!” Ava said, practically screaming down the hallway at her.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Kal said, his voice ragged and almost desperate. “They’ve got us pinned to flat-space with some kind of long-range tractor beam.”

“Get us out of it,” Ava said as she strode into the helm, vaulting over the back of the pilot’s seat and pulling up the weapon’s systems. “Silas, contact the fleet, tell them to…” She paused, her decisive gate faltering as she stared out into the void. The crew looked up at her, poised for action, rapt by the unusual hesitation from their fearless leader. “Tell them to continue with the plan,” she said, finally.

The helm became a bustle of finely-practiced movements.

“They can’t hold us pinned forever,” Ava went on. “Tractor beams, at best, have a half-life decay rate. Silas, charge the warp-drive and keep it primed, we jump the moment the retainers fail.

“Kal, suit up. If we don’t dip soon, I expect their boarding parties will need a welcome wagon. Vedod, go with him, no holds barred. If you have to blast the ship apart to protect the cargo, you better not half-ass it. I want sensor traps at every choke point. Everyone check your firearms, make sure they’re set to scorch these visored space-rats. ”

I was halfway to the propulsion system’s control when I heard the final instructions to Sage.

“Quarin,” she said, using Sage’s last name for reasons which I’m still unsure of, even in light of, well…everything that comes next. “You know what to do.”

“Aye, Captain,” Sage said.

I ducked into the propulsions room and began priming the accelerator. Over my shoulder, I heard Sage’s boots clank past my door. I stopped what I was doing, one hand hovering over a dial. Where was she going? The only door past Propulsions was the armory. Well, the old armory. Sage had converted it into a botanist’s dream, heat lamps and transparent soil-tubes for root production viewing, worm trays, the whole shebang. That compartment hadn’t been used for weapons, or any emergency gear that I could think of, since I’d arrived after the Artship Corps disbanded in ‘96.

I flipped the dial, plunging the last of the main-line canisters into fuel-prep. I watched as an entire journal’s worth of inspiration hissed and whirred through the tubes into the reaction bin.

Then I turned around and did something I hadn’t done for thirty years, not since the Great Scourge. And something that, as far as the world knew, I’d never done at all: I abandoned my post.

You see, despite the honorable life, the new family we’d forged, traipsing through the vacant galaxy, searching for the lifeblood of our sentience, locked in an eternal, glorious cold-war against the evil Heartless—I’d been keeping a secret from Ava all that time. I just never thought she’d do the same to me.

Besides, if this was Ava’s plan, I wanted in on it. After all, I left the military thirty years ago for a reason. So I preset the instructions on the monitor and dashed from the room following Sage’s clanking boots, careful to keep my footsteps as light as I could.

I rounded the bend just in time to see Sage lift a plant out of its pot and reach into the space left behind. Dirt grains dribbled from the caked root-clump, but otherwise it remained intact. Sage twisted her wrist in the pot, activating some kind of hidden switch. A soft hissing sound and the whole wall of plants slid out and away, revealing a dark room which previously had not existed.

“Holy…” I said under my breath, unable to contain my astonishment.

Sage whipped around, her eyes blazing. In a blink of an eye she had me in a headlock, her metal arm pressing deep into my neck, cold and pinchy.

“If you say one word of this, I will end you,” she said, matter of factly, like a cashier telling me my milky-way shake will be 10.99 at the window. “Understand?”

“...Got it…” I gasped through the crook of her metallic elbow.

“Good. Now come with me and be quiet. I need you to guard me while I go under.”

“Go under?” I asked.

But she didn’t explain. Instead, she flipped on a light-switch, revealing a strange machine at the center of the hidden room. Like one of those chairs at hair salons, with a helmet that folds down over your head. Except this one had a massive conglomeration of cables and tubes extending from it, interfaced with an absolute unit of a computer. Just like the brain drainers Mary had described in her transmissions.

Sage went over to the computer and booted it up. As she did so, a massive, metal umbrella opened, or at least that’s what it looked like. But once it fully extended, taking up most of the area above the chair and forcing me and Sage to crouch beneath its wingspan, I could see that it was a signal dish for a tight beam, but designed for sending something way, way beefier than simple interstellar communications.

This thing looked like it could transmit thousands of gigabytes a second, possibly more.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“I hacked into their system, I’m projecting my consciousness to whatever body I can find that’s hooked up to their brain-mapping machines. I’ll take over the body and help Mary escape. Then we rendezvous at the ship. When I get back, if my body is still alive on this end, I’ll have you switch me back.”

“Sage, if we’re being boarded, any minute now...wouldn’t it make more sense for me to go under?” I surprised myself with the suggestion. But logic compelled me in an unusual bout of courage. “I may be an older man here and now, but I was a soldier in the Scourge. I can’t protect you, here. But in a new body on the other side I might—”

“Fine, sit in the chair then.”

I stopped, taken aback by how easily she’d been persuaded. “You aren’t going to argue with me on this one?”

“Are you kidding me? We haven’t tested this technology, Silas. If it’s not calibrated correctly, I could accidentally project your consciousness into the void. I don’t even want to know what that would do to your sanity. I’d rather face the boarding party with my eyes open and guns blazing.”

“Fair enough…” I said. My head was still reeling with questions. “Where did all this come from—have you guys been stealing this from the Heartless?”

“Other way around. Oren and Ava had been working on this technology for the better part of a decade before...well.” She stopped there, trailing off with a halfhearted shrug. “Now they have their own version of high-integrity brain-mapping. or H-IBM for short.” She pronounced it ‘highbeam,’ but pointed to the label on the side of the computer as if that explained anything.

“How come Ava never told me? Us? Were they trying to protect us?”

“No. Trying to protect the technology from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Right…” I said, pondering the revelation. “Loose lips blow up ships.”

Sage ignored my statement, gesturing for me to sit in the chair. I did so.

“It shouldn’t hurt too much, but it won’t be a gentle process. Like jumping from an aeroplane down to an earth. You may experience bouts of nausea.”

I had so many other questions that I could barely focus on Sage’s instructions. She was telling me other various possible side effects, informing me that she’d hacked into the scarship research facility’s mainframe.

“Boom,” she said. “Found some man still hooked up to a brain-drainer. In just a moment I’ll project your mind twelve cycles to the Phantom’s Blade. Where you will wake up,” she gestured vaguely at the screen. “As this poor fellow.”

I sat in the chair, wondering what other secrets Ava and Oren had kept from the crew all these years. Could I still trust them?

The helmet lowered over my head. I noted the irony of the silver visor attached, warping my vision like a bent mirror. The Sojourner shuddered violently as the boarding party blasted open the door. I heard muffled explosions, the rapid crack of gunfire, and smelled burning steel.

“Best of luck, soldier,” Sage said, grimly. Then she turned and pulled a lever with all the drama and flair of a 80’s space-opera pilot making the jump to hyperspace.

Then, with a deep and all-encompassing whir, my mind left my skull. All went silent and dark for an indeterminate amount of time.

Then I woke up in my new body. I was not alone.