The second the stars closed up behind Tessa’s Stormfury, the AI flickered into sudden, disjointed submission. Everything dropped away, fluttered into nothingness, left her mind lost and floundering in a world that was all swirling, directionless abyss. Enough of the navigation software oscillated between action and oblivion to keep her rig on course through it all, but even with the assistance, Tessa felt hollow, broken, as if half her mind had suddenly vanished, leaving nothing, leaving only a childlike husk to pick its way through a maze of sensation that had all the order and openness of shattered glass.

In the haze, her sensors became like numb, unwilling fingers, optical units sifting through sensory data as light and sound coalesced into one in Tessa’s mind, waves meshing, colliding, beating rhythm across the hull in high energy waves that she felt, heard. All of reality came back to her with the intensity of the surface of a star, her flight like a sudden hard dive into the halo of a sun’s corona. An impossible flight. Part of her smiled in spite of the deadness of the greater whole. As impossible as this drop through hyperspace and into a wholly different intersection of time and space. . .

A harsh flare of burning everything shot through senses, cauterized numb neurons for an instant, then flashed into her mind’s eye. She blinked reflexively, drew back as the warnings coalesced across tortured mind, blasted her with words she could barely understand, could barely focus on enough to make sense of.

Groping through systems with half of the interface down and the AI assist totally offline was like fumbling through an endless black sea for a life preserver that might never have even been there. Rig systems were like a maze within a maze, a labyrinth beyond the labyrinth of her mind, a puzzle in passages dwarfed by the greater reality that stretched on endlessly into the greater maze of the outside world. Panem had installed failsafes designed to keep the rig on course, but she wandered through the morass anyway, struggled with the darkness and desperately turned each corner, touching the dead sigils of the machine mind in the hopes that triggering or adjusting one might fix the problem that was lurking beyond the wings of her rig. Over and over again in her mind, the system cried out in pain. Failure. Compensating. Failure. Compensating. . .

All at once, the echoing shriek of living steel shearing off against vicious waves of gravity and vacillating entropy caught her, blindsided her with such ferocity that her mind shot out of the system, came half-conscious for an instant. She cried out, and the sound hung corrupted and broken in the machine mind, mixing through sensor-streams with the screams of tortured fuselage as she felt it, as she forced herself to seize onto anything for support, forced herself to ride out the pain of catapulting face first into the narrowing unknown, her limbs ripped away at the joints, at the shoulders, scattered to the abyss. All around her, the world of the mind, of the machine and the flesh that hung dependent upon it, spun crazily, mere inches from the brink of collapse. With all the broken impulses of a dying bird, her senses flopped through the darkness one last time, desperate for survival, for a way to tear herself free, but in the end, there was only one choice, one way. Hands came alive, came separate from the system, found the one edge she had over eternity.

For one split instant, the Stormfury hesitated, seemed to wait, unresponsive, then dropped into a shuddering, one-winged spin that left her lost in waves of stuttering light. Space came a second later, triggered by the return of full AI control, limiters snapping into place. In the span of a breath, she was in the stars, struggling to orient herself as the void shifted sickeningly across her field of vision. Flooding back, filling her, the AI gently enfolded her in its augmentation software and guided steel and flesh into something approximating straight and level flight. The full awareness of the machine mind came back to her, and in the sudden pause, time itself almost seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

And then she saw it, saw the shape stretched out below her like a burnt and beaten monolith, a Wallace-class warship strung out between twin columns of untarnished silver. Seeing the thing there left her shivering, unable to pull her eyes away from its tortured hull or the two Cygnan behemoths bleeding chrome lines into it. The request went out fast, aggressive, and as her A.I. assist synced with the ship, she pulled an IFF ident from the thing’s own shaky A.I. system that shocked her almost to the point of silence, numbness.

She swallowed, hesitated. When control came again, she forced herself to jam a second aggressive request, this one for local date and time, and the response that bounced back carried so much weight in her subconscious that it was all she could do not to pass out under the force of it, the realizations that came with it.

Somewhere deep within her injured, metallic body, she opened her mouth, lost focus. Her mind latched onto the date, made it her world, her whole focus, wouldn’t let it go. She knew that date, had lived with it burnt into her brain for years, a wound that had refused to heal, a scar that had branded itself into the skin of her very soul.

Systems on her rig shivered and twitched as her mind disengaged fully, as terror, fear, anxiety gripped her suddenly, paralyzed her, left her gasping for air, isolated in the cockpit of a rig that no longer felt like an extension of her body, of her mind, her self. The moment, the time, the meaning– it was all that mattered. She’d replayed Izzy’s death over and over in her mind since that day, this day, spent hours, weeks, working her way through intricate “what if” scenarios, planning out each step she would make, what she would do different– and now she was here, now she’d been given her chance, her do-over, her opportunity to put things right, and it didn’t matter. She couldn’t move, couldn’t act. Fear had lain its cruel, cold hand across her shoulders and left her frozen, doubting.

And then, something broke.

Control didn’t come back all at once. Sliding back into her rig’s systems and dropping into the control interface was like trying to slide back into sleep with the fresh dread of death pulling at her heels. Sluggishly, her mind found its way back into the machinery, picked through the injured systems, vaguely cataloging what was working, what wasn’t. Analysis came slow, too slow, and even as the numbers trickled in, bounced back and forth between computer control and the fleshy passages of her mind, the data she did get became less and less encouraging.

In a matter of moments, it was clear that her rig would barely fly– there was no way she was going to be able to burn back into hyperspace and aim vaguely for a point closer to her original destination, not with a third of her structure gone. That damaged, she wasn’t even going to make it into the bay, especially not as an unidentified rig broadcasting an obscure friendly code that the Hok’s own AI might mark as hostile the instant it got too close to a bay opening. There was only one option, one way to get into the ship, one chance to make her changes and save the human race, and it was almost as dangerous as running the gauntlet of argon-ion web emitters and aggressive Mitarashi response grids that would flare up if she went for any obvious openings. She was going to have to ditch her rig, make full use of her implants and find a spot in the hull where the metal was weak enough for her to punch through, strong enough for her to be able to seal it up after her. The rig would take her as far as the hull, somewhere she could tie it down until salvage teams could recover it during the clean up, but that was as far as it was going.

Beyond that, she was on her own.

Shouldn’t be a problem. She told herself, licked her lips. The lacings and subdermal emitter chains she’d been given as part of project Amaterasu had been specifically designed with short term EVA in mind, but the emphasis had remained on short term. Even with her Ninsar implants balanced at maximum conscious input, she’d have to work fast, hope that whatever energy reserves she had left to work with bound up within her body would be enough to augment and, if necessary, take over for the power assemblies of all three implants for long enough to get her where she needed to go.

She closed her eyes, pulled in a deep, steadying breath, let it out again. The hull of the Hok rose up to meet her, flattened out as the Stormfury modulated its S-vectoring panels enough to melt struts into the hull, an impromptu tethering that stuck solid, left Tessa cold, frozen for a moment with fear, the weight of inevitability.

Popping the canopy took a force of will, but even as the air in her cockpit rushed out, she didn’t feel the cold of the sudden vacuum. Skin flared golden and green as she drifted weightless, soaked up the meager light of distant stars, and fed a trickle of energy into the halo of fire and light that protected her from exposure, gave her just enough of a window to drop to the hull of the Hok. The resolve to open her eyes came slowly, and even as she did, she was struck for a moment by the beauty of the cosmos as it stretched on around her, the wonder of everything held in cold collusion.

And then she turned back to the hull, stared at it, into it, and dived into the cold sea of steel that opened for her as she moved, closed up again as she passed deeper into the belly of the half-dead warship.

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