Duty Calls

The bridge of the Nightstalker was quiet.

The bridge crew sat at their stations. Jolt sat in the command chair, following the event journals as they prepared to free themselves from the thin layer of radioactive cobalt coating the hull. Thresher's torso was duct-taped to a chair in front of the engineering station. Although he seemed to be grievously injured and unconscious, he had patched his robotic voluntary nervous system to his station's command interface. He was rerouting electrical power in the maze of conduits beneath the hull to align their magnetic fields precisely.

The Eye kept watch at the helm. The star-ship's short range sensors were almost useless due to the intensely radioactive film of metal that clung to the outside of the ship, but she was able to use the interrociter to get usable data to feed the fire control and tactical maneuver systems. This allowed the Nightstalker a zone of control covering 10,000 cubic kilometers of space. Since the Nightstalker was quite literally going nowhere anytime soon, this was enough to ensure that they didn't run into anything or anyone until the crisis was resolved.

The First Mate stood next to Jolt's command chair, and reviewed the project checklist on an overhead monitor.

Behind him, Thresher lifted his head and said, "Electrical conduits aligned."

The First Mate gave the cyborg a curt, telegenic nod, and checked the box on the touch-screen with grace and élan.

Executive Officer Benito Franco was the youngest officer ever commissioned by the Corporate Drama Academy. He and Jolt turned to each other, and Jolt gave the order.

"Energize." Powerful electrical currents created a powerful magnetic field that enveloped the entire hull. The cobalt was strongly magnetically permeable. Magnetic domains aligned, and the thin film was quickly magnetized.

Jolt turned around the other way to face Thresher. "How long will we need to magnetize the film?"

"Not very long at all. I think it will be ready in a few minutes." Despite missing the lower half of his cyborg body, Thresher seemed surprisingly lively. "Once it's magnetized, we can reverse the polarity and send pulses of current down the conduits in the opposite direction. The magnetic fields will repel, blasting the metal off the hull."

Jolt smiled at Thresher. "Great work! I'm proud of you guys."

The First Mate peered at the overhead monitor. "Captain, there's an incoming transmission, encrypted." He poked at the comms interface. "Key signature matches Arsenal."

Jolt turned towards the static-filled view-screen. "What? Didn't they find a body? Put this on the main screen."

Peter lay face-down on a bed, partially covered with a thin sheet. Jinx, dressed in a robe, sat down next to him and touched a spot on his back. Peter lifted his head, grinned and began to hum.

Jinx giggled and then gestured towards the end of the bed. "Hey, your encryption thingy finally finished handshaking. I think you have a connection to the Nightstalker."

Peter looked directly into the camera, and quickly leaped up. Thinking quickly, he just managed to cover himself a little with the sheet.

Jinx leaned back and waved at the camera. "Hiya, Sparky!"

Peter put himself together as best he could. He looked straight into the camera with an air of forced disinterest and saluted.

Jolt was not impressed. She sank into her captain's chair and rubbed her temples. The Eye and the First Mate gazed into the view-screen. The Eye's expression was a mixture of amusement and disgust. Thresher seemed consumed by vicarious embarrassment. The First Mate was simply dumbstruck.

"Arsenal here. Did you receive my message? We have a second image from a fighter simulator -- with a little luck, we should be able to reconstruct the attack plan by analyzing M-Seven's simulations."

Jolt looked at the view-screen through the corner of her eye. "What, that huge message that crashed my Inbox?"

"Yeah. That was an executable image of the simulators they used to train the fleet. I've lost my copy, but if you guys could sync with us, we might be able to re-construct the entire attack plan."

"We calculated where the fleet might re-materialize. Sedgewick Station is within the first standard deviation of the target distribution, so we're pretty sure they're going there." Jolt studiously avoided looking at the view-screen.

She turned to the slack-jawed First Mate. "Ben, open a data session."

"Yes, ma'am."

The sync operation quickly compared the images. Streams of data flowed to and from the Nightstalker and Jinx's ship. Jinx looked straight into the camera. "So, our ship has M-Seven livery. We can join up with the attackers--"

Jolt looked at Jinx with a withering glance, and interrupted her. "Did I ask you to speak? I don't remember asking you anything."

Peter spoke up. "It's a good idea. Once we know what they have planned, we might be able to disrupt their operations at a critical point. Attacking from surprise--"

"Yeah, that's not bad. We'll be there. You should try to land on the first wave and assist the defenders."

"Understood, Captain." Peter nodded. "We'll be in touch in a few hours once we've analyzed the composite image."

Jolt scowled at the screen. "Good. Put some clothes on next time. Close transmission."

The crew of the Nightstalker paused for a moment. Jolt then got out of the command chair and turned to her First Mate.

"Ben, you take over. I'm going to go soak my brain in warm soapy water."

Beyond Belief

Jinx looked down at her fists and laughed a little.

"Huh. You tagged out."

"Yep." Peter stood in front of her with his arms folded.

"It must be my charming personality." Jinx smiled at Peter in mock flirtation.

"I'm immune. Type 350 clones have extraordinarily low sex drives. Anyway, you ripped out my larynx with your -- uh -- sharp thing." Peter was a little taken aback, and rubbed his throat.

"It's a war spork. A weapon developed from a very old tool for skinning fresh kills." Jinx pulled the war spork from the inside of her jacket, and pointed to the parts of the weapon as she continued. "The spike penetrates the carcass, then you run it along the side to separate the skin and fat from the meat. You can then use the spoon part to scrape fat and muscle off the skin for curing."

"That was totally educational. Creepy, too."

"M-Seven, at your service. We're all about the old creepy stuff. There are some neat sword and spear-breaking techniques you can do with it." Jinx demonstrated a few quick strokes with the weapon. Peter kept his arms folded in front of him as Jinx stabbed the air.

Peter looked at Jinx. "Would you put that thing away?"

"Don't be scared -- it's just a tool. I put a whammy on it that attacked your nervous system. It's hard to defend yourself when you can't think or move -- not that that stopped you from trying."

"I did my best. It's hard to keep your balance when you can't feel anything."

"That's what I told the judge at my last drunk and disorderly trial." Jinx nodded towards the exit of the living area, and tucked her weapon back into her inside jacket pocket. "Let's take a look while we still have some time."

"Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious."

They walked into the courtyard, where a hole filled with ashes marked the location of a former fire pit. Peter looked into the hole filled with ashes as Jinx picked up a battered piece of colorful cardboard from the ground.

Jinx gestured to Peter. "Come here! They must be shutting down the training program -- this is one of the lottery cards they used to select new recruits."

Peter looked over Jinx's shoulder at the battered piece of cardboard marked with purple numbers. "A lottery?"

Classical lotteries, where prizes are simply given to those who had the dumb luck to have a certain number of matches to the randomly drawn numbers, were extremely uncommon. The most popular games were cumulative lotteries, where players collected matches from daily drawings and tried to place them in winning "hands" to claim prizes from the pot.

The lottery card was printed with a gaudy holographic pattern to discourage forgery and changing made bets. Based on a small section of the card, a lottery operator could uniquely identify it and its corresponding series of bets.

Jinx looked at Peter as he examined the matrix of numbers marked with stamps. She found that she could still read his face and imagine what was going on in his head simply by examining his expression. Discovering that she could, she did -- until she realized with a start that he was now looking at her with the same probing gaze.

They broke eye contact, and each took half-a-step away from the other in an attempt to re-assert their personal spaces. There was an awkward moment. Jinx's gaze sank to the dusty ground as she imagined for a moment what Peter must be thinking. Peter briefly seemed stunned, uncertain what to say or do next.

When he broke his silence, Jinx felt suddenly sad and ashamed. "Were you trying to do something to my mind?"

"No. Not anything paranormal, anyway." She stopped for a moment to push the shame from her mind. "I fed on your essence. I took into myself what makes you the person you are. This has some side effects. Right now, I feel a connection to you because we are looking at the same things, and responding to them in similar ways. This creates a context of shared feelings that--"

Jinx stopped, and was relieved when Peter continued her thought. "That enable us to connect emotionally? Have a relationship?"

The absurdity of what Peter said made her laugh a little inside. "Yeah. That's what normals feel when they fall in love. I told you that you shouldn't have come back."

"It's not voluntary, and that wasn't the first time." Peter seemed to relax a little. "I've been coming back from the dead pretty regularly since I discovered I had powers."

Jinx briefly considered the implications of what Peter said. "Does anyone know you're an immortal?"

"They must know. No one has ever asked me about it, though."

"Immortality really screws with people's heads. With a savings account and a couple of millennia you could end up owning the Corporation."

Peter looked at Jinx carefully. "What about you? You must be older than you look."

"It's complicated. This body was born about a century before the Last War on the Home-world."

"That's... three hundred years?"

"As long as I find souls to consume, I won't age or weaken." She felt ashamed. "It's not the same as immortality. Demons are parasites. As soon as the last sapient species goes extinct, our kind will perish."

Peter looked at Jinx's face and his mind wrestled with unaccustomed concepts. "Why do you look so sad?"

"This isn't how things are supposed to work. I hurt you and exploited you and--" Jinx discovered that talking about it made it worse.

Peter walked to her and took her hands. She looked into his eyes, and felt... something. She was having trouble giving it a name.

"They grew me in a vat, Jinx. I've been exploited since I was an embryo. It stopped hurting a long time ago."

His words comforted her, and she wondered why that was so. "We should go back to my ship, get drunk, and have meaningless sex. It's the only way to nip this in the bud. Discover the idol has feet of clay..."

"I have a better idea. Let's figure out where the fleet is going to attack, lay in a course, and then have drunken, meaningless sex."

She looked at him and they both smiled. "Gold star for robot boy..."

Silver Rocket

Jinx looked at the figure unexpectedly standing beside her. He was dressed in a nearly featureless slate grey unitard with a prominent insignia on his chest -- a stylized capital letter A in silver that vaguely resembled an old-style rocket with fins. His white furred face smiled at her, but his green eyes seemed to have trouble focussing.

"How the HELL did you just--"

"Woah. That was the edge of the freaking Universe! I fell off reality, and patched my state before I drifted into the void..." Arsenal paused for a moment, then gathered his wits and looked at Jinx. "...sorry if I'm rambling. I'm still adapting to time being all linear again."

"Listen, lady -- who is this dude?" A young man waved his plasma rifle in an unmistakable pantomine of taking aim.

Jinx stared the young man with the gun down. "It's a new ultra-realistic, semi-autonomous illusion spell I'm working on. This is supposed to be Arsenal --"

The young man looked at Arsenal. He let his rifle hang on its strap over his shoulder and rubbed his chin. "You messed up his costume. The real Arsenal doesn't have a chrome dick on his chest."

"That's not a penis! It's a silver rocket!" Arsenal was defensive, and pointed at his chest insignia.

"It totally looks like an erection, dude."

Jinx teleported inconspicuously beside the young man and squinted at Arsenal's chest. "That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?"

"Howcum it can talk?" The young man smiled.

"That's what I meant by semi-autonomous. I can use it to infiltrate Honor Guard." Peter seemed to understand what Jinx was playing at, and stood quietly in front of the other two.

"Cool." The soldier seemed impressed.

They both laughed, and Jinx's eyes locked for a fraction of a second with the young soldier's. This was enough for her mind to touch his with a numbing warmth. "You should lay off the paint fumes, son -- remember that one time you totally forgot you met me and I showed you this neat illusion?"

"Yeah, totally. I gotta get back on patrol."

"You do that." Jinx smiled sweetly at him, and closed the telepathic link. "Be seeing you!"

The soldier walked away. Jinx's face became hard as she swung back to face Peter.

"You can't do that! You SHOULDN'T do that --"

"Time comes all unravelled. I found an eigenstate before you beat me up and replicated it here."

"In a lame new costume with a stylized boner on your chest."

Peter rubbed the spot on the back of his neck where his communications implant used to be. "Stupid! I forgot my implants."

"Considering that you're deep in enemy territory, that's probably for the best. Let's get out of here!" Jinx turned to leave, peering back over her shoulder to see if Peter was following her.

He wasn't. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Jinx. "Wait a minute. I think I might want to beat you up and trash this terrorist base."

Jinx turned around and walked towards him. She held her fists in front of her.

"No, you won't. Tag me."

"What?"

"I want you to tag out. I can stop the operation in about a minute if I get in close enough to the fleet. Tag out -- this is my job."

"You're kidding me!"

"I'm serious. I promised you that before you died."

"But I came back!"

"I don't share your cavalier attitude towards death. Tag out."

Peter looked at Jinx's fists, hesitated for a moment, and tagged out.