//Feel free to post any constructive polite criticism! I promise you I can not only take it but need it!

I never realized how confusing and disorienting even a minimal change in body type can be. I waved a hand behind me in the air, feeling the space where my tail had been just a couple days ago, running a hand through my strange dark straight hair, feeling bare skin- which would normally be a sign that something was just plain wrong with my body, but now just meant everything was fairly normal. I wouldn’t normally have changed myself so radically, of course. I needed to generate a little profit somehow, and rumor had it that out on the rim of the solar system some pretty weird ideas had taken root and some hardline ortho politicians had managed to take power. My alternative to the unpleasant disorientation was hardly a good one- if I showed up in an anthro body the best I could hope for was a refusal to trade. The worst? A fair beating, perhaps. I silently mourned the loss of my ears. At least I’d been able to keep some of my less offensive genemods, so the loss of hearing and some of the more radical perception changes had been softened. I sighed and vowed to get back in a comfy anthro body as soon as this was over. At least it would be covered by the trade.
I was carrying a fair-sized load of instantaneous causal bits out around Triton; then I’d pop straight back to one of the larger anthro settlements so I could get my body rehacked into the lovely fox I’d been. I looked over at my copilot, who, by the looks of it, wasn’t any happier about having to shed his anthro body either. “Hey, Martin, how are you adjusting?” I’d lived with the mouse for most of my life. He’d been the brains of the operation, and I’d been the charm of sorts. He’d been a little afraid of the change, but I assured him we’d be fine, and that we could change back right after finishing, and that the trade mission would well cover it.
Our little craft carried five people, including us. There was Martin, who was a male mouse anthro – at least he usually was. He did a little piloting and he read the markets. There was me, Richard, usually a male fox anthro. I was the personable side of things, and I usually piloted and found trading opportunities. There was our friendly coengineer, Jeffrey, a female ortho, and Martin, a theory geek, nonetheless often helped. There was David, another ortho, male, the muscle of the operation, who was a wonder with a monofilament sword, and a talented amateur biotechnician. Finally, there was Srini, a heavily self-modded bio who was amazing at anything requiring computers or biotechnology. Our ship was fairly comfortable considering the size and number of people, but it helped that we all liked each other fairly well. The ship, a standard efficient Orion drive-powered model could get to around 0.12c on the best of days, but we were taking it a little slower at 0.1c, so we’d get to Triton orbit in a couple hundred kilosecs and make the return journey just as quickly.
The trip would be riskier than our usual missions to the Earth system, Mars communes, Europa, and Titan, because, like I said, some ortho hardliners had managed to gain political power in the outer system and thus to be an anthro, even one whose body had been changed, might pose a risk. Unfortunately, Martin and Srini had put together a little simulation, and the results were grim: if we didn’t take this mission, there was a fair chance that we’d go insolvent within a few megasecs. So off to Triton we went, with perhaps a side trip at Europa, which would be well-lined up in a third of a megasec or so.
Martin had tried to put together a grand project, tying together the specialities of most of the crew, attempting to put together some kind of nanotechnological tool with potential for weaponization. Unfortunately, as he had told me last week, the tests weren’t going well. The last time they’d tested the Swarm the little motes had attacked both the target and the model ship, wrecking both. They were still tinkering with it, and in my opinion they were throwing good money after bad. He told me he could get it to work, that it was just a minor bug in the IFF routines, but I wasn’t convinced.
The first few kilosecs passed uneventfully; the takeoff was flawless, and the nukes detonated without complaint. We navigated through the asteroid field without incident; whatever the movies show, it’s really very sparse. I walked over to a window to find Srini silently staring out at Jupiter as we steadily cleared the asteroid field. Perhaps it was a quirk of his biochemistry, changed in a thousand different subtle ways and making him different from every other human in existence, that made him do strange things like this every so often. I knew better by now not to disturb him, so I began to walk to the back of the ship, towards the engine. My mouth felt dry and my throat hurt a little, so I stopped in the small but adequate galley on the way back, hoping to get a small glass of the asteroid water we’d collected on our way through the Belt. I picked up my glass, colored a rich blood-red due to the semi-serious accords the crew had all signed perhaps a tenth of a gigasec ago not to use each other’s dishes and silverware. I passed by the rest of the crew’s cups, careful not to touch them, out of respect. Martin’s was a deep cobalt blue, “the color of the sky right at the beginning of the night,” as he liked to say. Jeffrey’s was a cheery gold color. Srini, who prided himself on his biotechnic prowess, chose a bottle green, and the shade of David’s cup recalled the purple of ancient kings’ cloaks. I put my cup under the spigot and pressed the button to release water. To my dismay, the screen above the button lit up and displayed an incomprehensible error. Damn and blast. I’d have to see Jeffrey and Martin about that. I continued on towards the engine room to find Jeffrey and Martin irritated at each other over the molecular refinery’s failure.
“I’m telling you, I serviced it a couple of kilosecs before heading into the Belt,” said Jeffrey. “I knew that the matter collection we do might cause problems, so I made sure everything was in working order!”
“That doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t seem to be working,” Martin retorted. “Tell me then, why isn’t it working if you just serviced it?”
Just then, Srini walked in holding something whose nature I couldn’t discern by some sort of limb. “It’s a bioengineering spore, or what’s left of one anyway. It must have found its way into the collecting scoop and messed with the refinery. It’s a typical Gödel-class sabotage model.”
I was just about to comment that the spore could have been a leftover from one of the earlier wars when Martin commented that the chance of hitting such a small spore by chance would be incredibly small. Thus, he surmised, it must have been intentional sabotage. We hadn’t seen any ships pull alongside us, and since Jeffrey had serviced the machinery right before entering the Belt, the saboteurs must either have very good aim, excellent predictive powers, or be on the ship itself. In this last case all indications were that no extra mass than what we’d expected was on the ship, so it would have to be that one of us was the saboteur. I decided not to share this conclusion with the rest of the crew.
“Srini,” I asked, “didn’t you say you’d been after some anti-saboteur wetware for the ship for some time?”
“I did,” he replied, “but honestly with the ship’s monetary situation as it has become, and with no more requisition credits, it was a choice between having anti-Gödelbot wetware for the ship, and having a ship.”
Jeffrey, who had crawled into the biological component of the ship and attempted to fix it with a combination of soothing whispers and small doses of various liquids, had since crawled out. “Well, it’s fixed now,” she said, “but we’ll likely have to flush a lot of the water we collected out. There’s no telling what that spore told the wetware to do. For all we know, it could have taken some of the cometary carbon and nitrogen and made some nice cyanide ions for us.” She pressed a large red button marked “Vent All” on the wall, and a sucking noise filled the ship. “That’s that done,” she said. I was rather disappointed. I’d been rather looking forward to the rather special taste of cometary water, hidden away for billions of years, waiting. When on Old Earth, in Ancient France, Brother Dom Perignon had said he was “tasting the stars,” he wasn’t quite right. Cometary water deserved the label much better.
At any rate, we were now low on raw matter for the assembler-disassembler, which irritated me greatly. We’d already passed through the Belt, and no other outer planet was remotely nearby. The only thing to do was recycle even more ruthlessly than usual and get to Triton as fast as we possibly could.
The mood was grim on the ship as we all sat down to eat a little; part of the compact we’d created together pretty much guaranteed communal meals. I looked around the table at everyone’s faces, trying to discern whether anyone had either come to the same conclusion I had or was in fact the saboteur. The food was a little strange and unfamiliar; Jeffrey had cooked something very meaty tonight for me so I could slowly adjust. All the same, I was getting used to a fairly different set of taste buds; Srini had told me before we left that he’d heard of some rather nasty technology some ortho hardliner somewhere in the Outer System had invented to find anthro tongues. Geez, what kind of free time do these people have? I thought. But I hadn’t wanted to take risks, so I’d gone as far ortho as I’d dared.
Luckily for Martin, his old body’s taste buds weren’t that different from an ortho’s, drawn as it was from somewhat more similar omnivorous stock. He seemed to enjoy the new foods he could eat. Ah, Martin. He’d always been one for crazy new stuff. Meanwhile I struggled to get used to hamburgers. The bread and veggies were giving me a little trouble, and the taste of the tomato was a little disorienting. I’d never had too much in the way of veggies before at once; even during my long history with Martin, he’d never gotten me to try more than a couple of bites of veggie-laced material at a time. It was a shame, too – he was a fairly talented cook. It must have been something about the way he saw flavors. He’d come up with some weird but surprisingly good stuff too. He’d had Srini pretty well interested in the soup he’d made. He’d put in tomatoes. That was all well and good. Then he tossed in some rice. That, too, was pretty normal. And that’s when he broke out the cinnamon. When he took out the little can of cinnamon after the rest of the stuff he’d tossed in, he instantly drew disbelieving, shocked stares from the rest of the crew, myself included, stares that rather clearly said “You’re not honestly tossing cinnamon in a savory dish, are you?” After all, I was going to have to eat this; it was Martin’s turn to cook, and I was trying to get acclimatized to ortho food. But Martin just shrugged and grinned cheekily in that way that just screamed that this was one of those things you’d have to trust him on. And indeed we did, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d expected. The acid edge of the tomato I so detested was softened by the warmth of the cinnamon, and in turn the bitterness of the cinnamon was tempered by some milk. Somehow he’d managed to pull off what seemed impossible.
“It’s really strange,” he replied to my shocked inquiry, “how many excellent flavor combinations the world at large shuns. This’d be one of them. I found it in an Old Earth Middle East cookbook.” He showed me a passage from a decrepit cookbook commenting on the Ancient Moroccans’ use of cinnamon in savory dishes. “And then I just ran with it,” he muttered, looking off into the distance. Martin never ceased to surprise us in that regard.
I headed back to my bunk to review some sensor logs, hoping beyond hope that it had been chance, or it had been fired from a very, VERY quiet ship at some point in the Belt. I was reading the sensor logs, combing for something, anything, when I heard a knock at my door. I got up to open the door to find Martin standing in the doorway. He knew as well. We’d known each other so long it was almost as if the mouse could read my mind. From his body language I could tell he’d gone through the same course of reasoning I had, and quite probably further and faster. We anthros aren’t quite as keen on facial expressions as orthos are; we could easily figure out facial expressions but had had little luck trying to replicate them. We’d have to figure it out, and fast. Jeffrey and David had had limited success with that, but that might have been because they were teaching us a huge number of social customs and treachery related to facial expression. As it was right now we didn’t really have one, ever, but that would change, and they definitely didn’t want us messing things up with unpracticed and open expressions. We understood; it was a little like the way anthros communicated with body language. Even Martin, who wasn’t too good with people, had mastered the subtleties of the anthro equivalent of what we were learning. In fact, he was probably better with treachery than I was. He was nice enough to be around the vast majority of the time, but occasionally this strange side of him, this cold, calculating monster would creep out a little, but Martin seemed to have made a sort of agreement with it to harness it only when necessary. I understood, but it made him ridiculously annoying to play board games against.
At any rate, it was clear he’d come to talk. He frowned at my comparatively clumsy manipulation of the data; he took the datapad from me a little roughly, not because he was at all angry, but more because he was in the throes of an idea, and when an idea seized him, there was little he could do. It was a surprisingly good thing. He looked around at the data and called for Srini.
“No!” I cried softly. “How do we -”
Martin cut me off with a shush. “It’s alright,” he said quietly as Srini approached. “I don’t know how I know it, but I can tell that if there’s a saboteur, it’s not him. He loves the ship, especially its wetware. It’s like a pet to him.”
I understood; Jeffrey seemed the same way about the machinery of the ship: protective and kind in some strange way; even a bit motherly. So the only person it could possibly be… “Would be David, if we’re assuming that there is one,” Martin cut in. He’d seen my strange facial strainings and correctly interpreted my thoughts. David had always been a little suspicious; he’d come on as a sword for hire and a good negotiator, but as the dozens of megasecs had worn by he’d become much more a part of the ship. He still stood at arm’s length from us though, or perhaps hand’s length, and it’d probably be a while before we really trusted him as we trusted each other. Srini poked his head in the doorway.
“You called, Martin?” he asked, in his strange, almost sing-song voice.
“Well,” replied Martin, motioning to the datapad, “I’ve drawn some interesting conclusions from this data, and…” at this point his voice lowered to a whisper, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. All I know is that Srini nodded, and said, at one point, “Yes, that seems to make sense.”
“Well, Richard, I think we have the problem,” said Martin finally. “It was a long-range saboteur after all.” He pointed to a region of space I’d completely overlooked, above the ecliptic. The sensor readings were only subtly different; someone a little duller than Srini or Martin, like me, would have missed it, which I had. I sighed in relief; the nightmare seemed to be over. Martin and I exchanged knowing looks; we'd come to the same conclusions, and we'd been hoping the same things. But unlike me, Martin had already steeled himself to deal with the saboteur, should there be one. I silently cursed myself for my irrationality; had there truly been a saboteur on the ship I might have let him go, and that would have been the end of us all.
We walked quietly and contemplatively back towards the engine room, where the Gödelbot still lay there dead, as Srini had left it. He took a while to look it over, thinking for a while.
“Well, there's no sense in wasting it. We could dump it in the assembler-disassembler,” Srini said, finally breaking the silence. His face suddenly lit up. “Or, you know, we could eat it!” To be blunt, in comparison with the veggies I'd been eating recently, a Gödelbot, which, after all, was made of meat, didn't sound like such a bad plan. Then again the raw matter would be more useful in the assembler-disassembler, so I held my tongue for the moment. To my surprise, Jeffrey spoke up.
“You know, the assembler-disassembler takes a pretty penny of energy to use. We might as well eat the darn thing after all. I’m sure Srini can figure out how it’s put together, and if we can eat it, and everyone’s alright with Gödelbot cutlets, then I’ll cook it for dinner tonight and feed the unusable parts into the A-D,” she piped.
Srini looked over the Gödelbot closely, taking samples and feeding it to the ship’s bioanalysis component. He seemed to like the result, too, because he came back with a datapad file showing precisely what we could eat and commending the flavor and texture of the edible parts as something like chicken.
“Right, I’ll go get the breading together, shall I?” said Jeffrey, walking towards the kitchen. Meanwhile, Srini fed the Gödelbot into our heavily modified assembler-disassembler and told it to eat the parts we couldn’t, which it readily did, producing a rather attractive-looking set of meat cuts on a green glass plate, which he then whisked away to the kitchen. Meanwhile, the assembler-disassembler was rather happily grinding away, the half-machine, half-meat mechanism producing a faint, comfortable heat, that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my bed to replicate. I’d come fairly close though. The world seemed to get fuzzy and dim; I barely made it to my quarters and into my bed before I lapsed into a short unconsciousness. I dimly realized as I fell asleep that it had been time for my polyphasic nap; I’d nearly forgotten.
I woke – or thought I woke – to the sound of rain. I got out of bed and walked to a window, to find we’d landed on a world, though it wasn’t any I recognized. The rest of the crew was nowhere to be found, not even Martin. I shuddered rather badly, I’m ashamed to admit. A helpful sensor informed me that the air outside was completely breathable, so I decided to take a look around. I hopped out the door to find myself right in the middle of a thunderstorm in half standard gravity. The rain fell soft and slow, and the drops were a little larger than I remembered from the storms in the domed cities on Mars, but for my standard gravity-adjusted frame walking and jumping were easier.
It seemed that whatever world we’d landed on was in the middle of an autumn analog; the weather was cool, and the trees, which looked like Earth standard, were losing their leaves. A sudden sound startled me from off to the side, and a shadowy, humanesque figure leapt upon me before I could react.
“You are all disgraces to the race of man,” it whispered in my ear. “You are all complete wastes, you anthros.” And with this he sent a knife, like a jet of fire, ramming into my abdomen. I noticed that I was somehow in my old anthro body, but before I could do anything else the world spun and tilted and my vision went quickly gray. The last thing I saw was the leaves and rain falling down together; the trees looked like frozen fire.
I woke to someone screaming; it took a few moments before I realized it was me. Martin was at my side.
“You were screaming pretty badly,” he said, concerned. “What happened?”
“It was nothing,” I responded. “It was nothing but a bad dream.” I turned over to pick up my dream diary. It was covered in a lovely blood-red velvet, and locked with an old-fashioned mechanical lock. I opened the lock and wrote down as much as I could remember, but the details were fading fast.
“Just a dream,” I whispered to myself. “It was nothing other than a dream.”
Jeffrey poked her head in the door. “The cutlets are ready now,” she said. “If you’re hungry, come over and eat.” And that’s precisely what I did.
The Gödelbot was surprisingly delicious; the texture was actually like that of beef, but the taste reminded me more of chicken. I was taken aback by the fact that something never designed to be eaten would work so well as food. Jeffrey and Srini had done a masterful job preparing the cutlets; the breading was crisp and flavorful, and light fruit tones perfectly complemented the savoriness of the meat. I was taking a drink from my cup when David began to speak.
“So what was all that about? I could’ve sworn you were being murdered,” he said, laughing. My face went rather pale at this pronouncement; all of a sudden I felt sick, and I lost most of my appetite.
“It was a bad dream,” I choked out. “I dreamt we’d landed on some colonized world, with rain and trees and everything. I got killed by what looked like a human, and it told me that all anthros were wastes.” Having lost my appetite, I gave what was left of my piece to Martin, washed and shelved my dishes, and went back to my quarters to try and calm down.
I was filled with dread as we began the descent into the Neptune system. I’d already been afraid of the repercussions of an anthro in an ortho body waltzing into Trident City to trade, and the dream hadn’t done much to relieve my anxiety. We’d all decided even before the trip had begun that it would be best not to reveal that our minds – mine and Martin’s that is – were anthro minds, tossed into ortho bodies.
My hands began to shake uncontrollably. As we began to dock at Trident City, Martin and I held hands for a little while. It didn’t help too much, but it didn’t hurt either.
As we docked with the city, we began immediately to unload our precious cargo; we didn’t want to waste any time here, and neither did we want to spend any more time here than we needed to. David, of course, was the first to walk out of the ship, carrying a crate over each shoulder. Jeffrey followed him with a crate clutched to her chest, then Srini, with one of his strange hauler-beasties carrying a pair of crates. Martin and I lifted a crate between ourselves and figured out how to carry things without paws. It was a surprisingly painful process, as the corners and sides of the crates dug into our soft hands, unsuited to such work and unaccustomed to being without a protective layer of fur or pads.
We were carrying instantaneous bits to Trident. The little things could irreversibly transmit a single bit, 0 or 1, instantaneously to their brothers, wherever they were, which was probably currently somewhere in the Inner System. I wasn’t really clear on the details, but when I’d asked Martin he’d gone on about how they transmitted an analog signal through the gravity brane, and about how the fundamental constants there were very different, especially the speed of light, which was far, far higher. Each of the crates contained a few tens – or sixteens, as it were – of smaller crates. These smaller crates in turn each contained a single gigabyte of the bits, each of which massed around a kilogram. They might perhaps be converted into some mass-produced units for commercial use, or they might go in larger chunks to any of a dozen power structures.
Clumsily porting the moderately heavy crate down the ramp, Martin and I hoped fervently that our gauche motions wouldn’t ferret out our anthro minds. I thought I could almost feel the hateful stares of a dozen bigoted orthos upon me, hoping for a single excuse, hoping to bore their ways into our brains and find out what we were really made of.
We were about to leave when Jeffrey suggested we at least take a quick look around. I was about to disagree when Martin piped in that he’d love to go for a bite somewhere. He was probably right. We were all rather tired of ship food, fresh food costing what it did despite our pretty good cooking. At first I thought it was Martin sticking our necks out for me, overcurious as usual, but his body language seemed to say “It wouldn’t be wise to leave just yet. That’d tip our hand, wouldn’t it?” I decided a look around couldn’t hurt.
There was something rather strange about the city. I couldn’t quite place what it was. I’d been to Trident once, when I was a little younger, and something about the city had changed. “Got it,” I suddenly said. “It’s a lot quieter now. And there aren’t as many lights.” The state of affairs was much clearer now that I knew what I was looking and listening for, or rather what I wasn’t. The once-vibrant metropolis had quieted down disturbingly, as if the new regime had draped a blanket of silence over everything. The sky was an ominous shade of gray.
Another disturbing thing about the city was the complete lack of crowds. We met barely half a dozen people on our way to the café Jeffrey had recommended, and every one of them was alone and hurrying along with eyes down. It seemed to me that the city was now not defined by presence but rather the unnatural absence of what should be but wasn’t there. It was not, it seemed, a joyous place.
When we reached the café, we found it nearly empty. A couple sat in a corner, talking quietly to each other. Over across the room from us, a trio of rather unpleasant-looking folks stared at us as we entered. The door chimed rather loudly as we entered the café, and we entered as the door closed closely behind us with a distinct thud. I motioned for a few menus.
In response, the waitress pointed to a dingy blackboard on which was written a depressingly poor selection of any of three dishes, none of which seemed particularly appealing. We each chose one, got a little water, and sat down at a crumbling table.
“Sorry, guys,” said Jeffrey. “I thought this would be a lot better. At least, it used to be. Not sure what happened.” She took a drink of water. “We might as well have stayed on the ship.” She took a bite of her gluey and rather tasteless pasta. As if that were a signal, the rest of us began with distaste to eat. I can only describe the meal by supposition: it was as if some sadistic chef had deliberately tried to make a meal out of incredibly substandard ingredients and in the worst way possible. I wound up feeling bad as I left half on my plate. We paid quickly and left; from the looks on everyone else’s faces, they hadn’t enjoyed the meal much more than I had.
We walked back to our ship in silence, none of us hearing the triplet of quiet footsteps right behind us. It felt awkward to comment on the state of the city, which had fallen pathetically since I’d brought Martin here. It had been the first place we’d gone in the Outer System after I’d helped Martin escape his family in Luna City, and it had been wonderful; there’d even been a giant ice statue built each month by a different team of artists. All that was gone now.
Nostalgia finally won out and I opened my mouth to speak. I was about to start chatting with Martin as we headed back towards the ship when a voice sounded sharply perhaps 10 meters behind us. “Stop right there,” it called. I slowly turned around to find the trio that had loomed over us at the café. “What is it?” I asked tentatively. I had a pretty fair idea of where this was going, but it never hurt to confirm. Much. He responded in a deep growl, grinning cruelly and flanked by a pair of what were probably his friends or lackeys. “You shouldn’t be here. Your kind of filth isn’t allowed in Trident.”
“And precisely what kind of filth is that may I ask?” I responded, trying my best to present a picture of innocent confusion. “So far as I can remember traders are allowed more or less anywhere.”
“I think you know perfectly well,” he responded, seeming to grow angry. “You and that one both.” He pointed to Martin. “You I’m not sure about, but he’s pretty clear to me. I can see his butt twitching just a little; his body language is exactly what I’d expect from a filthy half-animal! So far as I can tell you’ve both come into Trident illegitimately disguised in Ortho flesh to advance the Anthro agenda!” I realized that my worst fears about the entire trip had come true: we’d missed some minor point or committed some obscure blunder that flashed to the sufficiently bloody-minded and attentive how very non-Ortho we were.
Did we have weapons? Could we have fought? In our modern society to own weapons was not unusual. David carried his monofilament sword. Srini carried a bunch of different capsules filled with varying things I’d rather not think about. Jeffrey had built for herself a small but effective railgun. Martin and I both carried older, chemical-powered weaponry, and Martin even used optics that, apart from a little augmented reality magic, could pass as something from a previous century. Always a little old-fashioned about this sort of thing, he also had with him a rather lovely light steel saber with a diamond edge. The only problem was that we weren’t psychopaths and would greatly prefer not to hurt people if we could remotely avoid it. They were mostly for diversion, practice, or keeping in shape. Luckily, we came up with the same idea at roughly the same time. That is to say, we ran really far and really fast.
Scumbags as they were, none of us wanted to be stuck with assaulting government officials, which we suspected they were. This was because the Trident government would, as a direct result, not only be searching for our merry band in particular, but also looking quite a bit harder and with more effort. So we dashed towards our ship, hoping to escape that way, but our ship alerted us that it had been groundlocked. Deciding things couldn’t get much worse, we stopped in an alleyway out of the way as Jeffrey jacked in to find a buyer for our stuff, which she did fairly easily. A few seconds and a large pile of assorted varieties of credits later, I turned and realized Srini didn’t seem to be with us anymore. I checked a second time and nudged everyone else; no luck. It seemed he was well and truly gone, perhaps having taken a right when I’d leaned slightly that way, or perhaps a bit too slow and already captured. Whatever the reason, we’d have to come back for him – we were already in big enough trouble as it was.
It felt like only moments after I’d noted this that the rather unpleasant folks who’d been chasing us showed up on one side of the alley with a plethora of weaponry pointed in unpleasant directions. Unfortunately, the other side of the alley was closed, or so we thought. Martin, however, lateral thinker that he was, turned to his side, and with his diamond-augmented blade slashed straight through the surprisingly flimsy brick wall – apparently the local materials hadn’t been too great for building, and any remotely more expensive solutions weren’t available. He leapt through the new gap, and the rest of us quickly followed straight into a small abandoned store. David rammed the door open from inside and we dashed off.
We decided to try the ship again. To our surprise, this time it reported that it wasn’t groundlocked anymore.
“We might as well try it,” I said. “It’s not like we’ve got any better options.”
I opened the main hatch and dashed in, breathless. Last in, Jeffrey closed it and locked it behind her. When I got to the kitchen, I was rather surprised to see Srini sitting there without a care in the world with a bottle-green pot of tea on his left and a plate of cookies on his right.
“Srini!” I cried with surprise. “What are you doing here? I thought we’d lost you!”
He wiped a last bit of some shiny goo off an arm with a napkin before responding. “I just got the ship to eat me. It likes me well enough not to digest.” He met our shocked stares with a nonchalant shrug. “What? It wasn’t that bad. It actually tickled a little.” This pronouncement did little for our rapidly tilting heads. “After that it was a snap to get the ship to digest the bonds. The locks here are pretty easy to wreck.”
I shook my head as if clearing it of a dream, and walked into the cockpit to take off. This was probably going to be a little bumpy. The pile of credits on the floor that the A-D machine had printed as the transactions had completed sloshed over the kitchen’s rug as I took off from the ice moon, noting a ship in pursuit. I turned on a few different passive and active defenses and launched a large number of small payloads to keep things busy for them, knowing that their defenses could well handle it, but would be taxed enough to give us an advantage.
Srini and Jeffrey swarmed about in their respective corners of the ship performing their respective ministrations to their corresponding portions of the ship; Jeffrey was back in the engine room and computer complex, and Srini was currently lying in a pile of fur, his mind linked up to the ship hive. Martin was busily running a simulation predicting the other ship’s actions.
I didn’t see any options at this point, though. We were badly outgunned by the governmental cruisers, and we were running out of time in which to make an escape; the larger railguns on the surface would be half-warmed up by now, and the smaller ones were already lobbing chunks of iron at us.
“Martin!” I called. “How did your tinkering go?” He called back a “Pretty well! I think it’ll work now!” I hesitated briefly, then nodded to Martin, who’d finished his simulation. “Release the Swarm,” I said with resignation. Martin sighed and looked at me with glee, as usual never grasping the gravity or risk inherent in such a situation. “Looks like my simulation’s improving! It said you’d suggest the Swarm prototype, but it didn’t think you’d do so so fast.” Martin grinned. “And finally! I thought you’d never let me do a live test of this thing.”
The Swarm, as I’d mentioned earlier, had been a months-long project between Srini, Jeffrey, and Martin that had probably led to our late financial press. In its weaponized role, it was a combined offensive and defensive system of millions or even billions of micromachines which carried a small processing device and a plethora of biological, chemical, and physical weaponry. They were cheap to print off by the millions and had a sort of intelligence, perhaps that of an omnivorous mammalian non-apex predator when in sufficient numbers, and the machines were programmed to self-destruct when they ran out of maneuvering fuel to avoid reverse-engineering. They were partly biological and partly mechanical; Srini had done most of the biological work, and Jeffrey most of the micromechanical, and Martin had dreamed up most of the stuff that had made the connections and interactions possible. They’d even managed to make the machines hold quite a bit of maneuvering fuel, and even incorporated a small degree of redundancy. They would do nicely: no countermeasures we could think of worked well against a giant swarm of cheap weak things, and we wanted to make sure no one else would have the chance to find one - Jeffrey had initially pointed out that an electromagnetic pulse might disable them, but such a measure would do nothing to the biological components and also possibly wreck the attacking ship’s circuitry.
Martin picked up a cobalt-blue mug of something of a shade that made my eyes hurt a little, took a sip, and with intentionally ridiculous pomp slammed the large red brightly lit button that would trigger the release of the Swarm. Someone had seen fit to surround it with a garish yellow-and-black striped band, which I thought was a nice touch.
I heard a clunk as the first canister of a few million of the little critters got launched out of the ship. It was then that I decided to take a look at what was going on to our flank.
A thousand little flashes of painfully bright blue light surrounded the ship, and the ablative armor seemed to melt away beneath the assault. As some of the outer wetware began to become exposed to the Swarm, it too seemed to crumple and pale under the biological and chemical assaults. The ship seemed to be coming apart before my eyes.
Thankfully for my conscience, the ship turned around and retreated at high speed away from us, sending off a few missiles which were easily ripped to shreds by the Swarm. Our point defense lasers barely had to fire.
Of course, we hightailed it out of there after that; we didn’t want to stick around for the inevitable reinforcements. I plotted a course that would swing us around Saturn to deliver us at high speed to Europa, far faster than we could have even if we ran the engines at full speed otherwise. We might even be travelling at 0.2c, depending on how close Martin felt like cutting it. Luckily for the ship, he didn’t cut it that fine, and the blossoms of our explosions shone brightly on the ecliptic, propelling us towards Europa and the promise of a long and fruitful future.