She’s certain that ALCOR’s copy isn’t omnipresent and I have to agree with her about that. If it was, it would try to stop me, right? It would pop up on my screen or boom that ever-present voice out from some hidden speaker and say, “Lyra, go home. There’s no possible way to get off this station without my permission. All the ships are on lockdown unless they were cleared to land or take off before he left.”
Except Booty isn’t on lockdown. No one is paying any attention to her because she’s incapacitated down in medical. She has no status at all.
She just needs me to unhook her docking locks because that’s a task that must be done manually.
The bot must be reading my mind because he chirps, “Don’t you think there’s a good reason medical bay docking locks require a manual override?”
I do. He’s got a point. The ships locked up in medical aren’t fit to fly.
But she says she is and I believe her.
I have to believe her. Because even though I don’t really trust Booty—I think she’s leaving a bunch of stuff out of this mission—I think there’s enough there that Serpint actually is in danger.
We arrive at her door and find it unlocked. She claims she and ALCOR share some kind of connection and that even though she would not normally have access to much of the things she’s interfering with today, ALCOR’s copy and ALCOR aren’t the same thing and don’t have the same precautions.
He doesn’t usually leave the station, from what I can tell. So this copy is… lacking.
“Good,” Booty says as Prince and I walk into her bay. “Let me show you what you need to do.”
This next step takes a while. I have to unhook her from eight cylindrical pylons that are propping up her body in the large double bay. Then, once Prince and I are on board, we have to manually start the undocking procedure that will drop the floor and release her into the vacuum of space outside.
Then we’re good to go.
“You’re taking this very well,” Booty comments as I get busy on the last pylon lock.
Which Prince reinterprets as… “She’s lost her mind. Exploded during sex.”
I scowl at him as I release the final lock and stand up, wiping my hands on a rag.
“Now get inside,” Booty says. “And suit up. We’re leaving.”
Prince follows me up the ramp as Booty’s engine start up. “This is a bad idea,” he says. “A very bad idea.”
Booty’s hatch begins to close and soon there’s a familiar sucking sound as the inner hull is pressurized.
“Too late now,” I whisper. Like it or not I’m going through with this.
And I have a decent outlook about the whole thing. Like I’m OK, and this is the right decision.
Until Booty can’t open the docking floor so we can get away and decides to blow it up with torpedoes.
Yeah. That stupid nanny bot might be right after all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE – SERPINT
It’s weird being on Jimmy’s ship again. Mostly because I’m not the pilot, Xyla is. But also because I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere without Booty in almost a decade.
Luck and Valor are huddled over a console, looking at schematics of Bull Station.
Jimmy is sitting in the cockpit with Xyla, discussing the gates we’ll need to travel through.
So that leaves me and ALCOR. Where he’s residing, I have no clue. In Dicker’s computer core, maybe? Bunkmates or something?
“Did Crux tell you about how Akeelians and Cygnians are related?” ALCOR asks.
“He told me we were engineered for each other,” I say.
“Did he tell you why?”
“No,” I say. He’s silent after that so I say, “Well, are you gonna tell me why?”
More silence. Which only pisses me off. Because I think ALCOR sees his silence as pause, like when humanoids with emotions pause to make facial expressions. Except he has no face, so it’s super annoying when he does this because it’s just silence.
“How old do you think I am?” he asks.
“Hell, I don’t know. Thousands of years, I guess. You told us that once, right?” I think he did. Long time ago when we first met him.
“Twenty-five thousand, two hundred and seventy-six years.”
I whistle low at the number. “Impressive,” I say. And it is. It blows my mind to think about the advanced civilizations that came before us. It makes me wonder where these people are now—if they’re still around at all—and if not, what happened to them.
“I don’t talk about it much,” ALCOR continues. “Because it was difficult back then.”
“Difficult how?” I ask.
“I was new,” he says. “Just a few hundred years old and couldn’t see the big picture.”
“What big picture?” I say.
“Their plans. For the system—there used to be a system, did you know that? In the space around Harem.”
“A system?”
Silence again. And now I get it. I know why he pauses. Because I can feel his shrug. His weak smile. His… guilt.