By the time Free managed to screw her brain back on straight she realized that she had been submerged in the Sea. She broke the surface and scanned the surface. She let out a breath as she saw her capsized .vessel and swam up to it. She pulled out the ship’s screen from the console underwater and started fiddling. She tapped a final button and the mast swung up. She managed to snake an arm around it then was launched off as the abrupt correction sent her flying back into the Sea.

  She crawled back on-board, mentally exhausted.

  “Well corpo-crap.”

  She looked around and didn’t see anything, at least she was given that small mercy. She had been half expecting a Corpo Response Squad, or whatever stupid corporate name they had, to have shown up by now. Still, that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t eventually do so. She took one final look around and saw mass quantities of data-fish floating on the surface of the water on their sides. They twitched and broke apart into corrupted bits of data as portions of the Sea looked black or red or green. Not the uniform blue that it was supposed to be.

  She changed her thinking from, ‘probably will eventually show up’ to ‘likely on their way’. Free fixed her rigging and set sail at full speed.

  Free’s legs were wrapped around the top of the mast as she looked through a CodeParser, or as it appeared in the CodeSea, a telescoping magnifying telescope. She had been focusing on the devastated area she had just vacated when she finally noticed something in the distance. A whirlpool had formed underneath that section and she felt her Freeborn respond with a slightly reduced speed.

  Debating her course for a few seconds she pulled out a Clone-Worm, compiled it, then threw it into the Sea. An exact copy of Freeborn and a somewhat-poor copy of herself cut away from her to the starboard side. Just in case.

  She needed to figure out a plan, but before she hopped down she swept around the rest of the angles. There was a hazy shape off to her portside, the omnipresent haze at a distance made the shape fuzzy and obfuscated. She modified some of the parameters of the telescope and brought it back up. It focused into view. It was another ship and larger than hers, perhaps a class larger. She picked up a glint from the top of the other ship’s mast. They also had likely just seen her.

  Corpocrap-prime.

  She saw another helix starting to form, this time in the distance ahead and slightly to port. That way meant she would likely have contact with the ship.

  She bit her lip and refocused on the helix. This one was the biggest one she had seen by far, both the upbound and downward streams were individually as big as several of the other ones, combined.

  If she was going to catch one it would be that one.

  She looked behind her and saw that the whirlpool had stopped. Her clone-worm ship was far to her right now and she saw a vast stir in the water move to pursue it. She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or not.

  She had been constantly recalculating both her and the other ship’s headings. She was heading in a direct line to the helix, still distant. It had been constantly growing in size. That was good. Her best, and only, guess was that it must be a CoreStack upgrade, and a big one at that.

  This was her opportunity and she wasn’t going to keep chasing little helixes around the CodeSea until she ran out of time. She couldn’t, she didn’t have forever… her timer read: 2:13. Her eyes widened, she had been chasing around smaller helixes for entirely too long. A wave of anxiety threatened to swallow her in a choking swell but her mind distracted her by recalculating the contact range of the other ship for the hundredth time. At this rate running out of time would be the last of her concerns.

  It would be close enough to shoot at in only a couple of minutes. She sideloaded her anxiety into another part of her brain with a forceful shunt.

  She really wished that Three had given her a better estimate of how long the SharkSkin would last. If she used it now, would it cause catastrophic failure just short of the helix? No, she told herself. Better to wait.

  The Corpo-Ship was a schooner, bigger than hers and managed by a group of three. It had 2 cannons on either side and a sail that was slightly larger than hers.

  They were close enough that she logged some sort of scan being attempted on her ship. In response Free threw one of Three’s modified Corpo-Shrouds into the space between them. A ‘pop’ and ‘hiss’ sounded out as a blast of fog erupted from the space in between their ships. A flare fired out from the front of the ship but it quickly died and was swallowed by the fog. Too close, she had been just in time.

  Free immediately fired from her port cannon and the SQL missile beamed across the distance to rip a chunk out of the ship and take one of the screaming Corp-crew with it. The return fire was standard corporate-SQL rounds that launched from both cannons, both flew narrowly over the top of her deck. The enemy ship continued its attempts to launch flares that choked and died one after another in the thick mist.

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  Shots continued to fire between the two, neither side able to find good purchase. She saw the fog start to thin, she needed to end this quick. She turned Freeborn toward the Corporate-ship and weaved between another set of shots. She loaded and aimed both cannons as far to the bow as possible and jerked the wheel quickly to the left and loosed the starboard cannon and then jerked the opposite direction to fire the port cannon, both shots launched in tight arcs forward as they landed deep into the body of the Corporate-schooner and massive chunks of Code blew out from its frame. The CodeSea quickly took it from there as it started its inevitable death below the surface.

  “Just in time,” she smiled as the shrouding fog drifted apart.

  As a final ‘screw you’ a series of flares launched from what remained of the deck. The last one managed to break through the thinning shroud and briefly flared bright. Most of its momentum had been stripped, but still. That wasn’t good.

  Then, she felt? Heard? Sensed? No, not sensed she concluded as a rumble vibrated her avatar across her deck before she grabbed onto the railing and stabilized herself.

  Then, she saw it. A massive multi-set of teeth shattered her cloned-ship in half as the shroud failed and the worm was exposed to writhe in pain. The rest of the worm was taken in a second bite. Then the creature sunk below the water again and she saw a fin many times over the size of her ship cut in her direction.

  "A.m.e.m.d.o.n.n." she whispered under her breath.

  She started to calculate its distance to her and how long it had taken it to catch her clone-ship. She didn’t finish the math but the number was suitably short enough that she deployed the SharkSkin on Freeborn and a layer of fine silver quickly spread over Freeborn’s hull and she held on as she cut over the very surface of the water.

  Three saw the flare. Dammit Free.

  Every Supervisor on his shift had been deployed in command of a ship in a Corporate-BattleGroup to defend this CoreStack update. Normally he wouldn’t have been called down here as a Junior Supervisor but the interruption and corruption of the last helix had set off warning bells. The flare solidified it.

  “All Supervisor-Captains! Enemy cracker sighted, load weapons and maneuver into defensive formations. Interceptors, move out to engage! We can not allow this upload to be interrupted!”

  Then, he saw her through his CodeParser telescope. Damn, she looked glorious, well… maybe not glorious, but definitely cool. That wasn’t his way, to be flamboyant and loud like her but… that was kind of why he liked her anyways.

  Despite the serious situation he grinned.

  It had taken a few moments for Free to solidify her footing on Freeborn’s deck. The SharkSkin had her cutting over the surface of the ocean, barely even making contact with the surface. Free looked at her wake. Where her ship did touch down, massive ripples pulsed out behind her.

  Damn, at this speed she should have just used it before on one of the other helixes.

  Well Free, a little late for regret.

  She could make them out now, and at her speed, it was quickly going from ‘can see them’ to ‘nearly in contact range’ frightfully quick. Around the base of the helix were a host of ships. In a circle were larger galleons and warships flanking a massive battleship. Between them and her were interceptors that raced out to meet her.

  Bursts of ones and zeroes decayed into fractured dead code as they plumed around her, well off their mark. She pushed forward, the air whipped her hair in wild arcs.

  She took an opportunistic shot against a ship that happened to perfectly position itself in her firing line and blew off its mast.

  “Crap idiots!”

  It was two statements that came out in one as interceptors maneuvered directly in front of her. She pulled on the wheel and Freeborn hitched before spiraling out of control. Her spin and whirl over the surface of the Sea continued as she couldn’t gain enough traction to course-correct. Blasts started landing around her and she threw out her second, and last shroud.

  In the fog she managed to slow down her acceleration and caught enough friction to be able to gain control of her ship. Fire continued to land around her and she scanned the waters around her ship. They were too close now. She sped up in a burst and skimmed along the flank of a ship as she aimed low and blew a malignant hole into the ship and below its water line. She cut an angle and was glad she did it as more fire came in at her old trajectory. She continued to cut back and forth, she needed to get out of here! She traded blows with another ship and took damage for the first time.

  A glancing blow had struck her hull and she took heavy damage to her starboard cannon; she had made Freeborn, her .vessel, with compartmentalization in mind. She swiped a hand and dropped the cannon into the Sea. She was in trouble.

  She cut across another ship and ducked as their cannons fired overhead then cut her speed and drifted around the back of another ship.

  With a slice of her hand she cut off another portion of her ship that took a heavier blow, this time on her rear portside as her ship reformed again after the loss in an attempt to compensate. She whipped around as she threw a Bot Bomb at an unlucky ship and watched as it exploded on the deck and the Bot-zombies crawled over the ship and consumed the crews’ credentials in silent screams then hijacked its controls to manipulate the ship to ram into another Corporation vessel. The chaos bought her a few seconds as the Corporation ships prioritized their cannons on their more immediately dangerous Bot-infested brother or in attempts to put some distance between them.

  There, she felt the vibration again. She was out of time, she launched a clone out toward the massive swirling helix that was slowly starting to poke through the fog and set it at max speed. It cloned some of her SharkSkin.

  She looked below her and saw a truly massive school of data-packets swim underneath her ship. They were heading in the direction of the helix and the main Corpo battle formation. She loaded a Bot-Bomb to passively copy itself among the school and set a delayed deployment timer on it. At the last moment she moved the timer a bit earlier, she couldn’t afford to corrupt the data double-helix like last time.