Zheng can hardly stand, and his mouth tastes of stomach acid.

  Everything has felt like a dream since the first Fleet ship, the unfamiliar Agni, hailed the buried Scorian command bunker. No, that’s a lie; it’s the past three months, that’s been the dream, or the nightmare, rather. Maybe the whole deployment has been part of a psychotic break; maybe he’s still on Terra, in a coma after a junior officer training exercise. Or maybe he’s taken too many stim tabs again, misjudging a snorted line in order to give him the strength to hold down a fellow soldier while she gets her leg amputated.

  It’s real, he reminds himself. Volkova is real: the way she hunches over the bunker’s consoles, screaming orders at the remaining colonists that no, this isn’t some trick, Fleet has come, and they need to evacuate, and do it now. Some of the colonists refuse to believe her, so wound up in their nutrient-deficient paranoia. They think that the Bellitran forces finally managed to hack through what remained of the CDF’s stubborn, half-mad AI system. It must be a trick, they tell themselves. Whole families die then, at the moment of their salvation, washing down suicide tablets with sulfuric-tasting recycled water. As the rattling blasts of the Gor assault troops turn upward toward the Fleet insertion forces, Zheng re-deploys the meager remnants of his troops downward, trying to convince the delirious colonists that no, this isn’t a Bellitran ruse. Fleet has arrived.

  Then the mad hours of evacuation, not knowing if a Bellitran ship has managed to jump out of the system, soon to bring back an armada of reinforcements. The first weeping contact with a blue-armored Fleet assault trooper, and evac-medics behind him. Onward and upward, past the overrun barricades and pockmarked walls that they had stubbornly defended, past the clumps of flesh rotting against the walls, the heaps of armor so tangled that one can barely tell the difference between Gor, Vorie, and Human; and then out, shielding eyes from the red light of the system’s old sun, into the thin grey atmosphere of Scoria’s surface.

  Volkova is beside him as they finally strap into the Fleet transport ship. She is the last to leave, as is a Commandant’s duty, and Zheng is damned if he won’t do the same as the commander of the CDF forces, even though his vision is double and his throat is so sore from yelling that he can barely manage a whisper. She is beside him as the ship fires upward, teeth rattling against the heavy gravity of their stubborn little moon, and she is there as they file out into the overwhelming vastness of what can only be a carrier ship, a dream within a dream. He should feel amazement, he knows, at being alive and at the cavernous ship, but instead there is only a dull shock.

  It is all he can do to shuffle forward, one foot in front of the next, down the transport ship’s ramp and into the cool, sterile air of one of the Guanyin’s hangar bays. Around him are other ships, and colonists, and wounded CDF, all being made fast or moved to medical bays, their grunts and screams drowned by the shouts of Fleet personnel and the dull roar of engines.

  He feels a breeze, and he cranes his neck upward: a towering Insertion Unit is re-docking, latching onto an overhead gantry the size of Fleet pinnace before moving upward to the Unit launch bay. He feels his empty stomach rise from the vertigo of the sight. After that, he keeps his eyes to the floor.

  A Fleet medic tries to help him, but Volkova takes him under the shoulder instead: go, she says, he’s tired, that’s all—there are others that need you more; and the medic nods, and moves on.

  She guides him to a row of stasis pods. There are thousands of them in blocks and rows in just this corner of the hangar. More than enough for the survivors of Scoria. They expected more of us, Zheng bleakly recognizes. There’s food and water, too, and Zheng tears open a silver packet, his hands trembling as he guides the nutrient rich bar into his mouth. He turns the packet in his hand.

  Apple flavored, it reads. It’s not real apple, of course; but the word has a meaning, and a taste, and it is this word that finally makes the big man cry, choking on sobs as Volkova holds him tightly.

  A fruit, on a tree, on a planet.

  The Terra Home Fleet shifts into jump formation, ships separated by mere kilometers. The call rings out among the Navigators and their AIs:

  Guanyin, navigation systems go.

  Tyr, navigation systems go.

  Heracles, navigation systems go.

  One by one, the Navigators of the five Fleet destroyers— Aceso, Aegle, Hygieia, Iaso, and Panacea—confirm readiness, their voices joining those of the two heavy cruisers and the planetary assault carrier.

  All ships go. Awaiting Agni’s mark, Admiral, booms the integrated thought of Navigator Litton aboard the Guanyin.

  Lanis, weightless and naked within her capital ship’s five-meter tall navigation pod, scans the compiled biometric data of the Agni’s crew. They are safely sedated, ensconced in their Warp pods, minds shielded from the dimensional splintering that only a Navigator can withstand. For a startling instant, Lanis is struck by the strangeness of being the only person who is awake on the megaton battlecruiser. Ether gently pushes the thought from her mind.

  Not alone! You have me. And the Agni, I suppose, Ether adds, with mock exasperation. Beside her, around her, Lanis feels the Agni relay a head-patting bemusement toward Ether.

  Admiral Atsuya was the last officer to be sedated. Even asleep, he is still linked to the Agni, his dreams cementing a portion of the AI’s ego-base, but it is now Lanis who has command of the ship. It isn’t quite a full integration, but it’s close. She flexes a hand, running her mind along the kilometer-long length of the Agni’s huge rail-guns like fingers tracing the edge of a blade. What would it feel like, to fire one of those? There’s an irrepressible surge of envy toward Admiral Atsuya—the imagined taste of such power reminds her of the time spent within the Planetary Assault Unit, though even that planet-storming mech is a cheap plastic toy in comparison to the Agni’s devastating power.

  Drives are primed for jump, Admiral, the Agni calmly states. Awaiting your mark.

  It’s an unusual arrangement, this type of dual integration with the ship and Ether, but the two AIs serve a distinct, if overlapping, purpose. The image of a knight comes unbidden to Lanis, treading through some murky road, bandits thick to either side. The Agni, my horse; Ether, my armor.

  So I’m the inanimate object? Ether protests.

  And I’m the one being ridden? The Agni interjects.

  This is why dual-integrations are problematic, Lanis thinks, a silent smile spreading across her physical lips.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Truthfully, though, they know their roles precisely. The Agni, after all, is the ship, and will handle all of the computational logistics of the jump. Ether is there due to the experiential bond they share. And the fact that she’s the only AI to have ever survived direct contact with the Rot.

  Lanis’ reply spreads to her fellow Fleet ships: Agni, navigation systems go. Countdown engaged.

  She feels the rapid exchange of protocols between the ship AIs, feels a pinpricking sensation across her body as the Agni’s Warp drives flicker into being, if such impossibilities of quantum mechanics can be at all compared to the lumbering engines that push the ship through realspace.

  Lanis steadies herself with a deep breath. A series of navigation mantras runs through her mind, prayers to saviors and gods, accelerating, faster, the words becoming indistinguishable in her mind, until only a vibrating hum surrounds her. She is Lanis. She is a Navigator. She is nothing but a possibility; imagined energy, squeezing through the redirectable funnel of space and time.

  A sphere envelops the Agni as the huge ship’s Warp drive fully activates, bending light like a black hole, the ship a blue and white presence at its core. The Warp field expands, meeting those of the other Fleet ships; each bubble is individual, and yet part of the whole, like bubbles blown from a child’s toy; and there, along the surface of each ship, is another glow, something new, something that has never been a part of Fleet’s arsenal before the appearance of the Dwellers: ancient symbols gleam, huge warding runes cut into composite metals.

  Mark

  Lanis dies. With a burst of darkness, the Fleet ships enter the Warp.

  Dead. Alive. She is a burst of energy, a streak of imagination guiding the Agni through an impossibility. And yet she is also a still-breathing human being.

  Tachycardia noted. Intracranial pressure stable, the AIs murmur to each other like consulting surgeons. She feels a flush of saline, followed by dextrose and magnesium in her implanted chest port.

  This is what the Dwellers could never understand; how a part of Lanis is dissolved, ego-less, floating through the void of eternity, but another part of her clings to Ether and the Agni, like two ropes coiled around her fists.

  It is easier going back, like following a freshly trod path through the forest, she thinks. She feels the Agni folding realspace together, with her guidance, like two points on opposite sides of a paper now coming together. Time is an illusion, but the Agni keeps the trick going, its timer counting down. A fast trip. Not long, now.

  A warning flashes in the periphery of Lanis’ Agni-infused awareness.

  What is it?

  The Iaso, the Agni reluctantly replies, its mind intently prodding the sister ship. Navigator Laurence. An image of the twenty-two year old man flashes through Lanis’ memory, brown hair tussled by a windy morning, smiling tightly as Admiral Ren pins the crescent-shaped Navigator badge on the collar of his blue Fleet uniform.

  The Iaso’s Warp bubble shimmers, traces of golden light running along its sides. Lanis extends her consciousness toward the struggling vessel alongside the Agni. Beside them, Ether's presence darkens with aggression, mirrored in the curl of Lanis' lips.

  A Warp drive malfunction? AI recursion? Navigator hallucination?

  No, Lanis knows. It’s here.

  Another crash of light runs along the invisible sphere of the Iaso’s bubble, arcs dancing against the darkness of the Warp. The sigils etched along the Iaso’s hull glow a molten orange as the Dweller’s ancient tech attempt to fulfill its protective duty; they begin to glitter, throwing up sparks like metal dragged against concrete.

  Agni, how long?

  Computing second fold—at least one more. One minute and thirty-nine seconds until re-entry.

  Lanis, Ether, and the Agni reach out toward the Iaso again, a gauntleted fist of a triumvirate mind. The destroyer is shifting, tendrils of darkness curling against the ship’s Warp bubble as it is pulled apart from the other ships like a duckling being dragged beneath dark water. Lanis can feel the Iaso’s AI, can feel it pushing more power into the bubble and its Warp drive, heedless of the alarms that blare through its empty corridors.

  Navigator! Lanis and Ether scream into the Iaso. Briefly, she touches minds with the Iaso, and its Navigator.

  Second Navigator Collazo assuming primary jump logistics, the Iaso screams back, the ship’s voice manifesting as a young woman. That isn’t the problem, though; the bubble is fraying. At this rate, Second Navigator Collazo won’t have an opportunity to pull the Iaso out of Warp space.

  Steady, Lawrence, Lanis thinks, a thought groaned through fitted teeth. She watches the Navigator’s spiking intracranial pressure, far beyond hemorrhagic territory to an un-augmented brain, feels him jerking within his navigation pod, eyes rolling upward. Steady, she groans again. Focus!

  You risk contagion in case of protective collapse, Admiral, the Agni warns her, this ship’s steady voice finally fraying with fear as it reminds Lanis of the protocols that Fleet has developed for just such an event.

  Lanis hesitates; she thinks of Atsuya, of Ash, of Vice-Captain Dupont and his non-integrated officers; the battlecruiser itself, the last capital ship of pre-crisis Terra, nestled in the small palm of her mind. The weight of the decision is crushing. She makes it anyway.

  I won’t allow it.

  Now it’s Lanis ICP that spikes and the Agni’s power output that red-lines, its fusion core’s triple casing groaning under the sudden flare of its desire. Lanis’ breathing comes in grunts as she pushes the Agni’s Warp bubble alongside the Iaso’s, gliding it up and underneath the ship’s interdimensional shell like a medic filleting a shard of shrapnel from flesh.

  She can feel it now, along the skin of her mind, like an itch that would be bloody to the scratch. The Rot, the Anomaly, watching her with its drooling fangs.

  I know your Taste, Sweet Navigator, Sweet Human.

  There’s a crashing, burning sensation against Lanis’ imagination. She feels the Agni recoil, but Ether is beside her, stiffening her spine against the licking horror, and she redoubles her effort. She can taste blood in her mouth, and if she opened her eyes she would see it unspooling in the viscosity of her Navigation pod, a nosebleed and more.

  Almost there, she thinks: a sweep, a push, a final heave of the mind and will—the Agni watches, horrified, as the entire ship groans under the pressure. Then the bubble is complete, two ships encased together.

  Fold complete—Awaiting re-entry, Navigator!

  The other voice scrapes along Lanis’s consciousness as she pushes the Agni and the Iaso together through a new dimensional tear, the other Fleet ships exiting into realspace ahead of her.

  I have no need of you, the voice spits, growls, screams, and Lanis feels its rotten warmth even through her armored mind. My embrace will be felt beyond this place. I come for all, and I will become One. It is in motion.

  Soon, soon, soon.

  Then she is awake, the crew alongside her, status reports ricocheting between the huge ships like screaming mass drivers.

  A blue and green disc of light floats before her.

  Terra.