Once Hook's main airlock cycled, Carolina313 ripped off her helmet, and it tore with the rest of the one time use suit.

  “Wow, when they say one time use they really mean it.” I said I as I watched the suit shred around her.

  “Yeah, just like a condom.” Carolina313 piped up.

  I blinked.

  “Right... yeah.”

  She grinned at me.

  “What, too lewd for you old man?”

  I snorted.

  “No no, it's just... Most of the people I have met recently have not talked about sex at all.”

  She raised an eyebrow “Really? COGS are prudes? Huh... wouldn't have expected that... the rumors are that you are all techno-fetishists who are morally bankrupt and jump on any and all new experiences with ravenous hunger!” She said, extremely perky, her eyes wide. I was actually beginning to wonder if she was on something.

  “Uh... sure... let's get you to medical and get you checked out.”

  “What? OH! Right... I just survived an attack my ravenous horrors, then going hypoxic... right right.”

  “You went hypoxic?”

  “I was heading there when you found me, half thought you were a hallucination.”

  We walked down the corridors as she chattered at me. “I was just performing some maintenance after the fight, sometimes when we fire the main cannon the capacitors start to shake themselves lose so I was going through and checking all of them, when all of a sudden there was this awful noise and the screaming, I went out to help, but then the atmosphere alarms went off, and Susie evaporated in front of me, and then one of those things came out covered in her blood, and I just ran to the capacitor bay and sealed it...” She said all in one breathe. I was 100% sure she was on something that was making her hyper

  I lead her to medical and motioned inside. “Just take a seat in the medical bed, I need to get back to the bridge.”

  “Can't you let the officer of the watch hold things down a bit longer? It kinda looks... creepy.” She said looking into the medical bay.

  “Uh... what officer.”

  “What do you mean what officer, the officer controlling the ship right now.”

  “There... There... Do you know how COG ships are run?”

  “I assume like imperial ships, just more... cyborgy.”

  “Um... Each member of C.O.G. Crews their own ship.”

  “So just like imperials, with clones right?”

  “No, each SINGLE member crews their own ship.”

  “Okay... so what do you do for crew?”

  “We crew it.”

  “I'm not following, where is the rest of your crew.”

  “You are looking at him.”

  She blinked at me.

  “You... are the only crew.”

  “Don't get any weird ideas, I die the ship don't fly, it's keyed to me.”

  “That's... that's not what I was thinking just... how?”

  “Go in there, I'll talk to you from the bridge.” I said, motioning into the medical room.

  She tip-toed in, and I shut the door behind her.

  “Captain, I believe she is pounding her fists on the door.”

  “I'll try to calm her down once I get to the bridge... and get this suit off.” I said, clomping my way back to the airlock and removing the space suit, void suit... I needed to agree on a nomenclature in my own head at least.

  Once I had divested myself of the suit, and taken a quick shower in my quarters, I headed back up to the bridge and made sure the door was secure. Having another person, and potentially an enemy, on board had made me paranoid.

  As I settled into the chair and reached full synchronization, my mind was bombarded by warnings and errors... all stemming from the medical bay.

  I quickly switched to a camera in the medical bay to view what was happening, and saw Carolina313 by the wall, a panel removed and on the floor, and a little repair drone standing on it's many legs inside the hole, darting menacingly back and forth towards Carolina313, a plasma torch in one hand and what looked like an electrical... charger? That was sparking with electricity in the other. Carolina313 kept trying to get around it to the inside of the ship.

  “Carolina... what are you doing.” I said over the ships speakers.

  She jumped up and looked around, before her gaze settled on the camera.

  “Uh, well.. I just... I wanted to see what Your ship looked like on the inside! Also you locked me in here you jerk!” She said, waving her hand over to indicate the bulkhead and the removed panel, and the repair drone that was currently accosting her.

  “You know what this looks like right?”

  “What?”

  “Sabotage.”

  She suddenly stood ramrod straight.

  “Captain, I would never, we have so many treaties between our factions, our nations, that such a thing would be unconscionable, the last time someone violated the treaties entire populations were destroyed, we haven't been that barbaric since old earth! There are so many rules against a rescued POW sabotaging the ship that rescued them. If people started doing that, no one would ever get rescued again.”

  “I came from those times Carolina, I know exactly how little treaties and consience and the lives of others mean to some people,. Do not test me again.” I said, incensed.

  Could she really not have realized what she was doing looked exactly like sabotage? There were pirates, they had to know people would pull bullshit like this all the time.

  “Captain, if I may” Hook piped up. It took me a moment to realize his voice was being piped in to both of us.

  “Carolina313 likely has very little experience beyond what was sleep taught to her and what she has learned on the job, it is unlikely she knows much about how criminals operate or much of the history to which you are refering.”

  I made sure my voice was only going to Hook.

  “So... treat her as a child?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, treat her as someone who has a very sheltered life.” Hook replied.

  I sighed.

  “So you are saying it is possible she actually just wanted to see what the ship looked like on the inside.”

  “Ask her what her profession was on her vessel, or her rating.”

  I switched over to speaking to Carolina313, who was currently cowering in the corner of a medroom...

  Like a scolded child.

  “Carolina, Please do not open up my ship and tinker with it without my permission. What was your position aboard your ship?”

  “Engineer!” She blurted out, the hurt expression on her face morphing quickly to one of... excitement?

  “Any particular part of the ship?”

  “Nothing specialized yet, they leave that for the older clones, the young ones like me get the initial round of sleep learning, then depending on what we show more proficiency in we are put in a low level role to learn the basics while the learning fully settles in. But I did like working on the big gun” The last part she said with a big stupid grin on her face.

  “The learning has to settle?”

  “Yeah, if you don't start to use what you learn in your sleep immediately you forget it, I think in a week they told me? So... can I look inside your ship? Please?”

  I sighed.

  “Sure, we don't have much else to do while we drift to the transit point.”

  “Drift to the transit points? What do you mean?”

  “I mean drifting the transit point, the exit to the transit in void space. We are way further out than the last few, and I don't want to risk even maneuvering thrusters with those... things so close.”

  Carolina313's eyes bugged out.

  “You can see in the void.”

  “Bits and pieces. The swarm that attacked your ship is... behaving oddly.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Initially I had thought they were moving for the stream that stretched to the transit point, but the Lindworm's had veered off and were heading towards the tendril that had been my disturbing companion through every jump.

  “COG can see in void space? That must be why you guys can use all those other points and appear where you shouldn't and and...” She apparead to be making a lot of connections that maybe she shouldn't.

  I said to Hook. “Should I disabuse her of this notion?”

  Hook replied. “Well, captain... I fear that would put you in danger, especially if she speaks on it to someone else. Right now your ability to see the void is wholely unique, and if it got out... I believe entire fleets would be dispatched to capture you.”

  “Keep it on the down low then, got it.”

  I refocused on Carolina and saw she was asking something to the camera.

  “Sorry, I had to check something on the ship, what was that?”I asked

  “Can you kill them?” She replied, her face hard.

  My heart hurt a little, seeing that. She had lost probably everyone she had ever known, and wanted to kill the things that did it, I could empathize.

  “Not without alerting everything else in here to our presence, and there is something right outside that if it detects us could end us in an instant so... no.”

  “What is it?”

  “I could tell you, but then you'd sleep as little as I do during transit, and I don't think that is healthy without the kind of augmentation I had to get just to fly the ship.”

  She paused.

  “So... could inside your ship?” She cocked her head to the side, asking cutely, and I couldn't help but smile.

  Or you know, tried to smile. The camera in the bridge informed me that my actual face remained the neutral mask it always did when I was fully synched.

  Thought-smiled, that's it!

  I focused, and suddenly I was inside the little drone that had been barring Carolina's entrance.

  “I'll be right here supervising if you want to look around... but we should get you checked out..” I said, my voice projecting tinnily form the drone.

  “If I have to jump back to main control I need you to get out of the engineering compartment, without me directing them these little guys are all set to be very zealous in their defense of the ships components, and I am not willing to turn that part of them off.”

  “You really are the only one controlling the ship aren't you... I honestly thought I just misunderstood or something, but it's just you, with all of these little helper systems.”

  “Correct.” I said, again from the drone, she got down into the drones face and poked at it with a finger.

  I grabbed said finger with my griper and rode it up as she lifted me to her face. She grinned, and placed me on her shoulder as she dove into the maintenance compartment.

  “It's far less efficient than I thought it would be.”

  “Excuse me?” Hook said over the comms.”

  “I mean, on imperial ships all of this stuff would be squished together, to save space, but it's all spaced like this, I could stick my whole hand in between each part and... yeah I can feel a whole bunch of bolts and wires and...” She paused and looked over at me on her shoulder, and her eyes widened in realization.

  “Your bots CAN'T pull out the parts! They have to work on ALL of them in situ! Oh... that is very different. Very interesting.”

  “Interesting good or interesting bad?”

  “Well... I mean if you slot out a whole component, it's easier to replace it quick. If you have a spare shield cell, or conduit, you can just quickly swap out a damaged component, and fix it later, but your little bots here just fix everything in place. That has to be slower but...”

  “Far more efficient. And not as slow as you would think. Imperials use shield's right?” I replied. I had actually studied the overviews of how COG tech worked and several things had caught my eye. There were a lot of manuals and easy to understand guides for captain's in the archives I had had available to myself.

  “I mean, yeah of course we.... OH! C.O.G.! Right you don't use shields at all. Bet you don't have any idea what a shield cell looks like do you?”

  “Not a clue, though I have some theories. Either a battery that contains energy for the shields, or a sacrificial component that absorbs the energy tanked by the shields until it breaks.”

  She snorted.

  “Pretty close, it's a combination of the two. See we use the reactors power to bring up the shields, but then the shields absorb the kinetic and thermal energy that strikes them, well most of it at least, and dumps that excess energy into these. We CAN use them to help run the ship, in fact we use them to fast charge the main cannon a lot, but the rapid recharge and discharge tends to wear them out real fast. And if they ever overcharge, Boom! But not a big boom, a little one, but they are surrounded by armor plating to keep them from damaging anything else, they're kindof in this like, honeycomb wall, with steel plating in between that limits the damage if any one cell goes.”

  “Smart. C.O.G. Ships don't use shields, we rely on rapidly regenerating armor, so we don't have any shield systems like that.”

  “I see, so what does the rapid regenerating? Nanobots? These little guys hauling steel plates?” She asked.

  I sidled up the little robot closer to her.

  “You want to know?” I asked, waving with one of the tools to bring her down closer.

  She leaned in until her face was barely an inch from the little drone I was operating and nodded.

  “You really want to know?”

  “yes!” She said, a little too loudly for how close we were.

  I leaned my little drone body forward till it was just at her ear.

  “It's a secret.” I said in a whisper, then scuttled back into the crawlspace, dancing back and forth as I did so.

  I couldn't hold back a laugh as her face screwed up in disappointment, some anger, with at least a little petulance mixed in as she stared at my little drone capering back and forth.

  “You are nothing like what I was told C.O.G. Pilots were like.”

  “Oh? Are C.O.G. Pilots a special breed?”

  “I mean... C.O.G. People... I guess I've only ever really heard of them being called pilots, but I figured that was just cause we were in space...”

  “Oh, no, theres a good reason for it and it is not simply lexical laziness on the part of your... employers? Owners?”

  “Progenitors.” Carolina313 amended.

  “Progenitors. I did tell you that I am the only crewmember on board remember?”

  “Yeah... I still can't wrap my head around that.”

  “Yeah, so... To be a member of C.O.G. Basically means to embrace the ideals and to pilot a ship. Each member of C.O.G. Has their own ship.”

  “Oh.” her eyes widened. “So literally every member of C.O.G. Is a pilot!”

  “Theoretically, I am sure there are some individuals on prime who haven't fired thrusters in a hot minute.”

  “Hot minute?”

  “Old earth slang sorry, means it's been a long time.”

  “I see.”

  I was very hesitant to tell her how new I was to all of this, so I changed subjects.

  “You still haven't gotten checked out yet.”

  “But there is not doctor here.”

  “The seat is the doctor, just... sit. It doesn't have the best bedside manner but it can do everything up to and including delicate surgery. Well... delicate-ish” I said, remembering the soreness from my own surgery after the painkillers wore off.

  The mention of surgery seemed to hurt more than help, as as I said that she recoiled from the medical bed slightly.

  “Just lay in it, it will suck if I went to all that trouble to board a ship in the void and you wind up dying from a concussion or internal bleeding or something.”

  She gingerly made her way up onto the medical bed, and then jumped when the straps slapped into place over her wrists and ankles.