“You go out there, you’re going to die.” Nathaniel wasn’t stopping her, though he wasn’t helping either.


    “It’s them, Nathaniel. Those pirates set all of this into motion, from waking me up to murdering Alaya’s parents.” It was almost true. As close to the truth as could be, separated from it by a width as thin as hammered gold.


    “Indeed. And those pirates are currently docked inside of the very station which nearly destroyed you last time.” He stood next to the airlock where Gaz had run the moment she’d spotted the pirates. “You can leave if you want. I’ll even welcome you back, as long as you’re not trailing angry Root clerics behind you.”


    “But?”


    “But you won’t be coming back.” Folded arms and a slow lean against the white stone hallway gave Nathaniel a casual smug look. “I said that already.”


    Alaya would have cursed up a storm, blown her fury over the halls, and marched into the airlock because Nathaniel told her not to. But Gaz… “Fine. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”


    “Study, regather your mass and we’ll spend time looking for your friends. Some of them might have survived.” It was what they’d been doing for far too long now. But what else could she do? Gaz readied herself to argue, but Nathaniel finally raised his hands up and pushed away from the bulkhead. “I’ll even sweeten the deal for you: stay and I’ll spend some more of my precious time working on you. If you want.”


    The offer was tempting. He’d saved her life, or rather kept her from having to sail on and find another safe harbor. Somewhere she might have been endangered and where she would have had much more trouble looking for Alaya. Besides, he was a technomancer offering Gaz something worth more than mere mass. “Okay.”


    “Good.” He nodded at her. “There’s no reason to throw your life away.”


    She snorted internally, scoffing at the conviction in his words. Nathaniel believed them, but Gaz could not. More and more reasons for her to stop functioning occurred every cycle. If not for Gaz, Alaya’s parents might have lived. If not for Gaz, Bahl-Mau would still be floating in the Void. Millions would have lived.


    Nathaniel cocked his head. “Do you really think you’re allowed to die before you’ve paid off the debt you’ve accrued with the Verse?”


    The way he said it stunned Gaz for a moment, as if the Technomancer were angry with her. But then he turned on his heel and stalked away, his head and shoulders shaking as he did. Had Gaz made a misstep, had she incorrectly interpreted Nathaniel’s meaning? Was he only keeping her alive because he thought she owed a debt to the verse? Or to him?


    No response to her unspoken questions, just silence and the clank of Nathaniel’s shoes over the halls.


    Gaz sat in her featureless room reviewing the footage from the Root station’s rendezvous with the pirates. One of the reasons, the main reason, she’d wanted to head out immediately and confront those pirates had been the fear they would leave before she had the chance. But no, they’d docked, the ship had been eaten by the roots as all docked ships were, and then nothing. No other pirate ships connected to the Root, and Malorn’s flagship never departed.


    The fourth time she found herself poring over the sensory recordings observing the Root station, Gaz shut off the internal review and switched over to a different set of memories. When Gaz first met Alaya, she hadn’t fallen in love right away. The girl was around ten and Gaz was… technically by that point, Alaya had lived more continuous time than Gaz herself had. But Gaz possessed the mental attributes of an adult, the body of an adult and Alaya simply didn’t.


    It had been a little under two years ago, before Bahl-Mau, before they’d struck on the lead which pointed them in Kowal’s direction. Pirates never walked away from Malorn, which meant Kowal had been on the run. At the time they hadn’t known the escaped pirate’s identity. All they had was a ship’s registry and a description of the cargo manifest that matched an earlier lead.


    The maintenance station where Kowal had docked orbited as far off of the main Loop lines as any station could get. Named Ranja Springs, Gaz had found the name somewhat ironic considering the station’s water situation. Air aboard Ranja Springs tasted of dust and dehydration. The people there were thin with their skin clinging to their frame due to the lack of water.


    It was a strange thing to need out in the black. All spacers knew the baseline rules about resources and needs: four minutes without air, four days without water, and four months without food. Every one of those essential needs should have been met with simple energy. A well-constructed recycling plant could turn foul water clean, CO2-heavy air to pure, life-giving O2, and other waste into food. Worst case, new people would have to supply their own air and their own water to keep from stressing the system, though redundancy should have been built in.


    Not so with Ranja Springs. When they’d docked, rather than pay in credits or barter, the hangar authorities seized half their water and air.


    Alaya hadn’t been bothered, but Gaz was. Claiming essentials like that was a good way to have your docked ships fire out through your hull to leave. Besides that, water and air were ironically abundant in the void. As long as someone spent a little time and energy searching.


    Exactly like an old-earth desert. Water flowed in the very atmosphere and could be captured with a little ingenuity and planning. The same with the Void. Currents of solar ejections sent hydrogen and other light elements blasting through the cosmos. Big enough collectors could capture a vast amount of matter and powerful enough recycling engines would turn anything thus collected into breathable air and water.


    With no plans to stay on Ranja Springs, their scarcities had been strange, and evoked a primal indignation in Gaz. But she had done nothing to investigate the problems aboard the station as her job had been to protect Alaya. And Alaya had a mind for capturing Kowal or one of his cronies and nothing else.


    Ancient systems posed no kind of threat to Gaz’s peripheral nanites. She’d injected her own commands into the station systems before they’d discovered a berth. Which was nice because Gaz was able to use her systems to get them a double room. Which, for some reason, had only one bed.


    She followed Alaya over the station, using her infiltration to guide them to security black holes and down into the bowels of the station’s black district. Exactly where their — as of yet — unknown target had gone.


    Filth and more strangers’ blood than expected covered the two as they returned to the upper decks. Guilt had weighed Gaz down for a solid decade up to that point. Alaya never questioned the events surrounding her parents’ deaths. It was… strange to Gaz, who thought she would have wanted to confirm every detail and learn as much as she could. Thus, Alaya had no idea Gaz had done so much to hurt her. That night, in the middle of their search for the partial culprit, Gaz had decided to confess her crimes to Alaya.


    When they’d reached the room they shared, they discovered their personal water use severely curtailed. They’d given the station enough water to accommodate another twenty people for a lifetime, even including the slow loss of material through he hull of the station. And Ranja’s Spring wouldn’t pump up an extra three liters of water so Gaz could bathe.


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    It didn’t really matter, of course. Gaz could have just cleaned herself with an act of will. Alaya’s indignation over the water rationing had set Gaz on that very course. Coprocessors poised to activate her self-cleaning systems, Gaz had stopped when Alaya put her hand on Gaz’s shoulder.


    “Why don’t we just bathe together? We’re both girls.” It was one of Gaz’s most precious memories. Alaya had blushed, lowered her eyes and raised them back up with a sheen of moisture over her irises. “I mean women.”


    A dozen different responses had queued up in Gaz’s mind. But she must have blown a circuit because she blurted out, “I am not even sure if I’m really a woman.” That sentence might have unpacked into a great deal more, if Alaya hadn’t giggled in response and glanced down at Gaz’s chest and front.


    “Close enough.” She pulled off her overalls and the rest of her clothing in a single move. “You stink and we need a shower. Hurry up.”


    Nothing untoward or erotic had happened then. Alaya’s body had never been a mystery to Gaz before, she’d stood by her through ten year’s worth of baseline human growth. Sickness, biological changes, all of them were no strangers to Gaz. And yet… those scant minutes of hot water, steam, and giggling awkwardness as they squeezed into the shower stall had changed Gaz’s mind more thoroughly than replacing every hadron-circuit in her brain might have.


    She’d lingered in the shower when Alaya stepped out to dry. It was impossible to tear her eyes away from Alaya, solar gravity drawing Gaz’s attention more thoroughly and fully than proximity to a black hole.


    Then she was gone. Stepped out of the bathing area and into the bedroom proper. Gaz had lingered a brief time before she joined Alaya in the other room. They’d shared the same bed for a long time, but that night Gaz lay awake as usual next to Alaya. The only difference was a tremor in Gaz’s heart. Over and over she’d reviewed her own sensory recollections of the shower, trying to understand why anything had changed between herself and Alaya. And whether Alaya might have felt the same.


    Obviously not.


    Present-day Gaz opened her eyes and reviewed the mental thread she’d reeled through. She applied the same obsessive attention to her more recent memories of Alaya. The woman she saw in those sensory reruns made Gaz want to reach out through the recording and urge her to abandon her quest for vengeance, to leave the Loops and the charter binding her to them behind them and escape to a vacant part of space.


    There was no changing the past, only reviewing it.


    That was where Gaz found a large hole. Right before their fateful encounter with the Root station, when Alaya’s implants had been attacked by the seed they’d stolen, Alaya had turned over a series of memories she’d stolen from the rogue priests.


    In the course of the battle against the original Root priests, when Gaz had been crushed and nearly destroyed, a good deal of what she’d received from Alaya had been corrupted. It was such a small thing, smaller even than the memories of the first time Gaz realized she loved Alaya. But Gaz could not deny the fact she’d yearned to share those memories. For no other reason than they’d been in Alaya’s head first. But a second reason arose. What if those memories contained something useful for Gaz? What if they could help her find Alaya?


    The Root priests had sent Alaya and her team against those Rogues. What if those eccentricpacifists could help against the Root clergy? It was a long shot, a desperate ploy where little hope existed. But a little was better than none.


    “Could I bother you?” Nathaniel had given Gaz access to his movements aboard his ship. Since he’d stopped her from leaving, Gaz had not approached the Technomancer.


    “You would have to try rather hard.”


    “What?” Gaz wrinkled her nose and tilted her head, aware of how much like Alaya she sounded.


    Nathaniel looked up from the project he was engaged in, it looked like a cyberbrain overhaul. “You’re not bothering me.”


    “Sorry, um, do you need assistance?” It was almost automatic for Gaz to ask. She was too beholden to Nathaniel and it made it hard for her not to try to help him.


    “I could use your assistance.” He said it in a slow way, hesitating between the words as if afraid he might scare Gaz away again.


    “Sure.” She needed his help herself and there was no better way to clear the balance sheet between them than for Gaz to preemptively help. Not that I could ever pay him back for what he’s done.


    “You’re right, you know.” He glanced up at her as she rounded the operating table he stood at. “You can never pay me back because your coin is no good here.”


    “But…”


    He sighed and set the cyberbrain back in its casing. There was no attached body and the case looked like it lacked any organics. “I mean you owe me nothing, therefore there is no way for you to pay me back.”


    Gaz laughed softly. What people owed each other followed them around the galaxy, an endless digital record of their lives and the lives of the ancestors. And this Technomancer rejected that trail. Only because what he makes is beyond cost. “Okay.”


    “I know you’re here for a reason. And I also know you’d prefer I just plucked it from your mind rather than force you to ask.” This time he lowered his gaze back to the cyberbrain and touched the top of the spheroid. A tiny cylindrical component rose up, as if attached to the tip of his finger. “But, if you want my further help, the first thing you’ll need to learn is how to ask for it.”


    Gaz wanted to choke, if she’d had the mechanics, she might have on principle. “But…”


    “What I said at the airlock stands.”


    It required her spinning up two additional processors before Gaz was comfortable meeting Nathaniel’s demands. “Could you help me retrieve some fractured memories?”


    “Of course.” He answered with a perfunctory nod and proffered the little metallic cylinder to Gaz. “First, let’s see if we can’t refurb this old busted CB?”


    Nathaniel did not know who the original owner of this cyberbrain was. According to him, he’d received it as part of a lot. The organics had been virally cleansed and the digital components had been quantum-purged. Whoever had killed the last owner of this brain, had wanted to be certain of their work.


    Despite what he’d said, there was nothing old about the brain. It wasn’t cutting edge by any means, but its line was certainly still being sold on the consumer market. For a massive amount of credits. And though busted, more of it functioned than some ships Alaya and Gaz had lived on during their first decade together.


    They went well over their typical thirty-six hour work schedule. With his supervision, Gaz disassembled the entire brain in just over forty hours. Nathaniel could enter slow time with Gaz, something she’d never encountered before. Which meant they could communicate digitally though slow time, despite not being connected or running the same sim environment. It also meant Nathaniel could direct Gaz more efficiently than in meat space.


    Why he’d avoided doing that until now was a mystery.


    Pieces of the brain lay arranged in neat little rows or connected to various mounts to prevent the delicate parts from picking up dust or a passing magnetic charge. Nathaniel ushered Gaz away from the table and the two of them sipped from coffee mugs. It was easily one of the best cups of coffee she’d ever tasted. Wasted on Gaz, Alaya would have appreciated the drink more.


    “Promise me you’ll finish putting this brain back together before you leave and I’ll look at those memories of yours. Deal?” He held out his hand in a positively ancient gesture.


    Gaz shook his hand. “Deal.”


    The moment she touched him, her nanites trembled. Nathaniel’s presence in her mind was a soft, subtle thing of whispers and breezes. He glided across her circuitry to the place where her long-term memories were stored. Gaz possessed a vague sense of the magnitude of her mind. But only under Nathaniel’s scrutiny could see the specifics herself. Assuming her current memory usage trends, her cyberbrain would fill in just under eight millennia. A fact which also assumed she did not evolve her recollective capacities further.


    With a start, she experienced the meta-conclusion that Nathaniel was distracting her from what he was really doing. And then the fully undamaged contents of the Rogue’s computer systems flooded over her processors, both main and secondary.


    Data in the order of magnitude Alaya had stolen from the rogues required massive processing resources to organize and review. Gaz relaxed into the data stream and applied the full cycles of her processors to the analysis. She didn’t feel Nathaniel release her hand. She didn’t notice when he returned to his place at the head of the table and resumed organizing bits of the dismantled cyberbrain.


    Because those processors and circuits hit on something absolutely life changing: those “rogues” didn’t think of themselves that way. As far as they were concerned, they were the real Root priests.


    “What is it?” Nathaniel waited to ask until after Gaz blinked and returned to the fore of her sensory controls.


    “Can you send to the Rogue outpost, or maybe find a way to contact some of these people…” Gaz sent him a list of names provided by the data Alaya had stolen. If what she’d found was true, the people at the Riggon Root cluster weren’t really Root clerics, but a violent splinter group. If this data was correct, the actual Root clergy had set the seed out as bait for the splinters. And Alaya and Gaz had ruined their plans. “Maybe don’t tell them who I am?”