Molly’s eye scanned the crowded bar, looking for inspiration. Nothing at all jumped out at her.
What about “Oz”?
Oz?
It’s short for Ozimandaus—which is actually a cool name too. Maybe that can be your Sunday name.
Sunday name?
Yeah, like your full name for formal occasions.
Molly mulled it over, imagining what Oz the AI might even look like. For a moment, she pictured the ridiculous Holly on that ancient show she used to watch as a kid…what was it called? Red Dwarf? Yes. Red Dwarf—with the folks who had the hilariously melodic accents. Thank goodness Grandpa had downloaded all those cultural pods before he and Nana had left on the QBBS Meredith Reynolds all those years ago.
Okay. I like it. “Oz” it is, then.
Great. So, Oz, the reason we are here is because we need to make money. And fast.
What about that trust you have set up? That could keep us going for a century or more.
How do you know about that?
I did a search on you. Once we were off base and I was hooked up to the XtraNET, I just scanned for anything that had your DNA or retinal print attached to it. Turns out it’s the optimum way to find all the recorded information on someone, no matter what their species.
You’ve been looking me up? And not just me by the sounds of it!
I think it’s logical for me to know all parameters of operation—including who I’m associating with.
“Associating with”? You jumped into my fucking holo!
Your sentiment is noted.
Anyway. That trust is private and all sorts of alarms go off if I go near it. I don’t want to touch it. Not yet. We need to find another way to make money independently.
Acknowledged. The trust is off limits.
Yes. Off. The. Record. Like I said, it’s private. I don’t want anyone else knowing about it. Okay?
Okay.
So, I have a serious question. How come you’ve not come up with a plan to tap into the Central Systems’ trade market, and just syphon funds from there? I mean, you’re an AI with frickin’ uber amounts of intelligence. It wouldn’t be hard to bypass some security and take a little from a lot of trades—no one would even miss it.
Ah, but Molly Bates…that would be unethical. And you’ve forbidden me from doing anything unethical. EVER.
What? What are you talking about? I never said that.
Sure you did. When I was going to cyber-blackmail that colonel back at the base, you went off on a moral trip making me swear to never do anything like that.
That was for them. Not for me. I never meant you were supposed to be all moral and shit when it came to what we needed to do.
I don’t understand the differentiation. Please clarify.
Molly recognized the man who had just walked in the door and who was now looking around the tables. She stuck her hand in the air, waved vigorously and slid out of the booth to stand up.
Joel is here, asswipe. This conversation isn’t over.
* * *
Former Captain Joel Dunham wandered over to the table. He was buff and large. In fact, much larger than Molly remembered.
>>> “Yeah, I was kinda surprised by that,” Molly confessed over the sound of the explosions hitting the shields.
>>> “Well, you hid it well. I had no idea that was what you might have been thinking. Mind, I was probably distracted by some thoughts of my own,” he confessed.
Joel smiled at her, looking her up and down.
“Long time, stranger!” She grinned.
“Hello, Geek-brain!” he said, wrapping his bear-like arms around her. He squeezed her tight.
Molly tapped his back, signaling her surrender.
“Sorry!” he said, realizing that his enthusiasm had gotten the better of him. “I forget how delicate you girlies are.”
Molly suspected there was something loaded in that statement, along the lines of him not having much contact with women these days. She didn’t have the inclination to ask, though.
“There’s something different about you though…” He held her out by the shoulders, looking her up and down again.
“I’ve lost weight?” She looked hopefully up at him.
He shook his head. “Something else.” He paused and looked at her face. “Didn’t you used to be a brunette?”
Molly’s cheeks slowly revealed her embarrassment. “Yeah. One of my genetic experiments is taking longer to wear off than I had anticipated.”
Joel howled with laughter while pointing at her hair. “How much longer?” he asked, catching his breath.
“Two years, three months and nineteen days. It was meant to self-correct in three months, but, well...”
“You miscalculated?”
“No, tequila,” she admitted.
“You were drinking?”
“No, I used tequila as the carrier fluid.” She eyed her friend in annoyance. “I was impatient and it was handy.”
Joel was still snickering, and shook his head at her. “Same ol’ Molly, I see.” She rolled her eyes…both at herself and the familiarity Joel had with her sagas.
She pushed a chair out for him, and sat herself down.
“Anyway, good to see you, fuckwit. I ordered you a beer.” The waitress arrived with their drinks, and Molly was quick to get her lips around hers. “You still drink this stuff, right?”
“Of course, and thank you. So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asked.
She played with her bottle before looking at him. “I’ve left the military, and I need a job.”
She didn’t say more, and allowed Joel to absorb it. He lowered his eyes to his bottle.
“A job, you say? Genius-girl Molly Bates has come to me for a job?” He looked back up at her, clearly amused at the irony. “You know, all the time you were assigned to our detail, there never once was a problem that you couldn’t solve. The boys would swear you were a witch, or a freak, or something. I just told them you were an evil genius. They called you ‘devil-woman’ behind your back, did you know that?”
“I knew.” She smiled, completely uninterested in what some meatheads thought of her.
Joel continued, “And yet you’d keep going back to the research core.” He asked her a question that he had wondered about from time to time, “Why did you never join an ops team?”
She shrugged. “Dunno. Guess I just felt more comfortable not having to make life and death decisions all the time.” She looked around before returning to her beer. “I’ve made a few mistakes in my life already. I found out that sometimes I act before I think, and sometimes even when I think, I don’t always think like normal people.”
Because I’m broken.
Joel waited a moment before asking, “And that’s why you want a job now? So you don’t have to put all that talent to good use?” Joel took a sip of his beer.
Her grin spread across her face, looking a little mischievous. “Oh, no, I’m happy to put my immense reservoirs of talent to good use. I just want you to help direct it for me at the moment!”
Joel’s squaddies often found her arrogant, but Joel knew better. He understood her weird humor, even though he didn’t get it half the time. He put it down to the whacked-out ancient shows she would watch. Fokk knows where she got those datastreams from, though. One of the engineers had once told him they were from a time long forgotten in the Sark System.
“So, a job, for your talents…that pays beer money.” He pointed to the drink that she’d already almost drained. He rubbed his chin, pretending to think deeply.
What he couldn’t do with her talents!
“And it has to be, uh, legal,” she added, remembering that at some point she also needed to find a way of reprogramming Oz to make sure she wouldn’t be too restricted by his newfound morality.
Joel’s eyes opened wide. “Legal? What do you think I am? I’m an upstanding Sarkian, I’ll have you know!” His moc
k indignation made them both giggle.
Molly knew he was mostly straight-laced when it came to the jobs he would take. But there was no denying that the circumstances under which he had left the service had left a few people wondering.
Joel pursed his lips. “I have some ideas. A friend came to me the other day about something he noticed that was going down in his company: price-fixing on a type of painkiller that thousands of Oggs and Estarians need. Said there were whispers of hiking the prices to three times their market value, just because they can. He wanted a way to stop it without involving official channels or losing his job.”
He continued, waving off the waitress asking him if he wanted another beer. “I didn’t know how to fix it; I don’t have the tech skills to tackle something like that. And taking on a big corporation? Who’s going to listen to me? Not the police, that’s for sure. But now,” he glanced at her, “now you’re here. And I wonder if we can’t take this job and do some good things for these folks?”
Molly used her sultry voice, and her eyes glinted with glee. “Sounds like my cup of tea. Tell me, will there be hacking?”
Joel had worked with her long enough to know that hacking turned her on. Shit, she is one weird chick… “Oh, there will be hacking, baby. There will be lots and lots of hacking.”
As he smiled, his awareness seemed to drift off. When he refocused, he dropped his eyes to his beer. “You know, I never did apologize for the thing with Candy.”
Molly did a double take, trying to work out what he was talking about.
He lifted up his bottle to point at her. “You remember. The girl you said had several guys in the squad in tow.” He took a sip. Molly nodded, recalling the bust-up. “I just wanted to say, I appreciated you looking out for me. I mean, I know it was a big thing then and we didn’t exactly part as close as we had been. But, I’m sorry I was a jackass about it.”
Had Molly been drinking at that exact moment she may have choked. “Well, er, that’s great. I mean, yes, I was. I just didn’t want her to make a fool out of you.” She hesitated. “While we’re on the subject. I have something to apologize for too.” She noticed that Joel had looked up.
“You remember that club we went to not long after that?”
“Yeah, the gay bar where you got called away for some lab crisis?” Joel recollected the night.
Molly looked at him, hoping that she wouldn’t have to say it.
“There was no crisis, was there?” Joel figured out. “And you knew it was a gay bar?”
Molly kept her face straight. “And I paid Jose, my friend on the door, to encourage the guys to, erm, keep you company.”
Joel’s face dropped.
“You mean…”
“Yeah. They didn’t find you that magnetic. They were having you on.”
He closed his eyes in a grimace. “You are a cold-hearted bitch!” he groaned.
“Now, now, you just tried to make good about Crystal.”
“Candy.”
“Whatever.”
“I genuinely tried to get out of there without letting anyone feel rejected. I fretted about that for days! I even wondered if…” He stopped himself, realizing there was some information he didn’t want to share with Molly.
They looked at each other and couldn’t help but chuckle.
Joel finally admitted. “One of them told me I should go into modeling.”
“Yeah, model airplanes maybe!” Molly retorted.
The two laughed. Just like they had done back in the day, before Candy had gotten between them.
He drained his glass, dropped some credits onto the table for the drinks, and stood up.
“Lemme talk to my contact and see what we can set up in terms of this job. I’d say ‘stay sober,’ but stay by your phone, at least. I’ll get back to you soon.”
And with that he headed out of the bar.
>>> Oh my ancestors! I’d forgotten about the Crystal saga!
>>> Candy! And anyway, what I never told you was that I was only trying to use her to get your attention. If I’m honest… and since this is it, I feel like this is the time to be honest.
* * *
The two stood in the cockpit, with everything crashing all around them, occasionally being jolted against each other, and sometimes apart. Each time, they came back together, spontaneously as if they were on some kind of self-correcting buoyancy system.
“Do you ever regret anything?” Joel asked.
Molly felt herself struggling to find the words to say everything that came to her mind.
“More specifically,” he added, helping her out, “about us?”
She could barely dare hope he meant what she thought he meant. “I do,” she confessed.
A smile crept across his face as he grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. “That’s enough for me,” he whispered in her ear.
Aboard The Empress, Outer Sark System
“Shields at thirty percent,” Brock announced to the cockpit that was now crowded with the entire team watching the events unfold on the main screen together.
The rest of the ship had gone dark when auxiliary power kicked in, in order to maintain main power to the shields.
Red lights flashed, illuminating the cockpit in the danger signal.
Karina reached for Sean’s hand as she braced against impact as another missile hit the shields.
“We’re not going to be able to take many more of those,” Sean commented above the noise and chaos. He watched Molly for a reaction, but she continued to watch the screen intently, mouthing numbers to herself as if making calculations that might potentially help them.
He felt Karina lean closer to him as she got her balance. “Did you ever think it would end like this?” she asked.
He started to shake his head, but then held her closer and put on his dry comic face. “Actually, I thought there would be more sex in the end…”
She sniggered and slapped against his chest as he squeezed her. “I’m glad I’m with you,” she told him. “We’ve all gotta die somehow, sometime. I’m just glad I’m with you.”
“Me too, baby.” He kissed her head and pulled her tight, as if trying to shield her from the inevitable. Or at least shield her from seeing the inevitable when it happened.
“Brace! Brace! Brace!” Crash called to them again as he spotted another missile heading their way.
A moment later the ship was battered again and tilted on its side. The internal gravity dampers took a few moments to kick in, leaving the crew to be thrown to one side of the ship.
There were shouts and screams as they were caught off guard, and then scrambled to help each other up again.
Jack managed to catch hold of Pieter, deftly preventing him from smacking his head against one of the utility units jutting out of the wall. “Thanks!” he called above the noise.
Jack smiled at him. “Any time, friend.”
The two held each other’s gaze for what could have only been a moment in the chaos, but felt like an eternity in their perception of time and expanded awareness. Each was grateful for the comfort of connection as they awaited their fate. Jack threw her arm around his shoulder and they stood together, feeling stronger together and as a part of a team, watching the details on the main screen again.
“Shields at two percent!” Brock announced over the crashing of kinetics and the scream of sirens.
Knowing now that there was nothing else he could do to divert any more power to the shields, he got up out of his console chair and moved over to Crash ’s console. He laid a hand on Crash’s shoulder. Crash turned and looked up at him and nodded, a lifetime of understanding and compassion streamed between the two.
Brock’s eyes teared up.
Crash pushed the final buttons on his console and then stood up out of his pilot’s seat and looked around at the crew. The crew he had served with the last several years. The crew who he could never imagine ever leaving. The crew that he w
as prepared to go to his death with.
He looked across at Molly and nodded, the chaos, the flashing lights, sirens, the destruction all disappearing into the background.
He wrapped an arm around Brock as another missile hit the shields, throwing them all off balance again.
Pieter’s eye was caught by one of the consoles he fell against. “The bulkhead breach is failing. The fuel core has been hit. This is it,” he announced.
Molly looked around at her team, making eye contact with any of them that could see her. She noticed Jack and Pieter holding onto each other, Karina and Sean doing the same, and then she felt Joel putting his arm around her and pulling her close.
She watched as an explosion rippled out against the remaining part of the shield meters in front of them beyond the window. She watched as if in an altered state of consciousness and awareness as the final segment of the shield failed. The explosion was green and blue and electrical in nature as the missile created a fission reaction in the vacuum of space.
The pupil of her eye dilated as the reflection of the explosion spread out across its glassy surface… the last thing that eye would ever see.
Aboard The Corona, (Estarian Flagship)
“Admiral Boys!” The technician’s voice was sharp with alarm, and her fingers flew across the terminal in front of her. “We have a problem, sir.” The tone of her voice alone made it clear that her statement may well have been the biggest understatement of the millennium.
“Multiple calls incoming,” the communications officer chimed in.
“Keep them on hold,” Boys replied, his eyebrows furrowing together in bewilderment. At last check, the order he had given had not been that complicated.
As the sensor readings continued with the explosion of activity, Boys didn’t need to issue any orders to see what was going on. The technician cleared the sensor data away without prompting, instead bringing up the primary virtual window. Abruptly, it was as if the bridge had a front row seat to the entire ordeal.
It seemed to go in slow motion at first, as Boys tried to process what he was looking at in that horrible moment.
“What in my ancestors’ name is going on?” Boys demanded to no one in particular as he surged out of his seat so quickly he very nearly stumbled over his own feet. “Patch me through to Grouthe,” were the next words out of his mouth.
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