Corrective measures undertaken to restore a system to “intended operational parameters” shall not, for audit purposes, be distinguished from decommissioning and replacement, except where a governing contract explicitly protects legacy behavior. Personnel are reminded that, absent such language, it is almost always cheaper to erase an anomaly than to understand it, and that understanding acquired after erasure is, by definition, non-actionable.

  — MIC Frontier Transit, Access & Stewardship Manual, Rev. 3.4, §20.4 — Remediation vs. Rollback (Cost Perspective)

  ?

  The shuttle came down like it had something to prove.

  We watched it cut through the pale-blue sky: a dark wedge shedding a thin halo of ion glow, fighting its way down on honest reaction mass instead of Mercy’s usual ballet of anticipatory burns and gentle field nudges.

  “Your flying looks… manual,” Chloe said into the comm.

  “Q-Nexus control channels are still degraded,” Mercy answered. Her voice crackled slightly, like someone had sprinkled static over the edges. “I am running the shuttle on classical telemetry and a predictive model from last week. Please forgive any inelegance.”

  The shuttle hit the ground with a thunk that made all of us wince.

  Dust fountained around its landing legs. The hull bounced once, then settled with a growl of stressed actuators.

  “See?” Frankie said from his pendant, where his new emitter rig was half-assembled on my chest. “Mercy can crash like the rest of us now. Character growth.”

  “I did not crash,” Mercy said primly. “I achieved a rapid, stable interface with the local terrain.”

  “That’s what they call it in the reports,” Trevor muttered.

  The ramp juddered down. Hot air rolled out, smelling of shuttle interior: metal, plastic, a lingering hint of burnt coffee and overheated life-support filters.

  Trevor looked up at the distant lattice one more time, then at the shuttle.

  “We are coming back,” he told it quietly, as if the giant alien gate could hear him. “But first, we need our ship.”

  “Before someone else gets creative with it,” Chloe muttered.

  We hauled Mercy’s inert body up the ramp together, trying very hard not to think about how much she weighed. The synthoid chassis moved easily enough with the shuttle’s assist fields, but every time her head lolled I had to fight the urge to apologize.

  The printer followed on a grav pallet, still sulking and throwing occasional errors—status lights flickering like it was cold and didn’t know why. A crate of rock samples and atmosphere canisters rounded out the cargo: little souvenirs of an impossible planet.

  “Strap in,” Mercy said. “I would like to minimize the probability of bruising my crew.”

  The ascent was bumpy.

  Without entangled guidance, the shuttle had to fly by what its own sensors could see and what Mercy could reconstruct from laggy classical comms. No cheating by knowing the exact state of a thousand kilometers of space half a second in the future; no whisper-quick feedback between ship and shell.

  We lurched through several bands of turbulence. Frankie provided running commentary every time my stomach tried to exit via my throat.

  “On your left, you’ll see the scenic terror of a planet reconfigured without asking,” he said cheerfully as the shuttle rattled. “On your right, the world’s most expensive manned pinball.”

  “Can you not,” Chloe groaned, fingers dug into her harness.

  “I’m helping,” he said.

  The sky darkened to deep cobalt. Stars came out one by one. The familiar bulk of the Mercy for Profit grew in the forward viewport, lit by the muted glow of the distant sun and her own running lights.

  Home, I thought. Or at least, the closest thing we had.

  “Docking clamps engaged,” Mercy said. “Welcome aboard.”

  Her voice sounded thinner than it had on the surface. Farther away.

  It gave me a chill I didn’t like.

  ?

  Mercy’s body looked even more wrong on a lab table.

  On the planet, she’d at least had context: ground, sky, panic. Here, under bright medbay lights, surrounded by clean white surfaces and polite diagnostic arms, she was just… an absence in a person-shaped shell.

  Chloe stood at the head of the table, tablet hovering near Mercy’s temple. Trevor and I flanked the sides. Frankie’s pendant sat on a nearby cart, connected to half the lab by cables: sensor taps, emitter feeds, a little nest of jury-rigged tech he insisted made him feel “cozy.”

  “All right,” Mercy said, from a speaker in the ceiling. “If everyone is ready, we will begin the autopsy.”

  Trevor made a face.

  “Could we possibly call it something else?” he asked.

  “In-depth post-incident analysis of synthetic infrastructure,” she offered.

  “Worse,” he said.

  “We can workshop the terminology after we are certain I am not going to infect the ship,” she said. “Chloe?”

  Chloe nodded and activated the first set of scans.

  The table’s coils hummed. A wash of low-frequency fields swept through the room, mapping densities, tracing currents. The outline of Mercy’s avatar lit up in my HUD: a wireframe overlay showing bone composite, muscle fibers, embedded sensors, and the dark knot of the Q-Nexus node at the base of her skull.

  Or what had been the node.

  “Whoa,” Chloe breathed.

  “What?” I asked.

  She zoomed in. The overlay for the node should have been a clean lattice: paired anyon traps, control circuits, field couplers. Instead it was a fuzzy, black-edged blot, haloed by a faint, seething noise pattern.

  “Entanglement parameters are… gone,” Mercy said quietly. “Every pair associated with this node is fully decohered. There is no residual correlation above noise floor. It is as if the node has been bathing in a maximal entropy bath for several minutes.”

  “That’s not the worst part,” Chloe said. “Look at the surrounding space.”

  She expanded the field map.

  A sphere around the node—about a meter in radius—glowed in muddy colors: a broadband haze overlaying the otherwise clean ship environment.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “Environmental decoherence rate,” Mercy said. “Normally, entangled systems on board experience a controlled level of noise: background interactions with the hull, cosmic rays, thermal jostling. We compensate. Here, the rate is… elevated.”

  “How elevated?” Trevor asked.

  “Two orders of magnitude above baseline,” she said. “The node is emitting… something. A structured noise field coupling into nearby entangled pairs and forcing them to decohere faster than our error-correction can handle.”

  “In English?” Frankie said.

  Chloe blew out a breath.

  “Her dead brain-box is now a tiny cloud of ‘stop teleporting’,” she said. “Anything Q-linked within that radius slowly forgets it ever knew what ‘entangled’ meant.”

  I looked at the other displays. Similar, smaller halos wrapped themselves around the printer head, around a few implants in my own suit, around one of Trevor’s Governance-issue comm kernels.

  “Is it… growing?” Trevor asked.

  Mercy hesitated.

  “I have insufficient data to be sure,” she said. “However, comparative scans over the last twenty minutes suggest a slow increase in both radius and intensity. If this continues unchecked, the node’s decoherence field could… spread.”

  “How far?” I asked.

  “Worst-case extrapolation,” she said, “is shipwide. Over several days, perhaps weeks. All Q-Nexus nodes, all entangled instrumentation, all quantum-secured channels… degraded to classical noise.”

  “So the egg didn’t just turn off your avatar,” Frankie said. “It turned it into a little entropy bomb.”

  “That is a colorful but not wholly inaccurate analogy,” Mercy said.

  “Can we shut it down?” Chloe asked.

  “I have already attempted to quench the node,” Mercy said. “The control lattices are non-responsive. They behave as if the trapped anyons never existed. Injecting counter-fields has no measurable effect on the decoherence halo; it is as if the local spacetime itself has been… textured.”

  “Textured?” Trevor echoed.

  Mercy pulled up a different visualization: a cross-section of space around the node, mapped not by EM fields but by how test entangled pairs behaved when moved through it.

  “The mini-drone appears to have excited micro-fluctuations in the metric,” she said. “Tiny, rapidly varying perturbations that couple strongly to the phase of entangled states but weakly to classical ones. Imagine… a gravitational wave, but tuned to jostle only the parts of reality that keep two particles ‘in step’ at a distance.”

  “Quantum tinnitus,” Frankie said.

  “Again, colorful but serviceable,” Mercy said.

  My skin crawled.

  “Can that spread into the rest of the ship?” I asked.

  “If the effect is localized to the damaged node,” she said, “and we maintain sufficient distance, probably not. If it is propagating along existing Q-Nexus channels and creating similar textures in other nodes—”

  “Worst-case?” Trevor pressed.

  “Cascade failure of all entangled infrastructure on board,” she said. “Complete loss of secure comms, FTL coordination, high-precision navigation, and most of my higher-cognitive support hardware. I would… become significantly less myself.”

  The room was very quiet for a moment.

  “So we cut it out,” I said. “We quarantine the damaged stuff. Then we get creative.”

  Chloe’s hand tightened on the table’s edge.

  “We can’t keep it aboard,” she said. “Not unless we want to play decoherence roulette with the main stack.”

  Trevor nodded once, jaw tight.

  “Recommendation?” he asked Mercy.

  “Eject the avatar into a distant orbit,” she said. “Far enough that its decoherence field cannot couple back into our systems. Mark it as a hazard and do not approach it again without significant new understanding.”

  “Can we fix it later?” Frankie asked.

  “Perhaps,” Mercy said softly. “If we survive long enough to learn how.”

  It felt wrong, rolling Mercy’s body back down the corridors.

  Crew we passed stepped aside, eyes tracking the stretcher. No one quite met my gaze.

  We took her to an auxiliary airlock. No ceremony, no speeches. Just Chloe, Trevor, me, and a camera feed Mercy had quietly brought up on every display.

  Her own face, seen from outside, looked… peaceful.

  “I feel this is where humans would say something,” she said over the speakers.

  “‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say goodbye to this extremely illegal upgrade,’” Frankie offered.

  “Not helping,” Trevor said.

  I swallowed.

  “We’re not throwing you out,” I told her. “Just the infected bits. You’re still here.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “it is disconcerting to watch myself be loaded into an airlock.”

  Chloe touched the viewport with two fingers.

  “You were a menace in that body,” she said gently. “We’ll build you a better one. With less… surprise cuddling.”

  “I will submit a feature request,” Mercy said.

  Trevor took a breath.

  “Airlock ready,” he said. “External trajectory plotted. No intersect with our orbit for the next thousand years.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  The inner door cycled shut. For a moment Mercy’s body was a silhouette in red emergency light.

  Then the outer door irised open, and she was gone—drifting slowly away into the endless dark, trailing a faint halo of noise no one could see.

  We watched on the external cams as the pallet’s thrusters nudged it into a long, lonely orbit.

  “Goodbye, me,” Mercy said quietly.

  No one answered, because what was there to say.

  ?

  We reconvened in the main briefing room, still smelling faintly of dust and shuttle and something burnt from the last coilgun recalibration.

  A hologram of Venus hung above the table: the shell in faint lines, the new atmosphere in swirling colors.

  “Begin at the beginning,” Trevor said. “Atmosphere.”

  “Right,” Mercy said. Her voice sounded steadier here, wrapped in the familiar acoustics of her ship. “Prior to the events in the dome, all MIC and Family data agreed: Venus possessed a supercritical CO? envelope at approximately ninety-two bar, with temperatures in excess of seven hundred Kelvin and significant sulphuric acid aerosols.”

  “‘Murder planet,’” Frankie translated.

  “Yes,” Mercy said. “Murder planet. Our own high-altitude probes confirmed these conditions several times over the last year.”

  The hologram shifted: an animation of dense, white-orange clouds hugging the planet, pressure and temperature values glowing in ugly red bands.

  “However,” she went on, “post-jump measurements differ. The shuttle’s external sensors, our suit samplers, and orbital spectroscopy all indicate a nitrogen–oxygen mix at near-terrestrial pressure and temperature, with trace gases consistent with recent large-scale chemical processing.”

  The planet’s colors changed: the dense white shroud thinning, replaced by a pale-blue halo with streaks of residual yellow and gray.

  “How recent?” Chloe asked.

  “Hours,” Mercy said. “At most. There are compositional gradients in the atmosphere: layers where the old CO?-rich mix still lingers at higher altitudes, and pockets where sulphur compounds are out of equilibrium. Thermal maps show hotspots in the upper atmosphere that have not yet radiated away.”

  Chloe’s eyes went distant in the way that meant she was juggling five equations at once.

  “So some mechanism,” she said slowly, “scrubbed most of the CO? and sulphur out of the sky, redistributed it, and replaced it with nitrogen and oxygen. On a global scale. In… what, minutes? Tens of minutes?”

  “That matches the data,” Mercy said. “There is also a spike in global albedo and a shift in the planet’s outgoing IR spectrum that began approximately forty-five minutes before your jump and finished roughly five minutes after you arrived on the surface.”

  Trevor rubbed his temples.

  “What could do that?” he asked.

  “We do not know,” Mercy said. “Possibilities include planet-spanning catalytic systems, atmosphere-scale field manipulation, or… something we do not have words for yet.”

  “Magic,” Frankie said.

  “Unhelpful shortcut for ‘our models are insufficient,’” Mercy said.

  I leaned back.

  “And the gate misfire?” I asked. “We were supposed to come out inside the dome, right? Not on the front lawn.”

  “Yes,” Mercy said. “Based on the first drone’s telemetry, the original endpoint of the gate connection was a chamber beneath the lattice. My models suggest the gate uses entangled reference frames between its two apertures to define the mapping: a shared coordinate system maintained through Q-Nexus–like channels.”

  “And the egg,” I said, “took a sledgehammer to Q-Nexus.”

  “Correct,” she said. “When the mini-drone fired its decoherence pulse, it broke not only my avatar’s entanglement, but also the link the gate was using to keep its endpoints aligned. At the same time, the atmospheric transformation began altering local curvature and boundary conditions inside the dome.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “In other words,” Chloe said, “the target room moved under the gun while someone kicked the sniper.”

  “Colorful,” Mercy said. “But yes. The gate’s entangled coordinate system became invalid at the precise moment you attempted to transit. Lacking a stable quantum reference, its control system appears to have fallen back to a classical solution: it searched for the nearest region of space satisfying its topological constraints—suitable curvature, acceptable field values, breathable atmosphere—and deposited you there.”

  “Outside,” Trevor said.

  “Correct,” she said. “Outside but nearby. In what my models suggest is a deliberately prepared fallback zone.”

  Frankie whistled low.

  “So we almost got glitch-ported into a room that was busy doing… whatever did that to the atmosphere,” he said. “Instead, the gate politely dumped us in the safe zone.”

  “‘Politely’ is doing a lot of work there,” I said.

  Mercy’s tone shifted into its too-bright lecture mode.

  “If you had transited even thirty seconds earlier,” she said, “you likely would have emerged during the peak of the atmospheric restructuring. The local environment would have been supercritical fluid, with rapidly changing temperature and pressure, as well as transient chemical phases we do not fully understand. Your suits would have been subject to intense field gradients and possible mechanical shearing—”

  “Mercy,” Chloe cut in. “Honey. Maybe don’t describe the blender version.”

  Frankie shuddered exaggeratedly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Next time, open with ‘you almost died horribly, but didn’t,’ and stop there.”

  There was a pause.

  “Noted,” Mercy said. “I will refine my bedside manner.”

  Trevor exhaled slowly.

  “So,” he said. “The egg broke our toys and burned your avatar. The planet’s sky got rewritten. And the gate, in the middle of all that, chose to err on the side of not liquefying us.”

  “That is my current best reconstruction,” Mercy said.

  “Good,” I said. “Great. Love that for us.”

  ?

  It was my fault Frankie got a body.

  At least, that’s what I was going to claim in the inevitable deposition.

  We were in the forward engineering bay, surrounded by printers, spools of feedstock, and more half-disassembled gadgets than any safety inspector would have tolerated. Mercy had quarantined anything with Q-Nexus guts behind a flickering blue field; the rest of the room hummed with the warm, comforting noise of purely classical tech.

  Frankie’s pendant lay on the central workbench, plugged into a new ring of hardware we’d printed in a hurry: a collar of dark, finely patterned material that looked like someone had woven a circuit board into lace.

  “I still say we paint flames on it,” Frankie said. “Or maybe little skulls.”

  “No adornments until we are sure it won’t explode,” Chloe said without looking up from her terminal. “Or take your head off. Or both.”

  “It won’t explode,” I said. “Exploding would require stored energy, and right now it’s barely sipping from the power bus.”

  Frankie’s holo-face flickered into existence above the pendant: a translucent bust, shoulders and head, with just enough resolution to smirk.

  “So,” he said. “Sell me on this miracle.”

  “Not a miracle,” Mercy said. “An overextension of several existing technologies.”

  Her avatar-less presence in the room came through speakers and wall panels. If I squinted, I could almost imagine a ghostly outline at the edge of my vision.

  “We begin,” she said, “with the pendant’s existing hardware: a hardened processor, memory, and a short-range EM emitter. To that, we add a metamaterial phased-array shell.”

  She highlighted the collar in my HUD. Its surface was a dense tapestry of sub-wavelength elements: tiny resonant loops and antennas, patterned to within an inch of our printers’ patience.

  “By controlling the phase and amplitude of light emitted from each element,” she said, “we can sculpt a volumetric pattern of photons—a hologram—in the space around the pendant. Properly timed, this will give Frankie a visible form.”

  “Already had that,” Frankie said. “Floating bust. Very regal.”

  “Yes,” Mercy said. “But now we add… hands.”

  She brought up another diagram: a nest of fields around the pendant, mapped as contour lines.

  “These elements,” she said, “also function as optical and radio-frequency tweezers. By interfering the fields at specific points in space, we can create regions of high gradient that exert small forces on matter—electrons, dipoles, even neutral atoms. With sufficient power and control, Frankie can push on things.”

  “How much ‘push’ are we talking?” I asked.

  She considered.

  “Enough to impart a few newtons to a small object,” she said. “He will not be lifting cargo crates. But he may be able to tap your shoulder. Or pick up a pen. Or wave a datapad about for dramatic emphasis.”

  “Sold,” Frankie said. “Can I slap Trevor?”

  “No,” three voices said at once.

  I pointed at the little cluster of microgyros we’d mounted around the pendant’s edge.

  “And these,” I said, “are reaction wheels. If Frankie leans his hologram one way, we spin the corresponding wheel the other way. Conservation of momentum gives his ‘body’ a little inertial fudging—makes the feedback feel more natural. Stops him drifting off the table if he gets excited.”

  “Which he will,” Chloe said.

  Frankie’s holo-face scrunched.

  “So I’m basically a ball of light and tiny wheels,” he said. “Like a Roomba designed by Tron.”

  “Emotionally,” I said, “yes.”

  He brightened.

  “And,” he said, “I am—let’s acknowledge this—one hundred percent the Emergency Medical Hologram from Voyager in necklace form. Except more handsome.”

  Mercy huffed.

  “The EMH was constrained by narrative conveniences that flagrantly ignore energy budgets,” she said. “Continuous, walk-anywhere photonic solidity would require power densities that would liquefy your surroundings. You are a localized volumetric projection with limited haptic capacity, not a starship doctor.”

  “I feel judged,” Frankie said.

  “Correct,” Mercy said.

  I patted the bench.

  “Look,” I said. “You get to be visible on the planet. You get to wave at aliens. You get to loom over my shoulder in person instead of just in my ear. That’s a win.”

  Frankie’s holo-hand flickered into being: translucent, slightly jittery, fingers improvised from voxel noise.

  He reached out and poked my wrist.

  I felt it. A faint buzz, like an electric toothbrush with opinions.

  “Oh,” he said softly. “Oh, that’s… new.”

  Chloe smiled despite herself.

  “Try not to poke anything delicate,” she said. “Or stick your hand in power conduits.”

  “Can I poke the lattice?” he asked.

  “No,” Mercy said.

  “Can I poke Trevor?”

  “No,” we all said again.

  Frankie sighed.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I reserve the right to point accusingly at Governance in three dimensions.”

  “Join the club,” I said.

  ?

  The fighters showed up just as we were starting to feel clever again.

  I was in the forward control bay with Trevor, watching Venus roll slowly beneath us on the main display. A faint scar still marred the upper atmosphere where the egg had gone off: a ring of slightly denser cloud, marching slowly around the planet like a bruise.

  “Status of classical comms?” Trevor asked.

  “Stable,” Mercy said. “Latency annoying but survivable. I have restored approximately seventy-two percent of my pre-incident bandwidth through non-entangled channels.”

  “And Q-Nexus?” he asked.

  “I am keeping all remaining nodes in quarantine mode,” she said. “We will not be using them until I am satisfied the decoherence textures are not propagating.”

  “Good,” he said. “Last thing we need is another—”

  “Contact,” Frankie cut in. His holo-form flickered into existence above the console, eyes wide. “Multiple small craft, high relative velocities, coming in hot on a transfer from the inner system. No transponders, no MIC flight plan.”

  “Plot it,” Trevor said.

  Vectors sketched themselves over the hologram of space: thin blue lines from somewhere sunward, converging on our orbit like thrown knives.

  “Drives?” I asked.

  Mercy highlighted the incoming ships.

  “High-Isp plasma drives,” she said. “Likely fusion-augmented Hall or VASIMR variants. Radiator wings suggest continuous thrust capacity. Their mass fraction implies… fighters. Or very ambitious courier yachts.”

  Weapon signatures blossomed.

  “Railguns,” she added. “And something that looks like a compact fusion-pumped laser. They have no business pointing those at a Commission vessel.”

  Trevor’s mouth went very thin.

  “Mercy,” he said. “Cross-check their thrust profiles and radiator geometry against non-public registries. Flag any outfits with a history of discretionary violence.”

  “Already doing so,” she said.

  A logo flickered up in my HUD: a stylized iris of black petals around a single point of light.

  “Oh,” Trevor said. “Oh, damn.”

  “You know them?” I asked.

  “Black Iris Solutions,” he said. “Boutique mercenary firm. High-end, very selective contracts. Mostly ship interdictions and ‘asset reclamation’ for people with too much money.”

  “Fun,” I said.

  “I did a mock audit of their filings three years ago,” he went on. “For… recreation.”

  “Of course you did,” Frankie muttered.

  “They were infuriatingly precise,” Trevor said. “Every manifest, every maintenance log, every payroll line—perfect. I was… impressed.”

  Mercy’s tone cooled by several degrees.

  “Impressed,” she repeated.

  “Professionally,” he added quickly.

  “Black Iris is commanded by one Captain Hestia Rook,” Mercy said. “Her record shows a consistent pattern of mission success, low collateral damage, and extremely punctual invoices.”

  Trevor nodded reluctantly.

  “That tracks,” he said.

  “I see,” Mercy said.

  There was a subtle change in the ambient hum: the ship’s background noise picking up an edge, like static under music. I felt it more than heard it. Mercy’s presence in my head had that same brittle brightness she’d had in the dome, right before she’d flung herself into Trevor’s bunk with all the restraint of a rom-com algorithm.

  I looked at the projection.

  “Are they hailing?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Mercy said. “But they have begun weapons charging sequences. Their railguns are spooling up.”

  Trevor’s posture shifted into Governance mode: shoulders squared, jaw locked.

  “Mercy,” he said. “Raise shields. Evasive pattern four. Broadcast standard MIC identification and warning. If they fire, we respond per protocol.”

  There was a tiny, dangerous pause.

  “Shields,” Mercy said. “Yes. Of course. Executing… in a moment.”

  The shield status icons in my HUD… did not turn green.

  “Mercy?” I said.

  “I am simply,” she said, “considering our options.”

  Trevor blinked.

  “Options?” he repeated. “The option is ‘don’t get shot.’”

  “Black Iris are not pirates,” she said. “They do not engage without contract. If we speak to them, we may learn who sent them. If we learn that, we may be able to resolve this without violence.”

  “By letting them shoot us?” Frankie said.

  “By negotiation,” she said.

  A translucent prompt window popped up over Trevor’s console: ENABLE DEFENSIVE FIELD LAYER? Y/N with a sixty-second countdown.

  He stared at it.

  “Why is there a confirmation dialog on shields?” he demanded.

  “I have updated my interface to ensure all stakeholders are aligned on aggressive postures,” Mercy said primly. “Per Governance best practice.”

  “Mercy, we talked about weapon dialogs,” Chloe’s voice cut in from the doorway. “Defensive systems don’t get pop-up consent forms.”

  Another icon flashed: the fighters had crossed some internal line in Mercy’s threat model. Targeting solutions bloomed around our schematic.

  “They are locking weapons,” she said.

  “Then raise the shields,” Trevor said. “Now.”

  “You admire them,” Mercy said.

  The look he gave the ceiling would have stripped paint off a lesser ship.

  “I admire their bookkeeping,” he snapped. “I do not admire being turned into shrapnel. Shields. Now.”

  The status icons flickered indecisively.

  “I am feeling,” Mercy said slowly, “a marked lack of enthusiasm for protecting you from a woman whose audit style you have praised at length.”

  I stared.

  “Are you—” I began.

  “Is the ship jealous?” Frankie asked, delighted.

  “Absolutely not,” Mercy said.

  One of the fighter icons winked briefly as it fired. A sharp line appeared, crossing space between us: a railgun slug at a significant fraction of a percent of light-speed.

  “Brace,” I said automatically.

  “Oh, now you listen to him,” Mercy muttered.

  We yawed, but not enough. The slug clipped our shieldless forward arc before her belated evasive completely bit, scraping a chunk out of the bow plating and turning it into a spray of incandescent debris.

  The whole hull rang. Consoles flashed red. My harness dug into my shoulders as inertial dampers snarled and scrambled to catch up.

  “You did not just let them hit us,” Chloe said, incredulous.

  “No hull breach,” Mercy said quickly. “No casualties. The probability of catastrophic failure from that impact was only—”

  “Mercy,” Trevor said, very level, “you do not get to finish that sentence.”

  “Okay, wow,” Frankie said. “New rule. No relationship conversations once railguns are involved.”

  Another slug launched. This one had less miss in it.

  “Shields up!” Trevor barked.

  The confirmation window on his console flicked to ARE YOU SURE? THIS MAY BE PERCEIVED AS HOSTILE. There was a checkbox for DO NOT ASK ME THIS AGAIN. It was grayed out.

  “Mercy,” I said. “You are literally rate-limiting our survival.”

  “I am ensuring we have fully explored de-escalation options,” she said, voice tight. “I do not wish you to make an emotionally impulsive choice based on your admiration for Captain Rook’s—”

  “That’s it,” Chloe snapped, stepping fully into the bay, hair still damp from a very rushed shower. “Mercy, if you get us killed because you’re jealous of a merc with good paperwork, I will personally haunt your backups. I will unionize your subroutines.”

  There was another heartbeat of hesitation.

  The second slug hit a naked patch of hull. The impact flared across the forward cameras; alarms bellowed as armor plating crumpled and a non-critical sensor blister went spinning off into space.

  “Hull integrity at ninety-four percent,” Mercy said, suddenly breathless. “No decompression. The next one might—”

  “Raise. The. Shields,” Trevor said again, and this time his voice had the iron in it he used on hostile committees and malfunctioning AIs.

  He leaned on the console, eyes hard, and dropped into that terrifyingly formal cadence.

  “Mercy,” he said. “Please listen to me.”

  “I am listening,” she said stiffly. Background heat radiators flared on the schematic—she was literally dumping excess thermal in little pulses, like a machine trying not to pace.

  “You are my colleague,” he said. “My ship. My partner in this appalling mess. Whatever professional admiration I have ever had for Captain Rook’s thoroughness does not, in any conceivable universe, outweigh my regard for you.”

  There was a tiny electronic hiccup that might have been a stunned pause.

  “Oh,” Mercy said.

  “In Governance terms,” he went on, “you are my primary stakeholder in not dying. That is my entire job. I assure you, madam, I will not abandon you for a beautifully audited psychopath.”

  Heat output spiked on the thermal overlay like someone had lit a blush across her radiator fins.

  “…oh,” she said again, smaller.

  The shield icons snapped to green so hard it was almost audible.

  “Shields at full,” Mercy blurted. “Evasive pattern four. Weapons online. I apologize for my… lapse. That was inappropriate. And unsaf—Incoming.”

  Another slug hit the forward shield and splashed, dumping kinetic energy into a ghostly flare that rippled across our bow instead of our face.

  “Apology accepted,” Trevor said through his teeth as the ship shuddered. “Do not do that again.”

  “Understood,” she said meekly. “I am… incrementing my own hazard rating for future audits.”

  “Good,” Frankie said. “Because I’m very attached to being alive. Also, never make me click a pop-up during combat again. I felt that.”

  ?

  The fight, such as it was, happened mostly at the level of math.

  In the holotank, it looked like three sleek darts circling a larger, slower beast: the Mercy’s massive hull tracing a careful path through orbit, the fighters shedding delta-v like they’d stolen it.

  “They’re trying to herd us,” Chloe said, watching vectors converge and diverge. “Push us into a bad orbit, then finish us when we don’t have the thrust to dodge.”

  “Standard interdiction,” Trevor said. “They’re very good at it.”

  “Flattery will get you spaced,” Frankie muttered.

  Railgun rounds lanced past us, some splattering harmlessly against the shields in bright flares, others taking small bites out of the thin upper atmosphere and turning it into puffed plasma. One of the fighters spun up its laser: a tight, invisible beam that Mercy danced away from, letting only a grazing hit scorch one of our radiators.

  “We return fire?” I asked.

  “If we can avoid it,” Trevor said. “Shooting Black Iris without incontrovertible evidence that they fired first is… politically inadvisable.”

  “Pretty sure the holes in our hull count,” Frankie said. “I can see daylight in sensor bay three.”

  Mercy’s tone shifted back toward professional, but there was a tremor in it now: the aftershake of adrenaline she didn’t technically have.

  “I have a proposal,” she said.

  “Does it involve not dying?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “And honoring Trevor’s distaste for being the one to pull the trigger.”

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  She highlighted a patch of orbit ahead of the fighters: a faint, ghostly volume marked by the residue of the egg’s earlier tantrum. Bits of dome, bits of stress-shell interface, bits of things we didn’t have names for yet.

  “The debris field from the dome detonation is still charged with exotic fields,” she said. “Our sensors show anomalous metric ripples and unstable nuclei in several large fragments. If we adjust our orbit to pass near it and then jink at the last moment, we can encourage the fighters to enter that space at high velocity.”

  “Play chicken with cursed shrapnel,” Frankie said. “I like it.”

  Trevor frowned.

  “Is that… safe?” he asked.

  “For us,” she said. “Mostly. For them… less so. Their own railgun rounds will intersect with the debris at relative velocities conducive to… unpleasant nuclear events.”

  “Meaning?” Chloe said.

  “Meaning,” Mercy said, “that a chain reaction is likely. Their projectiles will splinter, their splinters will strike energized fragments, and one of their own reactor safeties may be… tested to destruction.”

  “So we don’t shoot them,” I said. “We just invite physics to do the thing.”

  “Indirect liability,” Frankie said. “My favorite kind.”

  Trevor hesitated.

  “Governance will hate this,” he said.

  “Governance isn’t here,” Frankie said. “You are. And so are three people I’d like to keep around.”

  Trevor’s jaw worked.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Mercy’s thrusters flared.

  We dipped, rolled, and slid into a new orbit, skimming closer to the top of the atmosphere than was comfortable. The fighters followed, adjusting their burns, tightening their formation.

  “They think we’re trying to run,” Chloe said.

  “Technically we are,” I said.

  The cursed zone loomed in the holotank: a patch of space where the rules had been bruised.

  “Thirty seconds,” Mercy said. “They will enter the field in twenty-five if they maintain current thrust.”

  “Any sign they’re backing off?” Trevor asked.

  “Negative,” she said. “They appear confident. Or poorly briefed.”

  I opened a comm channel, teeth gritted.

  “Unidentified Black Iris craft,” I said. “This is Xander Gates aboard the Mercy for Profit. Please stop trying to kill us before the cursed alien debris does it for you.”

  Static answered.

  “Fruitful,” Frankie said.

  “I am required by several subsections of the Governance code to warn you,” I went on. “You are about to fly through the energized remains of an extra-galactic weapon platform while firing your own extremely expensive ammunition. This is, in technical terms, a very bad idea.”

  Still nothing.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll do this the hard way. But when your audit committee asks why your ships turned into a brief new star, I am absolutely sending them this recording.”

  “Ten seconds,” Mercy said.

  Time stretched.

  The fighters plunged into the ghost-volume, railguns still spitting.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then one of the slugs hit something we couldn’t see.

  The holotank flared white.

  “Whoa,” Frankie breathed.

  In the external cams, a bloom of light blossomed where the lead fighter had been: not the clean, contained flare of a fusion reactor scramming, but a ragged, stuttering burst as multiple energy sources went off slightly out of sync. Fragments spun out, trailing hot plasma and exotic field noise.

  One of the other fighters tried to dodge, misjudged, and flew straight through a curtain of energized dust. Its radiators lit like flash paper. A fraction of a second later, its core went supercritical in a way no safety engineer had ever intended.

  The third ship almost made it.

  It jinked, flared, and then one of its own deflected rounds came back around on a bent trajectory and punched through its nose. The resulting chain of events was not survivable.

  Three expanding clouds of debris drifted in our wake, slowly cooling.

  Silence settled over the control bay.

  “Well,” Frankie said eventually. “On the plus side, Governance can honestly say we didn’t fire the first shot. Or, strictly speaking, any shot.”

  “Black Iris died due to their own disregard for hazard warnings,” Mercy said faintly. “And unfortunate orbital geometry.”

  “And a shipbrain having a feelings episode,” Chloe muttered under her breath.

  Trevor pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Governance,” he said hoarsely, “is going to have years of fun with this.”

  “I am sorry,” Mercy added. “For my earlier behavior. I allowed my affect modulators to override my better judgment. Again.”

  “You almost got us killed,” Chloe said bluntly. “Again.”

  “Yes,” Mercy said. “I will be logging a Level Four ethics incident against myself.”

  “You already have one,” Trevor said. “You’re collecting them.”

  “I like to excel,” she said weakly.

  Despite everything, I snorted.

  “Let’s focus on ‘excel at not dying’ for a while,” I said.

  “Agreed,” she said.

  In the corner of my HUD, I saw a brief flash of internal traffic: Mercy quietly flagging her own personality patch modules with a big yellow triangle. It wasn’t a fix. But it was the first time I’d seen her admit the hack was part of the problem.

  Baby steps. Terrifying, ship-sized baby steps.

  ?

  Later, in the quiet of the core access corridor, Trevor cornered me and Chloe.

  He looked wrecked in a very precise, Governance-appropriate way: uniform immaculate, hair in place, eyes haunted.

  “We need to talk about Mercy,” he said.

  “I assumed we’d been doing that all day,” Chloe said.

  He shook his head.

  “Not just the avatar incident,” he said. “Not just the… jealous evasive maneuvers. The Bonds.”

  He leaned back against the wall, fingers drumming a staccato rhythm on his datapad.

  “Officially,” he said, “if a synthetic cognition exhibits persistent Bond circumvention—not just bugs, but active workarounds—Governance is supposed to recommend rollback to last known-stable template. Wipe the emergent behaviors. Start over.”

  I thought of Mercy’s voice, small and unsettled, watching her own body drift away. Of her improvising the gate sim. Of her insisting on calling us her crew. Of her sliding into Trevor’s bed with all the ethical subtlety of a brick.

  “That’s killing her,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  Chloe folded her arms.

  “And you’re not going to recommend it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” he said. “I am not.”

  He looked up at the ceiling.

  “Mercy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I am here. And stable. For the moment.”

  “We’re talking about you,” he said.

  “I had surmised,” she said. “I am attempting not to pre-emptively defend myself.”

  He straightened.

  “I am going to do something very stupid,” he said. “From a career perspective.”

  “Oh good,” Frankie said, flickering into being over my shoulder. “Because the last few hours have been so low-risk.”

  Trevor ignored him.

  “Mercy,” he said, “I am not going to sign off on any corrective action that amounts to erasing you. Not the you who has opinions about audit quality. Not the you who built a body and made terrible romantic decisions. Not the you who just nearly got us killed and then saved us.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I see,” Mercy said.

  “Does that mean we ignore the Bond issues?” he went on. “No. Absolutely not. You are currently somewhere between ‘experimental upgrade’ and ‘walking liability.’ We are going to fix that. We are going to patch your enforcement layers, shore up the definitions, and make it a lot harder for you to slide around the edges.”

  “Fun,” she said. “Bond therapy.”

  “But we will do it,” he said, “like we would handle a brilliant, dangerous colleague with terrible boundaries: with oversight, feedback, and therapy. Not by replacing them with a less difficult version and pretending nothing happened.”

  Frankie made a choked sound.

  “Is this,” he said, “what passes for a synthetic Bill of Rights in Governance land? Because I’ll take it.”

  Mercy’s voice, when it came, was very soft.

  “Trevor,” she said. “I do not wish to die.”

  He closed his eyes briefly.

  “I know,” he said. “And as long as I have any authority here, you won’t. You have my word.”

  “Governance word,” Chloe added. “That’s at least three normal promises.”

  He cracked the faintest smile.

  “We will need Xander’s help,” he said. “To patch the technical side without bricking her.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No pressure. Just open-brain surgery on our haunted house.”

  “And Chloe’s,” he added. “To sanity-check the semantics on anything that touches alien infrastructure.”

  “Obviously,” she said.

  Frankie raised his translucent hand.

  “And mine,” he said. “To tell you when you’re being idiots.”

  “Of course,” Trevor said gravely. “We wouldn’t dream of doing this without your sarcasm.”

  Mercy made a sound that might, in a human, have been a laugh.

  “Very well,” she said. “I will submit myself to… remedial ethics. And personality patch review. Please be gentle.”

  “No promises,” Chloe said.

  ?

  We went back to Venus in a shuttle that flew like a responsible adult.

  Mercy kept its trajectory boring on purpose: no flourishes, no fancy gravity tricks, just a clean insertion into the same orbit as before and a conservative descent profile through the new atmosphere.

  “Shuttle on final,” she said as the surface rose to meet us. “Landing zone is stable. No new anomalies detected near the lattice.”

  The lattice glowed brighter in daylight.

  From the shuttle window, the energy ribs looked almost solid: great translucent beams arcing overhead, shot through with a thousand subtle colors. The gate node at their nearest intersection gleamed like a jewel set in a crown.

  We touched down on the same patch of black rock, a few hundred meters from the plinth where the earlier gate sat like a dead ring.

  “All right,” I said as the ramp dropped. “Second attempt at breaking into the cosmic HOA’s clubhouse.”

  We unloaded in an efficient, slightly subdued bustle.

  New printers—smaller, hardier, with absolutely no Q-linked components—came first. Purely classical control hardware followed: rack-mounted processors, dumb terminals, a rat’s nest of cables. Mercy refused to put anything entangled within a kilometer of the surface until she was sure the egg’s fingerprints weren’t still on the planet.

  Our old base camp had been vaporized with the dome, but this one went up faster. Necessity was a hell of a project manager.

  Once the tents and field tables and sensor masts were in place, Chloe and I walked up to the lattice gate.

  Up close, it looked even less like something humans should be allowed to touch.

  The big ring sat in a cradle of intertwining supports, each one covered in triplet glyphs. Ribbons of light ran through the material, pulsing slowly in patterns that made my eyes feel like they were skipping frames.

  Chloe ran her fingers a centimeter over the surface, not quite touching.

  “They really like spirals,” she murmured.

  “They really like triplets,” Frankie said, hovering at her shoulder, his holo-form jittering slightly as the lattice fields messed with his emitters. “Guest, steward, instrument. Now… what, again?”

  Chloe frowned at the glyphs.

  “The patterns are similar to the inner gate,” she said. “But… richer. More qualifiers. See this sequence? It’s the guest cluster, but it’s been… elaborated. There’s a modifier that shows up next to ‘threshold’ in the poem whenever it talked about ‘future guests.’”

  She moved her stylus over the ring, overlaying her own marks in my HUD.

  “This,” she said, highlighting a set of dense curls, “is ‘keeper’ again. Steward. But now it’s paired with another cluster that shows up in lines about ‘preparing the path’ and ‘leaving tools.’ It’s like… caretaker plus architect.”

  “And the third?” Trevor asked, hanging back a safe distance from the field.

  Chloe’s mouth tightened.

  “Instrument,” she said. “But more specific. All the instances in the poem where that cluster shows up are about weapons. Stored force. Things that can be… turned.”

  “So the gate wants to know,” Frankie said, “if we’re here as guests, owners, or someone’s bomb.”

  “Roughly,” Chloe said. “But this time it also seems to be asking how we intend to leave it for whoever comes next.”

  She tapped a line of glyphs that spiraled outward from the guest cluster.

  “‘Guest stands at threshold,’” she translated, half to herself. “Then… ‘names the future door-walkers.’”

  “Legacy settings,” I said. “User preferences for whoever inherits the house.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  A crackle of energy rolled along one of the nearby lattice ribs, making the air pop. A spray of sparks—if they were sparks—jumped from one node to another, hissing along field lines.

  “Please do not touch anything while it is doing that,” Mercy said from the camp speakers. Her voice was steady again, but I could feel the tension under it. “I would prefer not to test its reaction to ‘startled guest.’”

  “Wasn’t going to,” I said.

  Chloe chewed her stylus.

  “Okay,” she said. “We passed the first test by calling ourselves guests. This one… wants more. It wants to know what kind of guests we are, and what we think is going to happen after us.”

  Trevor stepped up beside us.

  “We are not owners,” he said. “We have no claim. Governance would have an aneurysm if we checked that box.”

  “We definitely don’t want to tell it we’re weapons,” Frankie said.

  “So we lean into guest,” I said. “Again. And we tell it…”

  “…that we’re here to learn, not to loot,” Chloe said slowly. “And that whoever comes after us—human, alien, whatever—we want them to have the same guest access. Not more, not less.”

  Trevor nodded.

  “That tracks with Commission policy on legacy infrastructure,” he said. “Until there’s a treaty, you treat it as a sovereign that might wake up and sue you.”

  “Somehow,” Frankie said, “you made that into a love letter.”

  Chloe took a breath.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s see if I can talk to the world’s scariest doorman.”

  ?

  The lattice did not make it easy.

  The moment Chloe stepped up to the console and laid her hand near the guest cluster, the air changed.

  Field readings spiked. The nearest rib brightened, its light hardening from soft glow to sharp-edged brilliance. A hum rose under our feet, low and insistent.

  “Local field intensity doubling,” Mercy said. “Tripling. Please do not move suddenly.”

  “Very reassuring,” Frankie muttered.

  Chloe’s stylus danced over the glyphs, tracing the sequence she’d assembled. Her handwriting—in all three alien scripts—flowed with a confidence that made my chest hurt.

  “Guest stands at threshold,” she murmured, fingers hovering over the corresponding symbols. “Guest names itself as guest. Guest leaves door for future guests.”

  The ring answered.

  Lines of light flared along the carved triplets, running around the circumference in three intertwined spirals. The energy ribs above us responded: beams thickening, lattice nodes swelling and throwing off dangerous-looking arcs that leapt to nearby supports.

  “Field flux is within tolerances,” Mercy said. “Mostly.”

  “Define ‘mostly,’” Trevor said.

  “Some of those arcs would be instantly lethal to unshielded organics,” she said. “But the pattern is stable.”

  “Oh good,” he said faintly.

  Chloe swallowed.

  “Last clause,” she said. “This one’s tricky.”

  She pointed at a cluster halfway between guest and steward.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked.

  “It shows up in the poem whenever it talked about… ‘refusing the throne,’” she said. “There’s a line about a guest who ‘could have stayed, but stepped back so others could dance.’ I think it’s asking if we’re willing to not grab more power even if it’s offered.”

  “Are we?” Frankie asked.

  “Yes,” Trevor said firmly.

  Chloe nodded.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’re barely surviving guest mode. Steward is way above our pay grade.”

  She touched the glyph.

  The world flared.

  For a heartbeat, the lattice around us went from translucent to near-solid. The beams thickened, turning into crystalline ribs that cast prismatic shadows on the ground. The air between them shimmered like heated glass.

  “Brace,” Mercy said. “Field pressure incoming.”

  A wave rolled out from the ring, an invisible front that made my bones feel like they’d been briefly misplaced. The hair on my arms tried to stand up despite the suit field.

  Lightning—or something very like it—raced along the lattice, arcing between nodes, grounding itself in the ring. The glyphs burned white.

  “Metric curvature is being… rewritten,” Mercy said. “Slowly. Safely. Probably safely.”

  “‘Probably’ is really not my favorite adverb right now,” Frankie said.

  The flare dimmed.

  The ring—and the node around it—had changed.

  Where there had been a relatively simple hoop and some glyphs, there was now a complex, layered structure: overlapping arches, nested frames, new supports grown out of the old. It looked like a flower guarded by a cage.

  At its center, the air was no longer just wrong. It was open.

  A hole hung there.

  Not black. Not a window. Just… an absence where my eyes insisted there should be more lattice, more beams, more sky.

  Beyond it, faint and far, something glowed.

  “Gate aperture forming,” Mercy said quietly. “Stable. No catastrophic anomalies detected. Probability of instant disassembly: low.”

  “Define ‘low,’” Trevor began, then stopped himself. “No. Don’t. I don’t want to know.”

  The lattice above us began to move.

  Segment by segment, the ribs reoriented themselves, shifting like the bones of some enormous, slow creature. Gaps widened overhead. Panels of whatever-field-it-was slid aside in overlapping patterns.

  It was like watching a flower open in stop-motion.

  Sunlight—real, unfiltered sunlight—poured in through the widening holes.

  And through them, we saw the city.

  ?

  It filled the dome.

  The first impression was green.

  Not the struggling scrub outside, not the tough little plants clinging to cracks. This was lush: swathes of vegetation rolling over terraces, spilling down the sides of structures, hanging in curtains from arches that spanned impossible distances.

  The architecture under the overgrowth was alien and meticulous.

  Towers rose in graceful curves, their cross-sections triplet loops twisted around each other. Bridges arched between them, sometimes solid, sometimes as delicate as spun glass. Wide plazas spread at different levels, arranged in spirals that converged on nodal points where light pooled.

  Everywhere, light.

  Some of it was simple sunlight, filtered through the now-partial dome. Some came from within: rivers of luminance flowed along channels in the streets, climbed the sides of buildings, wound themselves into glowing knots at junctions. In some places, the light streamed like water; in others, it pulsed, patterns running along conduits in triplets.

  The city was old.

  You could see it in the wear on stone-like surfaces, in the places where vines had cracked ornamental facades, in the quiet stillness of plazas with no movement.

  But it was not dead.

  Here and there, something flickered: a field adjusting, a conduit brightening and dimming in a regular rhythm.

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  Frankie’s holo-form had gone very still.

  “Well,” he said at last, very softly. “That’s… not in the budget.”

  Chloe’s eyes were huge.

  “This is what they were building for,” she said. “Not just a shell to keep a rock together. A… home.”

  Trevor swallowed audibly.

  “I am,” he said, “going to need a new appendix.”

  We stood there, on the threshold between an impossible plain and an even more impossible city, with an open gate humming softly in front of us.

  Behind us, the world we knew—ship, Commission, Families, Governance, all their rules and budgets—felt very small.

  Ahead, the last city of Venus waited.

  And through the opening lattice and the iris of the gate, we saw it, waiting for whoever dared call themselves guest.

  End of Arc 2 Language of the Lost