Chapter 5

Captain Yetna – well, no longer Captain, really – leaned her head back against the smooth stone wall of the fortress of Queen’s Crown. The walls were pleasantly damp, and the salt smell of the sea filtered in through the narrow slit windows that lined the upper edges of the cells, while the floor was covered with a thin but comfortable growth of moss and fungus. All things considered, she supposed that she had been given one of the more comfortable cells.

The only real problem she had, right now?

“I believe these bars may be corroding.”

Was her cellmate.

The former Stasi, Lidara, turned from where she had been examining the thick steel bars that were sunk into the ceiling and floor of the open part of the cell. She pointed at a bit of rust that looked like it might have weakened the bars to the point where you could break them. If you were a living Goddess, or had a dozen women to help turn a huge crank, or any number of impossible things that they didn’t have right now. Yetna sighed, then laid her head back against the wall, her eyes closing.

She realized something and laughed.

“Captain Yetna, you have a duty to work with me to escape, to return to the Empire!” Lidara snapped.

“Do I?” Yetna opened an eye. “I wasn’t aware I did.”

“You are a Captain of her glorious majesty’s navy!”

“Hmm, true, I am,” Yetna said, mulling the idea about in her head, sticking her tongue against her cheek. “What happens to Captains who lose their ships?”

“Well, they-”

Lidara choked off, but Yetna filled in what she was clearly unwilling to say.

“Oh! Right! They get court martialed!” Yetna stood up, pushing herself to her feet as she began to walk over towards her cell mate. She grabbed onto the former secret policewoman’s ear, yanking her up to her feet. Lidara gasped, sucking in air, more offended than in pain. Her eyes bugged and she gabbled half-words and confused squawks as she was womanhandled up and Yetna could put her lips almost against her ear, in a parody of intimacy. “And you spent the entire fucking trip making sure I knew it.”

Lidara gulped.

“W-Well, I can put a good word in for you...” she wheedled. “We must do what is best for the Empire – the Empress is all, surely, you must know this, Yetna, Captain Yetna, you must listen.” She grabbed onto Yetna’s arm.

Yetna shook her arm free, then walked to the bars, and called through them, her voice echoing. “Please, you can put me in the highest cell in the whole castle, without shade or water, just get me away from this Stasi!”

Her voice echoed back.

“Yetna!” Lidara’s voice hit new levels of whining and Yetna bonked her heads against the bars.

A realization sometimes leads to an immediate understanding of what to do next.

For Hornet Abernathy, though?

“So, we just lay around and wait to see what happens?” K’iren asked, frowning as her tail coiled around her shins. The lot of them were sitting sitting around, thinking about the bombshell that Hornet had just dropped, and none of them had been able to come up with anything to say in response. Hornet, personally, was beginning to regret even opening her mouth – because after the initial delight of ‘aha, that must be it!’ realization, the ramifications of what she had hypothesized started to creep up on her, crawling along her spine like tiny bugs.

Firstly: It was entirely unfalsifiable – there was no way to prove it false, because she could always just go ‘oh, well, what if the Gods are being sneaky about it?’

Secondly: It explained everything without requiring them to actually do anything.

That made it worryingly similar to a conspiracy theory’s self recursive brain-loop bullshit. She shook her head, but before she could say anything, Rotting Corpse spoke up: “Arrogant Confidence: No, we cannot assume that we need do nothing. I believe that we should take steps to prove ourselves to the Pantheon. There are VR pods in Found, we simply need to access them. Smugly: I am aware of multiple programs that we can run that will allow us to practice and hone our abilities as a team.”

Hornet, who had been just about to suggest that, sprang to her feet and brushed her hands along her butt. “Lets do it!” She turned to the air and a butterfly skimmed down and hovered before her. “Lead us to a VR pod, capable of suiting all of our biological needs. Please.”

“You do know, you don’t need to say please, right?” Hugh said, chuckling as he bumped his shoulder against her. Hornet stuck her tongue out at her, while the butterfly flapped off.

“Come on, everyone!” Heinlein said, waving his hand.

“Follow Line!” K’iren said, springing to her feet, her tail cracking through the air authoritatively.

“Please don’t call me that,” Heinlein said.

The virtual reality pods on Found were, like most of the technology, entirely based on self-replicating, self-repairing biological systems. Carefully cultivated ecologies worked like miniature industrial chains – bacteria excreted material that was collected by other, more complex bacteria to then construct into more complex machines, which were then collected by fungal growths and worked. Biological processes, used in the way some worlds used nanofactories, to end with a staggeringly complex device that looked, for all the world, like an oversized pitcher plant that was sunken into the ground before several pyramidal trees that buzzed with electric fields and smelled strongly of ozone. Crackling sparks leaped from the tips of branches that thrust into the air, grounding themselves on carefully placed stones, while several large, rhino-like beasts stood around each tree, and whenever anyone got close, they would gently but firmly push them away from the trees.

“Almost kinky, isn’t it?” K’iren said, kneeling beside one of the plants, looking down into the human-sized hole that reached into the soft dirt that surrounded the tesla trees. She grinned up at Heinlein, Hugh, Hornet and Rotting Carcass. “Who wants to bet there are plant tentacles that go up into your fun parts.”

Heinlein snorted. “And this makes it different from any other simstim ... how, exactly?”

“It’s aliiiiiive!” K’iren said, then stood, unzipping her top, casually. “How do we hook Hugh and Carcass into them?”

“With Casual Confidence: Tip me into one of the plants,” Carcass said, while Hornet tried to look anywhere but at K’iren’s chest. Unfortunately, this meant that her eyes fell on Heinline’s muscular back as he slid his own shirt off. She went entirely red as Hugh laughed.

“They’re stretchy, I can fit my head in there! We’re not going to be in so long I’ll need the other life support gubbins, so that should be fine,” he said, nodding casually. “And if we do stay that long, I’ll just yank myself out, use the facilities, eat something, then stick my head back in. Easy peasy.”

Hornet nodded. “Sounds good! Good! Great. Good, even.”

Heinlein, as utterly careless of the fact he was now pantsless as he had been about his shirtlessness, looked at her curiously. “You, uh, going to get ready too?”

A horrible, sinking feeling hit Hornet as she looked from the smirking K’iren and the confused looking Heinlein. In this entire pan-galactic, Concord spanning group of sentient beings, she was the one with the most extreme nudity taboo. Mortification like hot mud slapped onto the top of her head and began to dribble around her ears as she said: “S-S ... Shuuuuure!”

Her finger, quivering, went to the zipper of her shirt and she began to undo it, trying to look straight ahead and not at either Heinlein nor at K’iren. Fortunately, K’iren made that part easy by sliding feet first into the VR plant. Heinlein, though, was taking his self appointed role as serious team leader very ... well, seriously, and was waiting to go in last. Meaning that every time one of Hornet’s traitor eyes flicked to the side, she could get another look at his exotic body.

Exotic.

It was a weird word to apply to a Terran, considering the wild range of possible ways Terrans could look. It was weirder still to apply to a Terran who eschewed most of the more extreme reaches of the spectrum – Heinlein Clarksworld had two arms, two legs, normal number of abdominal muscles. Y-Yes, they were exceptionally well defined, lithe, flat, could-eat-breakfast-off-them, cut glass sharp abs, but they were still just abs. Some Terrans didn’t even have hips, and this guy had hips. Strong hips. Hips attached to a taut, muscular buttocks and ... a groin ... that...

Heinline chuckled. Hornet, who was midway through undoing her bra, jerked her eyes back up. “S-Sorry!” she stammered.

“I have to ask, is oggling like that considered a compliment or an insult on SKJ?” he asked, casually.

“Yes! No! Maybe!” she stammered, shoving her pants down and turning at the same time, which meant she almost fell flat on her face as her legs tangled up under her. She hopped around as Heinlein reached out, taking her hand and jerking her upright with a laugh. His voice was warm in her ear.

“That does cover all the bases, Nettie,” he said, with such playful seriousness that Hornet felt like her entire skin had been electrified. She stepped from her pants, turned back to face Heinlein, opened her mouth to speak, took another step backwards, and fell straight into the pitcher plant. The plant, inside, was padded and slippery and it slurped around her with a warm, wet sensation. The stretchy material that made up the exterior drew taut against her skin, trapping her arms above her head and making her legs squish together. She felt lubricating fluid slip over her and Hornet snapped her mouth shut before any of it got into her lips ... but that just delayed things.

Fluid filled the base of the plant. Tentacles writhed along her shoulders, her arms, her legs. She felt two press against the cleft of her pussy, two bumping against her anus, but it was the one that pressed to her ear that caused her to open her mouth, about to scream when-

-BINK-

Hornet stumbled, blinked, looked round herself, and realized she was standing in the vast, clear white field that had been visual shorthand for a simspace meeting room since the first VR unit had been invented, back in the murky prehistory of nearly every civilization that had ever set to space. She adjusted herself, tried to center her thoughts, but felt that niggling little sliver of discomfort that burned in the back of her mind, that hit whenever she was in simspace.

That was one of the big Filters that hit every civilization before they escaped the one Planet Trap, and it was kind of unfair. Okay, not that there was anything fair about the Great Filters. Each one had its own cruelty about it – like, if an asteroid whacks your planet when your most advanced rocket is a thrown spear, then there’s nothing fair about it at all. But a lot of the Filters could be passed through by people making the right decisions. Nuclear war could be avoided, climatological changes could be averted, capitalism could be dismantled and put in the bin once it had outlived its usefulness alongside feudalism and priest-kings.

But the VR Filter was nearly impossible to avoid intentionally.

Pretty much everyone tried to invent virtual reality the instant they realized that their own brains were thinking based off incoming information that was piped in via nerves. The realization that that information could be manipulated was followed almost immediately, in galactic time scales, by the ability to do so with near perfect fidelity. And here, the Filter struck.

Some species could take the incoming data and accept it forever. Their brains became just a part of a virtual reality environment and existed that way until the systems shut down or, if the Concord was involved, until the heat death of the universe. There was actually a whole branch of the Rocket Fleet that just checked habitable, unexplored planets, looking to make sure civilizations weren’t trapped in simspaces that couldn’t be repaired from within and needed help.

But most species – including humanity – had ... a kernel of rejection. Some philosophers called it the deepest, most irreconcilable problem in sentience. Others called it the savior instinct, because it had kept humanity from sitting in VR cocoons until the reactors failed, the life support died, and the entire species went extinct.

Hornet?

She just thought of it as an annoyance. She wasn’t here to enjoy virtual paradise. She was here to get work done!

From the expression on everyone else’s faces in the simspace meeting room, they were all working hard to try and ignore that same niggling complaint at the back of their mind. Hugh pawed at his head, while Heinlein rolled his shoulders. K’iren just crossed her arms over her chest and grinned at Hornet, before frowning. “Where’s Carcass?”

A moment later, the petri dish appeared. Then the moldering, mossy flutes and whorls of Rotting Carcass filled them in. “Aggravation: There was some delay in the VR system finding my neural structures. I am now here.”

“All right,” Heinlein said. “Lets see what programs they have loaded up.” He turned and then made the galactic standard Terran hand gesture for opening a window. The window unfolded, but as Heinlein started to read off possible sims, Hornet saw that each of them were the kind that she’d already practiced dozens of times. Heinlein rubbed his chin as he examined them, murmuring softly to K’iren about which to pick from.

“Well, are we all going to be the ships?”

“I mean, we’re all here to see if we can manage it, right?”

Hornet put their words out of her mind, pursing her lips. These sims were the ones that they had practiced before they had even arrived here. There had to be something more. She brought her own window up, but rather than just looking for the list, she began to do some basic archaeology. Every computer system on a world like this had to be built on centuries upon centuries of programming and updates and alterations, creating a labyrinth of code and systems that could interact unpredictably. This usually meant that there were some backdoors into root systems – old codes and passwords that were used by old admins, back when this programming space had been used for some alternative systems...

“What re you doing?” Hugh asked, curiously, as she tried several backdoor tricks – working them through with programs she could yank off the network with almost no bandwidth requirements. As the programs did their trial and error battering, Hornet turned and looked at him, grinning.

“There’s gotta be more than those public sims,” she said. “Oh!”

The list she was looking at just bloomed with dozens of grayed out names – stuff that admins had concealed from their initial searches. There were advanced programs here with names that bordered on illegible jargon, the telltale signs of programs that were meant to only be seen and used by fairly advanced instructors. She made her best guess and tapped one to activate it, planning to run it in a sub-system so she could investigate it.

Instead, the whole white room plunged into blackness.

“Oops,” Hornet said.

[What the hell did you just do?] K’iren’s voice spoke – but it didn’t come from a simulated space near her simulated ear. Rather, it came from a spot inside and behind her forehead, echoing outwards. Hornet blinked, then looked around herself. Turning herself caused her to swing around with the zipping spinning motion that she recognized from the starship simulation programs. She looked down at her hands and saw that they were a dark black, with red highlights along the fingers, and white rectangles on her elbows. She was in a simmed Starship body. She craned her head and saw that her shoulder markings said she was the CNS Trainer-01.

[We’re in a bridge program, I believe, ] Carcass said, dryly – his emotions actually came through without needing a translation tag on it. [Hornet, as you are not here, I presume that you are the starship?]

“I am,” she said, her breath catching. “I’ve never had a bridge crew before...”

[You’ve turned on the bridge command and control training program, I guess. What kind, we have to figure that out... ] Heinlein said.

“Sounds like you’re angling for Ops,” Hornet said. “Who wants tactical?”

[Me!] K’iren said.

[I suppose that leaves science for me and navigation for our best at approximate three dimensional course officer – sadly, we shall have to make do with Hugh, ] Carcass said, causing Hugh to bark out a laugh.

[Carcass, one day, I am going to knock your petri dish over, ] Hugh said, but Hornet was instead focusing on the sensation of their command stations coming online. It was a buzzing sensation, tingling and washing out from different parts of her mind, and each time it happened, she felt an odd sense of comfort. Then she felt a tingle along her fingers, her knuckles, the insides of her arms, and along her shoulder blades, her buttocks, her thighs, her ankles.

[Checking out our loadout, ] K’iren said. [We’ve got x-beams and grazers, no munitions, but we have enough feedstock for anything that’s subatomic. Shield emitters are Class-1s and 2s, all armor is online.] She chuckled. [We’re loaded for bear.]

Hornet nodded. She realized the darkness she floated in was becoming populated with glittering stars. She closed her eyes and just enjoyed the simulated sensation of the void against her skin – and tried to ignore the little kernel of disbelief. Softly, happily, she murmured: “So, what’s on the docket, Ops?”

[A rocket transport with five K civilians has been bumped out of E-space by an unexpected gravitic swell. Pantheon modeling says it’s likely it dropped on the inner core regions – so they’re in the slow zone and we need to rescue them, ] Heinlein said, firmly.

“How’s our bottom lugger capacity?” Hornet asked.

[We’re rated for the shallow slowness, but don’t get more than fifteen parsecs from the red line, ] Hugh said.

[I will begin to work up some basic response programs in case we stray. Preparing for E-Space jump, ] Carcass said.

This was new. Since none of her previous simulations had had a bridge crew, they had just faked the kind of stuff that bridge crews did – and one of those was the preparations and calculations for a jump. Having an actual person (well, sentient mass of fungus) to do the math meant that Hornet could feel the faint warmth of her internal computers running, and then felt the energies gathering through her shoulders, her back, her belly as the dark energy reactors that were threaded through her body started to fill quantum capacitor after quantum capacitor, priming them for the immense amount of energy it took to punch from realspace to Euclidean space.