Dee turned from the console, staring at the two men sitting across from her. The glittering form of the limited AI watched them from further in the room, standing between two chairs in the middle row of the concentric half-circles of chairs and work stations. The screens behind it were lit up with astrogation maps, a partial map of a space station, and other data.

She could feel the disapproval radiating from the AI and ignored it, picking up her pack of cigarettes from the desk and opening them.

"You're welcome," Dhruv said, referring to the fact that he and Daxin had found the pack hidden under the edge of a work station a few offices away.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Dee snarled, setting the pack down. She lit the cigarette then set the lighter down.

Dhruv wasn't sure when she'd gone from slim and clothed to naked and thick bodied and, to be honest, he wasn't sure he wanted to know.

"All right. I can get you there," she said, pointing at Dhruv. "Well, I can get Legion there."

Dhruv just shrugged. "Just a different mindset, that's all."

Daxin looked up from where he was scratching FIDO's neck. "You should probably go as Luke."

Dhruv closed his eyes. "I haven't been Luke in a long time."

"I was wrong," Daxin said. "I've admitted as much."

"And did for Matty," Dhruv said softly. He opened his eyes. "All right. I'll go as Luke. How are you going to get me there?"

Dee exhaled smoke and leaned back, crossing her legs by putting her left ankle on her right knee. She stared up at the ceiling for a moment. "I'm going to do a signal clone of your beacon and place it near Marco/Pete. That should let you jump right there."

Dhruv nodded slowly. "It should."

"With the Case Omaha lockdown removed and the Imperium garbage removed, you should be able to still summon a ship as part of your Fleet of One," Dee said. She tapped her ashes into an empty beer bottle. "I didn't remove the coding for a lot of your abilities. I wasn't sure what was Imperium and what was the Digital Omnimessiah."

"Thanks," Daxin said. He looked at Dhruv. "Don't forget the greenies."

"Daxin the Destroyer, Enraged Phillip, worrying about a handful of green mantids?" Dhruv smirked. "Times have changed."

"Don't make me put you in a headlock, drag you to the bathroom, and give you a swirlie," Daxin growled.

"I'm bald, you idiot," Dhruv smiled.

"Mom, Dhruv's calling me names," Daxin mock-whined, looking at Dee.

Dee rolled her eyes and exhaled smoke. "Be serious, you two."

She picked up a half-empty beer, took a swig off of it, and made a face. "Blech. Warm," she looked at Dhruv. "Time dilation effects are pretty bad still. It looks like Earth is going through a chronotron storm, so I can't be sure when you're going to show up because I am unsure of the exact amount of temporal dissonance between the station and here."

Dhruv nodded. "Got it."

Dee took another drink, then made a face and dropped the bottle into a trash can half full of empties. "I needed to bring him back, bring him forward, so..."

Daxin stared at her, opening and closing his right hand. "You did something to our brother."

Dee nodded, taking a long drag and exhaling a cloud of smoke around her. "Let's just say, he's had to work to stay alive. The faster you get there, the bigger chance he'll be able to walk away."

Daxin snarled silently for a moment.

"Problem?" Dee asked, smiling.

"You're a bitch," Daxin said. He shook his head and looked at Dhruv. "You should go soon."

Dhruv looked at Dee. "I'm ready whenever you put the beacon in place."

Dee shrugged. "I already did," she grinned at Daxin. "Activate your plan before your monologue."

Daxin snarled again.

Dhruv closed his eyes for a long moment. "Found it. Not too far, a little under fifteen hundred light years coreward and down. I can reach it easily but I'm going to have go single-form."

"Better get going. I imagine his feet are looking mighty tasty," Dee giggled.

Dhruv vanished in a puff of black twisting smoke that sucked into itself and vanished.

Daxin got up as Dee turned back to her console, opening several different windows and watching the datastreams. He moved behind her, standing behind her, looking at the screens.

There was silence for a long time.

"You just going to stand behind me breathing heavily or are you going to do something about it?" Dee's voice was soft, gentle, and only mildly curious. "My neck's not going to snap itself, you big knuckle dragging crayon eating thug."

"Huh?" Daxin looked at her. "Sorry, was watching the screens," he moved back over and sat down.

"Unlike everyone else, I'm not going to drop fifty IQ points from you because of your appearance. What was so fascinating about the data?" Dee asked, turning away to look at Daxin. She reached out and grabbed the cigarettes again.

"You can read the mat-trans data in real time and understand it without additional programs," Daxin said.

"Yes," Dee said.

"Ever given a thought to what you're going to do when we get out of here?" Daxin asked.

Dee shrugged. "Not really. Try to keep one step ahead of Pinocchio and Howdy-Doody, try to keep from ending up in one of the Black Boxes with some Alphabet Agency hardcase staring at the back of my neck and furiously masturbating at the thought of putting a bullet in my brainstem," she said.

Her voice was light and carefree but Daxin noted the way her pupils contracted and her nostrils flared slightly.

"You made the Mat-Trans System, right?" Daxin asked. He dug in a pocket for a moment and pulled out another pack of cigarettes that he tossed to her. "Found that hidden in the women's bathroom."

"Thanks," Dee said, snatching it out of midair.

Daxin noted that her reflexes and grab speed were way outside of human normal.

"So what?" Dee asked.

"Mat-Trans technology is a largely abandoned field. After it was discovered it caused insanity and other issues in living beings, it was largely abandoned. About the only people that use it are the old Imperium Era troops and a few others use it for ammunition reloading," Daxin said. "The Star Trek LARPers use it to beam down to planets, using the old Gen-Two system."

"I made that too," Dee said. She closed her eyes for a moment then opened them. "So nobody uses it any more?"

"It's abandoned tech. Every century or so someone gets a group together or does garage lab investigation, but they run into problems," Daxin said. He waved his hand. "You could do mat-trans research and every omnicorp and government agency in the galactic arm will run slobbering to you offering you whatever you want."

"Right up until someone brings some big freaky looking bug to wipe my brain," Dee snapped. "I know how that shit works."

Daxin shrugged. "Not if you're public."

"The creation engines and nanoforges make the mat-trans inefficient for moving goods and materials," Dee said.

Daxin shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. If nothing else, having the person who originally designed the system working on it again would have everyone paying attention. It's old tech, so you don't have to worry about everyone freaking out about it. Who knows, maybe you can find out something new."

Dee nodded. She ran a finger along the edge of the desk as she took another drag of her cigarette. "When I made the Type-II breakthrough, there was a lot more I could see down the line. Interdimensional travel, deep space exploration, even terraforming."

"Terraforming?" Daxin asked.

Dee laughed. "Set down one gate on a planet with enough gravity to have an atmosphere, the other side in a gas giant. Keep both sides in quantum flux and open. The gas from the gas giant will flood the other planet."

"It wasn't terraforming you were picturing, was it?" Daxin asked. He smiled, a cruel cold thing. "You were picturing planets inhabited by people threatening Earth."

Dee shrugged. "Yeah," she admitted. "So what?"

"Doesn't bother me," Daxin said. "See, it's that kind of thinking right there that I have a feeling that we're going to need a lot of."

"What?" Dee asked.

"How to keep Earth and humans safe. How to protect us and strike at our enemies," Daxin said. He gave a vague motion to encompass the world outside of Crying Anne Mountain. "You think different, you and I. We're from a forgotten age, an age where there were people who could threaten us. Now, people don't think we can be threatened."

Dee snorted. "That's half the problem. When Earth got bagged people fell into despair," she shook her head. "You're all weak."

Daxin raised an eyebrow. "Explain."

Dee waved one hand. "When we firebombed Tokyo to the fucking ground and killed over a hundred thousand Nips in March of Forty-Five, did the Nips give up? Fuck no. The Nipponese Emperor told Nippon to grab their nuts, they were still in it to win it. When Tibbots named his plane after his mother then pancaked Hiroshima like a fat girl farting on a cake, did they give up? Hell no. Hirohito told the Nips to dig in, that we couldn't do it again," Dee laughed, long and hard, the sound echoing and twisting in the room.

The AI dimmed, going nearly transparent.

He didn't like it when she laughed.

"We did, of course. Told Ol' Hiro that we had a couple dozen more and offered to drop the next one in his lap," Dee giggled. "Should have listened to MacArthur, though. He wanted to bomb China, Russia, everyone who so much looked at us sideways," she looked down. "God, it was a heady time to be alive."

"I'll bet," Daxin said.

"It was in the summer of '46 that I was looking over the blast wave computations that I saw something. A little tiny hole. A sparkle. I didn't have a name for it, not back then, but some of the energy 'tunneled' to another point," Dee dropped her cigarette in an empty bottle. "Everyone told me that it was just an anomaly, or an error in the calculations, but I knew what I'd seen."

"That led to mat-trans," Daxin guessed.

"Fusion interlacing of particles to cause reflective states across long distances," Dee said. She ground her teeth. "Fucking MIT told me in the spring of '47 it was all interesting, but there was no proof beyond my math," she grabbed her cigarettes and bared her teeth. "I needed a nuclear detonation to prove it. It took until the Marshall Islands until I could convince them to let me run a test."

Daxin just nodded. He could feel the heat radiating off of her as her voice got tighter and tighter.

"Then that fucking big bug ripped out my fucking name!" Dee shrieked, jumping to her feet. She grabbed a beer bottle and threw it at the AI's hologram, the bottle whipping through it to smash into a video screen and shatter. "Fucked with me! Fucked with my brain!"

She threw herself into the chair, folding her arms. "I taught it a fucking lesson. Yes, I fucking did. Ripped that big bastard's brain right out of his fucking head and ate it right in front of him as he went with me through the first mat-trans. Everyone got to watch that fucking Lord Knight Mashram and his fucking pet 'Bound One' get their minds ripped apart right in front of them."

She began to laugh again, rocking back and forth, holding her stomach.

Daxin just stared.

The Bound One, he thought. And Mashram. I wondered what happened to them.

Finally Dee wiped her eyes. "I suckered that big idiot bug into replaying my memories of my first mat-trans, pulled him with me, ripped open both their skulls, and feasted on their thinky goo right in front of everyone there," she giggled again.

"I knew Lord Knight Mashram," Daxin started to say.

"Aw, did I kill one of your friends?" Dee said, her voice high pitched and mocking. She leaned back in the chair and put her hands under her belly button, over her inquinal ligament. "Were you and the big bug and him gonna pick out curtains and have handjob Thursdays? Aw, it makes my vagina bones ache in sympathy."

"You killed him before I could," Daxin shrugged. "He was an asshole who enjoyed what he was doing to people, and the Bound One was something I hated."

Dee's smile vanished. "Aw."

"Last time I saw him, though, he had Peter with them. Did you see him?" Daxin asked.

"I saw a lot of people," Dee's smile came back. "Killed them all a few times too," she waited a second then made a face when Daxin didn't take the bait. "No. Never saw him."

"So, between the last time I saw him and when you saw him, he dropped Pete off somewhere," Daxin said. He tapped a finger on the table, the cybernetics clacking on the plastic surface. "That might be useful."

"He probably had the Bound One rip apart Pete's brain," Dee laughed. "Oh, make no mistake, he did a number on me. I just fought back the second time."

"He wanted to show you that there was no hope against the Bound One," Daxin said. He shook his head. "He tried it on me but I was a little too..."

"Angsty? Sad about your favorite boy band breaking up? Oh, I know, you were a little too obsessed with the latest issue of Tiger Beat," Dee guessed, smiling and bouncing up and down in the chair.

"I was going to say 'pissy', but sure, why not," Daxin shrugged.

Dee made a face. "I thought you were like the 'walking war crime', where's all that fury?"

Daxin sighed. "I'm tired, Dee. I mean, I feel good, it was nice to help people again, but I'm still a little tired. I'm eight thousand years old."

"Oh, wah wah wah," Dee snapped. "Do I need to kick you in the gut so your balls drop? The Jews survived the Holocaust I imagine you'll survive being a little tired."

"Do you go out of your way to try and be offensive?" Daxin asked. "You know, most of that doesn't work on me."

Dee sighed. "Truthfully? Yes," she grabbed her expansive chest and squished everything around. "I look like I'm smuggling cantaloupes, people see this honkers and as of then I'm simply a set of talking sweater meat."

"So you go around naked," Daxin smiled. "If their brain is going to short circuit, let's just melt it down right out of the gate."

Dee shot back a grin. "Got it in one. You have no idea how many people have coughed up their lifeblood onto these milkers, with me moving around something sharp in their guts, and still can't look away from them even as I'm killing them."

Daxin frowned. "Does that really work?"

"It does on people who didn't leave their wang on a greasy cement chopshop floor next to a 350-V8 ripped out a Corvette," Dee grinned.

"Huh. Weird. Different times, I guess," Daxin said. He reached over and petted Fido's head. "I didn't think you had random assassins running around killing people back then."

Dee nodded slowly, all the humor gone from her face. "We did. It's why my boys were so important to me. After some No Such Agency dipshit tried to make a run at me, I realized I was in just as much danger from my own government as the cock sucking Soviets."

"The more things change," Daxin chuckled.

"The more they stay the same," Dee finished. She sighed and looked at the monitor. "Oh, hey, the Incredible Multiple Man is there."

Daxin looked down and petted Fido, keeping his face expressionless.

He'd had about enough 'truth' for the day.

--------------

Dhruv felt his center bobble for a moment as he appeared in the room. The temperature drop was noticeable and he was pretty sure the station wasn't all that warm to begin with. He closed his eyes and a dozen of him peeled off of him, including three DS versions, all of them speeding away. He sent another order and felt the light cruiser come online and fire up its engines.

He'd be able to take the greenies home and take Peter back.

The space station was in rough shape. Most of the lights were out and he kept having to 'teleport' to the other side of blast doors. The cruiser burst out of Deadspace and moved slowly toward Theta Section, where there were a few lights and he could 'feel' the greenies huddled down.

It took him almost half an hour to find Marco/Peter.

The other man was sitting in one of the few warm and lit rooms, leaning against a nutriforge. He had a computer in his lap and was typing rapidly as Dhruv let his features shift.

"Peter," Dhruv said gently, moving up to the other man and kneeling down.

The man looked up, his eyes haunted. He blinked a few times. "Luke?"

"It's me, Peter," Dhruv said softly. He brushed Peter's hair out of his face. "It's me, brother."

"You got here before I got to my legs," Peter sobbed.

"I did, brother, I did this time," Luke said.

"I killed them. The reset killed them," Peter said, grabbing onto Dhruv and staring at him. "I can't get the replication system back up, they're locked in the system. I killed them, Luke."

Dhruv touched Peter's cheek. "It's all right. It wasn't just you. Nobody's going to blame you."

"I can fix it, Luke," Peter said, looking down at the portable comp. "I can fix it, I swear I can."

"I know," Dhruv said.

"I fixed it before. I can do it again," Peter said. He looked at Dhruv with tears in his eyes. "I can fix it again. I might not be able to get everyone back, but I can fix it again. You and me, Luke, we can save humanity again."

Legion could feel the greenies were boarding the cruiser, the last of them making a rude gesture and a snarky equation toward the station itself and NSO in particular.

"We will, Peter, but first we have to save you," Luke/Legion/Dhruv said.

Peter just nodded. He tapped a few keys on the computer. The lights dimmed slightly then came back up as Peter pulled a storage wafer carrier from the side of the computer.

"What about the Hellspace Breach?" Peter asked.

"I'll handle it, Pete," Luke said. The waited until Peter put the wafer carrier on the chain around his neck.

Luke took his brother's hand. "Let's go home, Pete. Close your eyes."

The both vanished in a plume of twisting purple smoke that twisted back on itself, sucked into itself, and vanished.

-----

Dee looked up from the terminal. "He's on his way back."

Daxin just nodded.

---------------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Did anyone else feel that? It felt like an earthquake.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---