Jesri slammed the hatch cover closed, wincing as the noise reverberated painfully around the cramped access tunnel. “Okay, how about now?”, she said, speaking to the air.

“Ah, let’s see,” came Rhuar’s voice in return. “Oh yeah, that fixed some of it. I’ve got some more power flowing to the secondary hyperdrive coils - wait, no, that’s the tertiary hyperdrive coils. Why did you build ships with three fuckin hyperdrive coil sets?”

“In case the first two break?”, said Jesri innocently. “I don’t think you should be complaining about redundant engineering considering how much of this shit is broken.”

“Fair,” admitted Rhuar. “So that’s two sets of coils working, all of the nav computers and about two-thirds of the field plates. All that’s left is to get at least one of the White-Juday stabilizers online and we’ll be good to go.”

“Let’s try for two,” said Jesri tiredly. “Unless you want to try being a five-dimensional noodle when we spin up the drive.” They had been running around for hours trying to repair the damage five thousand years of neglect had wrought upon the ship’s systems. Although the primary systems were admirably intact, the fact was that the ship was well outside her maintenance schedule and mean-time-before-failure is never infinite.

She started walking back along the access corridor towards engineering, rolling her shoulder. “How’s everyone else coming along?,” she asked.

“Hmm, looks like Anja has the communications back online,” he said, “as well as a few sensors we were missing. Captain Qktk has made good progress on the aft radiator array, and I’ve managed to reboot and restore all of the functioning key systems that needed it.”

“Good work,” said Jesri, somewhat surprised. The ship had been in rougher shape than she thought, but even with only four of them they were making very good time on the repairs.

Rhuar had been key. As worried as she was about his mental state while linked, Jesri had to admit he was a natural at isolating the errors and broken components that plagued the elderly ship. He was always monitoring their activity, providing directions, specifications or advice on the task at hand. He had even found and reactivated a small legion of maintenance bots that were currently waging war against the accumulated dust of millenia.

Jesri stretched, working out the kinks in her neck. “All right, sounds like we’re good to go in a bit if you can get those stabilizers up,” she said. “I’m going to hit the autodoc before we head out, I’ll be back up on the bridge when I’m done.”

“Righto,” said Rhuar cheerfully.

She paced down to the end of the corridor, then dropped down a ladder to the hallway proper. She had been able to visit an autodoc here and there as needed, since almost all the transit stations could be counted on to have a few capable of handling her unique biology.

The gulf between the civilian docs and the military model she was about to hop into was immense, however. She hadn’t been able to find a working military doc in nearly three thousand years, so the prospect of slipping into one was adding an extra bounce to her step.

She passed through a wide mess area crawling with tiny off-white robots that carved methodical slices away from the omnipresent blanket of dust. Faded faux-wood paneling and white tile gleamed where they had traveled, save for the areas still covered by the corpses of the ship’s crew. Those waited for larger facilities robots, who would take the bodies to the morgue.

Jesri sighed. The morgue would overflow long before they managed to store all of the bodies. She hated to do it, but they would have to find a less dignified place to hold the fallen until they could come up with more suitable arrangements.

She passed beyond the mess, into another hall and then finally into the medbay. The robots had already been through this section, so every piece of equipment gleamed as if newly installed. Three autodocs sat at the rear of the room, each prominently featuring a wide cylinder open at the near end. As Jesri approached, the cap of the cylinder slid away smoothly.

The top retracted to show a flat bed of hard grey material raised slightly at the end to form a headrest. Shrugging her cloak on to the nearby exam table, Jesri quickly peeled off her clothing and sat on the bed. She scratched idly at the tight, shiny scars raking across her body while she modified a few settings on the doc’s front panel, then nodded to herself and prepared to enter the machine. As she was pivoting to lay down, however, caution broke through her enthusiasm.

“Hey, Rhuar?”, she said.

The speakers in the room crackled to life. “Yeah, what’s up? I see you’ve come to a more enlightened stance on clothing.”

“Hm?”, said Jesri, looking down. “Oh. Not for your benefit, Ensign.”

“Yep, yep, cutting visual feed,” he said hastily. “Aye aye, sir. Ma’am.”

“It’s sir,” Jesri said, a trace of irritation creeping into her voice. “I need to know the status of these autodocs. Which of them is in the best condition?”

“Hmm, let’s see,” grumbled Rhuar. “Well, hop off the one you’re sitting on now, that one’s no good. Looks like the far one is out of order as well. The middle one… yeah, that’ll work.” He paused for a second. “Okay, open the access panel on the middle one, rear hatch.”

Jesri worked her way back to the rear of the huge machine and popped open a thin hatch, revealing numerous brightly-colored electrical components. She paused expectantly for several seconds before realizing she had told Rhuar to cut his feed. “Okay,” she said loudly. “I’m here.”

“Good, good!”, said Rhuar eagerly. “Okay, do you see a big brown data card up top that has “P3308” on it?”

Jesri peered into the hatch, searching around a bit before spotting a green card on the circuit board with a matching label. “You mean this one up top on the right? Yeah, I see it.”

“Remove it from the board, that component is broken,” he said. “We’re going to take one from the first machine and swap it out.”

Jesri reached her hand in the hatch and paused a few inches away. Small blinking lights on the board illuminated her fingers in a pastiche of amber and blue. “Hey, big guy,” she said, “you going to cut the power to the machine for me or should I just stick my hand in there and see how it goes?”

“Ah, fuck. Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Power cut.”

The lights winked off and the hum of the machine faded from imperceptibility into nothingness. Jesri gave it a count of five for the capacitors, then reached in to pull the card. It came out with a satisfyingly mechanical choonk in her hand, a razor-thin array of boards stacked within a sturdy metal frame. “Okay,” she said. “Card out.”

“Great, now pull the card from the other machine. I’ve already cut the power, no need to rub it in,” Rhuar muttered. “Have the card? Good, now slot it into the other board, that should bring it to full functionality.”

Jesri did as instructed, pushing the card lightly into the slot until it stopped at the end with a vanishingly faint click. “It’s in,” she said, shutting the hatch.

There was a pause before Rhuar spoke, scored with the faint whine of power rushing back into the machine. “You sure?”, he said. “I don’t see it connecting. Try giving it a push.”

Jesri gingerly pushed down on the card, which didn’t move. “Looks like it’s in,” she said. “Should I try the one from the other machine?”

“No,” came the reply. “Give the card another push, it’s definitely not seated.”

Jesri frowned and pushed harder on the card. She felt a minor give and increased the pressure even more. The card slid in another few millimeters with a sickening cracking noise before coming to a stop. “Ah, shit,” she said. “Rhuar, I think it’s broken.”

“No, that’s great,” said Rhuar cheerfully. “Everything looks fine from up here. Go ahead and hop on in.”

“Rhuar,” she said evenly. “I am about to have my body rearranged in microscopic detail by a sensitive piece of medical equipment that has been gathering dust for millennia and may have just suffered a part failure. Please run another diagnostic.”

“Okay, fine, just one second,” said Rhuar testily. Jesri folded her arms and waited. “Okay,” he said after a few dozen seconds. “I’ve triple-checked everything. The machine thinks it’s working just fine.”

She sighed and climbed in. “You couldn’t have phrased that less reassuringly. If I’m not out in an hour, send your maintenance robots to clean up what’s left of me.” The cylinder slid shut around her, and Jesri was enclosed in darkness.

Anja strolled off the lift and back to the ops area, where Qktk and Rhuar stood conversing around a console. Rhuar had unjacked for a break, his exoskeletal arms smoothing the fur around his data port mindlessly. Qktk noticed Anja first and gave her a small wave.

“Hello!”, she chirped happily at the two. “All systems go?”

Rhuar nodded distractedly. “Yeah, it looks like the drive is good, Jesri patched it up before she jumped in the autodoc. We’ve got full environmental, sensors, comms.” He paged through the report on the console, pausing here and there to make note of an entry. “We should probably think about finding a source of deuterium before we do anything too energy-intensive. Ship seems to think our current stores will be good for a while, but if we start jumping all over the map it’d be nice to have some extra.”

Anja nodded. “Okay, I have a few places we could visit,” she mused. “How are we on materiel?”

“Uhhh,” mumbled Rhuar, paging through the readout. “We’ve got a whole fuckin mountain of railgun slugs for the CIWS and CQB emplacements, so we’re good there. A full complement of long-range torpedoes too, but I haven’t had a chance to check the engines out. There’s a few other specialized weapons systems, but this report is just abbreviations that I can’t make any fuckin sense of without the jack.” He squinted at the display and scratched his port under his fur. “This HCPL is probably that plasma lance thing I was looking at before, we’ve got a thousand shots or so there and it seems to be in working order. We’ve got about fifty rounds for the other one, says it’s a WCML?”

“Ooooh,” cooed Anja. “We have a whack-a-mole? That’s so fun, I’ve always wanted to see one of those in person.”

Rhuar gave her a flat look. “There is no way that’s what that stands for. What does that even mean?”

Anja shrugged. “No idea, some old joke. I forget what the actual name is, something official-sounding that nobody ever used. It’s fun, you’ll see.” She bent down to the console, paging through a few more entries. “What else, what else…” She chewed on her lower lip. “We have some fighters, that’s good, a pair of shuttles, a Huginn fast attack craft, hm. We could do a lot with these.”

“Only one of the shuttles works,” Rhuar pointed out. “I also haven’t had a chance to do full checks on the other craft, or to pull diagnostics on your suits.”

“Three out of four suits functional,” said Jesri, striding on to the bridge. She walked close to the others and grinned impishly. “I checked earlier. What do you think?”

Rhuar fumbled for a reply and found none, so he just stared. Jesri had left her cloak and old clothing back in the medbay and was clad in a TNMC duty uniform, a trim charcoal jacket and trousers with a gunmetal collared shirt and slim black tie.

Gold piping adorned her left shoulder beneath thin shoulder boards marked with the silver triple-bar and flared wings of a Valkyrie captain. Her knife and pistol looked especially well-used in contrast to their slim holsters, which looked and smelled for all the worlds like the few leather artifacts he’d encountered. Rhuar had no idea how she had managed that trick.

Anja clapped her hands excitedly. “Sister, you look incredible! Is the autodoc working, then? And the fabricators, obviously.”

Jesri nodded. “Yes, Rhuar was a great help with the doc.” She winked at him, eliciting a grumble in response. He found it hard to be irritated with her, however. While Jesri had always been an intense presence, she had been hard and distant with flashes of her good humor shining through. Where there was hard steel before, Rhuar saw flashing quicksilver in its place. She seemed young, vital, brimming with energy.

The changes were more than just affectations of personality, though - as Rhuar looked he could see where her skin was smoother, her movements more fluid, her dark hair lustrous and her eyes sparkling. He made a mental note to see if the doc worked on dogs.

He realized with a start that Jesri was talking to him. “I’m sorry,” he interrupted, “I didn’t catch that.”

Jesri gave him a look. “I was asking if you feel up to taking this barge on a jump.”

Despite himself, Rhuar felt a thrill run down his spine. His mind raced through the status reports and schematics he had been poring over most of the day, and he keyed his vocalizer to respond with his professional artificer’s assessment of their readiness. “Fuck yeah,” he said.

Jesri smirked. “Let’s get to it, then. First stop is Zephyr, the coordinates are already in the nav comp.” She ascended the dais, black boots clicking on the deck, and both sisters took their seats. Qktk secured the navigator’s station, and Rhuar moved back to his pilot’s post to once again interface with the colossal ship.

“I hope you don’t mind if I do this kinda slow,” he said as he jacked in, feeling the pressure of the ship’s massive flood of data straining against his mental barriers. A few select streams of information were allowed through to spiral into his brain, and he keyed up the jump parameters. He took a deep, steadying breath, then approved the jump sequence.

“Warning, jump imminent,” cautioned a calm feminine voice. The bridge lights dimmed, supplemented with amber caution lamps. Qktk looked around nervously and fastened his restraints, and a low hum began to vibrate through the ship. Outside the viewports, the stars began to slowly drift as the ship aligned itself for an exit.

They waited in silence for a long minute. Qktk tapped his legs nervously against the armrest of his chair. “Mr. Rhuar,” he clacked, “Is everything all right?”

Rhuar shot him an annoyed glance. “This isn’t the Leviathan, Captain, it’s like driving a fuckin asteroid.” He patted the console. “Sorry, babe, but it’s true.” Qktk trilled softly, but otherwise stayed quiet as the ship continued in its slow turn towards the exit vector.

“Okay, pretty lady,” said Rhuar, the stars outside the viewports sliding to a stop, “let’s see how you dance.”

Another warning tone sounded throughout the ship, and the hum from the drives escalated to an insistent low tone. Rhuar could feel it in his bones, or in the ship’s superstructure - he felt the tide of sensation pressing against him through the jack, flitting around the periphery of his vision. He locked it away and concentrated, initializing the hyperspace window.

Unlike smaller ships that had to take advantage of mass ramps to achieve any sort of meaningful speed, the Grand Design could forge its own path into the inky depths of hyperspace. A patch of space in front of the bow rippled and bent, swelling to hundreds of meters across and stretching thin.

The circular distortion seemed to vibrate as if under tension. Light from the stars behind it bunched and swam around its periphery, warping into smudged and lensed streaks. Slowly, the stars in the middle crept towards the edge of the ring to join in the coiled twists of light that danced there. The spread accelerated, faster and faster, the final stars smearing like oil across the stretched canvas of space-time until it quivered and tore. The middle of the ring snapped apart with a flash of energy to leave a yawning void into the trackless abyss of hyperspace.

Rhuar marveled at it, letting a few more sensor feeds through to bathe his brain in the wash of data from the ship. “That is so fucking cool,” he observed. “Okay, executing jump in three, two, one...” The coils spiked in pitch and the gateway swept aft in a blur of twisted space and crackling energy, devouring the length of the ship in an eyeblink before snapping shut behind them.

Jesri and Rhuar sat alone on the bridge, watching the oppressive blackness through the viewports. The jump had taken them deep, deep into the bowels of hyperspace, where light was a distant memory. Even the interior lights of the ships seemed to dim in deference to the total night outside.

On the upshot, that meant they were moving screamingly fast. It had taken five hours to make the trip from Harsi, but the slightly longer trip back planewards to Zephyr would take a mere two. Anja had taken the opportunity to visit the autodoc, while Qktk had excused himself to fetch some personal items from the Leviathan.

Rhuar looked over at Jesri, who was staring contemplatively into the inky murk outside. “Have you been to Zephyr before?”, he asked.

“Hm?”, she replied, seeming to have just remembered he was there. “Ah, yes, several times. It was a major military logistics hub and had a few research groups that were involved in the Valkyrie program. We would often stage or resupply from there.” Her eyes took on a distant look. “I always loved going there. The sky was a peculiar shade of teal and the plants were vibrant red, very striking. Big, beautiful oceans over half the planet.”

Rhuar shuddered. “I don’t know if I could walk around on a planet like that. Just out there in the universe with no suit, breathing unfiltered air and standing on rocks and dirt and shit.” He laid his ears back in disgust. “Yeah, no thanks.”

Jesri gave him a sad smile. “You probably don’t have to worry about it. I haven’t been back since the fall, but Zephyr was hit just like all of the other planets. If the atmosphere wasn’t totally blown away, it’ll be a thin mix of nitrogen dioxide and ozone - not breathable under any circumstances.”

Rhuar had the grace to look abashed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to, uh.” He paused, glancing away awkwardly before gamely rushing back into the conversation. “Where are we going on Zephyr? One of your old research labs?”

Jesri let her breath out slowly, thinking. “Not sure, to be honest. There were a few places that would be reasonable to store something like the weapon. I was hoping we could use the ship sensors to narrow it down, but we may end up having to brute-force search on the ground. Most of the potential sites are clustered in one big research park, but we may have to shuttle-hop to get between some of the others.”

Rhuar started to speak again, but said nothing and settled back. After a pregnant pause, he looked back at Jesri. “Do you need me to pilot the shuttle, or…?”

Jesri frowned. Something in Rhuar’s voice was strained, tense. “You can if you want to,” she said slowly, “but I was actually going to fly this one with Anja. I planned on having you up here in case we need to do a quick evac.”

His relief was palpable, and it showed as he flopped back into his chair despite his deliberate efforts at nonchalance. Jesri’s frown softened, but she pressed forward. “Okay, out with it. Why don’t you want to go?”

Rhuar fidgeted, chewing on his paw for a few seconds. Eventually he lifted his head and looked her in the eye. “Harsi…”, he said hesitantly, “well, it wasn’t what I expected.”

“It was rough,” Jesri admitted. “I probably would have recommended that you stay back if I had known how bad the locals were going to be.”

“I’m not talking about the bandits, I expected that someone might come after us,” he said with a slight shake of his head. “You didn’t see everything that went on, after the fight was over.”

Jesri pursed her lips. “You mean with Kenet-Tel and his kids.” Rhuar nodded. Jesri sighed and dragged her fingers through her hair, mussing it and leaving strands jutting in odd directions. The youth and vitality she had exuded since using the autodoc slipped away, leaving her face worn and tired once more. “That was my fault,” she said at last, her voice hoarse. “I couldn’t stop the bandit, couldn’t get over to you guys in time.”

Rhuar shook his head vigorously. “Jesri, that was not your fault. That one was fuckin fast and dangerous, nobody could have done better.” He swallowed. “Besides, it didn’t kill them.” He looked at Jesri significantly, ears flat back against his head.

Jesri gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head. “I know,” she whispered hoarsely.

Rhuar sat up on his chair. “You remembered?”, he said, surprise evident in his voice. “I thought you were unconscious.”

“I was,” said Jesri. “Anja filled me in later.” She rested her head in her hands, elbows propped on her knees. “It doesn’t change anything, though,” she said sullenly. “I failed, and they got hurt. We all got hurt, so badly that we lost our good options. If Anja had to pick one of our bad options and they didn’t make it out, that’s on me.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Rhuar said quietly. “We didn’t just leave them. Anja-”

“I KNOW!”, yelled Jesri, her face contorted with anguish. Her eyes glared at Rhuar’s shocked face through a haze of pain and anger. “I fucking know what my sister did! Do you want to make me say it? She murdered a man and his children, people we had promised to protect! Innocent people!”

“But then-” started Rhuar, but she cut him off with an angry swipe of her hand.

“You think that makes it better?”, she raged, “You think it takes any of the blame off my shoulders, just because I made my sister murder people by fucking up? You think just because she’s not a fucking wreck about it like me that it makes her somehow responsible? I put her in a situation where we had only bad choices, and she chose the one that didn’t end with them getting eaten alive by bandits. The one that didn’t end with us all getting run down trying to carry them back.”

Rhuar didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t. Jesri dropped her glare and rested her head back in her hands, saying nothing. The dim bridge lights splayed multicolored highlights across her hair, which shimmered as she raised her head to look back at Rhuar.

“Don’t judge Anja,” she said, the anger gone from her voice. “She made the right move, even if it was a move nobody wanted to make. That’s what she always does. That’s why she’s Anja.” She sat up straight in her chair, looking down at Rhuar across the dais. “The universe doesn’t owe anyone happy endings. Sometimes you’re just left there picking which flavor of fucked you are. We both spent a long time learning that.”

“If you’re that helpless, where the fuck does that leave me?”, he spat back. “I tried too, and that fucker just brushed me off like dust on the manifold. Are we just gonna tag along like useless pets until we’re collateral for your mission? Is that how this ends?”, asked Rhuar sullenly. “With Qktk and I dead because you ran out of good alternatives?”

Jesri laughed darkly. “Buddy, we’re all dead. We’re going up against an ancient alien superintelligence with unfathomable power and resources, and we’ve got no clear plan besides discovering someone else’s desperate gamble and hoping we can fill in the blanks.”

She shook her head and leaned back in her chair, her face hardening. “I’m not going to let it happen the same way again, though, not like on Harsi and not like back then. If we go out, we’ll lose perfectly. We’ll make the best damn plan possible, we’ll execute it brilliantly and pull out every trick we can think of. We will bend space and time to our will, perform miracles and call down the wrath of ages past on the Gestalt’s shiny genocidal ass. And at the end of all that, if it isn’t enough,” she said, looking over at Rhuar, “then I promise we’ll all at least die together, as a team.”

Rhuar gave her a sidelong look. “That is, without a doubt, the worst motivational speech I’ve ever heard. I feel more depressed now than when you started.”

Jesri snorted. “I’ve been told I have a gift.”

Rhuar chuffed out a quiet laugh and curled up in the seat of his chair, tucking his tail over his paws. “Okay,” he said, his voice muffled. “I’m in. Here’s to an insignificant and painful death.”

Jesri laughed, a real laugh this time, and mimed a toast. “To irrelevance and agony.”

They leaned back in their chairs on the dais and stared into the blackness beyond the viewports, awaiting their arrival at Zephyr.