Katare is in a pinch. Were her sweat glands in a functioning state, she’d be sweating bullets right about now. She had totally forgotten that the drone she ordered to pick her up had just a single moving mechanism. The majority of its body is made out of a massless driver, the internal engine pushing against gravity wells instead of using reaction mass. The other part is a large contact-less motor-driven pair of pincers. It usually uses these pincers to grab hold of massive cargo blocks, after which it transports these items. These cargo blocks tend to be massive, and the massless driver is proportionately powerful.

This means that the pincers have to be able to keep hold of heavy cargo while it accelerates at extreme speeds. This means that those pincers need to be very fracking strong.

Katare is just happy that she managed to cancel the pinching operation she had programmed it to before her skull had cracked. She had cursed at the hardwired grasping speed limit for being so slow. But she would be brain-paste squeezed out of a crushed bionic head right about now, were it not for that regulation. She programmed the drone with the sort of bright-eyed enthusiasm that comes with the fact that she can order it around. She didn’t double-check what units of measurements the controlling software used, and instead of using a couple of kilograms of force, she’d ordered it to pick up her head with a couple of hundred tonnes of force.

The reason why she is still alive is that she got kind of nervous when the drone came to pick her up. Because these things are always pictured as attachments to absolutely massive pieces of cargo, she thought it’d be a pretty small object. The looming mass of dark shielding and industrial edges that shot to a standstill in front of her had been terrifying enough for her to stay alert when it started grabbing her.

So that’s why she is literally in a pinch. She is held between two massive industrial clamps that are designed to hold gigatonne cargo loads, not delicate android brain-containers. Once again feeling like wiping away her nervous sweat, she decides to always double-check her outgoing communications for potential ways that they can directly or indirectly kill her.

Aside from nearly killing herself in an industrial accident, she has also been doing some digging into the network controlling the drone carrying her. The load-carrying vehicle was slingshotting around the sun in order to deliver its cargo of compacted ore to the Purgatory. It’ll probably be missed at some point, but because there are thousands of identical machines flying around within sensor range, and probably millions in the solar system, she believes she has some time. She also picked up on a gathering spot nearby. This cluster of vessels seems to be some form of meeting point for crew, located in the 4th Lagrange point of the sun and the Purgatory’s shell.

The fact that the empty frame of the Purgatory still has enough mass to create one of those stable orbiting parking places is just ridiculous by itself, but far from the most unbelievable thing she has heard lately.

While the drone that’s firmly grasping her slowly makes its way over to that area, Katare goes over her plan. She’s learned that her current vehicle doesn’t have a functioning warp drive, so she will need to find a vessel that’s capable of doing just that. She suspects that only a small portion of the vessels currently in-system have functioning warp-drives installed, but data like that isn’t usually publicly available. The general size and purpose of a ship are required to be included in a ship’s identification signal. All other information can be omitted by anyone that’s a bit tech-savvy, and creative mistakes are often made. The exact layout and capabilities of ships are often closely and jealously guarded secrets.

So she will have to go and see for herself. And she can’t just go around and ask details like that, as she is currently nothing but a hideously charred piece of a civilian android body that houses her brain. The only reason she can actually see is that there seems to be back up cameras hardwired into her face. Once all the synthetic flesh had smoldered off under the influence of the stellar winds, she started seeing grainy black and white images. Her Magical Integration skills seem somehow capable of receiving data from these backup cameras, probably only meant for diagnostic work and the like. So instead of looking at a dark void once more, she now gets a very rough and granulated view of one ribbed and scarred pincher arm. This rather poor visual reception alarmed her to the fact that the drone she was controlling was slightly bigger than she expected.

Katare shakes away mental images of brain spaghetti, squeezed from her cracking bionic head, as she concentrated on the present again. She has a few days of low power mode life-support left, which should be enough to get her somewhere she can switch heads again. Instead of continuing to lament over the past, she resumes doing what she has been doing a lot of recently. Going over all the digital communication that’s happening in space had been nearly impossible when she was floating through space by herself. Now, she can tap into the communication protocols, data processors, and transmitters of her trusty oversized cargo drones.

She’s been thinking about entering the minuscule cockpit built into the drone, but as that won’t be of any benefit to her currently, she decides against it. She will arrive at the gathering place of spaceships shortly, and popping into the climate-controlled area would only save her a little bit of energy on heating. Also, getting out again can be problematic.

She continues to listen in to all the chatter happening in the system, especially keeping an eye out for the Histaff cleanup status reports. The amount of encrypted messages she can’t break increases the closer to the gathering place she gets, but because she can’t read it, she filters it out. She overhears some chatter about an off-site and off-ship secure storage, and how a storage container of The Enemy contaminated paper and corpses are being transported there. She makes a note of the destination, some system even further out in the rim, a good ways away, but doesn’t pay it any more attention. There’s a conversation that’s seriously tedious about what to do with the GalaxSec base that confuses Katare. She really wants to know how a planet-dropped GalaxSec base would have become an orbital salvaging operation, but with the sheer amount of regulation and Galactic laws that apply, and no precedent for this situation, she wished the ones responsible for that mess all the best.

She then finds that she has arrived, and she orders her drone to let her go gently. The rudimentary orbital map she has of the place gets supplemented by a rather vague black and white image as she lays eyes-on. A couple of blurry shapes are slowly rotating, the fact they are connected by pipes and ropes preventing them from floating away. Ordering her drone to pick her slowly spinning skull in its jaws once again, she commands it to bring her closer. Her abysmal vision doesn’t help the situation, but she can guess how big the ships are.

Generating gravity through spinning is still the most efficient and cost-effective way to keep things stuck to the floor, and it helps that it’s cross-compatible with literally any ship, platform, or station. The bigger the ship, the slower the spin that’s needed to create the universally most accepted amount of gravity, namely one G. And Katare sees that the people visiting this particular improvised space station are not the noblest of people. These types of shanty-town initiatives usually house the less legal types of entertainment, and every single solar system that has anything going on has at least one. They are designed to be broken apart with ease so that if a GalaxSec inspection does happen, they can disband quickly.

The ships present are of two types. First, there are the ships where everything happens. These are usually renovated cargo ships, often turned into partial nightclubs, drug dens, whore houses, VR dive lounges, or other pleasures of the flesh. These are recognizable by their large airlocks, as they need to be able to vent all incriminating matter quickly. The second type of ship belongs to the visitors, smaller shuttles that are often more about looks and stupid amounts of acceleration than efficiency or cost. Katare aims for the largest concentration of these types of vehicles and starts scanning.

She clumsily manages to fake an identification that’s a combination between an impairment placard and an exceptional vehicle permit parking ticket. She never really had to worry about parking an industrial drone in a zone meant for personal shuttles before. It takes her a few tries before the Synthetic Intelligence handling the parking arrangements accepts her fabricated parking request packet.

She then wonders how she is going to move around, asking herself how she didn’t think of this problem before. She is still a floating brain inside a charred and ruined android biomechanical head. She has exactly zero experience with moving around as just a head, and she doesn’t feel like maneuvering herself around with the industrial clamps that nearly squished her. She then gets the brilliant idea to move her jawbone. The feedback sensors in her bionic skull tell her that although a lot of the systems are gone or damaged, the actuators in her jaw still work just fine.

[ New skill learned; Microgravity Maneuvering lvl 1 ]

Katare immediately notices two problems. The first one is that the System is once again inconsistent. She has come to recognize that skills that provide her with information are learned, as in ‘new skill learned.’ Skills that are new, and thus give no information, are generated, as in ‘new skill generated.’ Yet she just learned Microgravity Maneuvering, and she doesn’t receive a single thing. She only gets the faintest idea to open her jaw while there is solid matter underneath her, which even a child would be able to figure out.

Secondly, she is now madly spinning around, careening away from her only mode of transportation, and she once again sees nothing. The low-resolution video feed she sees through is now a blur. The quality and framerate of the backup visual sensors in her head are so bad that she can’t even figure out which direction she is traveling.

With a sullen feeling of defeat growing in her nonexistent guts, she decides that she isn’t going anywhere on her own power. She does try using her mana for a bit, but she once again is blocked by her inability to move mana outside her skull. For some reason, she can perfectly sense the mana around her; she just can’t influence it. So she once again uses her Magical Interfacing skill to form a nice packet. This one tells her vehicle to come and pick her up in the most detailed and safest way she can imagine.

While waiting for the drone to do its thing, she muses on her life a little bit more. She is currently a disembodied brain inside a rather well charred Berry FullBionic model’s head. She starts thinking that things can’t get any worse, but she barely manages to stop herself from finishing that thought. She can imagine that things can indeed very much get worse, and she isn’t about to test her luck in such a taunting way.

She just spins along for a while, secretly happy that she doesn’t have a stomach. Also, her vestibular system has no say about whether or not she is about to vomit in the first place, so that’s nice too.

Then, before her mind can once again devolve into the madness of multiple personalities or other shenanigans, she senses that her spinning has stopped. With a deep mental sigh, Katare tries to reason out a better way to hijack a warp-capable ship. All in all, flying towards the semi-legal gathering of ships had been more of an impulse decision than she would like to admit.

The chance of bionic bodies being present on any of those random ships is extremely slim. There is no way that the facilities needed to perform the brain transfer are present in ships that small. With a dark mood settling over her like a choking blanket, she concludes that she will have to return to the Purgatory. That massive ship is basically guaranteed to have at least a basic medical bionic suite, which she will have to gain access to somehow.

Just like it’s required by a lot of laws and regulations to have the needed vacuum survival suits onboard facilities to equip the entire crew, so are larger ships required to have bionic stations onboard. Katare steers her mind away from the terrible and horrific nWear suit that skeleton seemed to love so much. She then orders her vehicle to start moving towards the Purgatory again.

It takes her a good half an hour of sedately thrusting around to realize that she is not being clamped between two massive industrial pincers. Instead of the chipped coating and rough finishing of the cargo drone, she is now being grasped between two much smaller arms. The ship isn’t inside her visual range, so she could be forgiven for not noticing the change in pincer type. What’s less easily forgiven is that the amount of digital data flowing around her is of a whole different ballgame.

Katare commands the ship to stop, broadcasting a general stopping packet that probably instantly causes everything within her transmitter’s range to grind to a halt. Katare doesn’t care, as a combination of shame and excitement washes away all of her immediate problems.

She quickly reads through some logs, reconstructing the events of the last half hour in just a few seconds. The first vehicle to reach her after sending out the pickup package had, in fact, not been her drone. It had been one of the larger shuttles, previously docked to one of the longer pipes extending from the floating cluster of ships. It had reached her the quickest, and because of the relatively complex Synthetic Intelligence inside the ship, it had figured out how to obey her order to the letter.

The first thing she does is to whisper to the ship. She quietly asks it what it’s capable of. The moment this request leaves the confines of the Magical Interfacing skill, she is bombarded with data. Compared to the impossible deluge of information that had flooded through the Purgatory, this is just a trickle, and she easily channels it into the storage area of her neural implants. Once there, she finally gets a good look at the ship that’s currently grasping her in mechanical arms.

And to her horror, she sees that it’s a super-expensive private littoral warp-capable boat. The warp-capable thing is pretty good, but she isn’t too jazzed about the fact that it’s worth more than a capital carrier. For some reason, the owner of the ship thought it was a good idea to make the interior out of materials that are worth more than the ship itself. And Katare isn’t really worried about stealing the ship. She is worried about what the owner will do once they realize that their ship is stolen.

She sees that the boat itself is nothing special while going over its spec sheets. A thirty-meter long egg shaped hull with extendable wings, a few rooms, and a decent amount of amenities. Suitable for medium length journeys with a handful of people. So why is an unremarkable ship like this decorated to hell and back?

Katare realizes that she would not even have paused in the act of stealing this ship a subjective year ago. She then gives herself a pat on the back for adapting this quickly, her switch in mindset quite the feat in her eyes. Going from a socialite in the upper crust of the galaxy to a disembodied brain stealing ships is a rather sizable shift in social standing, after all.

Deciding that whatever comes will come, no matter what she does, she starts feeling out the best way to communicate with the vessel. The first thing she does is to order the vessel carrying her to start moving to the outskirts of the system. Then, she starts trying to figure out a way to get inside the ship without risking being flung into the void of space again. She has no idea what will happen were she to stay outside the boat when it warps, and she has no desire to find out.

The ship is halfway to the safe-warp line when she manages to make it inside. The SI plugged into the ship had picked her up with a multipurpose clamp on the front of the vessel. Meant for docking, grabbing small loads of cargo, and other miscellaneous tasks, it was never designed to be able to reach an airlock. Instead, Katare managed to tell the ship to drop her. It then maneuvered and turned just so that an open airlock catches her.

Noticing that the few still working sensors on her exterior report an atmosphere at a comfortable temperature is one of the greatest reliefs she has ever felt. No longer floating in the void of space, the life support systems in her bionic braincase also stop operating at multiple hundreds of percent of their standard operating conditions. Finding the number of one of the folding maintenance drones on board the ship, it’s child’s play to tell it to transport her to the cockpit.

Crafting another packet to request the ship’s inventory, she finds out that there are no braincases or neural preservers on board. With a ship this size, she would have been surprised if there were. Her charred bionic head is resting on the pilot’s seat when she finally calms down. Katare might have thought herself calm before, but the fact that she was floating through the void of space, barely a couple of centimeters of material shielding her from the inhospitable vacuum, prevented her from thinking clearly. Her brain no longer flooded with a constant low level of panic; she thinks what she wants to do next. She hates to admit this, but she comes to the conclusion that the best way for her to get help will be to go looking for it outside official channels. She struggles with this topic for a long while.

She finally manages to convince herself to plug in the coordinates of Daa-KeeTaa into the Synthetic Intelligence. The SI corrects her course by a few degrees and starts plotting out the warp jump. Katare doesn’t really know a lot about her old teacher’s location. The only thing she remembers is that the call was routed to an old research station in a largely abandoned section of the galaxy. She thinks about investigating why the previously prestigious Daa-KeeTaa would end up in such a shitty place. Then she remembers that she is most likely responsible for his predicament. She then decides not to think about that entire episode.

For the first time in a long time, Katare feels like she can truly relax. Her course is plotted, she has a plan, and she is in no immediate danger of death. While letting her tense mind relax, she starts to feel faint traces of mana inside the ship. Focussing on these faded hints, she concentrates on what she assumed to be a storage room located in the back of the cockpit. There, she senses a small collection of what she recognized as mana-infused swords and pieces of armor. The loops are barely even visible to her Mana Sense, but the circles tell her that they are undoubtedly nearly drained pieces of mana enhanced gear.

Then an alarm starts blaring through the ship, startling the shit out of Katare. She mentally asks what in the everliving warp is going on, accidentally sending a Magical Interfacing packet in the process.

The bearded face of Grandmaster pops on the screen, the previously black cockpit walls blazing with light. Katare only sees a blurry black and white shadow of the real to life image, but even then, she can see the fury in the imposing man’s eyes.

“Stealing Order property, penalty of death,” he booms. “Breaking and entering exclusive Order terrain, penalty of death. Displacing top-secret Order items and equipment, penalty of death!” he continues shouting.

Katare is freaking out again. Her mind just started to relax after her harrowing kidnapping and tumble through space. She starts sending information packets in a blind panic, doing the digital equivalent of randomly shouting her lungs out while punching random buttons.

“Grand theft littoral ship, penalty of death. Do I need to continue? Whoever you are, turn yourselves in right this instant, bring back my private ship, and we’ll make it qui-”

Katare feels like she should be panting frantically right about now. Just shouting ‘stop’ at the booming voice seemed to have worked. Instead of obeying, Katare orders the ship to burn its energy reserves.

She barely stays strapped inside the captain’s seat as the boat accelerates with all its might. It's internal dampeners barely prevent her brain from turning into grey slush, but Katare doesn’t care. That magical madman was bad enough already previously. She has no desire to find out what he will do with her if he gets his big hands on her braincase.

The ship starts warping ten panic-filled minutes later. It takes her a good few hours of frozen meditation before she manages to get her Still Mind skill to carry her to stasis-induced slumberland.