It took the Arctic Cutters a month to build Iris a new HAB unit. They took all the data from her computer and crunched the data and said they would optimize a new body for her, but only if she played nice in her prison cell. They gave her the choice between getting handed to the Shermans as a brain in a jar, or obediently wasting her time with video games and cartoons. She chose the latter.

The ship, the Washington Blues, was like a small city, though Iris still couldn’t understand why they had renamed it. Probably something legal, but they had scratched off the US- from the front and slapped on Blues in fresh paint. Not that she could see anything of it, from the brig. The closest she got to outside was her permitted access to their internal VR server, which happened to have an active arena for Call of Honor.

By the second week, she had topped the leaderboards in free for all, battle royale, and nearly maxed out her duos, but couldn’t for the life of her get a steady partner if Holly wouldn’t join her.

“God damn it, Haber. Don’t you know the meaning of teamwork?” her randomly matched partner screamed as victory fireworks went off for their opponents.

“Do I know the meaning of teamwork? I think it has something to do with getting points, and last I checked I got forty kills to your four,” she screamed back, getting right in his digital face.

“That’s because you kept kill stealing me, and leaving me to die!”

“Whine whine whine, I didn’t know Arctic Cutters hired grown ass babies. I thought this was a PMC.”

“Oh my God, why are you even allowed an internet connection? You’re in the fucking brig. Why do I have to listen to your stupid barking?”

“What? You think I wouldn’t say this to your face? Try me.”

“I outta! I ought to come down there and remind you that it don’t matter how smart you are, you still ain’t got no body.”

Iris snorted. “Would your girlfriend even let you come? Would you have to go get her permission?”

Her partner’s mouth hung open. He held up his hand, with a wedding ring on it. “Okay, first of all, I’m gay. Second–”

Someone terminated her connection to the Call of Honor server. Iris blinked, resetting her vision to her HAB unit. Holly held the ethernet cable in her hand and wagged it at her. “Iris, what the fuck?”

“What?” she asked, doing her best to shrug despite having only one arm attached, and that was a near useless hunk of plastic that struggled to press buttons on the tv remote. The brig of the Washington Blues was considerably nicer than most prisons she had seen. The bed she was on even had a mattress. She wasn’t even certain the door was locked, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t exactly mount an escape plan with nothing but a nasty tongue.

“We’re trying to be nice to you. Even got you a new skin suit.”

“You made me a brunette!”

“Yeah, ‘cause we used my spare materials. I expect a thank you! That’s natural hair too, grown clone samples from my actual head.”

“From five years ago? Gross.”

“All hair is dead! Ugh, oh my God. Iris, baby, if you keep acting like this someone is going to toss you off the side of the ship and say you tried to escape.”

Iris sneered back at her. “Like any of you would dare. This ship would eat a missile if you let that happen. You’re working for psychopaths.”

“Sociopaths, not psychopaths. They’re different. The world is coming to an end, and it ain’t the first time. History has proven that survival can mean compromising your humanity.”

She rolled her eyes. “Who the hell do the Shermans think they are? The Bastard himself? And when is my body going to be finished? The longer you take, the more likely Blumhagen is to bust in here and save me. Chop chop.”

Holly rolled her eyes. “Because you’re so put upon in here? Spending all day beating up on people in video games? Really? Mendel is on the run and out of supplies. He’s got guns and robots and workers, but just like everyone else on this planet, he’s running out of food. Unless God blesses him with a net full of tuna or something, he has to make a deal with someone on land before he can even think of coming up here.”

“Oh, he’ll be here soon enough. You always shoot a traitor before you shoot the enemy.”

Holly flinched and winced. She sighed and dropped the ethernet cable to the ground with a shake of her head. “That’s what I came here for in the first place. The parts just got delivered. I’m here to take you to the engineering tanks, assuming you still want to cooperate with us.”

Holly had put it strongly, but Iris knew she didn’t have a better option, so she did slightly more than make herself dead weight in Holly’s hands as she got transferred to a wheelchair and taken out into the hallway. She was rolled down the hall, to the cargo elevator, and down to the engineering room, the robot equivalent of a medical bay. The same man from Daedalus Labs who had met with her in Seoul sat beside the operation machine. He smiled stood up with a habitual adjustment of his suit coat. “Miss Haber, good to see you again. You’re becoming my favorite client.”

“Nice to see you too, you vulture war profiteer.”

His smile didn’t even flicker. “I prefer the term capitalist. And the techs who made your new body prefer being called scientists. In fact, they like working for you. They respect how you do business. It just so happens to also be very lucrative for us. First the sprawl covered your bill, and now America is covering your bill.”

Iris glanced at Holly, one eyebrow raised. Holly shrugged. “Me and you, girl, one mission and any price tag will be paid for. You’ll make everyone happy too, except the terrorists we gotta kill.”

Iris shook her head and turned back to the sales associate. “The Gawain worked pretty well for me. What do you have this time?”

“Well, if you’ll permit me to make some adjustments, we’d like to outfit you with a new power source. Not just a battery, but next generation supercapacitors. The batteries themselves will need more space inside your body, but with the correct interface ports, we can synchronize your body with an augment suit.”

“You mean like what they give regular humans?”

The salesmen grinned. “With the added benefit that we wouldn’t need much external power storage for it. And even outside of the augment suit, your capabilities would be greatly enhanced, for a limited time.”

“Like Chang’s overclocking?”

“His was but a knockoff prototype. Increasing power shouldn’t result in so much excess heat. That man was basically giving himself a fever whenever he fought, it caused brain fog. Very foolish.”

Iris sighed and nodded her head. It sounded like a good deal, which meant there was a problem. “Give me the rundown on who you’re asking me to take out, and then you can put me under. If Mendel has signed off on it too.” She hoped the operation would be his ticket to extracting her, somehow.

After the operation began, the Washington Blues sailed south, through the Bering Strait. It cut the Pacific between UA and US waters, circling around the South China Sea, through the Indian Ocean, and up the Red Sea. Iris came to mid journey, well before they arrived outside the Fertile Crescent, but re-calibrating her body proved difficult to impossible.

The moment her mind-body connection was restored, lest the reconstruction cause nerve damage, she discovered they had chained her, but not just handcuffs and a hobble. The crew had practically encased her arms up to the elbows in a steel binder that weighed over a hundred kilo.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me. I’m less free now than I was before!” Iris protested the one time she was allowed on deck with Holly. She could have jumped overboard, but she would have sunk like a rock and never been found until a Leviathan dredged her up as fertilizer.

“Are you serious?” the woman asked, hands in her pockets and leaning against the ship railing. “Are you really asking for the opportunity to kill us all?”

Iris stewed and glared. The synth skin she had been given had an innate flush reflex, and it turned her cheeks pink. “Maybe.”

Holly rolled her eyes, rolled her head back and stared at the gray sky streaked in contrails. “Come on, can’t you smell it? That rotten stench? The wafting odor of methane and human waste? We’re in the holy land, brought to new life by the failures of humanity!”

“It smells like a swamp.”

Holly clicked her tongue and wagged her finger. “That’s how you know it’s valuable. You can’t just get natural gas anywhere, you know? All those oil fields we humans drilled out in the twenty-first century, there just aren’t any better bacteria pits nowadays.”

“So why did your contract holders lose control of it?”

Holly sighed. “Even before this place was hospitable, back when it was barely better than a desert, no empire could invade without losing everything. Only the locals can hold it. Something about the land breeds stubborn people. You gotta be careful with how you profit from it. Once upon a time, the name of the game was the petrodollar, but that was back in the rudimentary age of fiat currency. Now that almost two-thirds of world currency transfer is in crypto, the open market had to be abandoned. Their produce is treated as a tithe to keep us foreigners out.”

“So?”

“So, it’s no surprise that the locals figured they could negotiate a better deal the moment they smelled weakness from America. Your job is to make sure the ammonium nitrate shipments go out on time. If our farms don’t get that fertilizer on time, the harvest will be diminished, maybe up to a third. That’s millions of people who won’t have enough calories for the winter. We’re the good guys.”

“And the locals, I’m sure they have no use at all for the extra money, and are planning to simply torch the fertilizer they produce if you don’t pay?”

Holly folded her arms across her chest and frowned. “You gotta keep your own house in order first, then you try to change the world.”

Iris sighed. “Show me to the plane, will you? It’s about time we took off, right? I feel like an attack dog on a chain,” she grumbled.

Holly laughed and pushed off to guide her along the array of flying devices, all the way to the very hoverjet that had abducted her. “Don’t be silly. You’re too cute to be an attack dog. Who would ever be intimidated by you?”

“Everyone who sees my leaderboard records seems to get intimidated just fine.”