Well, the good news is I am not completely stupid. When I set my implants to work on opening that door and got zapped with a minor shock for my troubles I was at least smart enough to accept that maybe a little backup would be a good idea before continuing with my exploration. I guess it serves me right for realising and cutting the attempt halfway through, at least it wasn’t a serious jolt. Enough to leave me a little twitchy for a while at worst. Though if it wasn’t for my surge protection I would definitely have been in trouble.

Soon enough I was joined by Jenel clutching her favourite toy, the one I nickname the overcompensation cannon, and Nara, who looked kinda guilty. Well.... that was worrying, it might be a good idea to investigate that later. Bleyk soon joined us too, with a new accessory that looked like some kind of squirt gun loaded with a pink antacid, or that gross stuff they make you drink before some x-rays. (Or at least did, these days they don’t try to x-ray me anymore. Or CT or ECG, or pretty much any of the usual tests they run on people. Too many bits that have been modified, that could act in interesting ways if exposed to standard tests. The sisterhood kind of care more about their secrets than their “volunteers”, and no hospital in the system will run any tests on one of their girls, well except maybe a few guys on the black market who are as likely to break me down for scrap as they are to run the tests, I’m not willing to gamble on that, so I don’t really have the best medical, besides which there’s a lot of metal in there so it would be kinda pointless.)

“OK so we have some kind of vault here, and if whatever is inside needs killing with fire then I’d much sooner have backup before I open it.”

“Isn’t it somewhat late for that given you already attempted to open it once?” Relly asked.

“She did WHAT?” Jenel snarled. “Are you fragged or something sweetie? Remember the rules? You wrote them for pity's sake. Don’t touch without backup. Remember that now?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, it was a bad idea, which is why I aborted before completing the unlock sequence.”

“Getting yourself zapped in the process Captain, I ask you please remember your duties to yourself, and your crew, failing that remember your partners will be most upset with you should you neglect the process again. By which I mean Jenel will, if my archives are providing the right term here “kick your ass.”

“Duly noted, I’ll work on it” I sighed, of course, I was under no illusion that I would remember that in all circumstances, hey you hold something shiny enough in front of my face and I’ll pretty much forget my own name, let alone the rules. But Relly was right, the girls were counting on me, and now we had a new crew member who without us probably knew nobody in the entire quadrant. I had to be better, for their sakes, since you likely already noticed self-preservation is definitely not my forte.