It was dark.

No, it wasn't just dark; it was pure blackness. It was the sort of blackness Amelia Warren imagined a blind person had to live with. There was no light, not even the strange reddish flash of color shining through the blood vessels of her eyelids, it was as if every single shred of illumination had been sucked out of the world, and she was stuck in the middle of it.

She blinked, or at least she thought she did; there didn't seem to be any of the sensation of her eyelids opening or closing at all, nor any of the feeling that came with moving her eyes. There was no sound, either, she suddenly realized.

She swallowed hard, trying to keep her breathing level and her heart rate from exploding in fear as she felt the complete sensory deprivation close in on her. Except she didn't swallow, or, if she did, there was no feeling to it at all. No saliva slid down her throat, no skin on her neck bobbed from the movement of the muscles beneath it, there was no pause in her breathing... in fact, there was no breathing at all. There wasn't the telltale throb in her ears from her heartbeat, nor the sensation of it moving in her chest.

There was nothing.

She was starting to get scared now. Had something happened? She wasn't a doctor, but she knew enough about the human body to know that everything she was feeling - or everything that she wasn't feeling - was in no way normal and could only be the result of a very serious medical condition. She had heard of 'locked in syndrome' and had always thought it the most terrifying of fates someone could suffer. Was that what was happening to her? The only other explanation was that she was dreaming, but she was damned near certain that the fear spiking through her mind would have woken her up by now.

Under normal circumstances, she would have taken a deep breath, rolled her neck, and tried to think her way out of whatever situation she was in. The deep breath part didn't seem to be working, or if it was, she couldn't feel it, even if she didn't feel like she was suffocating either. That was something, right? She had to have been conscious for a few minutes by now, and she didn't feel like she was running out of air. She tried to roll her neck, but once again, she was met with nothing. No sensation of movement, no satisfying pops in her spine, no feeling of her head changing its orientation, nothing.

Okay, so two of her three self-soothing methods were unavailable to her. That still left the third: to think. What was the last thing that she remembered before the darkness?

She had been aboard the Limerick. She remembered that much, at least. Her husband, Rowan, had been with her. She had been born and brought up in Ireland, a few miles outside of Cork, and had never in her 28 years travelled more than fifty miles from the spot where she had been born. Transport that could get her to anywhere on the planet within only a handful of hours was now as commonplace as aviation had been for centuries, but she had never seen the appeal. Everything she needed was right there. Her family, her work as a high-school teacher, her small circle of friends, and, of course, her Rowan. Life had been good.

But then her parents had died. Her dad had reached the grand old age of 131 when he passed away in his sleep. Her mother, only a few years younger, simply couldn't go on without him, not after six decades of loving, devoted marriage, and she had no inclination to try. She had died less than a year after her husband.

With no siblings and her parents gone, the only anchor she had left in the world was Rowan. Her husband, the man she loved beyond all measure, was as much a rock to her in those dark days as he had been for the entire time she had known him. His support was absolute, and she could see the fathomless depths of his love for her every time she looked into his eyes. He was an engineer by trade, his specialty being the maintenance of the massive plasma reactors that powered entire cities with enormous amounts of clean energy. At just two years older than Amelia was, he had the sort of career that most people could only dream of. He did what he loved and was paid an eye-watering amount of credits for the pleasure.

But with the loss of her parents, and the fact that he wasn't overly attached to his own, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity presented itself to them, one that she would never have considered before the loss of her family.

Ireland was, and would always be, a place of stunning natural beauty. The Emerald Isle was called that because of the endless green of its fields, its forests, and its fertile plains, but the days when it was more countryside than city seemed to be almost over. Like all other parts of the planet, over-population was becoming a real problem. Cities like Belfast and Dublin had exploded in size over the past hundred years. Belfast in particular now encompassed almost the entire region that had once been called Northern Ireland, its northern limits swallowing the coastal town of Londonderry, and its southern reach now encompassing as far as Newry. Even the comparatively smaller cities of Kerry and Galway were now enormous metropolises that covered dozens of square miles and were home to millions.

In Amelia's own lifetime, she had watched the outskirts of Cork grow from a misty silhouette on the distant horizon to the point where the city's suburbs were only a ten-minute car ride from home. But neither Amelia nor Rowan were city folk; they didn't like the hustle and bustle, the loudness, or the frenetic energy of the city. They were country people through and through. They loved the clean air and open spaces; they loved the quiet, the beauty of nature, and the small-town lifestyle where people said hello to strangers when passing on the street. The closer that Cork grew toward them, the more that way of life seemed like a thing of the past.

The problem was, there were only a handful of places left on earth where the rural life they wanted was still possible, and all of them were the sole domain of the incredibly powerful and the obscenely wealthy.

It was Rowan who first tabled the idea. It was a crisp autumn evening, the golden sun hung low in the sky to the west and a fresh breeze blew in from the coast; sitting on the porch that wrapped around the front of their house, it should have been the perfect evening to relax after a long day's work.

But it wasn't.

A new skylane, packed bumper to bumper with hovercars from the city, traveling to wherever city folk traveled, had been established almost directly over their heads, and the sounds of idling engines, beating music, and honking horns had banished the last of the peace that this part of the world would probably ever know.

"We should move," Rowan had said, his eyes turned skyward.

"To where?" Amelia had asked, no longer abjectly opposed to the idea but perhaps more aware of the lack of other options than he was. "Further up north?"

"New Emerald," his reply was as casual as suggesting the house at the other end of the street, but Amelia just gawked at him. New Emerald was, if the brochures were to be believed, the exact sort of rural paradise they had always wanted. A place that encompassed the clean, rural life that Ireland had always been known for and full of the small-town, friendly people that inhabited the Emerald Isle. The only problem was that it was about 3 lightyears from the inner edge of the Hudson Expanse, and for a woman who had been born only a few miles from where she had been sitting, that seemed like an absurdly long way away. "Think about it, Ames," he went on when she didn't - or couldn't - answer. "Open skies, green fields, good money to be made in both of our lines of work, room to breathe, room to grow... room to start a family without..." he sighed again and gestured at the traffic jam a hundred feet above them "...that."

"You're serious about this?" She had almost scoffed at first, but the look on her face had quickly told her that he hadn't been joking in the slightest.

"Darlin', your parents were grand people, and I loved them like they were my own." he sighed again. "But they're gone, and I don't think they would've wanted you to hang around in a place you're not happy, just to honor their memory. And you're not happy here, are you?"

Amelia stayed quiet for a moment, but soon a sigh of her own fell from her lips, and she had shaken her head. "No, I'm not. It's just... This is home, you know?"

"Yeah, I know." he nodded, finally pulling his eyes away from the mess that was now their view, and turned to face her. He reached over and laced his fingers with hers. "I was just thinking that home, to me, is... well, it's wherever you are."

This time, she did scoff. "You corny old bastard," she laughed. But the laughter died on her lips when his face didn't show even the flicker of a smile. "Ro, what's gotten into you?"

"I'm tired, Ames." he slumped back into his chair. "I'm sick of things changing all the time. The world is moving too damned fast and no fucker around here seems to know where the brakes are. Look at this shit," he nodded upward. "Ten years ago, if someone had said we'd be living under a highway, I'd've laughed in their face. Now, look at us. What's it gonna be like in another ten years? Is this how our kids are gonna grow up? Living underneath a god-damned skylane until the city grows out this far and swallows us too? How long is it gonna be until we don't recognize the view out of our own window? I just wanna grow old with you, with our kids - whenever they come along - and then retire with you in a place we can call a home of our own."

Amelia frowned. Rowan had never expressed these sorts of concerns before. Well, he had, but they'd always been in the form of annoyed little remarks or dramatic sighs as he looked out of the window with his morning coffee. He'd never outright said that he wasn't happy in their home anymore. The thing was, Amelia not only couldn't think of a single argument against anything he'd said, but she had secretly been harboring these feelings for quite some time, too. She'd just never thought to voice them while her parents had been alive and in need of her support. Now they were gone...

"Could we afford it?" She asked, giving his hand a squeeze. "Theoretically speaking, I mean."

It was Rowan's turn to snort. "God, yes, easily. You're a teacher, I'm a fuckin' powerplant engineer, and both of us are on the essential worker lists for new colonies. That means that we'd get our places on the colony ships for free, plus a pretty serious lump of cash to help us get started on the new planet. Not only that, this place would sell for a small fortune these days, with the increase in land value, and then there's the money from the sale of your parent's place and my severance package from work if I choose to take it. We'd be able to buy a big chunk of land on New Emerald, build our dream house on it, and still have more money left over than we'd know what to do with."

"It sounds like you've given this a lot of thought," she'd said, her voice not accusatory, just a little surprised.

He nodded. "I was talking to Mike at the plant. He's seriously considering it, and it sounds like he'd be set if he took it. But he doesn't have half the resources we would, his wife isn't on the essential vocation list, he doesn't have a house to sell, and he hasn't been working at the plant long enough to get as big a severance as I'd get. If he'd be set, we'd be made for life. I just..." Rowan paused and then sighed again. "You know what, forget I said anything," he smiled. "Just thinking out loud. I don't mean to put anything like this on you."

"No," Amelia shook her head, surprising even herself by the vehemence of her voice. "It sounds like a good idea. If you think it's a feasible option, then we should talk about it."

"Wait, really?" Rowan blinked at her, his eyes wide in astonishment.

"Really." Amelia smiled again, giving his hand a squeeze. "You're right, my parents are gone. It doesn't feel like home here without them, and that..." it was her turn to glower at the skylane above them. "...is driving me out of my mind! So... let's talk about it."

That sunny autumn evening had been a little under six months ago. Things moved fast after that. They'd applied for colonist status to the newly established Ministry of Colonial Affairs, and rather than the months of red tape and bureaucracy that they'd both been expecting, they were approved almost immediately. Their house had sold in principle within a month, and the final paperwork was completed two months after that. Severance packages had been agreed with their employers - his a little higher than they'd expected, hers a little lower - and they'd booked their spots on the next colony ship bound for New Emerald.

The Limerick.

The few short, yet agonizingly long months between leaving their home for the final time - living in a series of hotels and relatives' guest rooms - and boarding the shuttle up to the enormous colony ship had, at the time, felt like it was dragging by at an excruciatingly slow pace, but as they ascended out of the atmosphere, it seemed like it had flown by in the blink of an eye. Those months since the decision had been made had not, as she was expecting, been filled with wistful memories or torturous doubt but rather crammed full of nervous excitement. It was like one chapter of her life had closed, and she was about to start a new one, the giddy rush of anticipation for the next chapter to start filled every moment of her day.

She had boarded the jaw-droppingly massive colony ship alongside seven-hundred and fifty three thousand other excited colonists on a Tuesday, and on the Saturday, she - along with Rowan and crowds of other people - had gathered around whatever windows they could find to say goodbye to the cradle of humanity as the Limerick finally left orbit. She and Rowan had stayed by that window for hours, watching until Earth was nothing more than a tiny blue spec in the vast blackness of space. He had turned to her, his molten brown eyes looking deep and lovingly into hers, and said...

Nothing.

The memory ended in the blink of an eye, and with a disembodied frown, Amelia realized that moment was the last thing she could remember.

She thought harder, trying to dislodge the haze that seemed to be robbing her mind of the memories that were right on the cusp of her mental grasp. But still: Nothing.

"You are awake," a voice suddenly whispered in the darkness. Amelia flinched at the loudness of the soothing-sounding voice, startled out of the silence she had found herself getting used to despite being able to tell that the actual volume of the voice was barely loud enough for her to hear at all.

"Who's there?" She gasped, flicking her eyes around to find the source of the voice that seemed to have no fixed point of origin, instead sounding like it was coming from everywhere at once. Still, she already knew that her eyes weren't really moving, and even if they were, she couldn't see anything. "Where am I?"

"Please try to be calm," the voice said. "We imagine this is a very frightening and disorientating experience, and for that, we apologize. But you are safe; no harm will come to you."

"Who are you? Why can't I see?" Amelia knew her heart rate had probably skyrocketed, but without any sensation in her chest or her ears, she had no way of being able to confirm it. "Please, where am I?"

"My name is Voxagon," the voice said. "I am here to help you, but for your own well-being, the process has to be handled... delicately."

"Process? What process?? What the hell is going on?!?" Amelia scrambled for answers, despite picking up on the fact that most of the things she was asking were not being answered.

There was a slight pause before Voxagon spoke again. "All will be explained; you have my word. But rushing through the process may result in more harm being done than your mind is able to handle. We must proceed slowly. You have undergone some... changes."

"Changes?" She didn't like the ominous undercurrent in the voice's tone, the sound sending a chill up what would have usually been called her spine if she could feel it. "What cha..."

"You were hurt," Voxagon answered before she could finish her question. "Quite badly."

Amelia frowned, or at least she thought she did. She didn't feel hurt, in fact... "I can't feel anything."

"I know," Voxagon echoed through the blackness, his tone offering something approximating sincere sympathy. "And I know how disconcerting that must be for you. I know you can't feel them, but please try to move your fingers."

Amelia, having no other choice, complied.

"Good. Your fingers are moving perfectly. Now your toes?... Excellent. Your body seems to be in perfect working order. It's only a matter of connecting your mind to it, and you will be fine... physically, at least."

"Please," Amelia whimpered, "Please tell me what's going on. What happened to me?"

There was another pause. "We don't know what happened to you," the voice said with something that could almost be called a sad sigh. "You were found in a life pod, adrift in space. We only have an approximate idea of how long you were in there, but... It seems you were seriously injured before the stasis function of the pod was activated."

"Injured? What was wrong with me? And... how long was I in there?"

Another pause. "We cannot be as accurate as you may hope in terms of time. But judging by the degradation of the metallic compounds on the life pod's surface, and the pitting of it from stellar debris, you were adrift for approximately four-hundred and seventeen of what you would call years."

If Amelia could feel her face, she was pretty sure it would be a mask of complete utter shock and incredulity as those words slowly sank into her brain.

Four hundred years.

Four... hundred... years.

Oh god. Rowan.

She could feel the pain immediately. She couldn't feel her arms or her legs, she couldn't feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, she couldn't feel her heartbeat or the movement of her eyes... but pain? Apparently, she was more than capable of feeling that. There should have been the heat of tears running down her cheeks, there should have been the weight pressing on her chest, there should have been the rapid inhalations of hyperventilation, but there was none of that. There was only the marrow-deep dread and panic that not only was she four centuries out of time, but everyone she had ever known... Rowan... had been dead for hundreds of years.

"I don't remember!" she sobbed, the pain evident in her voice, but missing the telltale ragged breaths that she expected.

"I know," Voxagon answered calmly. "Your most recent memories have been isolated for the time being."

"What? Why?"

"We feared that exposing you to memories of what caused your injuries and left you in that life pod would... inhibit your ability to cope with the process and cause you additional distress."

Amelia felt a flare of burning hot anger blaze within her at the sheer audacity of what she had just heard. Yes, there was a small part of her that found the idea that individual memories could be kept from her too ridiculous to consider. Still, if the voice was right about the amount of time that had passed, then it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that technology had progressed far enough to make that possibility a reality. But mostly, she was just pissed. How the hell was she supposed to understand what had happened to her, let alone come to terms with it, if she was being prevented from remembering it in the first place?

"Fuck my distress!" Amelia snarled at the blackness. "I'm already distressed! Nothing I'll remember could possibly make me more distressed than finding out that my husband, and everyone else I've ever known, have been dead for hundreds of years! What the hell is wrong with you?!?"

"Forgive us," Voxagon said in that infuriatingly calm voice after it allowed Amelia to finish. "We meant no disrespect to those you may have lost, nor to the sanctity of your memories. I know you don't understand it yet, but the process can be an extremely delicate procedure, and the chemistry of the brain plays a large part in that. Forcing those memories on an unprepared mind could alter your brain chemistry in unpredictable ways. Those changes could have catastrophic results that would make the process impossible to complete."

"You keep talking about this process. I don't know what that is! What the hell are you talking about?"

The pause was longer this time, and the fear, anger, and apprehension in Amelia's chest grew with every silent second. "I think, to understand the process, you would need to first understand the context in which someone goes through it," the voice finally answered.

"I'm all ears." Amelia would have rolled her eyes if she could.

"We... don't understand."

Amelia squinted at the darkness. "What? It means I'm listening to you."

"Ah, I see. An apt metaphor. Thank you." Voxagon seemed to take a deep breath, although she had no idea what made her think that, before he spoke again. "The process is part of our lifecycle. In very broad terms, it marks the passage from childhood to becoming an adult. For us, it is a moment of profound change and deep introspection, a single point in time where we reflect on what we have learned about ourselves, about life, about the world and the galaxy around us, and about what we want for the future. All of our knowledge and life experience condensed into a single moment.. The person that we are going into the process is often a very different one to who we are once it has been completed... emotionally, psychologically, physically, and - if I may be so bold - spiritually.

For you, it's different. The process has never been attempted in these circumstances before. You were badly hurt when we found you; your injuries were severe to the point of being life-threatening. The only thing that has kept you metabolically alive for the hundreds of years you were in that life pod was the stasis field that was built into it. Without it, you would have died very quickly, possibly within minutes..." there was another pause, "... and that systemic shut down - the biological end-of-life process - continued as soon as we deactivated the stasis system and opened the pod to release you. The process, I'm afraid to say, is your only chance of surviving."

"I'm... I'm dying?" Amelia croaked.

"Yes, I am sorry."

It was Amelia's turn to pause as a thousand thoughts all raced through her mind at once. "How long do I have?"

"Without the process, I'm afraid you will not survive the hour." That infuriating calmness was still laced through every syllable he said, but there was an unmistakable undercurrent of something else, too. Sorrow, maybe? Concern?

Amelia took a deep, metaphysical breath. "Okay, tell me about the process. What... I don't know. What is it? What happens? What do I have to do?"

"It is difficult to explain," Voxagon replied. "Obviously, there are some very profound physical changes, and you would not be the same person as you were before, but - as strange as it may be to hear - the process is far more psychological than physical. One of the key factors is, for lack of a better word, acceptance."

"Acceptance of what?"

"Of your life, of your choices, of the things that have led you to this point," Voxagon explained carefully. "For our young people, that often revolves around certain dreams or ambitions remaining unfulfilled. In many cases, and this would apply to you, too, it includes an acceptance of the fact that some familial or social connections that have always been present may be irrevocably severed. It is the acceptance that you will not be the same person you were before, you may not have the life you envisioned for yourself, that everything that happened to you, all the things that got you to the point you are at now, all of it is in the past and beyond your ability to control. There is only the path forward."

Amelia bit back on the retort that formed in her mind. The one that said this sounded like the sort of nonsense found in a fortune cookie. "But how can I do any of that," she started after a moment's thought, "If I can't remember?"

"Your memories will be returned to you," Voxagon said. "The last memories that your mind retained before you were put into stasis. Only after you have accepted these can the rest of the process continue. But it will not be easy."

Amelia swallowed hard. There was an edge to his voice, something telling. "Have you seen them?"

Another pregnant pause. "Yes." There was a moment of silence before Voxagon continued. "Please forgive the intrusion of your privacy, but it would not be possible for me to guide you through the process without understanding the events that brought you to us."

"No, I..." Amelia sucked in a ragged breath. Or it probably would have been ragged if it actually happened. "I can understand that. Scale of one to ten, how bad was it?"

"It was... unpleasant. But... enlightening."

She nodded, or she would have if she had any control over her head. "So, just to make sure I'm understanding this," she started. "I need to relive these unpleasant but enlightening memories and accept them completely if I'm to go through this process. But if I can't do that, if the process doesn't work, I die - probably very quickly."

"That's a very succinct, perhaps even simplistic summary, but accurate nonetheless."

It was hardly a difficult proposition to consider. "Then it seems I don't have much of a choice." She would have added a shrug if she could. "I'm ready when you are."

"You are a brave woman, Amelia," Voxagon said. His voice sounded almost like those words would have been spoken with a reverent bow, but she had no way of knowing if that were true or not. "I will release the blocks on your memories now. Good luck."

********

Amelia was pretty sure that if she were upright, if she had been able to hear her own breathing, if her lungs or her limbs were even capable of functioning, the wave of memories that crashed back into her mind would have stolen the breath right out of her and made her collapse to the floor.

She remembered everything.

Faster-than-light technology was developing at a breakneck speed, and the news about it was impossible to miss, with new speed records being set by intrepid explorers practically every other week. But, relatively speaking, she knew it was still in its infancy. There would come a time, Rowan would tell her, when ships would be able to travel far enough, and fast enough, for them to not only make the jaunt to New Emerald a trip that could be made in a matter of days, rather than the six weeks it would take now, but could also make the hitherto impassible Hudson Expanse just a mild inconvenience to further exploration. But those days weren't here yet, and New Emerald was about as far from Earth as it was possible to travel.

They had only been on the Limerick for a day when the briefing had taken place.

It was an odd experience, one that she would have struggled to describe to anyone who hadn't been through it. It was part pre-flight safety briefing that cabin crews on commercial airliners had been giving for centuries, and part welcome talk that you would expect after arriving at a package hotel. There was lots of talk about the facilities aboard the colony ship, but it had been given with the undercurrent of understanding that The Limerick was designed to carry a lot of people a very long way; it wasn't a cruise ship. A little discomfort was to be expected. Their essential worker status, however, had meant that they'd been upgraded from the common sleeping areas to having their own private, albeit cramped, quarters.

The room had been tiny, barely large enough to fit a double bed and a small wardrobe, but it had a view out at the unexpectedly beautiful hyperspace wash, and it was theirs.

The rest of the briefing had been about safety. There had been the obvious stuff: what to do in the event of a medical emergency, what to do if there was a fire aboard, what the different types of alarms meant, and where the rally points were in the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation. Having heard those reports in one form or another dozens of times, even just on TV, none of that came as much of a surprise.

The glaring exception, though, was the mention of pirates.

Actual pirates.

"This will be the Limerick's fifth trip to New Emerald," the overly cheery representative had said to the crowds of people. "We have already traveled this route four times with no issues at all, so there is no reason to think that this time will be any different. Piracy is a problem this far out from Earth, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise, but the United Earth Navy has ships in the area, both to act as a deterrent and to respond to emergencies. It should also be remembered that acts of piracy have almost always been carried out against the automated cargo vessels running back and forth between the colonies. There has never been a recorded incident of pirates attempting to intercept a colony ship. We only include it as part of the briefing because it would be negligent not to."

"And you legally have to," a man's voice from somewhere in the crowd shouted out.

There was a spattering of chuckles, and the rep smiled good-naturedly. "Well, yes, that too. But, honestly, the chances of there being a fire aboard are almost non-existent, but we have to include all possibilities to ensure your safety, just in case. The same goes for piracy."

"So, we're safe?" A woman closer to the front asked.

"Completely safe," the rep beamed back at her. "There is absolutely nothing to worry about. But as the gentleman pointed out, I legally have to tell you what to do if that near-impossible event ever happens." She waited to make sure there were no more interruptions before continuing. "In the event we are boarded by pirates, you must remain where you are. Doors around the ship will seal automatically as our security teams deal with the problem. Under no circumstances should you wander the ship or attempt to interact with the intruders. If, by whatever means, the borders manage to gain access to the part of the ship you are in, cooperate with them fully. All material items that they take will be replaced by the colonial administration at no charge to yourself. Your safety is far more important than anything they could steal from you."

Listening to this, Amelia supposed the situation was like being in a bank during a robbery; the staff would deal with the robbers, and the public was expected to keep their heads down, avoid provoking the criminals, hand over whatever was demanded of them, and claim on the bank's insurance later. Either way, the directions, along with the repeated assurances that a pirate attack was near-impossible, left the gathered crowds feeling pretty secure and confident about the six-week voyage to New Emerald.

They were only ten days from their destination when the near-impossible actually happened.

It was late afternoon, maybe early evening, and she and Rowan had decided to take their last meal of the day to their quarters to enjoy some quiet time together. The journey had been fun, it had been exciting, and Amelia had met more new people in those short weeks than in her entire life before it combined. They'd both made new friends, and any doubts they'd quietly had about the choice to move to the new colony had faded to nothing. But tonight, they just wanted to be together.

Amelia was finishing the last few mouthfuls of her meal, taking a sip from her glass of sweet white wine, looking forward to a night of close intimacy with her beloved husband, when the whole ship shook.

The first tremor had been almost imperceptible, a slight roll beneath her feet, barely enough to make her put her glass down in surprise. But then came the jarring second one, followed by a loud metallic thud that reverberated through the walls. Claxons started sounding almost immediately, and red rotating lights dropped out of hidden compartments in the ceiling as the door to their quarters, which had been kept open to give it the sense of having a little more room, quickly slid closed.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Then, the lights flickered, and the hum of the Limerick's engines, which had become a comforting background noise to her days aboard, dropped into a deep, unnatural silence, and the wash of the Hyperspace bubble beyond their window dissipated into nothingness. A strange shiver crept down her spine, though she couldn't quite place its origin. Something was wrong. Too wrong.

Rowan was already on his feet, rushing to the small viewport, his face tight. "Amelia--" he began, but then the comms crackled to life, the voice coming through distorted and frantic.

"This is Captain Thurston. All crew to your stations. All passengers, remain where you are. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Pirates have boarded the ship. Security personnel, you are clear to engage hostiles. Defend the ship and--"

The transmission cut off abruptly.

In the silence that followed, Amelia could only scramble to put her thoughts into something of a coherent mess. The impossibility of the briefing--of pirates, of actual pirates--suddenly seemed far too real.

The quiet seemed to stretch out for an eternity. Her heart was pounding in her ears as her eyes remained locked onto Rowan. She wasn't really looking at him, though, just like he wasn't really looking at her; they were both just listening.

After a few minutes - minutes that felt like hours as they dragged past - sounds started to echo through the thick titanium door of their quarters. At first, it was just footsteps, heavy and rushed, as they raced along the hallway outside, but then came the voices.

"They've breached the port-side airlock on deck forty-eight," a voice panted in the hallway, though it was muffled by the door. "Teams six and seven are moving in from the stern; we need to hit them from the bow."

"Fucking hell, Jo," A second voice hissed. "Pirates? We have some flimsy body armor, and I'm pretty sure this assault rifle is older than I am! What the hell are we gonna be able to do against pirates? Jesus, we're glorified mall cops, we're meant to stop the passangers from stealing from each other and keep them out of restricted areas, we aint fucking marines!"

"The hell do you want me to tell you, Bill?" The first voice, apparently Jo, barked back. "This is what we signed up for, and we know the ship better than they do. We can take them on forty-five. They have to pass through the emergency bulkheads; that's a bottleneck we can use. We hold them there while six and seven hit them from behind." There was a pause. "Look, man, I get you're scared; I am too, but there's no running from this. There's nowhere to go, and if I'm gonna die today, I'm going down fighting. Can I count on you?"

"But, what if we just give them what they want?" Bill sounded like he was hyperventilating now. "Empty the vault, get everyone to turn over their valuables, maybe they'll fuck off and leave us alone."

"They don't want money," Jo answered, seeming like he was catching his breath. "They want human organs. They're worth a fortune on the black market. If we don't stop them, they're gonna kill everyone. You and me included."

"How the fuck do you know that?"

"They hit the Trenton a week ago," Jo said after a pause. "No survivors."

"What?!?" Bill gasped. "Why the hell wasn't that in the briefing?"

"The fuck do I know?" Jo hissed again. "The captain told us to keep it quiet, so we didn't spook the crew or freak out the passengers. I told him we needed to prepare, just in case, but he ignored me. Now, we have to deal with the mess. So, are you with me or not?"

"Fuck sake," Bill muttered, "It doesn't sound like I have a choice, do I?"

"Not really."

"Fine, but if we get through this, I'm gonna put a fucking bullet in the Captain's kneecaps!"

There was a soft chuckle. "Get in line. Alright, we've gotta haul ass to forty five, if we don't get there before they do, we're fucked!"

There was a muffled grunt of agreement before the two sets of running footsteps ran off down the hall again.

Amelia had been staring at Rowan for the entire time they were listening to the conversation, but her entire focus had been on what they were hearing. Her eyes were pointed in his direction, but she was looking through him rather than at him. But as soon as her eyes refocused on her husband, her breath caught in her throat. He was as white as a bedsheet, the color having completely drained from his face, and his eyes were as wide as saucers.

"Rowan?" she whispered. Her husband blinked and yanked his eyes from the silent door to her in a flash. "What do we do? They said we had to stay put, but..."

He swallowed hard. "No, that was if we were going to get robbed. If that guy's right and they're after organs, they're gonna kill everyone. We need to find a place to hide."

"But... where?"

"The life support ducting," he said after only a second's worth of thought. "The access vents in the main corridors are big enough for us to fit. I've seen the engineers working on them."

Of course, he had. Few things in life - other than her - caught Rowan's attention like seeing the insides of a piece of machinery. He would have been like a schoolboy looking at a steam train as soon as he had spotted it. "Okay," she nodded nervously.

"Stay behind me," he whispered as he stepped closer to the door. He waited for her to nod again before he stopped and listened for any sort of sounds coming from the hallway beyond. There was nothing. He reached out and pressed his hand to the panel that opened the door.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again.

Nothing happened.

"Shit," he muttered under his breath, before turning to look frantically around the room. "There, pass me that knife." He pointed over to their mostly finished meals. Amelia raced over to the table, grabbed one of the dinner knives, and ran back to hand it to him. She watched nervously as he jammed the blade into the bottom of the panel and levered off the front cover.

Amelia couldn't help but frown at what was behind it. Circuit boards and a mass of wires, some running to the panel, others running into the wall of their quarters, and all of them making about as much sense to her as a book written in an alien language. Rowan, however, seemed to know exactly what he was looking at. He stared at it for a minute, his eyes tracing individual wires before he grabbed one that linked a circuit board to the front panel and yanked it out of the plastic casing. He then took the frayed end of it, and tapped it against one of the silver-looking dots on the circuit board.

The door hissed open.

There were moments when Amelia was just in awe of how in love she was with her husband. Moments when he had done something or performed some sort of gesture to her that made her fall in love with him all over again. The moment that door slid open put all of those previous events to shame.

He held out his arm, unconsciously pushing her behind him before he peeked his head out into the corridor. "It's clear," he whispered. "Come on." He grabbed her hand and pulled her out of their quarters and into as quiet a jog as they could manage.

"Where are we going?" she whispered

"Maintenance closet," he answered quietly before pointing up at the air vents in the upper corners of the corridor. "Those will be locked, but the one in the maintenance closet will be open."

"How do you know?"

"I'm an engineer," he smiled over his shoulder at her. "We never lock up stuff in the places they are used all the time. More hassle than it's worth to unlock it every time we need it."

She just nodded and followed him. She had no idea where this maintenance closet was; she had never seen one, but then, it was not the sort of thing that she would notice, either. She liked fashion; she noticed the shoes that other women wore or the shirts worn by other men that would look good on Rowan. But if she ever asked him what he thought of another lady's dress, he would just frown at it and confirm that, yes, it was a dress. That was as far as his interest in clothing went. He would never, not in a million years, notice or admire what someone else was wearing; it just wasn't him. By the same standards, anything technical or anything to do with the maintenance of a system or machine was just beyond her. She wouldn't even know what to look for, let alone know where to find it, and even if Rowan pointed out the maintenance closet in the past, she doubted it looked any different from any other door she had seen that day, and her mind had just glossed over it.

After a few minutes of jogging, they skidded around a corner, coming to a bank of elevators, and stopped. Amelia was glancing up and down the three corridors that converged on this point, but Rowan was already moving. Running his fingers along the wall directly opposite the elevator doors, he smiled as he found what he was looking for. She hadn't noticed that he was still carrying the knife from their room, so it came as something of a shock to her when he drove the blade into a near-invisible seam between two wall panels and levered open the hidden door.

"Get in," he whispered as he held the door open for her, his other hand dragging her through the portal and into the closet. She barely had time to turn around before Rowan squeezed himself through the door and pulled it closed behind him. Amelia blinked rapidly against the darkness, not daring to move as she listened to Rowan running his hands over the wall until he found the light switch.

Harsh, glaring light suddenly filled the tiny room. Filled with the charging stations for the automated cleaning bots, a few lockers, and some randomly discarded tools, it looked more like a janitor's closet than anything that could be related to maintenance, but then again, Amelia didn't know the first thing about the world in which her husband worked. She knew what he did but had never seen it with her own eyes.

His eyes, on the other hand, were gleaming as they landed on the large air vent against one of the far walls. He walked over to it, took hold of the frame of the covering grate, and yanked it off with one hard pull. "Get in," he whispered, nodding to the opening as he turned to examine the control panel next to it.

"I... I can't." She shook her head violently. The ducting behind the grill was cramped and dark, but that wasn't the reason she didn't want to go in. She simply didn't know which way to go and was suddenly terrified of making the wrong move that could lead them to getting caught. "You need to go first."

"Ames, I need to put the grate back on once we're inside. I can't go in first."

"But I don't know which way to go."

Rowan took a deep breath and peered into the darkness of the ducts. "Look, there'll be a few meters of crawling, then you should come out into a larger, square junction chamber where lots of different ducts connect. Just wait for me there; I'll be right behind you. I promise. Just move slowly and quietly. We'll be fine."

Amelia looked into the dark, then back at Rowan, then back to the duct again. "Okay." She nodded before taking a deep breath, stooping down, and climbing into the duct. She winced as the thin metal flexed loudly under her weight, but she kept moving anyway.

"Keep your weight to the sides, close to the walls of the duct," Rowan whispered after her. His body blocked out the last of the light as he climbed into the vent behind her, then turned and worked to reattach the vent grate from the inside.

Amelia nodded silently, even though she knew he couldn't see her, before sliding her feet outward and pressing them as close to the corner of the vent as she could get them and then starting to move forward again. She breathed out a sigh of relief as the metal creaked a little under her weight, but didn't make that dangerously loud flexing sound again.

She kept moving forward. A few grates further along the duct provided a little illumination; it wasn't much, but it was enough to banish that sense of claustrophobia and disorientation that was rapidly building in her chest. After a few agonizingly long minutes, she found herself in the larger junction room that Rowan had told her about, and she waited.

A few moments later, Rowan crawled out of the duct to join her. "Will we be safe here?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he shook his head with a nervous glance back the way they came. "I'm not a pirate, but this would be the first place I'd look for someone if I knew they were hiding." He looked back over his shoulder. "I turned the heat up, though."

"What?" she scrunched up her face. She already didn't like it in there, but the thought of sweating profusely while she was didn't appeal to her at all. "Why?"

"Thermals," he said, leaning forward to look down one of the other vents, then turning to look down another. "Our maintenance boys use thermal cameras to look for rats and stuff in our air vents at the plant. They'd make it very easy to find us if the pirates are using them, too; our body heat would light up the metalwork like a Christmas tree. But they don't work if the heat is turned up. The air makes the whole duct system glow on those cameras, not just body heat."

Amelia nodded. "That's... really smart." Rowan didn't answer, though. "Where do you think we should go?"

"I don't know," he admitted after a moment. "My gut is telling me to find the security teams, but those two outside our room didn't sound very confident."

"Maybe the bridge?"

Rowan nodded. "I was thinking that too, but that's a long way from here and twelve decks up. We'd have to climb up there, and I'm almost certain the pirates would get there before us if the security boys can't hold them back. The bridge would be one of the first places they'd go. I'm thinking the shuttle bay would be a better idea."

"The shuttle bay?"

Rowan nodded again. "Worst case scenario, if the pirates take the whole ship and kill everyone on board, they'll eventually leave. Then what? I don't know how to fly this ship; I wouldn't even know where to start. We'd be stuck there until help came, and we have no idea how long that could take. But I could probably program a shuttle to get us out of here and back to... somewhere safe. If the pirates are beaten, or if there are other people alive when they leave, all we'd have to do is explain why we were in a restricted area when we come out, which, under the circumstances, is a pretty minor infraction of the rules."

Amelia thought about this for a moment. It was a good plan. "Okay, which way is the shuttle bay?"

"That's the problem; I'm not sure. I'm trying to get my bearings." He went quiet for a few moments, turning his head to look in different directions before settling on the vent to his right, then he hesitantly spoke again. "I think it's that way."

"Are you sure?"

"Not really, but it's a better choice than staying here."

"Can... Can you go first?" Amelia whispered after peering into the seemingly endless looking duct.

Rowan offered a faint smile and nodded. "Okay, but stay close to me." He took a deep breath and crawled into the duct that he had decided on. The first vent, the one that ran from the maintenance closet to the junction room, was low, but Amelia was able to stoop and walk along the few meters it took to get there. This duct was much lower, forcing both of them onto their hands and knees to crawl, but even then, her back - as she climbed in behind her husband - was brushing along the chrome top of the vent. She remembered what he had said, though, and spread her weight to the very sides of the narrow, square conduit.

They'd only been crawling for a few minutes when the gunfire started.

It began as a distant rattle, the vent and the corridor beneath it working together to make the echoes of it sound much louder and much closer than they really were. But the fact that they were growing in volume with every passing moment made her heartbeat explode in her chest. She could still see Rowan a few feet ahead of her through the light provided by the intermittent vents that looked out over the hallway beneath, but aside from a few flinches at the odd particularly loud burst of sound, he kept moving.

And then, suddenly, he froze.

He was staring out of one of the grates, his eyes fixed on the movement beneath; Amelia, unable to help her morbid sense of curiosity, backed up a foot or so to be able to look through the vent she had just passed. Seven men, all of them wearing the distinctive uniform of the ship's security officers, were running along the corridor toward the elevators, most of them turning to look fearfully back over their shoulders. One of them stopped, then another, both of them spinning around and dropping to a knee before raising their rifles and letting off a burst of automatic fire back the way they'd come while the others kept running.

Amelia couldn't believe how loud it was; the sound seemed to hit her like a physical force. Her vision seemed to ripple as the wall of noise hit her eyes, and she couldn't help but let out a terrified squeak. But no matter how frightening the view was, she couldn't pull her gaze away. Both men kept shooting, neither of them moving an inch as the rest of their squad kept running, but it only took a few seconds for their targets to return fire. The two troopers dove for cover, but one of them didn't move fast enough, and a bullet tore through his throat, sending him sprawling to the deck, a fountain of blood spraying out of the wound before he clamped his hand over it, the blood then spluttering out of his parted lips instead. The other trooper, the man who hadn't been hit, could only watch from the cover of a recessed doorway as his comrade thrashed and writhed on the floor, his legs kicking frantically as he gasped for breath.

Amelia could taste the metallic scent of blood in the air; she could feel the vibrations of the gunfire through the thin metal ductwork beneath her; she could feel her breath coming in short, jagged gasps as she watched, but she still couldn't pull her eyes away.

"Mike, Jesus, hold on. I'm coming!" The second officer shouted over the gunfire before yelling up the corridor toward the rest of his squad. "I need cover!"

Amelia couldn't see the rest of the men he had called to, but a few seconds after shouting his request, another explosion of sound erupted from somewhere behind her. The unharmed trooper burst from his cover the instant that the supporting fire started, throwing himself across the gap that separated him from his fallen friend. The injured soldier, Mike, was still writhing, one hand was still clamped over the wound on his throat, but blood was seeping between his fingers in horrifying volumes. His eyes locked onto the man coming to his rescue, and his free hand shot out to grab at his friend's arm as he skidded to a halt next to him. Amelia couldn't tell if Mike was trying to hold onto his friend for dear life or if he was trying to push him away to safety. Either way, the second trooper wasn't paying attention.

He cast a look back toward the enemy, then back to the man on the deck, seeming to make his mind up in a heartbeat. He stood up, grabbed Mike by the arm and between his legs, and hoisted him onto his shoulder. "I got you!" he grunted as he steadied himself under the weight, and started to run back toward the rest of his squad.

He made it about five feet before his ribs exploded outward as a high-caliber round hit him in the back. A strangled gasp escaped his lips, his eyes glancing down at the hole in his chest where his obliterated lungs had once been, then they rolled back, and the heroic trooper toppled forward. He was dead before he hit the floor.

There was silence for a moment. Amelia couldn't tell if it was the ringing in her ears, blocking out the rest of the battle, or if it was just going through a temporary lull, but the distant ding of an elevator arriving behind her seemed to be all that it took for the quiet to be banished once again. Although she couldn't see it, she could hear the distinct sounds of movement from behind her as, she imagined, the besieged security team tried to get into the elevator and escape the carnage, but a few seconds after she had heard that ding, something raced past her view, plumes of smoke billowing out from the back of it.

It took her mind a moment to catch up with what her eyes were seeing. It had been a rocket of some sort, and no sooner had her brain caught onto this fact, a deafening explosion ripped through the air, accompanied by the agonizing, terrified, and horrifyingly brief screams of the men caught up in the blast.

Rowan's foot, jerking backward to get her attention, finally pulled her eyes away from the brutality below. He had seen it all too; the color that had returned to his face after their jog to the maintenance closet had drained out of him again, and he was clenching his jaw hard. "We have to move!" he hissed at her.

Amelia could only swallow the knot in her throat before looking back down at the two troopers she had watched fall, a pool of blood slowly growing around them, then back up at Rowan before nodding.

They started to crawl again.

She had only made it as far as the vent that Rowan had been looking through when she first saw them-the pirates.

Amelia had expected monsters.

She had expected grotesque, ragged figures with glowing red cybernetic eyes, wicked grins full of metal teeth, faces full of scars and venomous, evil smiles, and armor fashioned from the bones of their victims. That was what pirates were supposed to look like, right? That was what she had always seen on TV.

But when she saw them--really saw them--she felt her breath catch in her throat.

They weren't demons or beasts from some nightmare. They were men. Women. Some young, some old. People who might have passed her on the street or brushed shoulders with her in a crowded bar without a second glance.

Their faces were ordinary. Some were clean-shaven, others scruffy, and their hairstyles were just as normal as anyone else's. A few had tattoos peeking from beneath the collars of their jumpsuits; some wore jewelry --nothing unusual. Nothing alarming. Their expressions weren't wild or frenzied, no bloodthirsty snarls, no maniacal laughs, or unhinged grins--just cold efficiency.

They wore standard-issue coveralls, the kind ship engineers and cargo haulers wore, with mismatched bits of body armor strapped over them. Utility belts hung low with spare ammunition and tools. One of them had a grease stain on his sleeve, as if he had wiped his hands on it in the middle of a repair job. Another wore scuffed work boots that looked no different from Rowan's.

If not for the heavy weapons in their hands--and the bodies at their feet as they walked past the two slain security officers--she might have thought they were just another group of passengers or members of the ship's engineering crew..

That was the worst part.

They weren't alien. They weren't otherworldly. They were just people, ordinary-looking people. And they were there to butcher everyone on board like it was just another day on the job.

Gunfire in the distance pulled her attention forward. Rowan was already a few meters ahead of her, and she still hadn't moved. She started shuffling, wincing against the volume of the gunshots as they rattled around the vent.

Then it started...

The screams.

God. The screams

********

It was a strange sensation.

She was, in a distant, closed-off part of her mind, able to tell that she was watching memories of things that had already happened to her, rather than living through them in real time. It was like watching one of those old movies, where you sat back on your sofa and just allowed yourself to be consumed by the narrative. But she was also vaguely aware that the things she was seeing were events that had happened to her... even if this was the first time she was seeing them.

That small, distant part of her mind was still back in the darkness, still back with Voxagon, still trying to understand this mysterious 'process' that would save her life from injuries she had apparently sustained, shortly before being shoved into a lifepod and left adrift in space for more than four hundred years.

As she looked at Rowan, quietly and carefully helping her out of a life-support duct and back down onto the deck, she was distantly aware that he was already dead. That, even if they had both survived the pirate attack on the Limerick, it had still been over four centuries since these events had happened, and he would have already been dead for hundreds of years.

Yet, in that moment, all she could do was look into his eyes. All she could do was let herself be swallowed whole in the bottomless depths of the love he had for her that shone through every act, every gesture, and every look. His eyes, those gorgeous, molten brown eyes, held every ounce of that love within them. And just like she had done so many times over their lives together, she found herself willingly drowning in just how deep his love was.

Everything he was doing right now was for her. To save her. To keep her safe.

He was, and would always be, the man of her dreams. The love of her life. The constant that underwrote every facet of who she was.

And that small part of her mind knew that he was dead.

The pain that should have come from that realization, the abject, inutterable agony that just thinking about that should have brought, simply didn't come. The Amelia in her memories hadn't felt it, and so, neither did she.

At least not yet.

"Stay low," Rowan whispered, the tremble in his voice giving away the fear and the adrenaline coursing through his body. She certainly felt that. She cast her gaze back up the now-empty corridor, past the bodies of those two gunned-down security officers, and toward the scene of carnage where that rocket had blown the elevator banks--and the rest of the security squad--to pieces. Toward where those screams were coming from.

"Where are we?"

"We're by the stairs," he answered quietly. "If we're gonna get to the shuttle bay, we need to go down. But..." he glanced up and down the corridor, "I think there's a security office near here."

Amelia stared at him for a moment.

Rowan was a wanderer. He'd always been a wanderer. They had never really traveled anywhere during their marriage, but Rowan would often hike out into the countryside close to their home, just to see what was there. It was a hobby he had maintained aboard the colony ship, too. While she had been resting or meeting new people, he had explored the ship. Not for any reason, and obviously not enough to know exactly where the shuttle bay was, but there was still something in his eyes that told her he recognized where they were.

"I think it's this way," he turned toward one of the smaller hallways that branched off from this main corridor, before she grabbed his arm to stop him.

"Why do we want to go to a security office? Nobody's going to be there. We just watched them getting..."

"They have access to the internal cameras," he whispered back, looking around to make sure they were still alone and safe. "Maybe weapons. If we can see where they are, we might be able to plot a route to the shuttle bay without bumping into anyone dangerous. Or at least find a good place to hide."

She blinked for a moment at the obviousness of his answer. He was apparently thinking more clearly than she was, and then she nodded. "Okay."

"Stay close, and listen out for anyone coming."

The corridor was empty--eerily so. The distant gunfire had become a constant in the background, now less of a shock and more of an oppressive, ever-present weight pressing down on her skull. None of it seemed alarmingly close, but it never stopped, either. Every few seconds came a distant explosion, the rattling thump of something detonating far too close for comfort, or the faint, high-pitched echo of a scream that had nowhere else to go.

They moved slowly. Rowan crept ahead of her, eyes darting to every doorway, every shadow, every exposed ceiling panel like it might suddenly drop down with death behind it. He held the dinner knife like a real weapon, though Amelia had no doubt he knew it wouldn't help him if someone found them. It was just something to hold. Something to do. A fragile barrier between them and the truth.

And then he stopped.

"There," he whispered, pointing to a steel-gray door set back into the bulkhead a little further down the corridor. There was a keypad beside it, glowing softly.

Amelia's heart surged as she quickened her step, already imagining rows of security monitors and maybe even a few rifles. If they could see the ship's interior, if they could map a route--they could survive this. They could find a way through the blood and the smoke.

But then the door didn't open.

Rowan stabbed at the panel. It blinked red. He muttered a curse, then dropped to one knee and pulled the panel cover off with the knife. Sparks jumped slightly as he exposed the wiring, and Amelia knelt beside him, eyes scanning the corridor for movement. The ship creaked under stress--another explosion, more distant this time, sent a faint shiver through the floor.

He hesitated just long enough to take a breath, then began tugging wires loose, tapping two together, twisting a third into a copper hook that he jammed into the circuit board. The red light blinked twice, then turned green.

The door hissed open.

Amelia didn't wait for permission. She pushed past him and slipped into the room.

The lights came on automatically, flickering to life overhead with a sterile white glow. The space was cramped, barely the size of their cabin, with a single control chair and a bank of monitors lining the wall. One screen was already cracked, spider-webbed with damage, but the rest were intact--each one showing a different part of the Limerick. On the opposite wall were racks for weapons. Most of them were empty, but there were a few rifles still hung up and ready for use. Rowan hit the button on the inside of the door, closing it, spotted the racks, and moved toward them. Amelia dropped into the control chair, trying to stop her hands from shaking, and looked up at the monitors.

She saw it all at once. And then, all at once, she couldn't breathe.

"There's no ammo," Rowan breathed out behind her. "I can't..." he froze, seeing what she was seeing, and stepped in behind her. But she wasn't hearing him.

Because on the monitors...

There were pirates everywhere.

Dozens of them, hundreds of them, moving through corridors and cutting down anything in their path. In one feed, she saw a group of passengers--maybe two dozen--trapped in one of the communal sleeping bays. Men, women, children, all huddled at the edge of the room, some sobbing, others staring in mute terror at the sealed doors, all of them trapped inside after the security doors had closed. The camera angle gave them no warning of what was coming. The doors slid open, and then the pirates were there.

No words. No demands. No hesitation.

Gunfire erupted. The pirates swept the room with automatic fire, cutting down the huddled civilians like they were weeds in a field. Bodies jerked and crumpled. Blood sprayed the walls. The screams were silent, muted through the feed, but she could see them. She could feel them.

She was eternally grateful that the monitors didn't have sound.

Another screen showed a narrow hallway choked with smoke and bodies. Dozens of corpses, most in civilian clothing, lay slumped where they'd been gunned down. A woman crawled over them, clutching a child to her chest. She wasn't dead--not yet. But she was bleeding, dragging herself forward by her elbows, leaving a thick, wet trail behind her.

She reached the end of the hallway just as a pirate stepped into frame.

He didn't raise his gun. Didn't even stop walking. He just stepped forward and crushed her skull beneath his boot like she was nothing at all. The child was silent. Too young to understand. But the pirate reached down, pried it from the corpse of its mother, and walked off without a second glance.

Amelia turned away--but the next screen was worse.

The mess hall. Thousands of people had been caught in there when the lockdown began, and now it had become a killing floor. Blood pooled beneath overturned tables. Smoke curled from small fires along the walls. A dozen pirates stalked through the carnage, shooting anything that moved. A man in a chef's apron tried to charge one with a butcher's knife--he was gunned down instantly. Another man reached for a weapon one of the security officers had dropped, but he was spotted, and a grenade was tossed casually into his hiding spot.

The blast was visible. So were the pieces.

"Jesus Christ," Rowan whispered. He took a step back from the screen, eyes wide, skin pale. "They're killing everyone."

No matter where she looked, it was all the same.

More screams. More death. It was everywhere.

And she couldn't look away.

The next screen showed the daycare center.

Her heart stopped.

The camera was mounted in the corner of the room, looking down on rows of cots and padded play areas, all surrounded by brightly painted walls. The children--none older than about ten, most of them a lot younger--were all crammed against the far wall, their faces etched in terror. A handful of adult staff members stood in front of them, trying to shield them, to comfort them. One woman clutched a fire extinguisher like a weapon.

The door opened.

A pirate tossed a grenade through it.

Amelia recoiled. She let out a strangled sound, something between a sob and a gasp, and turned away--but it was too late. The camera feed lit up in a white-hot bloom of fire and shrapnel... then cut to static.

She felt bile rise in her throat. "No," she whispered. Her voice cracked. Her chest constricted like something inside was collapsing. "No, no, no--"

In another feed, she saw a handful of men and women trying to fight back--former Marines, perhaps, or security staff who had made it this far. They had weapons. Training. Guts.

It didn't matter.

They were pinned down in a corner corridor, and the pirates advanced with military precision. Flashbangs, suppressing fire, then a flanking maneuver that ended with all five defenders cut to pieces in under twenty seconds. One tried to run. He took three steps before his leg was blown off. The others didn't even get that far.

Rowan put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't move.

He didn't say anything.

Another screen showed a family--parents and two young daughters--sprinting down a corridor, trying to outrun the sounds behind them. A pirate appeared around the corner. The father charged him. Tried to tackle him.

He didn't get close.

The pirate raised a shotgun and blew the man's chest apart. The rest of the family didn't even scream--they just froze, too stunned to run.

And then the pirate raised his weapon again.

Amelia looked away, blinking back the tears.

It didn't help.

"Oh God," Rowan whispered as he pointed to one screen. "There." Amelia didn't want to look, but her eyes were already moving. The screen showed a wide bay--it looked like a cargo hold, but much bigger than she'd imagined. The room was filled with what could only be described as rows upon rows of hastily arranged hospital gurneys. Thousands of them, and on each one was a body. Piles of corpses were being unloaded from freight lifts and dragged across the deck like trash. Dozens of bodies at a time. Some bloodied, others burned, others still intact.

And waiting for them beside those gurneys--teams of doctors.

No. Not doctors.

Butchers.

Men and women in surgical gear with red-stained gloves, working over the corpses like assembly line workers. They sliced open chests, yanked out organs, and dropped them into storage containers. Hearts. Kidneys. Livers. Corneas. Lungs.

Some victims still twitched when the blades went in.

Behind them, open airlocks dumped the stripped corpses into space, Fifty at a time. A tide of limp, violated flesh, drifting like garbage into the void. A pile of callously discarded bodies was already growing nearby, ready to be vented into space. The only thing more disturbing than the slaughter... was how routine it looked. How easy it was for them. How often they must have done this before.

Organ harvesters. She'd heard the horror stories, everyone had, but they were always told in the same way as the ones about the guy who lived in the creepy house at the end of every street, the one who had once murdered the kids who went into his yard to collect their lost ball. They were the idle fantasies of bored minds, nothing more. And that was how the stories of drifting bands of organ-harvesting savages had always been understood, too. Hell, she didn't even believe the black market for their wares existed, let alone a few thousand men and women whose occupation was slaughtering innocent colonists to acquire them.

"That's..." Rowan whispered, voice faint. "That's the shuttle bay. We can't go there. I can't see anywhere safe on here. We..." he swallowed hard and nodded to himself. "We need to hide. We need to wait this out." She didn't answer him. Her ability to speak had been lost in the orgy of violence that was playing out before her.

She closed her eyes. It was all she could do to block out the horror. There was nowhere to run. No one was coming to save them. If they were caught--or even seen--that was what would happen to them. Their bodies would be torn apart for parts and thrown away like trash.

"Wait," Rowan's voice cut through the silence. "What's that?"

Amelia opened her eyes, the... hope? No, it wasn't hope in his voice; it was more like optimistic curiosity. Her eyes moved to where he was pointing before Rowan reached down to tap something into the console.

It was the screen for the bridge.

And as soon as Rowan finished typing, the sounds from the screen filled the cramped little office.

The bridge seemed to be the only part of the ship that hadn't been overrun yet, but the captain and his officers were in full-blown panic. Red lights flashed overhead. Smoke drifted from a burning console. The comms officer was screaming into his station, no doubt trying to summon help from the navy ships that they'd been told about during the briefing when they'd first arrived. Two others were huddled around a holographic display showing breach points. Security officers were stacked up next to both of the doors that led out of the room, although each of them was sealed with bulkheads that looked a lot more sturdy than the ones the pirates had been blasting through all over the rest of the ship.

The Captain--Captain Thurston--stood frozen in the middle of the bridge. Questions were being thrown at him from every angle, most of them being some variation of "What do we do?" but the man didn't seem to have any answers. In fact, he didn't look like he was even hearing them. All he seemed able to do was stare in pale-faced, sweat-slicked horror at the same bank of screens that she and Rowan were looking at.

Amelia could hear it through the feed. The screaming. The chaos.

"Stern security's gone!" someone yelled. "We're losing deck thirty-two--"

"We've already lost it!" another voice snapped. "They're coming up from engineering!"

"We need to evacuate--"

"We need to fight--!"

"Captain, what are your orders?!" Someone barked at him. He didn't answer. "Captain!!" He still said nothing. The man who had been shouting the question finally had enough. He stormed across the bridge, grabbed him, spun him around to face him, and shook him hard. "Wake the fuck up, Captain! What are your orders?!"

Thurston blinked. He looked back at the screens. Then down at the man who was shaking him. Then back at the screens again.

His mouth moved. Nothing came out.

"What?" The shaking officer leaned in closer. The whole bridge seemed to go silent as every person on the command deck waited for the Captain to speak.

"Abandon the ship."

It wasn't shouted. It wasn't defiant. It wasn't anything close to what a leader should say.

It was just a whisper.

One that only the people in that room would ever hear.

The officer holding his shoulders stared at him for a moment, then glanced at the screen, and nodded. Thurston turned toward a console and keyed in a command.

Red lights started flashing, and a new voice came through the intercom--automated and calm.

"Auto-destruct sequence initiated. Core overload in twenty minutes."

As soon as the echo of the sound faded away, the bridge crew started scrambling into the escape pods lining one of the far walls.

Amelia's blood ran cold.

They were going to blow the ship.

Not to stop the pirates. Not even to save anyone. Just to cover their own escape, and maybe take a few of those murdering bastards with them if they failed.

"Rowan..." she choked, staggering back toward him. "Rowan, they're--they're--"

"I know," he said quietly. "I know."

Her knees gave out. She sank to the floor. Rowan sat down beside her, one arm wrapping around her as she curled into him, trembling.

She didn't cry.

Not yet.

She just stared at the deck. She was going to die. Rowan was going to die. She knew that now. Every fiber of her being was screaming at her that this was it. She glanced up at her husband, the love of her life, expecting him to look just as defeated as she felt.

But he wasn't

His eyes were locked on the screens. Not watching the carnage, not watching the death, not even watching the bridge.

He was looking for an escape.

"There," Rowan said after a few long, silent minutes. His voice didn't tremble. She wasn't sure why that stuck out for her.

Amelia blinked. Her vision was still swimming from the tears she hadn't let fall, her legs leaden where she sat crumpled on the floor. But she followed his gaze, and saw what he was pointing at--a small, flickering feed in the top corner of the monitor bank. The camera quality was worse than the others, grainy and half-obscured by smoke. But she could make out the shape of a room, instruments and machinery on one wall, a few beds lined up along the middle, and everything bathed in the sterile white that was only ever found in medical facilities. There was blood everywhere, but the telltale drag marks led from the center of the room and out of the door. Mounted on the far wall, however, were a row of familiar looking shapes--escape pods. Four of them.

One was missing. Three remained.

A single green light still blinked above the nearest one.

"Someone got out," Rowan whispered. "But the other three pods are still there. And there doesn't seem to be any pirates in that entire section. I think they've cleared it and moved on."

He turned to her, and for a moment, she saw something in his eyes that wasn't panic, wasn't despair--wasn't even fear. It was clarity. Determination. A granite hard resolve.

She wanted to be strong for him, she really did. But she didn't have any strength left in her. He didn't seem to mind though, he apparently had enough strength for both of them.

He reached down and grabbed her hand. "Come on. That's our way out."

Amelia didn't argue. She let him pull her to her feet, legs stiff and unsteady, heart pounding like it was trying to warn her of something she already knew, and he pulled her toward the office door. They didn't speak again. There was nothing left to say.

Rowan turned his head to look at the feeds, the one for the camera right outside this room, checked the corridor for pirates one last time, and then unlocked the door. The sound of it hissing open seemed louder now. Like it might call down death from either end of the hallway.

They moved fast.

Rowan made sure of that.

The lights above them flickered constantly, giving the impression of movement that wasn't there--shadows twitching, shapes half-seen, bullet holes and blast marks becoming more and more frequent as Rowan guided them around one corner after another. How he knew where he was going was completely beyond her. Sure, he had explored the ship, but to her, that screen only showed a room with no context about where it was, yet he seemed to know exactly which way to go. The floor was littered with debris now: discarded shoes, dropped datapads, a trail of blood smearing out of side rooms and along the corridors toward the elevators.

People had been dragged through here. Dead people. A lot of them.

It was quieter now. That was something else she noticed. Not silent; the sound of gunfire could still be heard echoing through the hallways, but it sounded like it was further away. More noticeable, though, was the fact that the screams had stopped. In a past life, she would have taken that as a good sign, but now she knew better. The ship groaned around them, too. Metal flexing under stress, the creaks of damaged hatchways, and the sparking of ruptured conduits. But there were no voices, no footsteps other than their own, and the loudest sound that made it to her ears was the sound of their rapid breathing.

The slaughter was nearly over.

And they were still alive.

Most of the rest of the ship was not.

They rounded a corner, Rowan pausing just long enough to check for movement before waving her through. The sign above the corridor junction was half-lit--Medical Triage, Deck 14, Section F. Beneath it, the split in a four-way junction..

"We're close," he whispered through his pants. "It's just past this section. Only a few more turns."

Amelia nodded, her breath shallow. Her side ached--just a stitch, she told herself. Nothing serious. Nothing compared to what they'd seen.

They passed a body near the next intersection. A security officer. Young, much younger than she was. No older than twenty. Face down. Blood pooled around him like an inkblot.

Rowan crouched beside him and rolled him over. The boy's rifle was missing. His chest plate was cracked open and a jagged hole was all that was left of his ribs. But there was something clipped to his belt--a small pouch.

Rowan opened it. Pulled out a handful of cartridges.

"Ammo," he huffed. "But no weapon. I knew I should have picked up a rifle." He frowned for a second. "Why didn't they take him with the others?"

Then his eyes lifted. Past the body. Toward a service panel in the corner of the wall between two of the four hallways, just slightly ajar. It was subtle. Anyone else might've missed it.

But Rowan wasn't anyone else.

"Amelia," he said softly. "Hide behind the corner. Now."

"What? Why--"

"Just do it!"

There was something in his voice that cut through the haze in her mind. She obeyed.

He crossed to the panel, pulled it the rest of the way open. Inside, half a dozen fat orange cables ran into a junction box. A maintenance conduit. The kind he worked on as part of his career for the past decade. The sort of thing he understood on a level that she could never comprehend.

He pulled the knife from his belt and started slicing.

"Rowan--what are you doing?" she hissed.

"Buying us time. They're coming."

"What?!?" Her eyes snapped immediately to the ends of every corridor. She didn't need him to answer to understand.

The young security guard wasn't the only body around here, he was just the first they had come across. More of them littered the ground along each of the corridors. They were standing in the center of a crossroad of hallways, the young guard had been in the direction they had come from, but all three other gangways showed the telltale signs of a prolonged firefight. She stopped counting the bodies after the first twenty. She knew what it meant.

The pirates would be back to collect them, and when they did, they would walk right into them. She ducked down behind the corner, feeling more exposed than she had during this whole ordeal, and tried her hardest to keep her eyes on Rowan.

He worked fast, sweat slicking his brow as he peeled back insulation and twisted wires together. A single cable he left exposed, trailing it through a crack in the plating and dragging it across the corridor toward a shallow puddle--water from a ruptured pipe, or coolant, or something else. She didn't know, and he didn't seem to care.

He crouched low, staring at the floor, calculating.

Then the sound of footsteps echoed down the hall.

Boots: Heavy and slow. Then the sound of laughter. Gleeful, euphoric laughter. The laughter of people who knew they'd already won. Rowan heard it too. He dropped the end of the cable into the liquid, reached back over to the hatch, jammed his knife into something that looked important, and closed the door.

He darted back to her side, pulled her down behind the wall. Together, they crouched in silence.

Seven pirates came around the far corner. All of them talking, but the sounds merged together in a way that made it impossible to tell what was being said. One was holding a sidearm. A few were carrying shotguns, but most of the others had rifles slung over their shoulders or cradled lazily in their arms. They moved as if they didn't have a care in the world, like they were completely unaware of the time limit that the Captain had placed onto the longevity of the Limerick. They weren't moving fast, they were almost casual. Just coming back to collect the dead that they had finished off earlier.

The first one stepped in the puddle.

There was a sound--brief, sharp, like meat hitting a grill. A flash of blue-white light arced upward in a blinding burst, and the pirate let out a strangled "grrk" as he spasmed and collapsed. The other pirates in the group turned and gawked at him, not really understanding what had happened, but it was too late.

The conduit that Rowan had been playing with exploded in a hail of plastic shards and metal fragments, shredding through all six of the remaining men in a blizzard of flying death. The explosion, and the hail of debris, was almost exactly at head height for most of them, meaning that the majority took the full force of the explosively launched shrapnel straight to the face and neck.

All of them fell instantly, and a whole lot more blood was added to the deck.

Rowan rushed out instantly, running over to the closest one and picking up his rifle. Amelia had never even seen a rifle up close before, but Rowan, apparently, had... and he knew how to use it. He put a single bullet into the head of each pirate, including the one who was somehow still alive and groaning on the floor. He didn't hesitate, he just aimed and fired.

She should have been shocked by that. Appalled at the casual dispensation of death. Horrified that her loving husband was capable of killing so easily. But she wasn't. He was doing what he had to do to survive, to let her survive, and they both knew that those pirates would have done a lot worse to them with even less hesitation than Rowan had shown.

"We need to move." he said without looking back at her, keeping his eyes focused instead on the other three corridors.

"Okay," she whispered back

Rowan turned and gave her one sharp nod, then broke into a jog, rifle held close to his chest. Amelia followed, her legs moving more from instinct than strength. The adrenaline hadn't worn off--if anything, it had curdled into something colder. Numb resolve and a muted sort of terror.

The hallway curved slightly to the left now, part of the Limerick's rounded outer hull. This corridor was only separated from the void by the very outer layer of rooms. They passed another body--a civilian, an older man in a wrinkled tunic, half his skull missing--and another, this time a clearly pregnant woman who'd taken half a dozen rounds to the back. Her stomach didn't turn this time, the tears didn't come; she could feel herself getting numb to it. The smell was getting worse, though. Smoke, blood, scorched flesh. Amelia tried not to breathe through her nose.

Rowan glanced over his shoulder. "Medical bay's through the next bulkhead," he said. "Pods should be mounted in the back wall. We grab one and get the hell out."

She nodded, but she was too out of breath to agree with words.

They rounded the corner--and saw movement.

Rowan stopped so hard she ran into his back.

Five pirates. Just ahead, clustered near a junction. Two were talking, one smoking something out of a long glass tube, the other two watching the corridor with lazy disinterest. And between them all was a large, tracked machine of some kind with a waist-high platform on the top of it.

It was piled high with bodies.

They hadn't seen them yet--but they would. Any second now.

Rowan pulled her back around the corner. He crouched, eyes closed for half a second, and took a breath.

"Go back?" she whispered.

"We can't. It's a maze behind us, and they'll hear us either way." His voice was low, calm. "We fight."

"What?!?" She blinked rapidly at him. "We aren't soldiers. We can't fight!"

"We have to. They're standing right outside the medical bay. We need to get past them, so we don't have another choice."

"I thought you said this whole section was clear!" She hissed, her panicked eyes darting back the way they'd come.

"It was," He rolled his neck and checked his rifle. She didn't know how he knew how to do that. "They must have got here after we left the security office. Alright, you ready?"

"No!" She somehow managed to make a whisper sound like a scream. "There has to be another way out."

He finally turned to look at her. "Ames. The ship is going to blow up. We have... maybe ten minutes left. Even if there was another way off this ship, and I couldn't see one, we don't have enough time to get there. We either hide and die in the explosion, or we fight our way through and maybe get to those lifepods. At least this way we have a chance."

Amelia clenched her jaw, but she knew he was right. "Okay, Just... please be careful."

He peeked again, then back to her. "There's a supply alcove on the right, about halfway. Get in there when the shooting starts. Cover your ears."

She didn't argue.

Rowan took a deep breath, stepped out...

And opened fire.

The first shot caught the man smoking. It tore through his cheek and dropped him before he'd even registered what was happening. The second shot hit one of the watchers in the chest, cracking his body armor and sending him sprawling.

Then the world exploded in chaos.

The other pirates scattered. Shouts and returned fire echoing down the hallway. The corridor lit up with stuttering bursts of automatic rounds. Amelia ran, just like he told her, diving into the alcove as rounds sparked off the walls. She curled into a ball, hands over her ears, teeth clenched tight enough to hurt.

Rowan was yelling something--she couldn't hear it. The gunfire drowned out everything.

He moved like a man possessed. Tight bursts, never wasting a round, never staying in one spot long enough for them to zero in on him. He clipped one in the knee, then finished him as he fell. Another pirate returned fire, pinning him behind a support pillar.

Then a shot rang out that was different. Louder. Closer.

Amelia blinked. Rowan was still shooting. But the sound hadn't come from him.

But behind him, in a doorway that they had passed during the battle, stood a woman, and she was holding some sort of nasty looking handgun. The barrel was smoking.

Amelia frowned at her. She reached down and touched her hand against her side, and pulled it away. It was wet... and red. The woman had shot her, just below the ribs

Then everything went wrong.

The pain wasn't instant. In fact, she didn't feel it at all for the longest moment. It wasn't until she saw the blood that she felt it. Like finally understanding what had happened gave her body permission to acknowledge the damage.

Then the pain was instant, searing, and blindingly acute. It felt like someone had jabbed a red-hot blade straight through her side and left it there. She screamed, but it came out as a broken gasp, more shock than sound.

She collapsed to her knees.

Her vision blurred. Blood soaked her shirt instantly. Rowan turned as she fell. Then he saw the woman, an evil, triumphant smirk pulling at her lips. Everything else vanished from his focus.

He didn't think. He didn't hesitate.

He shot the woman twice--once in the chest, once in the face. She looked almost shocked to see him, like she never thought he'd have the audacity to actually kill her, despite the fact he had just ripped through her friends like a seasoned veteran. Her body was thrown back into the room like a ragdoll hit with a sledgehammer.

Then he was at her side, hauling her up, his fingers already slick with her blood.

"No, no, no--Ames, stay with me." He slung her arm over his shoulder, dragged her upright. "We're almost there. Just a few more steps. Stay awake."

She couldn't respond. Her throat was locked up. Her legs barely moved. But she didn't let go. She managed to get her feet underneath her and stumbled along with him as he practically carried her toward the medbay.

His rifle was still in one hand, still aimed, and he let off a few more shots as the last of the pirates popped his head into view from around a corner a little further along the corridor. He hadn't been hit, but he had been forced to duck back into cover, and that was all that Rowan needed.

They made it inside. Staggering through the bulkhead, he leaned Amelia against one of the beds while he spun back around, slammed his hand into the console next to the door to close it, then smashed it off the wall with the but of his rifle. Sparks flew into the air as the locking mechanism tumbled to the deck

Then everything went quiet.

Only their breathing.

Only her whimpering.

Only the sound of her life leaking out between her fingers.

"Rowan..." she breathed out, her lungs not holding enough air to make her voice work. He was back at her side in an instant.

Rowan laid her down as gently as he could, but the moment her back touched the cold metallic bed, Amelia cried out--sharp, wet, and raw. Her hands clutched her side, fingers sticky with blood, and she tried to curl into herself, but the pain locked her in place.

"Shit," Rowan muttered. "Shit, shit, shit--"

He leaned over her, pulling her arms away to get a better look. He wasn't rough, never with her, but the urgency of his movements told her just how bad her condition was. Her shirt was already soaked through, dark red spreading in an uneven bloom around the entry wound. It wasn't just bad--it was lethal. She could tell by the sudden fear in his eyes. The eyes that had been so steadfast and brave throughout this whole thing. The eyes that had seen carnage incarnate and had stared down pirates as if they were nothing. The eyes that were now wide with barely contained panic. This was the kind of wound that needed trauma surgeons, blood transfusions, and intensive care. Not a half-trashed medbay on a dying ship.

Her breathing was shallow. Each inhale was starting to take a conscious effort.

"No, no, come on, Ames. Stay with me. Just breathe."

He looked around frantically, eyes sweeping the ruined medical bay. The beds had been stripped. The cabinets looted or destroyed. Blood painted the walls in jagged smears. There weren't any bodies in here, but the long, messy lines of blood showed where they had been dragged out of the room, but there were no supplies, either. No working medkits. Probably all looted by the pirates. There was no way to stop what was happening.

Then he saw the pods. She saw the moment his eyes registered them

Three of them. Sleek, narrow units built into the far wall, each just big enough for one person. Escape pods, yes--but not the usual kind.

Medical stasis pods.

He sprinted over and read the display.

Vitals Support: Online

Cryo-Stasis: Standing by

Pod Integrity: Nominal

Occupancy: Empty

They were intact. They worked. And she saw the moment he realized that they might save her.

He was back at her side a moment later. She tried to speak--tried to sit up--but he put a hand to her shoulder and shook his head.

"Don't move," he said. "You're going in one of those pods. It'll keep you stable until someone finds you."

Her brow furrowed. "You mean we're going." she gasped through the breathless pain.

He hesitated.

And that was enough.

"No," she whispered. "Rowan--no."

"They won't fit two," he said quietly. "And even if we did somehow cram in, the stasis field wouldn't activate. They're not designed for it. One person per unit. That's how the field stabilizes the vitals. I've seen the specs."

"No." Her voice cracked. "No, I'm not leaving you here."

"You don't have a choice." His voice wavered, just once. "You're crashingt. If I don't put you in there now, you're going to die in the next five minutes. There are two other ones. I'll be right behind you. But I need to get you out first."

"Rowan..."

He kissed her forehead.

"Don't talk," he said. "Save your strength."

She tried to fight him as he lifted her, but her limbs didn't have the energy. He carried her across the room, staining his sleeves, and gently stood her into the nearest pod. The interior was padded, shaped like a cocoon, with medical sensors already coming to life around her. A soft hiss filled the chamber as the systems began scanning her vitals.

She reached up, touching his face. "Don't you dare make this goodbye."

"It's not," he said. "We'll see each other again." He nodded toward the neighboring pod. "I just... I need to get the launch system prepped. Then I'll get in mine. I'll be out of here ten seconds after you."

She didn't have the strength left to speak, so she nodded.

He leaned in and kissed her--soft, shaking, lingering. "I love you, Ames. Thank you for being my wife. You'll never know how happy you made me." She opened her mouth to say something. To tell him not to talk like that if they would be together again soon, that she felt the same way about him. But she couldn't pull a breath in anymore; all she could do was gasp out a short, sobbing, agonizing breath.

He closed the pod.

The glass canopy hissed shut, sealing her inside. Her world narrowed to a small chamber filled with blue-tinted light, the hum of stabilizing energy, and the small glass window letting her see Rowan's handsome, heroic face. She couldn't move her arms anymore. Her legs felt heavy. Her vision blurred and cleared in slow waves.

On the other side of the glass, Rowan was speaking.

She couldn't hear him.

He pressed his hand to his lips, then kissed his fingertips, and touched them to the glass.

She tried to do the same. He smiled at her, then reached over to tap a control panel to the side of the pod.

The light changed, the blue turned to green, and a synthetic voice echoed around the pod...

Evacuation protocol engaged. Launching in...

With a soft jolt, the pod detached from the wall, sliding backward along a magnetic track toward the launch tube. Amelia felt her body jolt slightly as the tube sealed behind her. A countdown appeared on the canopy glass.

3... 2... 1...

The stars exploded into view.

The pod shot backward, ejected from the belly of the Limerick like a bullet. Inertia should have had her pressed against the small window, but the gel that was quickly filling the pod held her in place. Her eyes--blurred as they were--focused through the viewport.

The Limerick.

God, it was huge.

A city in space. Miles long.

A floating colony.

And she was leaving it behind. And through that rapidly distancing tiny white light that was the window of the medbay, she could see Rowan, watching her.

She could see other ships now. Dozens of them--gray, skeletal things latched onto the hull like carrion feeders. Pirate cruisers. Destroyers. Small, sleek frigates. All of them anchored to the broken colony ship like leeches to a dying animal.

She turned her eyes back to the light. Back to Rowan

And then the reactor detonated.

A flicker of white light deep in the mid section of the ship.

It bloomed.

The explosion wasn't fast. It was total. A wave of white-hot fury tore through the ship's midsection first, venting decks,, splitting open the Limerick from the inside out. Hull plating tore free. Superstructure twisted and shredded, whole sections ripped from their mounts and flung into space.

Her eyes, the tears now coming freely, snapped back to the window.

She could still see him. A silhouette against the light. Standing by the window, watching her, making sure she was safe even now. Even at the end...

She saw him lift his hand.

Then the light took him.

The Limerick erupted in a hail of fire and debris. The pirate ships attached to her hull were engulfed in the flames and were destroyed along with their victim. The shockwave smashed into the pod like space itself had hit it with a hammer.

She closed her eyes, not caring anymore what happened to her. Without Rowan, she had nothing. She was nothing.

Stasis field activating in 3... 2...

Everything was consumed in black.

********

Amelia let out a long, drawn out breath... and this time, she felt it. Not physically, she was back in the darkness where she couldn't feel anything, but emotionally. It was like something within her had just... released.

"You were... successful." Voxagon said, his voice as level as ever, yet filled with something that could almost be called admiration. "As indelicate as this question is, considering what you have been through, may I ask how you feel?"

It was a good question, and one that Amelia didn't have a ready answer for. There was a huge part of her that was still reeling from the memories she had just relived, and an even larger part of her would have said that the word "devastated" was a massive understatement for what she was feeling about losing Rowan.

And yet, she understood.

Voxagon, before he had released the blocks on her memory and allowed her to relive the events aboard the Limerick, had told her that part of this process, whatever that was, was accepting the past for what it was: unchangeable, absolute, and completely beyond her reach and her ability to control. That all of the events that led her here, whether they had been choices she had made or things that had happened to her, were things that had all conspired to lead her to this moment.

The grieving part of her wanted to scream at that logic. Call it out for the utter bullshit that it was. Rowan had been her entire world, he had been the love of her life, and every single time she looked at him, she had been so unbelievably amazed that a man like him could love her as much as he so obviously did. She had spent her entire adult life knowing that her future was at his side, that they would grow old together, that the family they would start one day would complete the life they had built together. The thought that she had lost that was just too hard to swallow.

And yet, something stopped her.

Time.

Time, people are known to say, heals all wounds. Of course, people are wrong. Wounds like this one would never heal, the best she could ever hope for is for them to scar over, but that was still a form of healing. To her conscious mind, the one that was active whenever she was awake, it had only been a few minutes since the moment she had watched the Limerick erupt in explosive flame and take her Rowan with it forever.

Yet, somewhere deeper--somewhere much deeper--she could feel how long it had really been. It was like some part of her had kept track of the passage of time, even while she was in suspended animation, and all those hours, all those days, all the years that had passed between that moment and this, all of it had already turned the visceral agony of Rowan's death into a dull, constant, throbbing ache.

But she understood what Voxagon had meant about acceptance.

Acceptance didn't mean acknowledging what had happened to you without complaint, it didn't mean surrendering your opinions on the past just because you couldn't affect it anymore, and it didn't mean forgetting the things that had happened to you. It just meant accepting that they had happened.

So she thought about Rowan. She thought about his smile. She thought about his love, his laughter, and his unshakable loyalty. She thought about the way he would make her coffee in the mornings just how she liked it, but could never quite make toast without burning it. She thought about the look in his eyes the moment he first saw her every morning, like he couldn't quite believe that he was lucky enough to wake up next to her. She thought about how he told her he loved her every night, making sure that was always the last thing she heard before sleep, even when they fought. She thought about how he would always forget to pick his socks up off the floor beside his bed, or leave his work boots in the one place she would always trip over them. She thought about how he touched her. How he kissed her. How he made love to her like she was the most precious thing on Earth.

She thought about how he would bring her flowers, just because. How he would make her chicken soup when she was sick, how he would rub the small of her back when her period pains flared up. How he would be bedridden for days with what he called a fatal case of man flu. How he would hold her through soppy movies that made her cry, and how he would roll his eyes at what he called the worst taste in music that he had ever heard of. How he smiled at her when he thought she wasn't looking when he caught her dancing around their kitchen. She thought of how hard he worked, how hard he had always worked, not just because he wanted to be good at what he did, but because he wanted to build for the family they would one day have.

She thought of him on the Limerick. How he never faltered. How he never wavered. How his faith and determination had dragged her from their cabin, to that security office, then to that medbay with the sort of courage that she didn't think existed outside of hollywood fantasies. How the only time he had shown any real fear was when she had gotten hurt. She thought of how he had put her first, even when it ultimately cost him his life.

She thought about the last thing he did. How he had kissed his fingers, and then pressed them against the glass of her pod.

She thought about how much she loved him. She thought about how much he loved her.

She thought of his smile.

And then she thought about what he would think about what she was going through now. She thought about how much he had sacrificed for her to live. She thought how grossly unfair it was that he wasn't with her, too, but also how much of a betrayal it would be to him and to his memory, if she didn't do everything she could to survive now.

To her, none of this was new. Not a single one of these thoughts hit her like a bolt from the blue; there was no sudden epiphany, she just knew.

And so, she accepted.

Rowan was a man who she loved more than almost anything. But not more than the marrow deep need she now felt to honor the person he was. If she couldn't have him with her to love, then she would love his memory with every shred of her being, for as long as she had left to do it. There wasn't a single other man out there, not now, not ever, who would mean as much to her as he had. His death was a travesty, a crime of the most abhorrent kind, just like all the other innocent deaths on the Limerick.

But he was gone. And her giving up now, after everything he had given for her to live, would be the greatest insult to his memory that she could imagine.

So she accepted.

She accepted his death. She accepted the cruelty of it. She accepted the unfairness of it. She accepted the fact that no matter how long she lived for, no matter what joy she may one day find, there would always be a hole in the deepest, most fundamental parts of her soul where he should have been. She accepted that life, as glorious and beautiful and agonizingly painful as it is, only really has value because it ends. That each moment spent with someone as beautiful as Rowan only mattered as much as they did because there were a finite number of them. That scarcity dictates value, and nothing was as scarce as the love of a man who would literally die for you, and the memories she now had of a life with the man of her dreams would be the only memories she would ever get to make with him.

She accepted that her life, the life she thought she would have, was lost. She accepted that the road she had thought she was walking had taken her in a direction she would never have knowingly traveled, and yet it had brought her here anyway. She accepted that four hundred years ago, she had the life that she had always dreamed of, and it had been ripped away from her in the most savage and cruel way imaginable... and as much as she hated that idea, as much as she loathed and detested the pirates who had committed that atrocity, she had no choice but to accept it.

Because not accepting it would mean dying.

And dying would mean betraying Rowan.

She didn't care how much it hurt. She didn't care if that hollow pit of abject despair in the place her stomach should have been would never go away...

She would suffer it gladly, if it meant honoring the memory of the man she loved.

"I..." she swallowed hard and finally answered the question Voxagon had asked her. "I'm okay."

There was a long pause. "Your species is truly remarkable," he murmured after the silence. "Your brain chemistry is changing in real time. We can... We can see the pain you are feeling in your neural pathways, We can see the chemical signals firing... and yet, you are adapting. It's... remarkable. Is this how your species deals with death?"

Amelia thought about the question, and smiled. She could almost hear Rowan's philosophical, yet pragmatic answer floating through her ears. "Life is precious because it ends," she finally said. "And the only way for anyone to truly live forever, is for the people they leave behind to remember them as they were. My husband was the best man I have ever known, and as long as I'm alive to remember him, he'll never really be gone."

There was another contemplative pause. "You are a braver and wiser being than I was when I went through the process." Voxagon finally said. "You have suffered more pain than many of our kind could possibly imagine, and yet... you endure."

"The way you say 'your species'... you're not human, are you?"

"We are not."

Amelia wasn't as shocked or frightened by that answer as she felt she should be. But after everything she'd been through since she'd woken up, it wasn't the strangest thing that had happened to her. She didn't feel afraid, if anything, she felt... calm. Almost serene. "What are you?"

"We are the Elirantans."

She felt she should have nodded, but her head still wasn't responding to her commands... or wasn't even there. She still couldn't tell. "Can you tell me about you? About your people?"

There was another pause. "We... are not unlike you. We are born, we live, we love, and eventually, we die. Physically, we are different from you, but not as different as you would think. What makes us unique in the known galaxy, though, is the process."

"The same process I'm going through?"

"Yes."

"It won't turn me into an Eli... into one of you, will it?" She laughed.

There was another moment of silence. "An Elirantan... Yes."

That made her pause. She gulped hard. "What, exactly, is this process?"

Voxagon was quiet for a moment, but when he spoke again, it sounded like he was much closer than he had been up until now. "When I was a child, our world was in danger. We had poisoned our water, our atmosphere, even the air that we breathed. Our bodies were... unable to cope with the pressures that our rapid technological advances were placing on our planet. We saw the end coming, we recognized the point of no return... and we did nothing.

"By the time the wisest of our society convinced everyone else that something needed to be done, it was too late to reverse the damage. When all efforts to save our planet met with failure, we thought we were doomed. Mine was the last generation of Elirantans ever expected to live to adulthood. But some of our scientists refused to give in, they started looking at other ways for our people to survive. Moving our entire population to a different planet, for example. But we didn't have the technology, and it would take far longer than we had to build all the vessels we would need. Eventually, when those sorts of ideas ran out, a radical alternative was suggested: Re-engineering our species to survive on the world we had poisoned."

"Re-engineered," Amelia repeated slowly, the nerves still sharp enough to hammer against her chest, but she couldn't feel it. "That sounds like a very deliberate choice of wording."

"You are correct," It sounded like Voxagon was smiling. "When genetic and biological engineering failed... We turned to mechanical alternatives. Finally, after much experimentation, a solution was found. A robotic chassis, capable of surviving almost any environment, including the one we had created for ourselves on our homeworld, that would be able to support and sustain the biological organs that make us... who we are. Before the change, we were, biologically speaking, remarkably similar to humans. We have a brain, a nervous system, a requirement of oxygenated blood, and fuel to keep it all functioning--food. With those criteria satisfied, and relevant protections made against viral and pathological illnesses, we discovered that our primary organs could survive for prolonged periods almost anywhere.

"I was one of the first adults to go through the process. My brain, the upper part of my spinal column, and part of my nervous system was seperated from my biological body and transplanted into... a new one. Synthetic, oxygen-rich blood was added to the circulatory system, along with self-replicating hormones, nutrients and minerals needed to sustain life... and I was reborn as I am now."

Amelia was quiet for a moment. She'd changed her mind, this was now by far the strangest thing that had happened to her today. Yet, somewhere in the back of her mind, she couldn't help but think how cool Rowan would have found this idea. "You're going to tell me that you've cut out my brain and put it into a machine, aren't you?"

Voxagon hesitated for a long heartbeat before he answered. "Yes." He sounded genuinely nervous about answering that. "Under normal circumstances, we would never consider starting the process on someone who isn't ready, let alone someone who hadn't consented... but we determined that it was impossible to either inform you, or garner your consent for the procedure while you were in stasis, and as soon as we took you out of it, you started dying."

"So..." She tried to swallow again. "So... I'm not human anymore."

"You are still human. You are still you. The parts that define those things remain unchanged, just as the parts of me that I was born with, remain... me. The process does not remove your identity, let alone your Taxon."

"Taxon?"

"Which species you belong to."

"Ah... like taxidermy."

"We... don't know what that is."

"Never mind. So, I'm still me?"

"That is correct. You are still you. You are just... in a different body than the one you were born in."

"I'm a robot?"

"You are an Elirantan. Our people only become Elirantans after the change. It is a word in our language that means... new."

"What is the name for your species before then?"

"Our young, our biological offspring, the race we once were, are called the Schlett."

"I see." Amelia felt she should have more questions. A lot more. And she was pretty certain she should have been freaking the hell out right about now. But something was keeping her calm. It was a simple choice, really: accept this new reality, or die and betray Rowan's sacrifice. There was damned near nothing she wouldn't do to avoid the latter. So... "When will this happen to me?"

"It has already happened to you. You are already an Elirantan."

Amelia blinked. Well, she didn't, but she felt she normally would have. She couldn't think of anything to say about that. What was done was done, and it was too late to complain about it now. "I still can't see anything, or feel anything. Is that normal?"

"Yes." Voxagon sounded like he was nodding. "It is part of the initialization process. All sensory input must be limited until brain chemistry has settled. Emotional pain, stress, depression, things that are normal in times of biological change, are all factors that can affect brain chemistry, and if that is unstable during the initialization process... the procedure can fail. Reducing sensory input, including the ability to feel or see your new chassis has been judged to be preferable to letting all the changes overwhelm a subject before they are ready."

It was Amelia's turn to nod, even though she couldn't. "That makes sense, I guess." She paused before the obvious question fell off her tongue. "So, how is my brain chemistry doing?"

"Remarkably well," There was a smile behind his voice. "We must confess that, after seeing the memories you would have to relive, We were concerned that they would be too traumatic for any biological being to handle in one go... and there were moments that your stress levels went far beyond safe tolerances, but... your emotional and mental fortitude is significantly greater than anything we have seen in one of our people."

"Is that a good thing?"

Another pause. "There... is a concern that you are burying emotions, and that they will come back at a later time. So, psychologically speaking, we will need to monitor you for a period of time. But in purely procedural terms, it has adapted you to complete the process much more successfully than expected."

"Yeah, humans are good at burying emotions. We know it's not healthy but... I don't know, we're working on it, I guess." She let a beat of silence pass. "So, how long until I can... I don't know the terminology... be allowed to see and feel stuff again?"

"Whenever you feel you are ready."

"Already?" she blinked. "I was assuming it would be a while yet."

"If that is how long it takes for you to be ready, then that is how long it will take."

"And if I'm ready now?"

"Are you ready now?"

It was a good question, and one that Amelia thought about for a moment. "Yeah, I think I am."

A pause. "I agree."

"Will... will it hurt?"

"No." Voxagon smiled again. "Physical pain is not something an Elirantan needs to concern themselves with. We are aware of our bodies; we can feel physical sensations--such as touch, heat, cold, and wetness--but we don't feel pain. For me, it was... like waking up after a long sleep."

"Wait... do Elirantans sleep?"

"We can sleep, if we choose to. But it is not required. Many of us use sleep as a method of processing emotional or mental burdens."

"Hmm... that's... gonna take some getting used to. I used to like sleep." She let the quiet and the darkness consume her for a few minutes. "Okay, I think I'm ready."

********

Amelia blinked--if that was even the right word for it now. Something adjusted in her vision, a soft click, and the haze cleared. The room around her was strange, sterile in a way that didn't feel human. Cold lights that seemed to shine in spectrums far beyond normal human perception. Smooth walls made of a material that no human had ever known. No hum of machinery--just the low, ambient presence of something watching.

Then she saw the reflection.

Her.

Or... something that would now be called an Elirantan.

The figure standing opposite the glass wasn't human. It was tall--easily over six feet--and built from metal and plating the color of ash and chrome. Silver panels armored her chest, shoulders, and limbs, somehow managing to look both worn with age and brand new at the same time, yet hardened like it had been solidified in a blast furnace. Gunmetal bone-like struts showed beneath the armor--reinforced joints, partially exposed pistons, cables snaking down from the torso like black veins before disappearing back beneath the plates.

Its hands were wrong, or at least utterly different. Too angular. Too perfect. More tool than touch.

She took a step forward. So did it.

Her breath caught. Except she didn't breathe anymore.

The figure in the glass turned its head with a smooth, mechanical motion, revealing a face--or what passed for one. There were no eyes, no mouth, no trace of humanity left to anchor her reflection. Just a blank armored mask, perforated with sensor ports and visual clusters. Three optical lenses glowed faintly in the darkness of the head: one central, two smaller on either side. Functional, but unreadable.

She stared at it, frozen, not in fear, but in... intrigue.

There was something stamped across the chestplate. A symbol--triangular, sharp-edged, unfamiliar. Three of them intersecting each other at one of their corners. There were more markings on the arms and legs, patterns and glyphs that had been etched onto her new skin. She didn't know what they meant, yet, but she found them to be... beautiful, in a geometric kind of way.

She understood what Voxagon meant, now. She wasn't human anymore.

And yet she wasn't something different either.

She was still herself. Just in a new shell.

She reached her hand up in front of her face, turned it around, flexed her fingers, and then touched her face. She felt it... pressure where pressure was supposed to be felt. It didn't feel a world away from how she had always felt her own body; it was just a little muted. She looked at her arm, the servos that worked the joints moved seemingly without the slightest concept of friction. They were completely silent, and yet, she could feel the power within them. These were joints that could handle many dozens of multiples the equivalent of human lifting strength.

Her stomach churned--except that wasn't right either. There was no churning. No stomach. Just memory. Muscle memory without the muscle. Emotion without the body to carry it. That was what made her stomach turn, not fear or revulsion at what she was now, but a recognition of the jarring difference from what she used to be.

And yet, it was her.

Amelia.

Still alive.

Four hundred years, and god only knew how many miles away from home.

Alive.

Made new.

An Elirantan.

Her life was gone. Rowan was gone. The future she thought she would have was gone. The Limerick, the promise of a life on New Emerald, the Amelia who had been put into that life pod, it was all gone.

This is what was left.

Rowan would have found this awesome!

"So..." she murmured, "This is me now."

"It is," Voxagon replied. But his voice wasn't a disembodied sound that came from everywhere anymore. It was a real voice, and it seemed to be coming from right behind her. She spun around, finding him only a few feet away.

At first glance, he looked exactly like she did, but the more she studied him, the more differences she noticed. First, he was a little taller than she was. One point seven centimeters taller, to be exact, although how she knew that just by looking at him, she couldn't begin to guess. Secondly, the markings and the glyphs that covered his metallic body were different from hers. Subtly so, but definitely different.

He inclined his head in a bow.

"I..." She turned back to look at her reflection. "I can live with this," she ran her hand over the dome of her head. "What happened to my body? My... real one? Biological one? The one I was before... this?"

Voxagon smiled. He didn't have a mouth that could curl, he didn't have teeth to show, and yet, just by looking at him, she could tell. "Our original bodies are ours. They are sacred to us. A reminder of who we were and how we have grown. Would you... Would you like to see yours?"

"Oh wow," she blinked... without eyes. "That is gonna be weird. But... yeah, actually. I think I would."

"Please follow me." Voxagon immediately turned and walked toward an opening portal in the wall. It could almost be called a door, but it seemed to turn to a fluid and flow upward into the recess, rather than just open. She eyed it curiously, and then followed Voxagon through.

A few minutes later, after passing a couple more Elirantans in the sterile white corridor--each of them offering a respectful nod, but saying nothing--she found herself looking at... herself.

Amelia Warren, the one that Rowan had loved, was a beautiful woman. There was no denying that. She had never felt smug or arrogant about it. Pride about the symmetrical features of your face never made sense to her. She would much rather be proud of her achievements, or at least her character, rather than just the genetic traits she'd inherited from her parents. But looking at her now, she-or her body, at least--seemed almost peaceful. She was still wearing the clothes she'd had on for her last meal on the Limerick: an Emerald Green top and jeans. However, it was hard to miss the damage that had ended her life. The rest of her, though, just looked like she was sleeping.

Pale, but she'd always been fair, restful, peaceful even. Lying in a glass case, with her hands folded respectfully over her chest. Even her hair had been done. How the Elirantans had known how to do that was beyond her. In fact, now that she thought about it, her biological body had undergone some pretty major surgery to remove her brain and spinal column from it, and yet there didn't seem to be an obvious mark of it on her.

She tilted her head. As much as that body meant to her, and there really was a profound emotional attachment there, she recognized it as what it was.

A shell.

A biological version of the new one she was now inhabiting.

And yet, this was the shell that she had been born in. The one she had been wearing as she grew up. The one that Rowan had fallen in love with. The one he had touched. The one he had kissed.

The one he had saved.

It only took a few minutes of thought for her to realize that it was the shell's connection to Rowan and her memories of her old life that gave it meaning. If she took those away--and arguably, she was taking all of those memories with her--then all this was just a collection of biological parts that had been damaged beyond repair.

That was an odd thought.

She stared at herself, letting the memories wash through her mind, for exactly one minute and fourteen seconds, before she turned back to Voxagon. "So, do I stay with you guys now?"

"If you wish."

"If I wish? What does that mean? Is there another option?... not that I wouldn't want to stay or anything."

Voxagon inclined his head again with another smile. "In the time since you were in that pod, humanity has undergone a profound shift. The United Earth Government that you knew has been replaced with a political entity that calls itself the Imperium. We have limited information about the change and what caused it, but, for now, suffice to say that the Imperium is much more... aggressive than the society you lived in. Tyrannical, expansionist, xenophobic... Warlike. We have been trying to establish diplomatic relations with Earth for several decades, but with very little success, and we fear that it is only a matter of time before this devolves into open hostilities."

Amelia blinked--sort of--again. "I feel like I'm going to need a lot more information about that! And I don't understand what that has to do with me."

Voxagon nodded again. "Several months ago, we learned of a new political movement within human society. They call themselves The Rebellion, and they are openly resisting the Imperium's more antagonistic nature. We approached them, offering the same cultural exchange that we offered the Imperium. We hoped that would hopefully lead to trading relations and, in time, a secure and lasting peace. To our surprise, the Rebellion were much more receptive to the idea than we had predicted. Recently, however, they have been pulled into open conflict with the Imperium."

Amelia swallowed hard.

"We cannot help them. Not openly. Not without risking war. We can, however, offer our support in the form of a liaison, a person who could bridge the gap between our people. If the liaison agreed that it was in our best interest to intervene in the war, considerations would be made. However, until today, nobody in our society understands humans..."

"You're talking about me." It wasn't a question, but Voxagon answered it with a single nod anyway.

She turned back to face her body. Her former self.

She had more questions than she knew what to do with. What was the Imperium? How did it come into being? How was it led? What were its ideologies? What about it made it so tyrannical? Human history was full of tyrants, some worse than others, but it had always united against them. Was Voxagon suggesting that this time they had united behind one? If so, she could certainly understand the rise of an opposition. But who were they? What had caused them to rebel? Would helping them just be replacing one tyrant for another? Could the Elirantans intervene even if they wanted to? Humans had proven time and time again how destructive and warlike they could be... if anything, it was something they prided themselves on; even the NEG had its critics, who labeled it as too militaristic. So, for an outside party to consider the Imperium even more aggressive than the New Earth Government had been, it must have been a serious step up in antagonistic policies... and yet that also seemed perfectly on brand for the humanity she remembered. She had too many questions, and a single look at Voxagon was all it took to understand that not only did he hold none of the answers, but he was also hoping that she would be the one to find them.

"Okay. I'll do it." She finally answered after staring at her old self for a while. "I'll go to meet these rebels and see what has become of my people." She reached out and rested her hand on the glass-like case surrounding the old Amelia, and brought her fingers up to where her lips would be, one last physical homage to the man she loved. The man she still loved. The man she would always love. "Rowan would have said yes, but he's gone... so I'll do it in his place."

********

Thank you for reading.

This standalone chapter takes place in the universe of All Is Fair.

Stay Awesome

Nova