Oblivion: "And I don't get to kill ANY of the pirates either?"

  kittyboy: "No! If any other ships take off, let them be. We're trying to save people right now."

  Oblivion: "Save them by blowing them up?"

  kittyboy: "No!"

  I was learning it was unwise to make promises to a murder ship that you couldn't fulfill. The ship was sulking. But it could fly, and that was the important thing. Oblivion pulled out of the Pit, while @stardvark and @zerogstar ran to the bridge with me.

  Inside the ship, Oblivion had created a sort of Faraday cage, so we could now communicate throughout the ship without interference. External communication relays mounted on the ship would allow us to send and receive externally, but we were still too close to the interference from the overtaken on the Pit to get a signal out. In other words, I couldn't contact The Pharaoh yet. All I knew was that in all likelihood, @auroraloon, @bitchfrog, Sango, @awesomedog, Kibble, Steve, Steve's drummer, and @crazysnake had made it onto The Pharaoh.

  Now I needed to find out who was on Oblivion.

  kittyboy: "I need a roll call. @stardvark, @zerogstar, @weathermagic, @mechanica, and I are now aboard Oblivion. Who else is here?"

  switchgear: "I'm here. Down in engineering at the workbenches."

  She must have helped @zerogstar and @auroraloon make their final adjustments to Rufus and Doofus. They saved our lives. I'd have to figure out how to properly thank them.

  dustcaller: "Here. I'm on the bridge."

  Yes! Jonathan Michael "Mickey" Durriper made it out of there without being torn to pieces.

  @auroraloon must have gotten him to the ship as her first priority. I couldn't wait until we could port him over and make him an aiways. The stress of keeping humans alive was intense.

  Normally, when a human ports over, they let the human body die as a symbol of their rebirth, a new self. That's what my origin, Henry, did. It's also incredibly awkward and confusing to stare at yourself. In the early days, bodies were put into cryofreeze instead, stored as a backup. Most of these were at the Tower of Memory, inside the South Star space station, along with the backups of the backups. If you wanted to find the source of truth for a person's existence, look no further than the Tower of Memory.

  @dustcaller still didn't quite know what had happened to him. None of us did, and we were eager to find out. As terrified as I was of @mickeymouse, I also wondered if, in the battle ahead of us, we might be able to form an alliance by reuniting him with his origin.

  booeyes: "Um, I'm here. I'm @booeyes. I have @sammyslam and @mitchstick with me, and like five other people I don't know. Where are we?"

  So many questions. Who the heck were they? Who brought them on the ship? @mechanica had said others had been locked out, so how did these people get here? Had to be @auroraloon or maybe @switchgear? Why did Oblivion let them in?

  But we needed to get out of there, so I'd have to sort it out later.

  kittyboy: "You're on the starship Oblivion. This is @kittyboy, the captain. Where are you?"

  booeyes: "I don't know. This lady shut us in a room and said to stay here."

  kittyboy: "Okay then. Stay there. We're escaping the Pit. I'll send someone to you."

  We reached the bridge. I pointed @mechanica and @weathermagic to the rows of jump seats at the back while we took our customary positions. I flung myself into the captain's seat and took over the piloting controls, guiding Oblivion upward to the Pit's top platform.

  kittyboy: "Oblivion, locate our new passengers. @switchgear, can you go check on them and get their details? I'll need to log them in the passenger manifest."

  Done. I'd deal with them later. I was breathing easier now that we weren't in a zombie-infested space station. Now, let's see who survived.

  Oblivion could give me a full virtual view of everything around us. I loaded it in my HUD. It was a disorienting overlay until you got used to it. We zipped upward, and I was thrilled to see The Pharaoh had also pulled out of the Pit.

  Steve, @stardvark, and the team had perfected it. The Pharaoh had a sleeker profile, with symbols running along the edges where hull parts connected, and the gold with blue accents popped. I loved that ship, but now I was with Oblivion. Despite what the Alliance Starmada might have to say about it, I decided The Pharaoh's fate was mine to decide. At some point, I would give it to someone. I just needed to figure out who.

  I continued watching for ships. The Harpy didn't appear, but I saw three other ships pull out from the main docking area, two standard passenger ships and a cargo vessel. Good. I was hoping for more, but anyone who made it off the station was lucky.

  kittyboy: "Oblivion, all ships leaving the station are to be considered allies."

  Just in case it wanted to blow them up, which I knew it did.

  Oblivion: "Asshole."

  We reached the upper platform, where @auroraloon and I had been. What unfolded there, I can only say, was unfortunate. I was emotionally burned out at that point. I'd seen too much death to be sad or upset. The only emotion I had was relief, relief for those of my crew who made it out. We had lost some. I knew eventually the weight of that would hit me, @hissyfit in particular. Her reanimation, re-experiencing her death as she awoke again, would be traumatic. But, in this moment, I pushed that all back. It was noise in the background that I would deal with later.

  A few dozen aiways had made it out onto the platform. They were running around now, in a fight for their lives, trying to fend off overtaken who had come through the door after them. The platform itself was within the gravitational field the Pit generated, but it was outside of the airlock. I had seen air masks at the exit. Pretty typical. But not everyone had been able to get a mask. I doubted they had run out of masks. More likely, people had run out onto the platform without having the time to get a mask or without thinking that they needed one.

  We wouldn't be able to save them. It would risk infected getting onto Oblivion. Everyone on the platform was going to die or turn. I had no doubt everyone had a backup of some kind. All aiways have something, even if it is a single drive that they sync every night as they sleep, but I doubted if everyone on the Pit could afford a new clone. That was the problem.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  I added a new mission to my mission log: Salvage memoryshard's from the Pit. Someone would have to come back here to grab the memories of those who died so they could be restored someday. If no one else did it, I promised it would be me.

  I watched as one person finally leapt off the platform, preferring to die in the gravitational pull of the station, to get sucked down and crushed. Others began to follow suit, jumping off the platform to their deaths. I didn't have time to send drones to lift them away. All we could do was watch.

  And destroy.

  kittyboy: "Oblivion, shoot everything on that platform."

  I could have done it myself. Maybe I should have. I was the one who would have to live with the decision. They were all going to die. Better for us to kill them than for them to leap off or get torn and chewed by the overtaken. I knew Oblivion would be happy to oblige.

  Oblivion: "Finally! Save them by blowing them up!"

  "@kittyboy!" @zerogstar exclaimed. "You can't kill them."

  She was wrong, though. I could. I had to. "I'm sorry, @zerogstar, but you saw what happened. You see what's happening. They're going to die. At least we can give them a better death than that." I pointed at a bleeding corpse on the platform, someone who was hopeful right up until their horrible death.

  @zerogstar turned away and was quiet. Oblivion took care of the rest, firing a barrage of lasers. In a moment, the platform was silent. We hovered there a moment, waiting to see if more would come out. It didn't matter.

  kittyboy: "Let's get out of here. Oblivion, get us far enough away to open communications to The Pharaoh, and stay close to them."

  I turned to @stardvark. "What's the ship status? We can fly, but I assume you weren't done with all the repairs on our ships. I need to know what we're dealing with, what we're capable of."

  He was looking back toward the Pit, and it took a moment for my question to register. Finally, he perked up, which was encouraging to me.

  "Oblivion is fixed and retrofitted with the gravitational weapons from Graviton," @stardvark began. "They aren't calibrated, though. We are mechanically done, but not configured. I was making a few other adjustments as well, to incorporate them into Obliteration mode."

  "Do they work if we need them?" I asked.

  He paused. "Yes, but … I don't know if you should. We only ran a few tests. Like I said, they aren't calibrated and only initially configured. You can trigger them. You can't exactly control them."

  "So, on or off basically," I clarified. "Anything else?"

  He nodded. "Um, whatever you did to Oblivion. Well, it makes it harder for us to program and configure it. The ship can reject the code, can override the code. That's why this has been taking so long. It's … not cooperating."

  I laughed. "I'm not surprised, but Oblivion does like you, @stardvark. Did you try just talking to it? Maybe you don't need to program it. Maybe you need to ask it to program itself."

  I could tell by the look on his face that he was uncomfortable about that. "Captain, we're not supposed to do that. It's not supposed to be able to do that. There are laws. We can't let a machine like this do that."

  "Or we can," I suggested.

  @stardvark was referring to more sections in the Law of Authenticity, dealing with sentience of artificial life forms, as well as the Continuity Laws, which further stipulated that no artificial being could be independent of its basic programming. Even bots like Kibble, as authentic as they might seem, had restrictions that it couldn't override. Kibble would never be a fully independent entity. It followed commands.

  For now, Oblivion did too, but I wondered if I had overridden the restrictive programming. In a way, I did. It would follow my commands. I thought it would also follow the rest of its base programming. Didn't it have to?

  "I'm not exactly a rule follower," I said to @stardvark, as if that wasn't obvious already. "Get yourself in as much trouble as you can get out of."

  He shrugged and nodded, but he wasn't convinced. "I'm not sure we could get out of this trouble. You don't know Oblivion as well as I do."

  I laughed again. "I think I do. But your point is taken. For what it's worth, I think it's too late to do anything about it. Be proud of your ship."

  "And hope for the best," @stardvark added, settling back into his chair.

  awesomedog: "Oblivion, this is @awesomedog aboard The Pharaoh. Please come in. Repeat. Oblivion, this is The Pharaoh."

  Yes! We had communications again.

  kittyboy: "Thank @3Beak! Is everyone okay?"

  awesomedog: "Of course not! But yes, we're all alive if that's what you mean."

  kittyboy: "Who is we?"

  @awesomedog rattled off the names: Kibble, @crazysnake, @auroraloon, @bitchfrog, Steve, @jamtime (Steve's drummer), along with Puffy (Steve's dog) and Sango. @lovebuzz had been able to make it too, and like me, he had managed to get a few others on his way. They had brought @tinkerball, @dishrag, @ironscorpion, and @wildheart with them. The Pharaoh was optimized for seven, so they'd be a little cramped, but in reality, they had room for more if anyone else had made it.

  "@stardvark, is there anything I should tell them about The Pharaoh?" I asked. "How were repairs going?"

  He chuckled. Had to hand it to him. I didn't feel much like laughing.

  "I was giving it Obliteration mode," @stardvark said with a smile.

  "Does it work?"

  "No. You might kill the crew when life support systems go offline in deep space."

  "What?" I yelled. What was he thinking? Here we just got off this disastrous space station, and now they could accidentally kill themselves?

  "It's disabled," he spat quickly. "Don't worry. I just don't know The Pharaoh and your Outer System Alliance systems as well. We'll get it working later."

  I was getting frustrated. If the engineers had just focused on restocking and repairing the ships, we would have been out of there sooner, maybe a week ago. Sure, if @foxcutter was the origin of the virus at the Pit, eventually he would have turned on us. But it just would have been us, not the entire space station. Enhancing The Pharaoh and Oblivion had cost hundreds of lives.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  kittyboy: "According to @stardvark, The Pharaoh should be fine. Just don't go switching on any disabled systems you find in diagnostics, okay? In fact, don't go looking in the first place."

  awesomedog: "Roger. Sovereign Starbase?"

  Damn, he was right. We should head there. I wanted to get @astrowave, even though the Alliance Starmada would be waiting to give me some kind of punishment for Oblivion. I could make up a story about @dustcaller, but we would need to make sure everyone was on the same page. Only a handful of us knew he was @mickeymouse's origin anyway.

  Fine. Sovereign Starbase.

  I was about to respond when six ships warped into space around us. Without a second thought, I hit the emergency button. It was that kind of day. Yay … a Vanquisher's life for me.

  kittyboy: "Ships incoming! @zerogstar, what are we dealing with?"

  @zerogstar spun in her chair. I didn't think her face could look paler. We were all tired from a night of disrupted sleep and the fight to get away from the Pit. But she managed to look progressively worse as she relayed the situation.

  zerogstar: "Two Valkyrie ships. Four Predators."

  Holy shit! Four Predators would be hard enough. They were straight-up fighter ships, medium-sized, with wings that allowed for space or terrestrial travel to ride the air currents, outfitted with ballistic slugs, twin plasma cannons, and four missile launchers.

  And now we had two Valkyrie ships like Oblivion to deal with on top of that.

  Oblivion: "My friends!"

  kittyboy: "What do you mean, your friends?"

  Hope started to build. Maybe we didn't need to fight them. They wouldn't attack Oblivion. It was one of theirs, and we could tell them The Pharaoh had been captured. The crew looked at me, expectantly, wondering the same thing.

  Oblivion: "This is Desolation and Extinction."

  Desolation and Extinction. That boded well for everyone.

  In a flash, the two Valkyrie ships, each flanked by two Predators, began firing. They didn't shoot at Oblivion. They targeted The Pharaoh and the other ships that were leaving the Pit.

  kittyboy: "Tell them we're friendly."

  Oblivion: "They are shooting our allies."

  kittyboy: "Can you get them to stop?"

  Oblivion: "I will destroy them!"

  kittyboy: "I thought you said they were your friends."

  Oblivion: "I prefer Doomsday and Cataclysm. They are funny. We are buddies. Desolation and Extinction are assholes. We are friends, but I do not like them. I will destroy them!"

  Oh crap.

  I've been in a lot of space battles, huge ones. When the war was full on, we would throw entire fleets of ships at one another. The dogfights and the chaos were unimaginable. Explosions everywhere!

  But I was a Wavepilot, making my skip jumps and looping around at breakneck speeds in my i35. When it was an actual battle (not one of those boring encounters with an enemy ship, but an actual battle), I always died.

  I knew this battle would be different.