Alice takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. This is it. Her first battle. The sky overhead is the color of a raw, bleeding bruise, and the violin screeching of the Sin echoes between the buildings. It’s huge. How is it so big? Couldn’t she start with something smaller?
She takes another breath. Ready or not, she’s going to do this. No—she is ready. She’s got to be. There’s no one else.
When you wake up, you spend a long while just staring into the mirror.
You feel like there’s someone standing right behind your reflection, but you can’t see anything. You’re always in the way.
She comes in and finds you staring again. She grabs your shoulder, steps in front of you, tells you to brush your teeth and come eat breakfast. So you do.
She’s made waffles. She’s trying. She knows you like them. But if you ever tell her why you like them, she’ll probably never make them again.
Six re-emerges through the hatch onto the cramped bridge, swearing in several languages.
“How bad is it?” Anya asks, tossing over a ration pouch.
Six catches it and takes a long swig before answering. “Fucked, is how bad. That missile the Blowjob Brothers hit us with had a bio payload, one of those engineered slime molds the fucking Accordance use for sabotage ops. Kill to know how the hell the bastards got their hands on that shit… Anyway, it ate half the engine before I could vent it, plus I think some of it might’ve gotten into the fuel lines, so I’m gonna have to empty the tanks, decontaminate the fuel, flush the whole system before I can even start on repairs…” She does some quick mental math. “Five days.”
“Five days?”
“Five days for me. Anyone else, it’d take a couple weeks.”
“So we’re out, then.” Anya slumps forward in her seat, forehead against the dashboard. “Even at max speed, we’ll just barely beat the last stragglers to Eris XIII. No first-place finish, no grand prize, no money to pay off the Ocelot before he harvests my organs…” She turns her head slightly, looking at Six out of one eye. Times like this, Six always has some sort of miracle waiting in her back pocket. Maybe, just maybe…
“How much do you know about nullspace drives?”
Anya sits upright slowly. “I know they’re fast. And I know they’re ridiculously illegal in pretty much every inhabited system. Six, you didn’t –”