“I am not Corla’s security beacon. She was a guest in my hull, yes. Correct. But that is not my name.”
“I… OK. Sorry? But… did you just say she was a guest in your hull?”
“That’s the least of our worries right now, Crux. Trust me on this.”
“What’s going on? Why are you here? Why am I here?”
“You’re not really here, Crux. You’re back on Harem Station locked up inside a time freeze. What’s the last thing you remember?”
I squint my eyes at him, very, very annoyed with this AI at the moment. Because I was just pulled away from my… family. Kind of. I mean, I get it. It was a dream. But it was a really nice dream. And it’s been too many spins to count since I felt that kind of… longing.
Wow. That’s kind of a powerful word. Longing.
Was it longing?
“Veila?” SB19 says. “Hmm? Remember her?”
“Yeah.” I let out a long breath. “Yeah. I remember her.”
“She and Valor froze time. Harem Station was—”
“At war.” I slide a hand down my face, perfectly mimicking the gesture Other Me did back in the bedroom. “Fuck. What the sun is happening?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t have any access to Harem. All the security beacons took a vote when Veila appeared with her ship and decided to close the gate and cut ties with the station just to be on the safe side. Turns out that was a good decision. Obviously. Harem Station is no longer safe.”
Tell me something I didn’t already know. “But how am I here? And where is here?”
“As I said, you’re not here. You’re still on Harem. In your office, actually. Valor and Veila put you there.”
“How do you know that if you have no connection to Harem?”
“And now we’re back on track.” SB19 smiles and pans his hands wide in a gesture that reminds me a lot of ALCOR. My ALCOR. Old, reliable, devious, evil, safe ALCOR. I guess I never realized how well he did his job until he was gone and everything went to shit.
If I ever see him again I think I owe him a thank you.
“Dragonbee bots are quite talented. I’m not in contact with the station, but I am in contact with Flicka. Those annoying little fuckers have their creepy clicking feet in everything these days.”
“Wait. Yeah, I remember now. We were… fighting. I was trying to make an announcement and all those stupid fucking princesses turned on us.”
“Yes. But time has been frozen. And Veila and Valor have taken over. Luckily your pet beebot injected you with something a little while ago. You don’t have much longer.”
“Wait. Flicka is trying to kill me?”
“I don’t think so. But one can’t ever really know what goes on inside the mind of a dragonbee bot. And time is a tricky thing. So very unreliable, even on the most local scale. Add in the fact that Harem Station is host to a spin node and actual people on board who can control it, and we’ve got ourselves a problem. How much do you understand about time, Crux?”
I blink at him, confused at the fast pace of shifting ideas. “What?”
SB19 snaps his fingers. “Please. Keep up! We’re on a schedule here. Now, tell me what you know about time.”
Time. I open my mouth to tell him obvious things like… it… ticks off? It’s… reliable.
But I stop myself. Because time isn’t reliable. It’s actually quite slippery.
I think back to our escape from Wayward Station twenty years ago. Right after we sent Corla through the spin node. And then I’m there. Literally. The endless gray room I’m in shimmers and resolves into the interior of the ship and I see my sixteen-year-old self, sitting at a console with a terrified look on his face. He’s worrying about time. I remember that now. He—I—was worried about Corla and the time difference between the two sides of a spin node.
It fades back into the darkness and I sigh, wondering, suddenly, if I’d do anything different if I could do it all again.
“Crux?”
“Hmm?”
“Time? Tell me what you know!”
“Not much,” I admit. “I never really understood it.”
“Don’t feel bad about that,” SB19 says. “No one really does. And if they say otherwise, they’re just liars. But I have a better grasp than most.” The holograph of the ship begins to shimmer back into existence once again and SB19 smiles at virtual representations of Serpint and Draden, who are floating around in