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  Alicia hit her keys again, killing the jets and powering down the counter-grav. They landed in the shadow of the freight pad, and she shucked the safety harness.

 

  Alicia was sprinting for the pad stairs even while she protested.

  Tisiphone replied as Alicia cleared the stairs and rocked to a halt.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered, and closed her eyes as if that could make it go away. When she opened them again, the fully-armed Bengal-class assault shuttle was still sitting there.

 

 

 

 

 

  “Oh, God,” Alicia moaned, but she was already dashing for the ramp. She had no choice. Tisiphone was out of her mythological mind, but whether Uncle Arthur believed in her or not, the Fury had done too many fresh impossible things. Alicia would never get out of observation after this!

  The shuttle interior was cool, humming with the familiar tingle of waiting flight system. It was like coming home, despite the madness, and she charged through the troop section towards the flight deck. A freight canister was webbed to the deck, and she almost stopped when she saw the codes on it.

 

 

 

  Alicia moaned again as she flopped into the pilot’s couch and reached for the synth link headset. This couldn’t be happening. Trained mental reflexes reached out to the flight computers, but underneath them was a bubble of wild laughter. So far, in a single night, she’d escaped custody, assaulted a fellow Cadreman, stolen a skimmer worth at least twenty thousand credits, crashed through Fleet security onto a restricted military reservation, refused to stop when so ordered, and caused the destruction of said stolen skimmer and damage to sundry base facilities as the direct result of lawfully empowered personnel’s efforts to apprehend her—and none of that even compared to what she was about to do. Talk about grand theft! This shuttle alone represented a good sixty million of the Emperor’s credits, and if that canister really contained a suit of Cadre combat armor, the price tag was about to double. They’d build a whole new jail just so they could put her under it!

  Tisiphone pointed out with maddening cheer. Alicia felt her teeth grate but swallowed her savage reply, for the computers had accepted her and placed themselves at her disposal. It was a disturbing sensation, almost frightening, as their inhuman vastness clicked into place about her. She hadn’t felt it in a long time, and for just an instant she quailed, but then everything snapped into focus and she was home. The shuttle and she were one, its sensors her eyes and ears and nerves, its power plant her heart, its counter-gravity and thrusters her arms and legs. Joy filled her like cold fire, burning away the confusion and dismay, and she smiled.

  Tisiphone whispered.

  Alicia punched up Flight Control and announced her flight designation in a voice so calm it astonished her. There was a moment of silence, and her adrenalin spiked. Her intrusion had scrambled operations. Security had imposed a lock-down on all flights until they got to the bottom of it. Someone in FlyCon had her head together and was using her own initiative to hold all takeoffs until the situation was sorted out, or—

  “Cleared to go, Foxtrot-Two-Niner,” FlyCon said, and she swallowed another tremulous laugh as her atmospheric turbines screamed.

  The shuttle sliced up through Soissons’ atmosphere, and there was no pursuit. None at all, and that was truly amazing. Of course, there was really no pressing need to pursue a purely intra-systemic craft. Where could it go, after all? For that matter, who in her right mind would steal an assault shuttle of all damned things?

  “So now what?” Alicia asked aloud.

 

  Alicia started to ask what they were rendezvousing with but bit her tongue and checked her computers for the proper coordinates. No doubt she would know soon enough. Too soon, judging by what had already happened.

  The shuttle swept higher, air-breathing turbines shutting down and thrusters firing to align its nose on one of the Fleet shipyards, and she frowned. If they wanted out of the system, they had to get aboard a starship, and that should have meant guile and stealth. Could Tisiphone be so confident—so crazy, she amended dourly—as to think they could hijack a ship?

  If so, she was finally up against something even she couldn’t manage. At absolute minimum, they needed a dispatch boat, and that meant a crew of at least eight. Not even a drop commando could force eight highly trained specialists to perform their tasks when all they had to do to maroon her was refuse to obey. And no way were Fleet officers going to help a crazed Cadrewoman steal their ship out from under them!

  They continued unchallenged on their flight path, and Alicia’s brows furrowed as she realized they weren’t headed directly for the shipyard after all. Their destination lay in a parking orbit of its own, and she brought her sensors to bear on it. It didn’t look like anyth—

  “No!” she gasped. “Tisiphone, we can’t steal that!”

 

  “No!” Alicia repeated, and unaccustomed panic sharpened her voice. “I can’t fly that thing—I’m no starship pilot! And . . . and . . .”

  the Fury said sternly. the Fury actually chuckled in her brain,

  Alicia tried to reply, but all that came out was a faint, inarticulate whimper as the shuttle continued toward the waiting alpha synth ship.

  Chapter Twelve

  The alpha synth glinted ominously in the light of Franconia.

  A cargo shuttle was docked on the number two rack, but Alicia’s momentary panic eased when she saw the fuselage number. It matched the one on the ship’s hull, so it must be an assigned auxiliary and not a bunch of yard workers waiting for her. Not that it made the situation much better.

  Her mind was numb, frozen by the impossibility of Tisiphone’s plan, yet she felt the ship’s sinister beauty. It lacked the needle-sharp lines of a sting ship, but the Fasset drive’s constraints imposed a sleekness of their own—different from those of atmosphere yet no less graceful—and it floated in space with the latent menace of a drowsing panther. She’d never expected to see one, especially not at such proximity, but she knew about them.

  The size of a big light cruiser yet possessed of more firepower than a battle-cruiser and faster than a destroyer, literally able to think for itself and respond with light-speed swiftness, an alpha synth was lethal beyond belief, ton for ton the most deadly weapon ever built by man. It was too small to mount worthwhile numbers of SLAMs, so it used the tonnage it might have wasted on them for even more broadside armament. Nothing smaller than a battleship could fight it, nothing but another alpha synth could catch it, and s
he hated to even think how Fleet would react if she and Tisiphone actually succeeded in stealing it. The damned thing cost half as much as a dreadnought just for starters, but having one of them running around loose in the hands of a certified madwoman would turn every admiral in the Fleet white overnight. They’d do anything to get it back.

  She tried not to consider that as she guided the Bengal mechanically toward the number one shuttle rack and through the docking sequence, yet she couldn’t stop the gibbering thread of horror in her thoughts. Bad enough to be hunted by every planet and ship of the Empire, but there was worse if their theft succeeded. Far worse, for there was only one way to pilot an alpha synth, and her throat tightened at the thought of meeting the ship’s computer. Of impressing it, mating with it, becoming one with it—

  She’d actually begun to undock before she could stop herself, and she closed her eyes, panting through clenched teeth while panic pulsed deep within her. But Tisiphone had burned all of her bridges; there was nowhere else to go, however terrifying the prospect, and she cursed with silent savagery.

 

 

  the mental voice said austerely.

 

 

 

 

 

  Tisiphone paused, then continued with a sort of stem compassion. A chill filtered through Alicia with the words. Not surprise, but a shivery tension as it was finally said. The Fury paused for a moment.

  Alicia bent her head and closed her eyes and knew Tisiphone spoke only the truth. She drew a deep breath, then straightened in her couch and removed her headset with steady fingers. A snake of fear coiled in her belly, but she climbed out of the couch and walked towards the hatch . . . and her fate.

  There was a security panel inside the alpha synth’s outer hatch. Alicia had no idea what sort of defensive systems it connected to—only that they would most assuredly suffice to eliminate any unauthorized intruder.

  Tisiphone commanded, and she bit her lip as her right arm rose under another’s control. Her index finger stabbed number-pad buttons in a sequence so long and complex it seemed to take forever, but then the outer hatch slid shut and the inner opened.

  Alicia’s arm was returned to her, and she stepped into the ship. Despite herself, she peered about curiously, for the rumors about these ships’ accommodations ranged from the simply bizarre to the macabre.

  What she actually saw was almost disappointingly normal, with neither vats of liquid nutrients to engorge the organic control component nor any sybarite’s dream of opulent luxury. The clean smell of a new ship hung in her nostrils with a hint of ozone and none of the homey scents of habitation. There was no dust. Every surface gleamed with new-minted cleanliness, unscuffed and unworn, impersonal as the unborn, yet she breathed out in almost unconscious relief, for there was no enmity in the quiet chirp of standby systems. The menace was a thing within her, not bare-fanged and overt.

  She followed Tisiphone’s silent prompting upship through surprisingly spacious living quarters. There were no personal touches, but the unused furnishings weren’t exactly spartan. Indeed, they were comfortable and well-appointed—which, she supposed after a moment’s thought, made sense. There was only a single human to provide for. Even in a ship as crowded with systems and weapons as this one, that left the designers room to make that human comfortable. And a chill whisper added, if she was going to be assigned to it for the remainder of her life, they’d better do just that.

  Her hand twitched at her side as she confronted the command deck hatch, and she allowed Tisiphone to raise it to the new number pad.

  she asked while she watched her finger entering numbers.

 

  A green light blinked, the hatch slid open, and Alicia stood on the threshold, peeping past it while she gathered her courage to cross it.

  The command deck was as pristine and new as the rest of the ship. The bulkheads were a neutral, eye-soothing gray, without the displays and readouts she was accustomed to, and there were no manual controls before the cushioned command couch. Of course not, she thought, eyeing the dangling link headset with dread fascination. The pilot didn’t fly an alpha synth ship; she was part of it, and while cyber synth ships required duplicate manual controls in case their AIs cracked and had to be lobotomized, there was no need for them here. An alpha synth went berserk only if its organic half did. Besides, no human could fly a starship without computer support, and there was too little room in a ship like this for a second computer net.

  She drew a deep breath and tried not to shrink in on herself as she approached the couch. She reached out, touching the headset’s plastic and alloy, the neural contact pad. The moment that touched her temple, she condemned herself to a life sentence no court could commute, and she shivered.

 

  Alicia bit back a scathing mental retort and drew another deep breath, then lowered herself gingerly into the couch. It moved under her, conforming to her body like a comforting hand, and she reached for the handset.

 

 

 

  Tisiphone replied calmly.

  <”Should.” Marvelous.> Alicia hesitated a moment longer, raised hand gripping the headset.

  She pulled down against the self-retracting leads, and the headset moved easily. She closed her eyes, trying to relax despite her fear, and settled it over her head.

  The contact pad touched her Alpha receptor, and something like an audible click echoed deep inside. It wasn’t the usual electric shock of interface with a synth unit—it wasn’t anything she’d ever felt. A sharp sense of mental pressure, of an aware
ness that was not hers and a strange balance between two separate entities doomed to become both more and less.

  How much of that, she wondered fleetingly, was real and how much was her own fearful imagination? Or was it—

  Her flickering questions died as a sudden, knife-clear thought stabbed into her. It was as inhuman as the Fury, but with no emotional overtones, no sense of self, and it burned in her brain like a shaft of ice.

  it asked, and before she could answer, it probed deep and knew her for an interloper.

  the emotionless thought was uncaring as chilled steel,

  She froze, trembling like a panicked rabbit, and felt a dangerous stirring beyond the interface. Terrified self-preservation commanded her to obey—a self-preservation which went beyond fear of punishment into the very loss of self—but she gripped the armrests and made herself sit motionless while a ghost flashed out through her receptor and the headset into the link.

  the cold voice said. A heartbeat of silence hovered, like one last chance to obey, and then the pain began.

  This computer was more sophisticated than any she had yet confronted, more than she had imagined possible, yet Tisiphone drove into it. She had no choice. There could be no retreat, and she had one priceless advantage; powerful as it was, only a fraction of its full potential was available to it. The AI within the computer was less than half awake, the personality it housed not yet aware of itself. It was designed that way, never waking until the destined organic half of its final matrix appeared, and the Fury faced only a shadow of the artificial intelligence in its autonomous security systems, only logic and preprogrammed responses without the spark of originality which might well have guided those systems to instant victory even over such as she.

  Defensive programs whirled her like a leaf with unthinking, electronic outrage, triggered by her touch as she invaded its perimeter, and she felt Alicia spasm as the computer poured agony into her neural receptor to drive her from the link, yet it scarcely registered. The joy of battle filled her, and though she had no strength to spare to shield her host from the pain—that struggle was hers alone—she opened a channel to the hoarded power of Alicia’s rage. It flooded into her, hot with the unique violence of mortal ferocity, and melded with her own elemental strength into something greater than the sum of its parts.

 
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