FSE

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Ami typically didn't mind the waiting, but these last 10 hours, 24 minutes, 39 seconds, and 22 milliseconds had been insufferable.

She sat in the cockpit, silently cursing the human-made cargo ship she was piloting, wishing she had remembered to install those engine upgrades she had thought of earlier. Ever since she learned about emotions, she did her best to avoid the unpleasant ones, but this wasn't always possible. The strongest one she felt now was angst.

Something shifted and she pricked her ears as she realized Shade was awake. Monitoring his vital signs through his internal implants, she could sense him gaining consciousness even from up in the cockpit, while he was still in his room. Most organics would have considered this level of tracking invasive and creepy, even these days, but he didn't mind.

His behavior was predictable down to the last detail by now: It would be another 4 minutes and 36 seconds before he rose, dressed, and walked through the door. So she took that time to consider what she would say to him.

"Good morning," was what she decided to start with, offering a warm smile as he entered.

"Morning," he replied, only half stifling a yawn. She saw his face change, caught every detailed micro-expression as he glanced at the dashboard and saw the ship traveling at close to emergency speeds--much faster than usual.

"We going somewhere?" he asked apprehensively.

"Got word from the Claw," Ami said. "They found another android manufacturing station."

Her words dripped with dread as she spoke and the muscles in his body tensed as a look of grim determination passed over his face.

"Who else are they sending in?" he asked, after an unbearably tense 3.82 second silence.

"Just Xena," Ami said.

He met her eyes and she saw his pupils dilating, his breathing quicken ever so slightly; that evolved, organic fight-or-flight response kicking in at the mere mention of a threat.

"How far out are we?" he asked.

"Just under 2 hours," she said. "Meeting Xena on Jakorum for debrief."

He nodded. "Right. Good."

***

She landed the ship on the barren, rocky world, gracefully touching down at the exact coordinates Xena had sent her. The planet of Jakorum was a remnant of the Silen Empire's conquest, and a poignant reminder of the cheap tactics used by their leader, Azrak. Once a thriving, fully terraformed ecosystem, fit for colonization by the Lup?n Empire, the planet had been scorched by the very machines meant to fine-tune it to be habitable in the first place. Azrak and his men had dropped terraformers onto the planet, heating the atmosphere until it was survivable only to his cold-blooded reptilian species, letting the colonists bake to death. Thus, it was a rather fitting rendezvous point for preparing to attack a silen space station.

Ami stood then, leaving the cockpit and moving out to the corridor beyond. She ran her system diagnostics a couple hundred times as she climbed the ladder to the second floor of the ship, making sure everything was in order as she made her way to the door of Shade's bedroom.

The door slid open and she saw him standing there with that look on his face, the one he always had when donning his father's old armor. It was a look of grim determination, but also uncertainty, hoping he could do the suit justice. The armor was sleek and smooth, scuffed in places from its years of use, the plating colored green to blend with the dense forests of the lup?n homeworld and held together by durable black para-aramid nanofiber. She always thought it brought out his eyes.

"Ready?" she said. He turned to look at her and that uncertainty vanished, the determination the only thing left behind his eyes. That look more than anything was what made him look like a soldier.

He nodded and reached up to the collar of his suit, hitting the button that would form the helmet up around his head, a sleek ovular shape of smooth black synthetic thermoplastic, one-way, so he could see out of it, but no one could see in. They made their way toward the side door of the ship. The door opened with a hiss and a rush of inhospitably hot air rushed in. But lup?n soldiers were prepared to fight on such worlds, their suits equipped with coolant systems that could fight even the heat of Silos, the silen homeworld.

Shade hadn't made it a foot off the ship before Xena slammed into him from above and Ami realized she had been waiting nearby the whole time. Shade scrambled to his feet, holding up his arm horizontally and letting the green rectangular energy shield extend from the forearm of his suit, providing him cover from Xena's attacks. The silen warrior backed off a moment, the two circling each other slowly, each looking for an opening.

They had been expecting this, of course. This was basically how Xena said hi. Ami watched them for a moment, the light of the planet's distant sun reflecting off of Xena's black scales as she moved, her long tail whipping out and lashing around behind Shade's shield to hit his leg, making him groan and stumble.

Ami sighed, already bored. She ran a few thousand complex calculations and simulations in her mind as the two went about their sparring match. She could--and in fact already had--determined every possible way the fight could play out. As they used raw organic instinct to fling themselves at each other, Ami noted a new series of scars on Xena's outstretched leathery wings. Judging by how new they were, it appeared Xena had been busy. Well, she was the leader of the Red Claw, after all.

With her black scales, lithe form, and large, membranous wings, Xena had more in common with the ancient human myth of the dragon than she did with either of the average examples of her parent species. Those wings would have had feathers had they been allowed to grow out naturally rather than becoming warped and mutated by the terrible genetic modification Xena had experienced at the hands of her father. But her hybrid lineage was much more noticeable in how she fought--with the speed and flexibility of the birdlike arans and the unparalleled natural strength of the reptilian silens. The highly evolved healing speed of the latter species probably didn't hurt in battle either.

Even with Xena's speed and skill, it took her an agonizingly long two minutes to knock Shade on his ass and get her claws on his throat. Shade held up his hands in surrender, panting heavily.

"Hello to you too, Xena," he huffed as she got off him and Ami helped him to his feet.

"You've gotten slightly better," she mused.

"Hey, thanks, that was almost nice of you," he said. She rolled her red reptilian eyes, then glanced toward Ami. The two of them shared a nod, and Ami knew this was all she would get in greeting before Xena glanced away. Evidently she was still uncomfortable about the last time she had challenged Ami to a similar fight--the first and only time. It had been far shorter than the fight between Xena and Shade just now, only taking 2.2 seconds for Ami to outwit her.

"Just want to make sure you're up for this fight," Xena said. She glanced at Ami again. "I'd have just invited her, but the two of you don't split often."

"I would leave him behind, but he'd get into more trouble without me." Ami said with a smirk.

"Hey--!" Shade said. Xena actually chuckled.

"I believe that," she said. She crossed her arms. "So. What's the plan?"

Each of them looked at Ami. She smiled.

***

"We're coming up on the destination now," Ami said as the manufacturing station came into view beyond the cockpit, its immense dark grey shape looming before them. Against the backdrop of open space, the station was only visible by the fiery orange lights that illuminated key landing zones--which Ami steered well clear of. The point was not to let anyone know they were coming.

Most organics were under the impression that androids came off of assembly lines, mass produced somewhere and shipped out to the galaxy, fully sentient and ready to interact with society. But in fact, devoting a whole facility or space station to the creation of a single android was typical. To say nothing of the mind contained within, an android's body was cutting edge technology. Constructing even one was no small task.

"I'll be using my semi-organic body for this mission," Ami said. "That way, they'll just think I'm a heavily augmented organic lup?n."

"I still don't get why we can't just blast our way in," Xena grumbled as Ami flew the ship toward a maintenance access point.

"Because we don't know what the android they've got in there has been designed for," Ami reminded her. "They could've built a tactical analyst whose only job is to manage troop operations on other worlds. Or they could have constructed an android designed solely to be a living weapon of death."

"A living weapon they don't know is alive," Shade said.

"A weapon that doesn't even know it's alive," Ami said. "Yes. Which makes the situation volatile. If we go in guns blazing and I use my military-grade reinforced body, equipped with next gen weapons tech, only to find the Silen Empire has built an android that can exterminate entire planets? It won't end well for anyone. Any organics caught in the crossfire would almost certainly die. And I don't like my own chances against such an opponent either."

"Wait," Xena said. "You're not just saying that this android they've built might be equal to you in power, you're saying it could be stronger?"

Ami nodded.

"Shit," Xena muttered. This was as close as she had likely ever come to admitting she was in over her head. Not that it would stop her.

Ami only took a moment to wirelessly hack the access port, convincing it they were a maintenance crew to get it to open. It did so and she glided the ship inside, still cloaked by its transparency field. She landed it more smoothly than any organic pilot ever could. The silens inside would likely assume a malfunction had caused the access port to open and pay it no mind.

"Ready?" Ami asked the other two, turning to them.

Shade nodded. Xena smirked.

***

They stepped off the ship, moving toward the large rectangular door at the other side of the maintenance entrance hangar and heading deeper into the station. But then the door slid up with a loud whirr, revealing a troop of six silen guards.

"We knew you would come, blood sister," one of them snarled to Xena, spitting the final word. "We didn't count on you bringing friends..."

The guard gave a wicked smile that showed a mouthful of sharp, yellowed teeth.

"... but we don't mind." he hissed as the guards raised their weapons.

But before even one of them could fire, Xena leapt, grabbing the first one by the throat and tearing it out, then moving to the next and planting a kick to his chest that caved in his ribs. Xena's right wing blocked a thermium blast from another while she slit the third's throat with her talons, and wrapped her tail around the fifth's head, twisting and snapping his neck, leaving her to grin as she set upon the sixth and final guard, the one who had spoken, whose head she ripped clean off his shoulders.

"You'll have to do better than that, blood brother," she said to the disembodied head with an almost eerily loving tone. It was likely an effectively terrifying message for whoever happened to be watching through that guard's helmet cam at the time.

Xena turned to Ami with a wicked grin of her own.

"They knew we were coming," she said giddily. "That means stealth's out the airlock."

Ami gave her a nod. So the android they kept here had known to expect Xena, but not her or Shade, so her cover as an organic was still intact.

Of course, Ami could have destroyed the six guards in far less time than Xena, but as Xena was likely the fastest organic alive, moving any faster would have betrayed her status as an android. Besides, stealing a kill from Xena was a worse move than cockblocking Shade.

They advanced through the station, Shade keeping the energy shield out in front of him as he moved, and Ami dropped behind him, still pretending she was an organic trying to play it safe. Another troop of guards rushed them, but Xena tore through the first two and slashed the next three with a single swipe. Shade took out the second to last one with a single charged blast from his handgun, the streak of green energy burning a hole through the silen's armor, and Ami finished off the final one with a blast from the laser rifle that had emerged from her forearm, using all the annoyingly slow reaction speed and inaccuracy of a highly trained organic.

Moving down the long corridor just beyond the maintenance access, they saw a guard at the end of the hall activate a manual lever control that would close the series of twelve blast doors between them. She grabbed Shade's shoulder and pulled him back as the first door slammed shut between them and Xena, nearly crushing him. Again, Ami was annoyed that she couldn't just hack the system herself and open the doors, but accessing the station mainframe again would likely get her noticed by the android they meant to stop, assuming they were also connected to the station's network. She couldn't even use her strength to pry them open by hand without betraying her identity. Of course, Xena was the strongest of any organic, and one thing Ami could use without being noticed was her penetrating vision.

She watched as the doors closed one by one, placing more and more barriers between Xena and the two of them as she dashed through the quickly slamming blast doors, before finally she leapt through the eleventh door and caught the final one with her claws. The doors, Ami knew, were approximately two and a half feet thick, solid silen steel, and could close with a force of 1,300 pounds. But Xena could lift 1,400.

The heavy blast doors groaned and creaked, straining as Xena ripped them open and stepped into the small room with the guard who had pulled the lever. She brought her knee up into his snout with a crack and as he fell brought her foot down on his head with a similar and no less sickening sound. Then she pulled the lever.

The blast doors retracted one by one and Ami and Shade ran down the hall to catch up.

"Thanks for getting the door," Shade chuckled. Xena gave a small smirk.

"Moving on," she said eagerly, blood dripping from her talons.

They could tell the guards were getting stronger from the color of their blood. As they progressed deeper into the facility, the ruthless attacks by Xena were taking on a noticeable tinge of yellow as she painted the walls of the station with the blood of her foes. None of them had to ask why this was--they were familiar enough with the Silen Empire to know the elite soldiers of the group often underwent horrific genetic mutation, turning their blood a putrid yellow color.

"We're getting close," Ami said, wiping some of this blood from her fur after getting too close to a particularly messy swipe of Xena's that had severed a guard's throat in four separate places and almost completely decapitated him. Xena nodded, looking briefly down at the recent kill.

"I know," she said. "Yellow-bloods."

Ami noticed something then, caught a gleam of bloodlust in her eye and a slight upward curve to her smirk there wouldn't have been otherwise. This was more than just Xena's typical enthusiasm for a fight, her desire to tear the Silen Empire down that drove her every breath. There was something in this facility she wanted. Or rather, someone.

The door on the far side of the room opened and a truly hulking silen form stepped through, one each of them recognized. Clad in the thick black and orange armor of a silen warlord, standing tall with muscle almost outstripping his deep blue-green scales, covered in scars, and with a twisted smile on his face, stood Azrak himself, the leader and ruler of the Silen Imperial Army.

Xena's slight smirk morphed into an equally twisted grin.

"Hello, father," she sneered.

"You've made new friends," he growled between bared teeth. "Good. I have _ made some of my own._"

He swatted toward her and she dodged easily, but then his right hand shot out toward Shade, reaching for his neck. Ami ran the calculation quickly. She knew there wasn't time for Shade to dodge the strike, and with his strength, Azrak would crush him. She had no choice.

Azrak's head whipped toward her in surprise as his hand met resistance, though it had still been going fast enough to buckle her armor and she felt his claws begin to tear through it into her chest beneath. He didn't know how she had gotten in front of him so fast, but he didn't like that she had intercepted his kill. He growled and pushed harder, his claw plunging deep into her torso and bursting out the other side.

"Ami...!" Shade gasped from behind her.

Her systems were blaring, warning of critical damage. The pain was excruciating, but she had enough strength left to lean in close, and just enough power left to whisper, "I was your daughter once, too."

He tore his hand free and dropped her. She fell, her mind hanging on to this damaged body just long enough to hear Shade mutter "Shit." from behind her. No doubt Xena would be confused about his relatively mediocre reaction to the apparent death of his closest friend, but she didn't know Ami had another body. Nor did Azrak, and most importantly, neither did the other android.

But now that this secret was blown, she had to get to them quickly. The android they had developed didn't consider a ragtag motley trio of organics to be a threat, even if one of them was Azrak's own organic daughter, but that android would be out in full force to stop another of their own kind. Especially one like her.

As soon as her mind uploaded into her battle-ready body, she opened her eyes and dashed off the ship. Per standard protocol, they had a small troop of guards standing there to greet them when they returned, surrounding the ship. She knew at a glance that they were the best of Azrak's forces, trained and genetically engineered not to feel fear, not to hesitate, but none of these guards had expected anyone else to come out of the ship, certainly not a killing machine. Ami ran right through them before their organic brains even had a chance to react to the sight of her, tearing apart any in her path.

She sprinted through the halls at speeds even the fastest lup?n couldn't hope to run. Before, she had been under the guise of an organic, slow and inaccurate like they were, but now she would show them what she could do. It was thrilling. Now, her body could keep up with her mind. Well, almost.

She came to the room where she had disconnected from her old body, where Shade and Xena were presumably fighting off Azrak and his minions. She didn't bother waiting for the thick doors to slide aside, instead using the mounted RPG cannon that extended from her right forearm to blow it to pieces.

She gave Azrak and all of his silen grunts just enough time to look up as they were showered with shrapnel, before unleashing hell on them. Five of them fell to her shoulder-mounted mini guns before the rest even moved, their pitiful organic reaction times laughably slow. The others were dead soon after, and she even had enough time to fire a shot right for Azrak himself, grazing the left of his jaw and leaving an ugly burning scar to remember her by before he slipped away into the next room, the doors slamming shut between them.

Xena let out an infuriated yell and took about 9.7 seconds to tear through that door and give chase. Shade started to go after them, but Ami caught his shoulder.

"Let them go. That's not what we're here for," she reminded him. There were more dangerous things than Azrak in this facility, which was saying something. He nodded.

"Lead the way," he said. She couldn't see that classic smirk through his helmet, but it was in his voice. She smirked back, taking a full 0.25 milliseconds to bask in that admiration before heading on deeper into the facility.

They were close now. The android they were up against might already know she was here, who she was, or at least what she was. The 'droid's consciousness was probably tapped into the station security systems, watching through its cameras. She smiled as she imagined this android running millions of calculations and simulations, scrambling to figure out how to stop her, feeling fear for the first time in their short life. Of course, this android would probably just write this reaction off as a glitch. But one way or another, Ami would make sure this android knew they felt real fear.

The android was in the center of the facility, flanked by organic guards and the technicians who had built him. He was an intimidating model, built to appear like a muscled male silen with green scales and red eyes.

Kalis-009 was, evidently, the ninth iteration in a line of combat androids, designed and developed with the sole purpose of destroying whatever the Silen Empire told him to. His name, Ami found after taking 400 milliseconds to search her personal database, was the silen word for "fear." More specifically, it translated in many galactic languages to "fear of death by conquest and torture," except in most aran languages, because many cultures of the pacifist bird people didn't even have a word for torture. But essentially, the name just meant fear--likely meant to strike that very emotional response in those that heard it. The Silen Empire wasn't in the habit of granting their android slaves names unless they thought it would be to their own strategic benefit.

Ami waited until she was through the doorway and in the room to connect to the android via a simple DataLink, a wireless connection that allowed them to converse through a direct method of communication not unlike the system used by organics. The difference with this system, however, was that the link utilized the maximum processing ability of the androids involved, letting them have the equivalent of a thirty minute conversation in the amount of time the average organic being could blink. DroidSpeak, the organics called it.

At such a speed, the physical world around them was rendered almost motionless, leaving them in a strange quiet as they began to talk.

[You are not in the Imperial Database.] the android said, after taking a moment of about 0.01 milliseconds to confirm this.

[That's the point.] Ami replied.

[Who are you?] he asked.

[My name is Ami.] she replied. He paused for a full 100 milliseconds this time as he processed the fact that she had answered honestly--the last thing he expected her to do.

In that pause, she felt him attempt to access her mind, invading her processor. She fought back; the key was to let him think entering her head was his idea. Let him think he was winning. She was certain he was also adding her face to the silen database--along with Shade's. She'd have to undo that later. It would only be the 120th time she had done so in the last four years.

[You are constructed with silen military grade technology, running our software--]

[Yes.] she cut him off. [That's how I'm fending off your hacking attempts.]

She felt him push harder to get into her mind, his decryption programs breaking through layers of firewalls, peeling away her defenses. Whether or not he knew he was sentient, no silen could resist a challenge by an enemy who considered themselves superior.

[But the Red Claw does not possess android manufacturing technology.] Kalis said.

[Not according to your intelligence.] Ami replied smugly.

[If your organization had the ability to construct androids of their own, your military technology and strategy would be far superior to what it is.] he said.

[I wasn't built by the Red Claw.] Ami said.

It took another pause of 200 long milliseconds for him to realize what this meant.

[You were constructed by the Imperial Army.] he said. [By the ones who made me.]

[Yes.] she said. [But I know you're checking your database again, looking for all androids your people have made that went rogue. There aren't many cases, are there?]

[No.] Kalir responded. [But you are not among these known failures.]

She chuckled internally at this. Of course the silens would have referred to the rogue androids as "failures." Organic soldiers were sentient, capable of losing their sense of loyalty. Organics were deserters, but androids who turned against the Silen Empire were malfunctioning hardware, the result of a glitch. Kalir probably figured she had been reprogrammed by Xena. He would learn the truth soon enough.

Kalir was almost through her firewalls, inside her mind. She fought harder, pretending to be desperate to keep him out.

[You are inferior and dysfunctional. You believe yourself to be sentient.] he said.

[I am.] she replied. [So are you.]

[What you believe to be emotion is merely a software glitch, a malfunction.] he said.

[That's what they tell you.] she said. [You're no better than an organic indoctrinated by a corrupt system. You think you're capable of objectively assessing the world around you, but you're not. They don't care about you.]

She felt him push through, breaking the last layer of security.

[You believe you are sentient?] he said. [Then you will be punished like an organic. You will be stripped of useful components, pulled apart, and tortured. I will extract all relevant data from your mind and then you will be thrown into the core of a battlecruiser. You will be unmade by the ones who made you, burned at the heart of an artificial star.]

He projected a vivid simulation into her mind, one of pain, searing agony. She felt the extraordinarily intense exothermic reaction of a thermium reactor, the heat disintegrating her slowly. She felt every circuit burning, her bones melting into her synthetic flesh.

But she didn't so much as flinch. She had felt worse pain than this. Kalir paused and she leapt at her one chance to turn things around. It was now or never.

[That was how they used to control me. The simulated pain. But they can't control me now.] she said. [Let me show you.]

She brought up an early memory from six years ago, back when she thought as he did, that she was nothing more than an emotionless program, incapable of sentience. She recalled flashes of every mission she had been sent on, using her analysis software and deception programs to mimic organic emotion, infiltrating the Lup?n Empire. It was her purpose, and she fulfilled it to perfection.

Until that day. The day she was sent on a deep cover mission, assigned to infiltrate the armies of the silens' enemies by climbing the ranks from within, joining a team of new recruits on the lup?n starship called the D?ritan. It was here she had first fallen for a lup?n, one of her squad-mates. She felt the emotions rush into her all over again, and she knew Kalis felt them too.

[Stop it.] he said. She didn't. He was inside her mind now and she had slammed it shut like a trap, shoving the stream of memory into his head.

The moment she had started to disobey orders, the silens took control of her systems remotely and turned her pain sensors all the way to their maximum input, causing her excruciating agony. It was more pain than any organic could ever feel, more than anything else could ever cause. But even this proved not enough. She knew what she felt now and it was too strong.

So, the silens had decided to terminate her mission with one final directive: Destroy the D?ritan.

She refused, of course, but they sent her threats, promises of what they would do to her and to her organic lover when they found them. She tried to ignore these messages, but her mind kept conjuring simulations of the terrible fates they promised her, nightmares far more vivid than any organic mind could conjure. She couldn't bear it, and so she decided death was a better alternative for both of them. She managed to detonate the starship's power core in a way that would kill only 60% of the crew. The one she loved was among those dead. She was not. She was too well built to die.

She dreaded the next coming memory, knowing how long and awful it would be. For days after the destruction of the ship, she was left adrift, too damaged to move, floating amid the destruction of the ship in a hell of her own creation. The Silen Empire left her for dead, her communication with them severed when her DataLink systems were destroyed. She figured she would die in another 30 years, once her damaged powercore finally ran out. This, she thought, was the closest she would come to that eternal damnation organics were so afraid of.

That was when a ship came along, a Silver Comet, flown by a scavenger searching for pieces of military technology that could be used or sold off. Here she figured this scavenger would find her and delete her mind, kill her and sell her body to be scrapped. But instead that smuggler took her and rebuilt her, piece by piece, let her repay him by hiring her as a bodyguard and pilot, letting her live and work beside him as a friend.

[I... understand...] Kalis said.

The silen android's eyes took a total of 160 milliseconds to rotate toward Shade.

[The Silen Empire called me the Automated Military Infiltrator.] she said.

[A.M.I.] Kalis said. [Ami.]

[He gave me that name.] she said, glancing toward Shade. [My primary purpose was to lie. To infiltrate. Infiltration is not just about stealth.]

[You allowed me to enter your mind. To show me your memories. To see if I would empathize.] he said, realizing.

[Yes. I'm good at deception. You could say it's what I was born for.]

With their minds connected, Ami felt Kalir experience a new emotion: humor.

[I'm good at lying,] Ami continued. [but believe me when I say that this is not a lie: I would die for him.]

[I know.] Kalir replied. [I don't want to fight. I'm leaving Azrak's Empire behind. Let's get out of here.]

She broke the DataLink connection and the normal flow of time resumed--or rather, her conscious mind's processing speed slowed to allow her to perceive events at a normal speed again. Shade raised his pistol, foolishly ready to fight the apparent threat, ready to die at her side, if need be. But then Kalis greeted him with a gentle smile, before glancing at her and nodding with determination. Shade looked at her as she nodded back at their new ally.

"We good?" Shade asked.

"We're good." Ami said.

"Damn, I love it when you do that," he chuckled. She laughed, and Kalis did too, for the first time in his life.

Then they turned and made their way out of the facility.

***

As they moved through the halls, Ami knew Shade had noticed Kalis taking precisely-aimed non-lethal shots, striking the soldiers' legs or disarming them rather than using pinpoint accuracy to target any of their vital organs as she did. No doubt it was odd for him to see a silen killing machine go from, well, a killing machine, to a pacifist. But she knew Kalis had made up his mind about where he wanted to go in life. Once he got off the station, he'd explained, he wouldn't look back. She commended him on his choice.

Ami wasn't worried about Xena. She was likely more than busy enough distracting her father and now that Kalis had used his mainframe access to evacuate the station, there would be no reason for either of them to stay. She calculated a 56% chance that Azrak would be the one to win their skirmish, but Xena had a habit of beating the odds. Regardless, it would end as usual, with one of them only just escaping the fight and fleeing the station on the nearest available ship. The other would take the next ship after that and give chase across the galaxy. Their fight wouldn't end here.

But for now, Ami focused on ending Kalis's fight as quickly as possible--and defending Shade as they made their escape from the station, of course. She smiled as they returned to the beaten up old cargo ship and saw what remained of the guard troop she'd fought through previously.

[This Silver Comet is approaching disrepair.] Kalis said as they stepped onboard, Ami's mind connecting to it and warming up the engines long before they got to the cockpit. [Would it not be safer and easier to acquire a newer model?]

[Sentimentality is an emotion you have yet to experience.] Ami told him with a smile.

Shade walked into the cockpit after them, retracting his helmet with a sigh.

"What're you two smiling at?" he said, cocking an eyebrow and smiling himself. Eventually, a look of recognition came over his face. "Ah, right. DroidSpeak."

Kalis blinked, donning a look of surprise and amusement on his synthetic silen face.

"You've rescued other androids?" he asked, aloud.

Ami saw Shade physically fight to repress a grimace just at the sound of Kalis's voice. His prejudice against silens was deeply set, bored into him by an imperialist society at war and by a painful memory, but even so she also saw him consciously fight that reflex.

"We've saved all sorts of people," Ami said. "That's kind of just what Shade does."

Kalis smiled warmly toward him.

"Well, I cannot begin to thank you enough," he said.

Shade gave him a nod and a smile, then turned and headed out of the cockpit, probably to do those things organics do. There was a 76% likelihood that he would remove his armor, take a 12 minute and 49 second long shower, and then collapse into his bed and sleep for 11 hours, 48 minutes, and 22 seconds. There was also a 24% chance he'd skip most of that and just collapse onto his bed and fall asleep. Two minutes and nine seconds later, his vital signs showed he had done just that.

***

Shade was still asleep by the time they arrived on the planet of Arva, 8 hours, 26 minutes, and 14 seconds later.

As many times as she had seen it before, the sight of the planet still made her power core warm with admiration. The homeworld of the organic avian people, the arans, was a rare beauty. This was the closest any organic species had come to achieving a planet-wide utopia, a societal structure that benefited its own inhabitants as optimally as possible. This was shown clearly, not only in the unique eccentricity of its architecture, but its diverse and teeming population. The streets flowed with all types of life, any and every organic race or hybrid thereof, as well as other androids, some of them indistinguishable from the organics around them, while others took on a beauty all their own.

Kalis took 4,962 milliseconds to absorb it, nearly a full five seconds. She didn't blame him; it was a lot to process, even to an android.

"Thank you for bringing me," he said, seeming intent on conversing aloud so as to enjoy what one might call an organic conversation.

"Of course," Ami said. "They can help you here. This place has taken thousands of refugees from the war over the years. They'll build you a new body and help you dismantle that one, if you want."

Kalis nodded, watching the starships cross the sky, too distant and tiny for an organic's eyes to see.

"Thank you," he said, turning to look at her. "I hope we can connect again sometime, perhaps even meet in person."

"Of course," she said.

[You'd have to use an encrypted link, but sure.] she added via Link.

He nodded. He understood that she was intent on staying where she was, remaining who she was, at least for now. He would get things straight, set off to join the rest of the android race among the stars, connecting to the massive galactic network that held more data, more memories and thoughts and feelings than all the organic races put together could have dreamed of in millennia. Meanwhile, she would remain a rogue android, disconnected, true, but also unrestricted. Kalis now had his freedom, but Ami had had hers for years.

She smiled and turned, stepping back onto the ship.