“That was so not funny.”

  Erie had her arms folded in front of her, sitting on a foldout chair mounted to one of her newly acquired and recently modified hunter drones. She dubbed this one Reggie.

  Boris, the real Boris, laughed at her and said,

  “Apology accepted. Now you know how it feels.”

  “I was like, seventeen, Aly.”

  The man had fine brown hair, thick and wavy. Given how familiar he sounded with Erie, he had to be older than her. Probably over ninety. He did not look a day over twenty-five. Althea watched his throat when he spoke, enjoying the gentle bob of his Adam’s apple.

  “Call me Boris now, Erie. And like I said. We’re even now. How have you been, girl?”

  “You’re the one camping out here in the wastes, what happened?”

  Boris looked over at Althea and the others sitting at the table. Pontikos had dutifully noted their names for Althea, but none of them interested her the way the man who claimed to have history with Erie did.

  “That’s a story for a later time. I can say that we’re just doing what people do, surviving out here now. Won a turf war with a corp a few decades ago, and now we have a home to call our own.”

  “How do you eat?”

  Boris laughed at Erie’s question. The assembled proteins and fiber patties tasted good enough here. Althea had worse during long nights in college.

  He said,

  “Finish up here and I will show you personally.”

  They walked out of the arched bunker into the light. Two people stood next to Boris at all times. One of them was a short, wiry man wearing a slim figure CoreMil tactical suit. The other was a full figured tall woman who carried a long staff across her back and a small assortment of pistols on her belt.

  Althea watched the two people while they crossed a courtyard full of buildings. These buildings rose high into the air around them and showed signs of recent repair and construction. Someone, probably Boris and his crew, committed a massive amount of time and resources fixing these buildings.

  Then the dust settled and she saw it for the first time, rising between a pair of steel buildings. It shone in the morning light, reflecting the low sun back into her eyes. Still, the fin looked majestic from this perspective, like a vast whale rising from the earth and waving to the people down below.

  “What is it?”

  Erie opened and closed her mouth and Boris whispered,

  “It’s a spaceship. Or at least it was.”

  Erie turned to the old man and bounced as she said,

  “Does it still work?”

  Boris motioned to the ship and said,

  “Why don’t you go check it out?”

  Erie raced forward ahead of her new human-sized drone while it kept pace with her. She slowed as she giggled and jumped onto the open arms of her drone. The drone sped up as Erie pointed and urged the creature on.

  Althea stopped near Boris who smiled at Erie’s response.

  “What is that place?”

  He shrugged.

  “Funny answer to that question. For Erie and me, that place is home. It’s where the two of us turned into adults.”

  “For other people?”

  Althea inclined her head toward the children and other adults running through the city.

  Boris smiled at her, pulling the hood of his cloak out and away from his hair as he did,

  “For those people, it’s home too. The only home most of them ever knew.”

  Althea sat under an awning that protruded from the line of buildings facing the crashed spaceship. Boris sat at the table with her while his two guards sat at a nearby table. He settled himself in the chair and Althea said,

  “You’ve known Erie for decades then? Was she always like that?”

  Boris chuckled as he nodded and a woman stopped by to leave a tin cup of a clear alcohol in front of him.

  “She sure was.” He sipped from the cup and motioned to Althea, “do you want any?”

  Althea shook her head.

  “I am good. Tell me something about Erie.”

  Boris took a big draught from his cup and leaned back in his seat, careful not to let the table legs leave the ground.

  “There’s a lot to cover. Any specifics?”

  “Sure, how does someone like her end up with Surge?”

  Boris laughed and said,

  “That’s an okay story. Let me think and decide what to tell you a sec.”

  He drained his cup and wiggled it over the table. The same server appeared a second time and filled his cup from a tin jug.

  “Ninety years ago, give or take, I was a young nothing private in one of the most elite military forces the galaxy has known. Sure, I was a nothing private, but I stood head and shoulders over the loftiest non-Surge colonels. At least I thought I did. Surge had everything and they treated us like descendants of royalty.”

  He took a sip and pointed to the buildings around him,

  “Of course, this is the nicest extended deployment I have ever had. So I was a dumb shit back then. But my point stands. To make the cut into Surge, you had to be a planet-cracking badass. I was twenty-two, in the best physical shape of my life, loaded to the skin with top secret military implants and more training that most people receive their whole lives. And that was before I failed Surge Selection twice.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  I heard stories of guys spacing themselves the seventh time SurgeFor refused them.

  My point is, we were all hardcore and we knew it.”

  Boris sipped from his cup again and this time set it down without resuming his story right away. Althea cocked her head and said,

  “Is that it, Surge was real hard to get into?”

  Boris laughed and waved the question off,

  “I am trying to suss out the right order for my story.”

  He lifted the cup, sipped, shook his head and then sipped again.

  “You know why Erie looks so young, right?”

  Althea shook her head and waited for Boris to answer,

  “It’s called Genopathic Ageria. When she was a baby, her parents had her receive a new genetic therapy regimen intended to prevent a host of congenital problems. Apparently they were both carriers for some nasty conditions.”

  Althea cut in,

  “They could afford infant genetic therapy? Were they rich?”

  Boris chuckled,

  “Yeah, they were. Really rich. I’ll get there.

  The therapy worked, prevented the cardio vascular conditions that might have killed her, but as a side effect her body’s aging process turned stunted. By the time she was about thirteen, her body stopped growing and producing natural growth hormones.

  Today, they could fix the whole mess with a pill, as I understand it. But back then, the only hope for her were massive, invasive implants as well as painful therapy whose outcomes were questionable. Neither she nor her parents were interested in those.

  So she sucked it up and lived with the body of a near-adolescent into her mid-twenties. As you might expect, she had trouble finding work despite her parent’s connections. And, as you intuited, they had connections everywhere.

  When they asked young Erie what she wanted to do, she told them a disturbing truth: she wanted to kill someone.”

  Boris laughed and turned his cup on the table.

  “I just love that image. Doting upper class family, sits their adoring, but barely post-pubescent looking daughter, down and asks her what she wants do with her life. And she answer: “murder some motherfuckers.”

  I like to think mommy and daddy had some objections that plan. But Erie was pretty stubborn and intent on what she wanted to.

  So here I was, four years of life as a hardcore badass under my belt. I’ve earned my lightning bolt a dozen times by then. I thought I was the biggest, swingingest dick in the whole galaxy, outside my unit. And that’s okay, because every single one of these other void crawlers with me had the same or equivalent skills. Then this thirteen-year-old fucking girl shows up aboard.

  All hell broke loose.”

  Boris took a renewed sip of his beverage; the server had been by again to refresh his cup. He settled and said,

  “You’re not ex-mil, right?”

  Althea nodded.

  “Right. This might not make much sense to civies with their clear comm channels and their secure networks. But out in the black in those days, we received our orders through short-burst encrypted repeaters.

  Though our group had the best comms in the black, that really only meant we never went anywhere without the ability to phone home when the shit hit the fan.

  But regular orders? Those were a mess. Rumor and innuendo flew across our ship like a cabin fire in zero G.

  And scuttlebutt said that new little girl really ended up placed with us and that she was more like an attached observer. In other words, she was a step below attention-seeking politician in terms of her welcome aboard our ship. I knew men who treated the cockroaches better than her.”

  Boris sighed and said,

  “Hell, I didn’t treat her great, not at first. This timid little thing who refused to speak more than a few words to us seemed like nothing more than trouble with a frilly package. Real soldiers would die keeping that girl alive and I could not see how the tradeoff landed in my favor.

  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t do the stuff the others did, but I ignored it. Until one of the groups of ladies went after her. Pour girl came bawling out of her bunk one night right in front of me.

  The moment she spotted me in the bulk, she knocked that crying shit off like she’d thrown a switch. I started to walk on by, ignoring her like the good team member I was. Then I saw that someone had dyed all of her underthings and most of her skivvies red. Worse yet, they used something that stank the whole hallway up.

  When I grabbed her arm, I expected her to shout or act surprised. Instead she shifted her weight and looked me in the eyes. She said,

  “Is this about to turn physical, Aly?”

  Shit man, those dead-fucking eyes. I tell you serious right here. I have only seen a handful of people with eyes like that. Like they imagined everyone around them dead. Most of those who had that look were lone survivors or MIA behind enemy lines for weeks. But this little girl wore a look that shocked me enough to let her go and stammer out a sincere apology.

  I said,

  “What happened to your gear there, kid?”

  Hoo boy did she light into me about the word “kid.” But she refused to tell me what happened. When three alphabitches from another squad walked by and asked each other what stank, I figured it out pretty quick.”

  Boris took a sip of his booze and wiped his chin. He seemed to be far enough into his cups now that he started to slur his words.

  “I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her ass to one of the sergeants.

  I could have handled the situation myself, or let the little girl handle it. But I was a good military man back then and that kind of BS on ship can cause some serious problems. And, if I’m being honest, I knew defending her would look good to the brass.

  Funny thing. The sergeant had no idea what the others were doing to that poor girl. Even Erie had declined to report the incidents until I did.

  That was when I made a mistake.

  I insisted the sergeant pull her to the support section of the ship. Nine out of ten hands aboard a Surge vessel are Surge-trained. But one in ten aren’t. And the brass had long ago learned what happened if you mixed the wrong kind of support in with Surge regulars. The support could never hang. Why they forgot that lesson then was a mystery to me.

  And the sergeant disabused me of that mystery in short order. In the course of a semi-private dressing down, my sergeant informed me that not only was my suggestion improper, but defied the very sense of esprit de corps our team lived and died by.

  I thought he was cracked until he turned to Erie and asked if the rest of the members of her squad knew about the mistreatment.”

  Boris laughed,

  “Then I realized the entire problem was a big communications clusterfuck starting from the very top. That post-adolescent-looking girl was a full fledged member of our flying kill squad. Her Surge Selections scores were not the best in the outfit, but they were as good as mine.

  Shit. After that night, that sergeant fed Erie’s selection films to every Surge-force recruit on board.

  Before he dismissed her, he added one more odd order I should have expected. He told her she could wear her kit if she wanted and was allowed to defend herself the next time one of her teammates tried to haze her.

  A few days later, the whole ship got involved when our captain learned about it. Erie and I were moved to the same squad and her former squad members received the public ass-reaming of their lives. The sergeants who fucked up the assignments and communications did too.”

  Althea said,

  “Was she a drone operator back then?”

  Boris nodded,

  “Drone Op and Medic primary, secondary mechanic and LR-support.”

  Althea said,

  ‘That sounds wild. Did they accept her after that?”

  Boris laughed again, slapping his knee as he did,

  “Fuck no. Are you kidding me? That made things worse. Now that I’m older and less of a dipshit, I can kind of see what the sergeants were trying to do: make their new “odd” recruit fit in, not by ordering it, but by letting the others discover her usefulness organically. Obviously, that did not work. The old standards of pulling her gloves off and finding at least one sucker willing to watch her back — I wasn’t the only one, or even the first, but I did watch her back — finally worked when Erie beat the chrome from a few of her tormentors and paraded their naked bodies about the ship suspended from her drones.”

  Althea grinned and said,

  “She sounds… colorful.”

  Boris slapped his knee and said,

  “That is a way to say it. I always like twenty pounds of blast in a two pound bag.”

  Althea laughed with him as Erie rode up to them, carried by one of her drones.

  “What are you two talking about?” She held her hands up and said, “Wait, never mind, I don’t care! Althea! Come with me and check out this ship! Part of the A-G system still works. And there’s hot water!”

  Althea almost knocked her chair over with the force of her abrupt movement.

  “You mean showers? I am down for that, let’s go!”

  Boris stood with the two women and said,

  “Mind if I follow you? Some things I want to check up on in the ship.”

  Erie swatted at him and said,

  “Of course we mind. Find your own showers!”

  All three chuckled as they approached the downed ship.