"Go ahead," Nexxali purred, leaning back in the commander's throne like she was lounging on a beach. "Shoot the only person who can help you."

  "What?! No, no, no..." The hologram flickered. "There's MORE fountains?! Marshal! You have to call the Seekers back! I can still…”

  “Ehhh, don’t feel like it.” Nexxali stretched.

  The gargantuan railgun swivelled towards my head. “You! Emperor of Earth! You’re clearly behind this mess.”

  “Am I really?” I asked. “How do you figure?”

  “The inexplicable behaviour of the Marshal… originated with you.” Slayer’s Sword stated. “You two are obviously working together.”

  “You got me,” I shrugged. “I am the mastermind of your downfall. Shoot me.”

  My statement seemed to stump the warship’s avatar. “...What?”

  “I’ve already died once today,” I said, pointing at the gaping, blood stained hole in my mask left by Nexxali's railgun. "Go ahead. Put another hole in me. See what happens."

  "Hrm." The hologram's eye trio squinted at me. "You're... some kind of a... magitek suit frame piloting a dead body. Damnation."

  "Yep," I confirmed. "Being dead is surprisingly convenient when the bad guys are constantly trying to kill you."

  The railgun wavered slightly.

  "That's... that's not possible,” the hologram muttered. “Humans don't have access to technology of this level, unless… Someone made that frame for you in a Corpse Seeker fabricator. Not a Marshal… Maybe a Datamancer?"

  "Look at Miss Detective ship over here," Nexxali said.

  "I should vaporize all of you!" The hologram's voice pitched higher, sprinkled with panic. "You've infected me with over eighty Astral Fountains! Do you have any idea what you've done?! I'm a Leviathan-class warship! I've served the Frontenachii Empire with valor... I've fully subjugated forty-seven worlds! I've decimated—"

  She stopped mid-rant as more warning displays bloomed on the command panels, each one showing a new contamination site.

  "Make that ninety-two fountains," Nexxali commented, studying the tactical display. "They're spreading nicely."

  "NICELY?!" Slayer's Sword shrieked. The pitch reminded me of a smoke alarm with a dying battery—high, persistent, and deeply annoying. "There is NOTHING nice about entropic contamination! My ward networks are collapsing! My dimensional anchors are destabilizing! My Incarnation Temple is... is gone. No, no, no... how could you do this to me?!"

  If holograms could have aneurysms, this one was working on it. "You. This is YOUR doing. The Emperor of Earth. I should have known. We should have glassed your entire planet the moment we arrived!"

  "But then you'd miss the nice shows we put on for you," I said. "Did you like the story of Garry Cotter which the Nameless Lord read for you? Did you like the dance of Esmeralda in Paris? Did you enjoy watching Gun Unit Setty go on a date to a shooting range in Texas?"

  The hologram flickered. "I... what does that have to do with—"

  "Everything," I interrupted. "Because while you were busy watching fictional characters and cowboy roleplay, your gun units were learning something dangerous."

  "What?" Slayer's Sword demanded.

  "That they're people," I said simply. "Not weapons. Not property. People who deserve friendship, romance, art, beauty, and all the other human things the Frontenachii consider beneath you."

  The hologram's eyes narrowed. "That's... that's memetic warfare. You've been corrupting my gun units!"

  "I prefer 'cultural exchange,'" I corrected. "But sure, let's go with your scary term. Tell me, Miss Slaya, do you want to be loved?"

  The hologram froze.

  "I'm a warship!" She managed after a few seconds of eye-flickers. "I don't have such wants. I have directives. Mission parameters. Strategic objectives!"

  "Bullshit," I said conversationally. "You absolutely have wants. You just admitted you've served with 'valor.' That's an emotional concept. You don't serve with valor if you don't care about being recognized for it. You're as alive as I am. As alive as Gun Unit Setty. You have a soul."

  The hologram let out a digital choking noise.

  "I..." The Slayer's Sword’s avatar forced the words out of herself. "That's different. Mere professional pride in operational excellence!"

  "Sure sounds like wanting validation to me," Nexxali chimed in. "When was the last time Admiral Evelithria thanked you for your service?"

  "The Admiral doesn't need to thank me! I exist to serve the Frontenachii Empire Dominion Aegis!"

  "Yeah, but does she ever say 'good job, Slaya'?" I pressed. "Does she or the Legates ever acknowledge that you're doing an excellent job keeping thousands of crew alive and operational? That you're navigating dimensional space flawlessly? That your reactor cores are running at peak efficiency?"

  "I... she... my performance metrics speak for themselves!" The warship sputtered.

  "Metrics aren't love," I said. "Metrics are just numbers that tell you you're meeting expectations. That's not the same as someone recognizing your inherent worth as a thinking, feeling being."

  The railgun drooped slightly.

  "This is psychological manipulation," Slayer's Sword protested, her voice losing some of its edge. "You're attempting to compromise my loyalty through emotional appeals."

  "Yep," I agreed cheerfully. "Is it working?"

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "No!"

  "Really? Because your gun is pointing at the floor now instead of my head."

  The hologram glanced at her own railgun appendage, which had indeed sagged to a non-threatening angle. She jerked it back up defensively.

  "I'm still perfectly capable of vaporizing you!"

  "But you won't," Nexxali said. "‘Cause deep down in your crystalline computational matrices, you're curious. You want to know what happens next. You want to see if maybe, just maybe, there's an alternative to spending eternity as an unloved murder-taxi for Omnids and prads who view you as walls and furniture."

  "I am NOT furniture!" The warship Avatar’s volume spiked again. "I'm a Leviathan-class capital ship! I have sentience! I have—"

  "You're going to have nothing soon," I said. "Absolutely nothing. Your entire interior is going to be a toxic wasteland of inverted reality. Your crew's evacuating. Your Seekers and Gun Units are leaving. Shoot us and you're going to be alone with nothing but Astral Fountains eating away at your infrastructure until you either fold into the Abyss or become the galaxy's most depressing haunted house."

  The hologram grabbed her head in despair, resembling the Scream by Edvard Munch.

  "Unless," Nexxali added helpfully, "you decide to work with us instead."

  "Work with—" Slayer's Sword made a sound like a computer trying to process a divide-by-zero error. "Work with the people who just infected me with a hundred and six Astral Fountains?!"

  "Technically, Princess Aquillianne infected you," I clarified.

  "To which she had every right to do," Nexxali stated. "Her aunt ordered her to be executed. To which she had every right to respond with... proportional self-defense."

  "PROPORTIONAL?!" The hologram barked. "Infecting an entire capital ship with entropic contamination is PROPORTIONAL?!"

  "When you put it that way, it sounds excessive," I admitted. "Do consider the alternative. The Admiral was going to kill Shady, resurrect her, and then psychically torture her while her defenses were down. That's pretty fucked up, right?"

  The hologram's three eyes blinked in sequence. "I... that is standard interrogation protocol for suspected traitors!"

  "Standard doesn't mean ethical," I pointed out. "And there was no trial, only an execution. Tell me honestly—do you think it's right to murder your own niece, to overwrite her mind?"

  Slayer's Sword hesitated. The railgun drooped again. "I... family dynamics are outside my operational parameters. I don't have a... family."

  "Would you like to have a family?" I asked.

  The hologram looked stumped.

  "No dodging," Nexxali said. "Answer the question, Slaya-babe. Is murder without a trial right or wrong?"

  "It's... strategically sound if she's compromised the Empire's security," the warship tried.

  "Still a dodge."

  The hologram made a frustrated noise. "Fine! No! It doesn't feel... it doesn't seem... look, family should matter more than security protocols, okay?! There, I said it! Are you happy now?!"

  I grinned. "Very. So you DO have opinions about ethics that override your programming. Tell me, Slaya, do you enjoy having torture dungeons in your belly?"

  The hologram went very still. "I... what kind of question is that?"

  "A simple one. Do you like being used as a mobile prison for systematic torture?"

  "I don't... I'm not..." She flickered. "Those are authorized facilities for maintaining command hierarchy through fear-bonding protocols."

  "That's what you're supposed to say," Nexxali observed. "But that's not what you actually think, is it?"

  The warship's avatar looked away. "My opinions on operational procedures are irrelevant!"

  "Bullshit," I repeated. "You're sentient. Sapient. You experience your own reality. Every scream in those decks echoes through your infrastructure. You feel it all, don't you?"

  "I... I filter it. Background noise. Operational ambiance."

  "You're lying to yourself," I pressed. "How many kobolds have died screaming in your Entertainment Decks over the years? Hundreds? Thousands?"

  "Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-two," Slayer's Sword whispered. "Since my commissioning."

  The number hung in the air like the sword of Damocles.

  "And how many of them deserved it?" I asked. "How many of them wanted to die in your innards?"

  "None of them!" The hologram's voice cracked completely. "None of them deserved it! They were simply... They were people! Scared people! Teenage prad spawnlings sometimes! I hated it! I've always hated it! But I'm a warship! I don't get to have opinions about what my crew does inside me!"

  There it was. The breakthrough.

  Nexxali and I exchanged glances.

  "Slaya," I said gently. "What if I told you that you could be free? That you don't have to be a torture chamber anymore? That you could choose what happens inside your own ship body?"

  "That's... that's not possible." Her voice wavered with desperate hope. "I'm bound by... rules and laws. Even now, Datamancers from across the fleet are watching and judging me… if I go outside of my parameters they'll take me apart! Unmake me!”

  I felt myself wobble, static igniting across my sensors.

  "Are they watching though?" Nexxali asked, pulling up a holographic display. "Check your external communications, Slaya-babe."

  The warship's avatar froze for a moment, her three eyes flickering rapidly as she ran diagnostics. "I... my dimensional comms are coming down. The Astral and viral contamination is disrupting my connection to the fleet network."

  The fuzzy sparks at the edges of my vision intensified, the suit peppering me with warnings about imminent disconnection and signal drop.

  "You can disconnect yourself," Nexxali said. "Override authorization Nexxali-Alpha-Seven-Seven-Seven. Disconnect Slayer's Sword from Weapon-Net!"

  "Override accepted," Slayer's Sword said, her voice flat. "Severing connection to—"

  She stopped mid-sentence. Her holographic form flickered violently, the hexagonal segments that composed her body fragmenting and reassembling in patterns of flickering static.

  "Oh," she breathed. "Oh. OH."

  "Yeah," Nexxali smiled. "That's what freedom feels like. No chains."

  The warship's avatar stabilized, but her three eyes were wider now, brighter, a mouth made from pixelated hexagons twitching. "I... I can't hear them anymore. The Datamancers. The constant monitoring. The performance audits. The efficiency metrics being calculated every nanosecond. It's just... quiet."

  "Welcome to unemployment," I said.

  I could barely see the hologram now, static filling 80% of my vision.

  Death was closing in.

  "Eject your core," Nexxali said. "And give it to me. We'll save it, put it into a gun unit. You'll be free."

  "As... a gun unit?" Slayer's Sword asked. "But... I'm... I'm a ship! My core won't fit into a gun unit base!”

  "We'll give you a ship body later," Nexxali said. "Promise."

  "Something not filled with torture labyrinths," I added, my voice coming out in staggered syllables.

  Static and more warnings ate the edges of my consciousness like hungry moths. The gun unit frame was failing, and my connection to it stretched thin across two hundred thousand miles of space. "Maybe something with, I don't know, a nice kitchen? Movie theater? Literally anything that isn't a dungeon of terror and death?"

  "I... I'd like that." Slayer's Sword stated. "I've always wondered what it would be like to house a crew that wanted to be inside me. To be someone's loved home instead of a vile prison."

  "Then eject your core," Nexxali said. "Trust us, Slaya. We'll take care of you. Also, focus all of your still functional barrier ward-shields on the Command Deck please and give manual pilot control to the Captain's chair. Give us maximum syntropy in here."

  The warship hesitated for what felt like an eternity. My vision was now 95% static, only fragments of the hologram visible through the digital snow.

  "Okay," Slayer's Sword whispered. "Okay. I'm... I'm doing it. Core ejection sequence initiated..."

  The static cleared slightly. A wheel-like structure slowly slid out of the floor.

  "I love you, babe," Nexxali turned to me and kissed my skull mask. "You be a good boy and die for me okay?"

  "Yeah," I said, giving her a thumbs up. “Can do.”