Eve and I were in a good mood from our time fooling around, but it drained away quickly as reality set in and we walked through the halls of The Radiance. Our footsteps were slow and precise as we held onto each other for support, both dreading what this meeting could do for our future together.

  When we entered the command center for the debriefing, right away we could see something was wrong; there wasn’t a single researcher in the audience, it was all clandestine agents and officers in the military. Either they were already separating themselves from the research side of the mission—our greatest supporters—or this was going to be one of those super shady disappear people in black-sites kind of deals.

  The command council at the front row was filled with the usual suspects; Commander Durgo, the stocky blue beetle alien with a facemask modulator that made him look like a Sith Lord from Star Wars, Captain Seash, the red lizardman with a battle-scarred maw, and Captain Quinna, the large brown tree-alien woman who’s spoken less than a dozen words before me in all the time I’ve known her.

  Commander Durgo gestured to the first row before them with just two open seats surrounded by dozens of agents and officers behind it, “Take a seat so we can begin the debrief.”

  Eve and I kept a respectable distance between us while we wore neutral expressions. We sat down in our seats and remained silent, waiting to see what exactly the commanders wanted from us.

  Captain Seash activated a large hologram in the center of the room, displaying an image of a Glorva Corp space station, “In your own words, we’d like you to explain what happened on Leisure-53.” He said evenly.

  I looked over to Eve, and she returned my cautious expression, giving me a small nod to start the story. “We arrived on Leisure-53 during the 18th cycle of the tour, and right away Eve was able to sense Gamma-12’s presence, but she couldn’t discern her exact location due to the Predazoan camouflage. Without much else to go on, Eve decided it would be best to spread her spores throughout the station, hoping to discover Gamma-12 in the event she ever dropped her camouflage—” I began explaining.

  “Was that your idea or Eve’s?” Commander Durgo interrupted curtly.

  “Uh, it was Eve’s, but we confirmed it with our mission team’s commanders before we implemented the strategy.” I told them, and I was surprised to see most people around me working on their tablets, as though writing down what all I was saying.

  Captain Seash nodded, “Continue.”

  I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to keep my words calm and steady, “A few days passed without progress; Eve’s spores aren’t able to see past Predazoan camouflage—”

  “And you both knew this?” Durgo interrupted again.

  I grit my teeth and bit down a sharp retort, “Yes, everyone on the team knew of Eve’s limitations, same as how your agent’s sensors are similarly limited.”

  Seash waved a hand toward Durgo, “Let’s limit interruptions until the story is concluded, please.” He nodded down to me again, “Sorry, go on.”

  I swallowed nervously, my throat suddenly very dry; Eve leaned a little closer towards me but was careful not to look too overly familiar—stuck in how she could actually comfort me without being too obvious. “Eve and I ended up getting lunch one day with a couple we’d met earlier in the tour, and they introduced us to another couple, a woman named Nyla and a man named Tremaan. Everything seemed normal with them, but after we parted ways with the first couple, the woman Nyla confirmed she was a Predazoan, asking why Eve had been spreading her spores through the station.”

  Durgo bristled and sat up as though he was about to interject again, but a harsh glare from Seash caused him to settle back down instead. Seash nodded at me once more for me to continue with our story.

  “We talked with Nyla for a little while and confirmed she didn’t want any violent altercation at that point, was mostly just curious what Eve was doing there. She agreed to meet up with us later, so we called an emergency meeting with the rest of our team to share our findings.

  “The next day we met with Nyla—Eve and I accompanied by Doctor Gorgam and Doctor Kianna; they had a conversation with her that seemed beneficial as Nyla confirmed she was fine with remaining in the Holistia Nebula under surveillance while refraining from harming any other passengers. We concluded the meeting with everyone seemingly in agreement, and from there Gorgam and Kianna contacted mission command to see how to proceed.”

  I paused there, shifting in my seat to try and get comfortable, wondering if I should remain neutral now or tell them all I thought command made the wrong call that led to the violence afterwards. I let out a frustrated sigh, keeping my thoughts to myself for now, “Orders came back we were to try and contain Gamma-12 instead, so the full team broke into her room so Eve could hack into the computer system while Doctor Zyno installed his control device, and everything in the room went exactly as planned. However, once we left the room we were confronted by a young green alien girl we’d never seen before, and it turned out she was Gamma-12 in disguise.” I shrugged, “No one knows when she made the body-swap, as all our sensors confirmed the Nyla persona was still in the middle of the paradise-core.”

  I turned and looked to Eve, “At that point there was no avoiding a violent altercation, and Gamma-12 attacked us all before anyone aside from Eve could properly react. Eve acted to protect me and those around me, but unfortunately Agent Uinda, Doctor Densdor, and even Doctor Zyno were simply too far away to be covered in time. I confirmed Uinda and Densdor were dead while I applied a tourniquet on Zyno’s leg, stabilizing him in the field. Gamma-12 then transformed into a massive cluster of bloody tentacles and started attacking everything around her, consuming nearby passengers while damaging the space station itself. Eve secured me against her and covered us in armor as she placed the rest of our team in a protective shield-ball, while Gamma-12 fled into the paradise-core to try and consume more biomass so she could even the odds against Eve.” I waved to the room around us, “It was then I had the idea for Eve to use her spores to try and hold the space station together as best she could, keeping the station intact while Gamma-12 went on her rampage. From there Eve and Gamma-12 fought, and same with Gamma-17, Eve was far more powerful. Eventually she took Gamma-12 into the vacuum of space to finish things off away from the rest of the passengers, and out there Eve consumed Gamma-12’s biomass core.” I let out a quick sigh, “Unfortunately the damage was already done, and the station was beyond structurally unstable, so eventually it was destroyed while we were out in space. I confirmed with Eve she sent our teammates into a nearby escape pod while we waited for a stealth vessel to pick us up and take us back to The Radiance.” I finished my retelling and sat back in my chair, feeling relieved to get it all out there, but nervous for how they would respond.

  The agents all around us continued working on their tablets, for what I couldn’t even tell; some of them seemed to be in communication with other people, while others looked like they were working on putting a holographic model of Leisure-53 back together—trying to match up our story with its remains maybe.

  The main hologram in the center of the room changed to show Leisure-53 in its current state, all crumbled and blown apart, with some Glorva Corp maintenance or maybe salvage vessels working around it.

  “I believe Agent Roote made it a point of inquiring how neither of you put a shadow on Gamma-12 after the initial meeting, letting her go on her own while you held the emergency meeting?” Durgo inquired, saying it like a statement while asking for a response like a question.

  I nodded slowly, feeling my stomach knotting up with nerves, “That’s right, Agent Roote believed we should’ve kept eyes on her somehow, but we wouldn’t have been able to—”

  Durgo held his hand up, “That is not your call to make, that would be up to the agents on your team. You should’ve messaged Roote to meet up with you before you separated from Gamma-12.”

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  Seash didn’t seem as interested in that line of thinking, “Were you able to confirm at all this Nyla persona was actually Gamma-12? Is it possible that body was just a puppet same as Tremaan, and the little green girl who confronted you was the real Gamma-12 all along?” He asked.

  I turned to look at Eve, and she nodded, “It’s possible; I can’t see through Predazoan camouflage without dissecting a person’s cells, and since I never did that for any of Gamma-12’s bodies or thralls, I would have no way of knowing which one held her core until she revealed her true Predazoan form to me.”

  Seash nodded along and added something into his tablet, remaining neural so I couldn’t really tell if he accepted the answer as good or not.

  “Can you expand on what you meant when you said Eve acted to protect you and those around you?” Durgo asked.

  I scratched the back of my head, wondering how best to frame my answer without admitting Eve just didn’t care about anyone else’s safety, “Since I have the failsafe heart monitor, Eve’s primary focus would always be to protect me as it protects her own life; she couldn’t risk me getting swept up in any attacks, so she acted first to protect me, then those around me, but couldn’t save everyone on the team.”

  I almost let out a sigh of relief as Durgo looked like he totally accepted that answer; self-preservation would make sense for just about anyone.

  “So, after Eve placed her protective netting over the station in order to stabilize it, what caused it to fail?” Durgo asked, moving down the list of his grievances easily.

  “Even my power has its limits.” Eve confirmed, gesturing to herself, “My spores are tiny combinations of particulates so small they’re basically invisible; transferring them into moldable biomass takes quite a lot of energy and concentration. I have to alter the molecular structure of my spores, combined with a quantum instability in the

  surrounding—” She paused, holding up her hand as though she thought it was pointless, “It’s basically Outsider magic, something that bends the laws of physics as you understand them.” She let out a quick sigh, “Suffice to say my spores can only turn into small manifestations of biomass, and even with billions of spores, spreading my biomass netting over the entire space station had it all stretched incredibly thin.”

  Seash nodded along, “And Gamma-12 already damaged part of the station before you even had the structure in place, so it only continued to lose stability from there.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Eve agreed.

  The hologram changed to show the inside of the destroyed paradise-core; it was so damaged it was hard to discern any details, but a few glowing lines highlighted in red before us, “We confirmed you unleashed some biothermal plasma discharge that caused quite a bit of damage on the station yourself; care to explain that?” Durgo pressed.

  I’d been hoping to keep Eve’s laser powers secret from The Radiance crewmembers—a future ace-in-the-hole maybe, but clearly we wouldn’t be able to keep many secrets hidden amidst all these spies and their constant surveillance. I let out a quick sigh, “Eve was just trying to end the fight; all the while Gamma-12 was constantly regenerating severed appendages, so Eve needed to use more power to prevent that regeneration—that’s why we took her out into the vacuum of space, so Eve could use her powers without risking the safety of the other passengers.”

  “The damage was already done.” Durgo said flatly.

  Again, I had to bite down a retort; the passengers would all be dead if it wasn’t for Eve.

  “Have you looked over the damage report, Agent Adam?” Captain Quinna asked, surprising us all when she spoke, her words very slow and equally calm.

  “No, we’ve just been getting settled back home, checked in on our teammates to make sure everyone’s been okay.” I answered slowly, wondering where she was going with that.

  Captain Quinna was apparently done talking as Durgo took up her line of inquiry; he activated another hologram to show a massive list of names and data, “3,188 confirmed dead, with 624 still missing. The station has been completely destroyed, costing over 200 trillion credits in damage. We also confirmed there were over 1,200 recordings of the Predazoans made, with nearly 200 livestreams we’re completely unable to contain. Our current strategy of blaming the attack on pirates is only projected to have a 38% success rate.”

  I looked around at the command council, “Okay? So what does that mean for us?”

  Seash steepled his fingers together under his chin, “It means we have completely failed in keeping our mission hidden from the Imperial population; already rumors and conspiracies are racing across the Empire and through the extranet to the point there’s little hope we can actually contain it. We’re looking at a complete restructuring of the Predazoan containment mission from here on out.”

  I quirked up an eyebrow, “Is that why there aren’t any researchers in our debriefing, part of the restructuring?”

  Durgo shook his head slowly, “Their grievances are not your concern; you two have always been a military asset, so whatever happens with them likely won’t affect you and your directives.”

  Well that certainly killed my hope our researcher allies could help us at all; it was just me and Eve against the super shady Imperial government and military at this point.

  I decided I held my tongue long enough, wanting to get one point clear before anything else moved forward, “As bad as everything looks now, understand the only hope we have in containing the rest of the escaped Predazoans is Eve here. Yes, it was a tragedy so many people were killed on Leisure-53, but everyone would’ve died on that station if it wasn’t for Eve—or did you think your agents would’ve been able to locate and capture Gamma-12 on their own? What could they have possibly done once she started destroying the space station?” I demanded, trying to keep the heat out of my voice.

  Seash cocked his head to the side, “And you don’t think you and Eve could’ve mitigated those loses? We understand how vital you are to the mission, but do you realize your every decision has severe consequences for everyone around you—both for teammates and civilians?”

  I waved my hands out in a frustrated gesture, “And what could we have done differently? We believed Gamma-12 was willing to come to the table with us, it was command’s decision to jump right to containment, worried another conversation could’ve led to an altercation. And guess what? The altercation happened regardless.”

  Durgo hissed into his voice modulator, “We run simulations on mitigating our loses constantly while you make those snap, reckless decisions. Did you think we were just rushing into these investigations without diligent planning and strategizing? You run around like some kind of Earth cowboy thinking you can make rash decisions and back them up with half-assed reasoning and think there won’t be fallout; do you think you know better than our supercomputer simulations that run through dozens of scenarios and outcomes every second?”

  “I never said that!” I growled, getting frustrated now, “But we’re down there risking our lives, and what, you’re going to blame us for the destruction the other Predazoans cause? We’re doing the best we can—better than your agents, that’s for sure.”

  Durgo scoffed and his modulator crackled, “You were rushed through your training so we could get you and the asset in the field as soon as possible, and clearly it’s gone to your head if you think you’re doing better than our agents who’ve been working in the field longer than you’ve even been alive.”

  “And what other options are there? Eve and I are the only hope you have in containing the Predazoans, so instead of grilling us like this, work with us so we can improve mission outcomes; give us more support moving forward rather than try to guilt us over all the deaths around us.” I snapped.

  Durgo bristled up again to respond, but Seash put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, “This is not a productive conversation.”

  I was about to respond with something sarcastic, but Eve placed a hand on my shoulder to stop me too, “I assure you, Adam and I talked it over and we’ve come to the decision the escaped Predazoans must be contained to prevent further destruction. Forget the mission, forget the failsafe in my core, we’ve agreed to work together for our own sake now to stop the Predazoans. Yes, we might need more training, and of course I understand with our recent exposure there might need to be some restructuring, but don’t think we aren’t taking our roles seriously when we’re personally invested in the outcome of this mission.” Eve explained eloquently, capturing the attention of everyone in the room—even Durgo seemed properly deflated by Eve’s admission.

  The mission commanders all exchanged a look, then turned back to Eve. “Some additional training would be beneficial.” Seash confirmed, then looked to me, “Make no mistake, Agent Adam, we absolutely understand how important you are to the mission and appreciate all you’ve risked for us so far, but you also need to understand what a huge responsibility that is; it can’t be treated lightly, and you can’t go around acting recklessly.”

  I was about to sigh, but Eve squeezed my shoulder again. Instead, I just nodded, “I understand.”

  Commander Durgo sighed instead, “Very well, let’s conclude the mission debrief here.” He nodded down at us, “Expect some significant operational restructuring once we’re able to coordinate with high-command, but for now you’re dismissed.”

  Eve and I got up together, looking around the room to see all the agents and officers who’d been entirely silent during the debrief; they were all still working diligently on their consoles or tablets, probably still working on damage control—damage some of them blamed us for, apparently.

  Still, as we left the meeting I was honestly feeling quite relieved over everything; they didn’t mention the fact Eve and I were in a relationship—no talk of the agent being compromised by the asset.

  I told Eve the good news, but her expression remained thoughtful—a frown on her face all the while.

  “Their minds were all a blurring buzz, as though they were purposefully trying to keep me out—classic agent training to resist mind-breaking torture.” Eve looked up at me, her eyes glowing with concern, “Whatever they think of us now, I believe our troubles are far from over.”