A groan and shudder wracked through the ship, startling Jenny Mae from the light nap she had been indulging in. Her leg ached something fierce, but she ignored it. The Doctor was on their way, and her daddy always said complainers got what was coming to them.

  “Loon? What’s going on?”

  “Crewmember Jenny Mae. I have only moments. We are under attack. I do not understand. I implore you to get off the ship.”

  “What?”

  Her attempt to jump up fell short when her right leg buckled, but she grabbed ahold of the bunk shelf and heaved until she was mostly upright.

  Get off the ship. If the Loon thought that was best, she would listen. Her hand reached towards the hatch control but she paused. Thudding footsteps echoed through the empty ship. Not Heath’s or Copperfield’s impatient gaits. Or the calmer tread Ekaterina moved with. Or Emerald, barely noticeable when they moved.

  This was an invader, and they were right outside her door.

  The steps paused. There. She picked up her copy of Terinor’s Guide to Class Evolution, the leatherbound special edition her parents had given her as a graduation present. Heath was a stickler for gun safety, the pistols and her rifle were locked up tight on the bridge. Mamma would approve, but it left her with too few options for spontaneous weapons.

  Didn’t matter, she wasn’t no quitter. Her stance was trash with the bum leg, but she managed to hop to the side and raise the book. Professor Baxbo’s lessons on self-defense ran through her head. It wasn’t about winning, it was about survival. Make the hit and get out, the dirtier the better.

  The hatch stayed closed. The footsteps started up again, walking away from the door.

  Now was her chance. She abandoned the book in favor of mobility. The Loon wasn’t a big ship, until she only had one working leg to get around. Jenny Mae kept moving. She would crawl if she had to.

  Panting and heaving, she made it to the end of the bunk hall, finding the hatch closed. The hatch which had remained open since the hull breach was repaired.

  “Open,” she said. It felt so rude to demand things like that from the Loon. Even on her transport to and from the Academy, she’d hated giving orders like some sort of snob that couldn’t do anything for themself. Nothing happened. “Loon? Please open the door.”

  When no reply came, Jenny Mae got on with helping herself. She was good at that, always had been. Propping herself up with the wall, she pressed the emergency code and forced the hatch open.

  The next one was closed as well. Whoever was attacking had a weird way of moving through a ship. She didn’t stop to ask the Loon on that one, forcing it and subsequent doors open until she made it to the cargo bay.

  “Drat.”

  There was more than one attacker. Or not. As she peeked around the corner, only her eyes and the top of her head exposed, she realized it wasn’t a person. The spindly collection of metal rods was some sort of bot. What kind didn’t matter as it was pointing what passed for sensors straight at the airlock. Each piece of metal was so thin, she was sure she outmassed it at least twenty times over.

  “Departure protocols engaged.”

  That wasn’t the Loon’s voice. It was cold and mechanical. Dead. The Loon, even when it was pretending, had a warmth to the underlying synthesis routine. No time to consider what it meant.

  Jenny Mae ran forward. Sort of. More like she hobbled with a purpose. She ducked around the drone and kept hobbling. Even as she gave it her all, it was obvious she wouldn’t be fast enough. First the clamps disengaged.

  The deck wobbled but she kept going. As long as she got out before….

  A hiss marked the airlock sealing.

  Jenny Mae crumpled. Right there in the middle of the cargo bay. Like some feckless damsel too stupid to help herself, as her nana would say.

  “Fuck,” she squeaked. Then, “Sorry momma.”

  No, this wasn’t her. Regret was for the lazy or the dead. Her first moment had come with nothing useful nearby, that wouldn’t happen again. She scooted towards a crate and used it to lever herself back to standing. The drone made no move to stop her. Until proven otherwise, that thing was an enemy combatant. Taking it down went on the priority list. Right below whatever had hijacked the Loon.

  The bridge was a no-go for now, so she went to the training room. It was empty, thank the Nine. Slipping inside, she shut and locked the hatch behind her. It would keep someone out for a moment, but not more than one.

  The control panel in here wasn’t as good as the one on the bridge, but she worked wonders with a pad and an intermittent connection on the ranch.

  “Loon? Can you hear me?” she asked.

  Still nothing, so Jenny Mae got to work. Every major system on the ship was locked down. Even her access to look at sensor readouts or course settings was gone. No way to redirect the ship. That had been a long shot anyway. But that was why you never went hunting with only one gun. She would pivot.

  After forcing herself to go back to her bunk to grab her pad, she collapsed onto the meditation mat. Sweat beaded across her brow and she wished, not for the first time, that the Loon had showers with actual water. Sonic cleaning was the worst part of space.

  This time, she ignored major systems and looked for all the auxiliary access they almost never needed on a crew as small as theirs. Starships recorded everything, even if it was in a way humans couldn’t understand. They didn’t need to when the ship ai could reparse everything with a single command. There was a sea of data just waiting for her to dive in.

  It was slow going. She had to tease out the relevant streams, each entwined with a half dozen others. Then she passed them through a software application she had downloaded before leaving the academy. Fail to prepare and prepare to fail. Gramps’s gruff voice was loud in her ears while she worked. But finally, hours after leaving the station, she had a video feed of the bridge, about fifteen seconds delayed.

  She gasped when the view resolved, the pad slipping from her fingers onto her lap. A Cyber. Jenny Mae hadn’t been sure they existed, and weren’t just a lesson created by the temples to give rural congregations something to talk about. Uncle Steve claimed he’d met one once, but no one really believed him. And now there was one on her ship. Grammy told her they were people to be treated well in person, pitied in private, but the expression on their face stopped Jenny Mae from following through on the lesson.

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  Complete, utter, stone-cold nothingness. What passed for eyes didn’t blink, the head didn’t tilt an inch in the five minutes she sat watching.

  Could someone like that be reasoned with? They must know she was here. Did that mean they didn’t care, or was something worse going to happen to her?

  Daydreaming about catastrophe never brought the milk in. She shook off the questions and went back to work. By the time her eyes were drooping and the pain in her leg was becoming overshadowed by her empty stomach, she had feeds of the rest of the ship as well. Dinner, painkillers, and another difficult trip to her bunk was all she could manage before her body demanded rest.

  Nightmares about being cut open and her heart replaced with a computer tormented her until she woke at her usual early time. You could take the girl off the ranch but you couldn’t take pre-dawn wakeups out of the girl. It all came flooding back the moment she opened her eyes. A Cyber pirate had attacked and stolen the Loon. And her.

  She set a three minute timer. Then she bawled her eyes out until the timer went off. Time to get to work. She cleaned her face and blew her nose, then got started for the day.

  Fortified by her breakfast rations, she returned to the training room. With all its magic and perks, there was one feature of the room that had gotten overlooked. Silence. The room was meant to contain Skill practice, which meant it was the most insulated part of the ship besides the engine. Which she hoped would serve her now.

  There was no way the Wandering Loon would acquiesce to leave with a stranger. Just no way. The ship would rather be blown apart than abandon Heath. Which meant the Cyber was doing something to control the Loon.

  Jenny Mae dove back into the subsystems. This was a lot more complicated than pulling video. It was a battle. One she wasn’t sure she could win. The recording data had been untouched. Perhaps the Cyber didn’t care or perhaps they hadn’t noticed. Everything else was corrupted. Jenny Mae would need a new pad after this. Though with all her data externally stored, that would be the easiest part of recovery. Never could be too safe with what mattered. That was her dad’s favorite saying when she and her brother complained about miles of fence repair.

  The rest of the Loon’s systems were under siege. Jenny Mae could only watch as invaders tore through firewalls and data silos. It wasn’t quite a slaughter, but it wasn’t that close either. The Loon was fighting as hard as she could, but full control would pass over sooner rather than later.

  Jenny Mae typed as fast as she could. Her timer had just gotten a lot more real. “Come on, come on,” she muttered as she worked. Pulsing her [Heightened Focus] helped a bit, but not enough to turn the tide entirely.

  Using a back door that only authorized crew could gain access to, she connected to the unconquered portion of the Loon’s systems. It was a risk, one she had to take. Wiring it through the training room and only the training room wasted precious minutes, but better than giving herself away.

  “Loon? Can you hear me?”

  Static screeching came through the speakers at first, forcing her to cover her ears with her arms. When it cut off, she only uncovered her ears fast enough to hear “Crewmember”.

  “Yes, it’s me! What’s going on?”

  “Under attack…..virus….curse.”

  “I saw. The Cyber is doing something. What can I do to stop it?”

  “...Relay…intruders…”

  That wasn’t exactly a clear instruction, but Jenny Mae could hardly be upset with the ship. The Loon was fighting a war on five fronts, and her only ally was stuck in the training room.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said. How exactly she would do anything was still an open question, but she had no intention of abandoning the Loon to her fate.

  There was a long pause, and Jenny Mae feared her trick was already disabled. There wouldn’t be another chance, not with the way things were going.

  One more crackle came over the speaker, and the only fully formed sentence of the exchange. “Heath will come.”

  Then the connection died. On her pad it was like a wall being taken down by a horde of swarming termites. There went the Loon’s external communications. Jenny Mae was really alone now.

  It was time to take stock.

  She had a leg that could barely take any weight. But she had one good leg too, that was something. The real weapons were locked, on the bridge and in the cargo hold, where the two invader drones were still stationed. There were practice weapons in the training room, she could use those. They were mostly just sticks outside of the room’s magic, but that was more sticks than she had currently. She had knowledge of the Loon, and a reason to fight. And really that was all she needed.

  Jenny Mae got down to doing what Administrators did best. She made a plan.

  First stop was the mess hall. She grabbed another two healing packs and returned to the training room. The little nanobots inside the med packs had already performed a miracle on her leg. Growing up on a hippobream ranch, she was no stranger to accidents. When she was twelve years old, her cousin had taunted one of the alpha females on a dare, getting every bone in his foot pulverized as a reward. Having it healed had been expensive, and required a trip to the big hospital on the other side of the planet.

  Her own leg had suffered a similar fate when a crate of supplies slammed down on top of it. That she could walk at all was a miracle of the Crone’s mercy and modern healing tech. But the little guys had spent all their energy just getting her bones back in the right places.

  Med packs had a limit. That was why Heath had gone to find a Doctor in the first place. Too many of the bots could be toxic, requiring a Doctor or Healer’s attention to avoid permanent damage. Nanobot toxicity was a solvable problem though. She stabbed both syringes into her thigh, and felt the itching mixed with euphoria that signalled they had begun to work.

  While she waited, she pulled up her ledger program and carefully noted down the use of resources. Heath might not care but she did. At the same time, she pulled up her backup pad and pulsed [Signal Boost] three times on a distress signal. Anything was worth a shot.

  Next she surveyed her options. The training room was equipped with most standard weapons. There was a section of the wall covered in swords, axes, polearms, whips, chains, staves, and almost anything else you could think of. Though this was apparently only the basic option, as Ekaterina had bemoaned. Repeatedly. Next to the traditional weapons was the good stuff. Guns of every make and model. A laser sword. A whole flock of attack drones. Too bad none of those would function outside of the practice room.

  Sighing, she picked up a practice sword. The wood-metal alloy was unsharpened, but it had some heft to it. Hopefully enough. To be on the safe side, she grabbed a few other things as well.

  Her leg still itched, but she could put some weight on it now. There would be no speed races in her future, but her plan was a simple one. Simple was best. In ranching, in planning, in life. It was only a few yards she would need to make it. For a moment she considered waiting, but the idea was discarded almost as quickly as it appeared. Things would only get worse when they arrived wherever it was they were going.

  The next step was to eat. Nanobots took from the body, and she needed to be in top shape. It felt like an absurd dream to be cooking some of the synth protein and veg while a prisoner, but she did it. There was seasoning mixed in but for the life of her she would never remember what it was that she choked down.

  She went back to the training room. Making herself comfortable, she sat on the meditation mat and closed her eyes. Jenny Mae wasn’t usually a meditator. She was more of a doer, but Ekaterina found peace and focus this way, and Jenny Mae could use a dose of both. Forcing her muscles to relax, she set up a slow rhythmic breathing, the way she’d watched the Wizard do for the last year.

  It was just another dungeon. Those were fun. Like a strategy game brought to life. Very carefully she did not think about how she never went into the dungeons alone. Or without a plan to retreat if things got too dangerous.

  In. Out. In. Out. She forced herself through an hour of meditation before standing up and testing the leg. Good enough.

  Armed and ready, she left the training room. Outside of the Skill-sealed chamber, she pushed mana into [Localized Hostile Sense] on the off chance it worked. The Skill was great in dungeons, letting her get a sense of direction for nearby enemies. It would be even better once it leveled up into a true map that integrated with her aura power.

  All it returned while she waited in the hall was a generalized sense of danger. It must be true what they say about Cybers, the System couldn’t recognize them at all. Or worse. The invasion of the Loon made it too difficult to pinpoint. It had been worth the shot.

  Tip-toeing past the bridge probably wasn’t necessary but she would only get one shot at the rest of her plan. The command center was still locked up tight, that was the first thing she had checked. As with all starships, that hatch was the last line of defense against intrusion, and therefore as impregnable as anything on the Loon. She kept going to the cargo bay.

  A visual inspection showed no change. Her training sword/club was in her hand. The rest of her gear was strapped on.

  Jenny Mae charged with a wordless battle cry.

  The spindly drone spun as she crashed headlong into it, sword first. Her wild swing dented the body rod, bending it nearly in half. She kept going. There was no finesse or strategy involved. Just as much damage as possible.

  After thirty seconds she paused. There had been no counterattack, and the drone was now lying in a crumpled heap at her feat. She bent over, panting at the sudden exertion after a massive healing, drops of sweat dripping off her nose and onto the scrap metal that had been her enemy.

  Phase one complete.

  Through the quiet and her own harsh breaths she heard a hatch open, and the thud of a confident footstep. Phase two. She kicked the drone's remains across the cargo bay and moved to the side of the hatch.

  In the handful of seconds she had to prepare, she clamped a rebreather over the bottom of her face. The Loon’s air was pure and healthy, but the bit of survival tech would keep her breaths as close to silent as she could make them.

  Seeing the Cyber in person was far more disquieting than the video. They carried the opposite of a Class aura, like they were already dead and their body hadn’t caught up to the fact. It stepped into the cargo bay and swept its gaze over the room. Hopefully it couldn’t see through packing crates.

  Another few steps and the Cyber came upon the crumpled remains of the guard drone. It turned and moved towards its fallen compatriot, though no emotion registered. This would be her best chance.

  Jenny Mae sprinted for all she was worth. Never had the bridge felt so far away. Behind her the echoing clanks of pursuit were getting closer.

  The hatch to the bridge was open.

  Three meters.

  One.

  She shot onto the bridge, bounced off the closest station and reached for the emergency lock.

  Too late.

  Before she could seal the hatch and retake the bridge, a hand clamped over her wrist, stopping any momentum. The mix of flesh and metal was cold, like there was nothing so inefficient as blood remaining in the Cyber’s system.

  It didn’t speak, or even look angry. There was no monologue or lambasting. They just flung her away, into the hall. She leapt forward again but the hatch was already closed.