And there, just there, amidst the bustling auras of the loading crew—the steady earthiness of the dwarf, the sharp, electric cunning of the goblin, the untamed potential of the purple-haired weeb—I felt it. A hint of familiarity so profound it was like a punch to the soul. Like a taste of honey blessed with the tiniest dash of orange and cream, a tiny, life-giving drink of cool, clear water in a desert after a decade of trekking through dry and dusty wastes.

  My head snapped up, my aura recoiling back into me in shock. My eyes found the source instantly.

  The amazingly gorgeous green-skinned girl. And she turned to look right back at me, even more quickly, her huge, crystalline blue eyes widening in recognition and shock. And yet… despite her obvious surprise, the dozen drones she seemed to be controlling—I could see the faintest psychic threads connecting her to them now—still moved with steady, unflinching precision, without a flicker of loss of control. The concentration required for that was staggering.

  She was… transformed.

  Where before she had been squat, a genderless, grubby little thing doing her best to look harmless and goblinoid, now she was… a woman. She had lively, curved hips that swayed with a natural rhythm as she shifted her weight. Beautiful yet subtle curves that spoke of strength and grace.

  A small but proud pair of breasts that strained against the fabric of her standard-issue shipsuit. Shoulders that were the perfect shape to hold onto while you dragged her in for a kiss, and her hair, previously just an endlessly cute but impractical tuft of long blue fur, was now a sleek, neck-length pixie cut that exposed a long, beautiful, slender throat.

  She was still very short, but it was woman-short. Five feet and a hint of change, just the right height to pick her up by that lightly curved bottom as you devoured that lovely, elegant throat.

  Her face, previously squashed and broad around her huge, expressive eyes, had stretched out and lengthened, her jawline filling out ever-so-faintly into a determined, delicate shape. And her eyes, her beautiful, impossible blue eyes, were still oversize, but now they dominated a face of surprising beauty, over a cute, pert nose resting above eminently kissable lips.

  What the absolute scrot had happened? This was the work of a month and a half? It was more defined than a Twin Core alteration! This was a metamorphosis.

  “Shut your mouth, boy, you are drawing flies,” Taera murmured beside me, her voice laced with amusement. “And yes, I get it. Little green treasure troll to Venus incarnate between one look and the next. Puberty hits Maenads like a freighter, apparently.”

  I didn’t know what a ‘fly’ was, but I snapped my mouth shut. I knew who the legendary Venus was; that lore was part of the Paladin curriculum. The goddess had nothing on what I was seeing now.

  No wonder that blonde midshipman, Princeton, had been so snappy and petty. Roisin’s change didn’t just elevate her; it turned the blonde from top-shelf wine into that generic, no-label white vinegar you find at the back of the supply depot after everything that people actually wanted had gotten raided.

  “See, that is what I want,” Taera said, her voice losing its edge for a moment, becoming almost… wistful. “I want someone to just once look at me like that… with that kind of raw, stunned, reverent desire. Or even better, I want to look at THEM like that. To feel that specific, all-consuming fire. They could even sneer at me in disgust afterward, I wouldn’t care, as long as I got to feel what you are feeling for myself for just one second. I’d even accept the wave of self-disgust you’re feeling right now when you think about the age difference and your own mortality.”

  I glared at Taera, the spell broken. “Thank you so much for bringing reality into sharp, cynical relief. You couldn’t even allow me to imagine that I was NOT a dead man walking for long enough to enjoy a simple, uncomplicated hormone rush. You are a total thrill-kill.”

  She grinned, the moment of vulnerability gone. “Now THAT is something I have heard many, many times. From better men than you, too. Now excuse me while I cover up my personal pain with a layer of biting sarcasm. It’s a coping mechanism.”

  “Personal pain?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “I was being euphemistic again. For ‘envy so deep it feels like a physical wound’.”

  I smiled a little, a strange sense of camaraderie settling over me. “I think I am beginning to understand you, a little. The performance. It’s armor.”

  She shook her head, the smile never leaving her lips. “No, you think that you think you are beginning to understand me a little, which is fine because I want you to think that you think you are beginning to understand something as fundamentally incomprehensible as me. Did you follow that?”

  I nodded, playing along. “Yes I did. It’s a hall of mirrors. And if you were a real girl, I’d be dangerously turned on by you right now. I appreciate wit almost as much as I appreciate not being in agony.”

  She shrugged as the door from the main loading bay hissed open. “And if I were a girl I probably would be having a lot more fun with this whole conversation. At least I can feel an intellectual appreciation for wit, but you, Mister Wasserman, have left me emotionally disappointed.”

  I facepalmed, a genuine laugh escaping me this time, and turned to greet the woman walking toward us.

  Roisin approached, her gait confident, though I could see the nervous flutter in her hands she tried to hide. Her aura was a calm, potent lake on the surface, but I could feel the turbulent currents underneath. She stopped before us and came to a crisp, if slightly awkward, attention. “Petty Officer Reynard, reporting as ordered.”

  “Hello, Petty Officer Reynard,” I said, my voice thankfully steady. “I am pleased, if not totally surprised, to see you here.” Understatement of the century.

  She smiled, and it was like someone had turned on a shipboard illumination lantern directly behind my eyes. I instinctively shut down my aura HARD, slamming up every mental barrier I had, before it could reach out and desperately enfold hers like a lion capturing a gazelle. Not that mine was stronger than hers—she had already proven several times that while mine was an exquisitely honed weapon for fighting evil, hers was… pervasive, welcoming, and incredibly potent. Very bad for maintaining my intentional emotional isolation. And it didn’t help that now, she looked exactly like she had always felt to my other senses: vibrant, alive, and utterly captivating.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “You look very different,” I managed, stating the blatantly obvious like a complete rookie.

  She nodded, a faint blush tinting her green cheeks a darker shade of emerald. “I am an adult. I was an adult before, but my species has an extended adolescence. Chemically, I wouldn’t really undergo my final maturation until there were suitable males around, ones that weren’t my father or brothers. It’s a… survival mechanism. Stops us from wasting energy on a population boom in a hostile environment.”

  She looked down at herself, as if still getting used to the new topography. “So I… stretched. I am pretty much physically as adult as I will get for a while, Warrant Officer. Did you come this way about your implant’s malfunction? From here, it seems to have gotten significantly worse. The feedback echo is… painful just to look at.”

  I started to nod, but Commander Taera smoothly interrupted, stepping forward. “Actually, he went on detached duty because of it for a while. A little side-quest. I trust this will be a low-level repair, and we had a sudden opening for a troop commander, so I jumped at the chance to get a certified Paladin on our team. Once you get his little bug pushed, we should be ready to start tracking those rifts.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were on the drones, which were still steadily laying in supplies, seemingly without Roisin’s direct visual guidance. Obviously, they were SI drones, perfectly capable of automated loading, but I could tell by the occasional micro-adjustment, the flawless avoidance of collision paths, that she was still giving them the occasional nudge of judgment… without even watching them. Her affinity wasn’t just about talking to machines; it was about becoming a part of their network, a silent conductor of a mechanical orchestra.

  Taera glanced at the chrono on the wall. “You will be relieved in 20 minutes. Can you be at the med bay in 30? Is there anything special you will need? Tools? Parts?”

  Roisin nodded, her expression turning professional. “Yes, ma’am.” She bit her lip, a flash of her former nervousness returning. “You are clearly a very skilled empath, Commander. I can feel the… clarity of your presence. And I trust your ability. Can you project? Not just receive, but send?”

  Taera nodded, intrigued. “Not my best or most practiced ability, but yes. I can impose emotional states, project sensations. It’s considered rude, so I seldom do it.”

  Roisin gulped. “I don’t know the med staff as well as I knew the corpsmen at J-School… and this is delicate. Can you set up some kind of empathic link? Feed him sensations, feelings, anything at all while I refresh the programming? I’ll need a remote programmer because I am not a surgeon. I don’t want to have to open him up or anything invasive to get to the Caliban’s core.”

  Taera looked at me, her black eyes serious. “You don’t know me, Wasserman. Not really. Are you willing to allow me to try and support your psyche while she reloads your firmware? It would be like… having a guide in a very dark place.”

  I grinned, a sharp, toothy thing. “Considering the stakes, Commander, I think it’s in your own best interests to keep me sane. That’s a way safer bet than trusting your generally benevolent nature. Right now, I’d trust you with my life and sanity more than anyone else in the universe. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.”

  Taera sighed, a sound of pure theatrical exasperation. “I hate being so predictable.” She turned on her heel. “Med bay. Thirty minutes. Don’t be late.” And she strode away, her form disappearing down the corridor.

  I looked back at Roisin. She was watching Taera go, a thoughtful expression on her face. The Crow itself was our backdrop. From this observation deck, I could take it in. It was shaped like a long, sleek cigar, almost 200 feet long—not that big for a carrier, but every inch was purpose. A predator.

  A belt of blister pods encircled its middle, each one independently rotating to line up drone launches with chilling efficiency. From the nose to the belt ran a set of pop-out spokes that would deploy the shielding array in combat, making it look like a metal sea urchin.

  The back end housed six heavily-armored pods set away from the main hull on reinforcement beams—the engines and transfer drives. The whole thing was coated in a deep, almost light-eating black that gave it its namesake appearance. A crow, silent and deadly against the void.

  As a light drone carrier, its weapons were its drones, as well as its primary defense. Hidden in the hull were a dozen anti-missile pods, but it carried none of the massive anti-ship weaponry of a ship of the line. It didn’t need them. Its mission was speed, stealth, and delivering its deadly payload—be it drones or delve teams—precisely where it hurt the enemy most. It was a stiletto, not a broadsword.

  “I do have something to tell you though, Warrant….” Roisin said, her voice pulling me from my assessment of the ship.

  I raised an eyebrow. “What would that be, Petty Officer Reynard?”

  She scuffed a boot against the deck plate, a strangely young gesture from her new, adult body. “I cheated on the Kobayashi. It wasn’t a graded scenario, and I kind of got angry that it was presented as a full-on failure state every time. It felt… unfair.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “So how did you cheat on it?” I was genuinely curious. I’d reviewed the sim logs myself. The victory had seemed total.

  She smiled a little, a mischievous glint in her huge eyes. “The School’s simulation had a built-in failsafe that restricts the maximum engagement range to a single AU. Sort of a cheat to avoid overloading the server’s memory. It’s only Tech Level 6, with limited processing power. I… massaged that parameter out to three AU’s using the school’s own training node as a backdoor and uhh… godmoded myself, a little. Gave my pod’s sensors and targeting a temporary, unrealistic buff.”

  “That was still an incredible feat of pattern recognition and execution,” I countered.

  She shook her head, earnest now. “Not really. When I showed Braxis,” she pointed out the older goblin who was now watching us with a knowing smirk, “how I did it, he did the same thing in only three tries, and actually improved on the efficiency of the code. I’m not some supergenius, sir. It’s just a matter of recognizing the patterns, and the trainers made sure I had LOTS of chances to learn the patterns. I know full well that void beasts cannot be rift-spawned the way the sim did it; it was a massive, cheesy move. So I decided to play back with a little cheese of my own. Sorry.”

  I grinned, feeling a strange pride well up. “Roisin Gabrielle Reynard, did you just admit to an ethics violation on the record?”

  She shook her head, her expression turning shrewd. “No, Warrant Officer, I was just letting you know that in the future, perhaps asking someone to win at any price might not be the best course of action for a punishment simulation designed for a technical affinity. There is almost always an easier, smarter way than just bulling forward. Sometimes the win condition isn’t the one on the briefing slate.”

  I smiled a little evilly. “In that case, I have a confession as well. The Kobayashi Maru was a graded scenario.”

  She blinked. “It… was? But they said…”

  I shook my head. “That the intent was to put you under pressure and see how well you could maintain your training in an unwinnable situation?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no such thing as an unwinnable situation, Roisin. Not in the eyes of the Fleet. Nobody is trained to fail. The deck was stacked against you, right from the beginning. That scenario, and its variants, has existed for as long as there’s been space travel. It’s a tradition. Usually, it’s used on command-track potentials with a streak of ‘black sheep’ innovation. A way of seeing how far you will go to succeed. What lines you’ll cross.”

  Her eyes widened in understanding.

  “The way to win,” I said, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “is to cheat. To recognize that the rules of the game are there to be broken if the game itself is broken. Good job, Petty Officer. You passed.”