Chief Warrant Officer Wasserman-

  The scent of recycled air, brog-loaf, and the faint, acrid tang of ozone that clung to every military vessel in known space filled my nostrils as I settled onto the hard, unyielding bench. The crew mess of the UPFFS Crow was a study in controlled chaos, a symphony of clattering trays, boisterous laughter, and the low hum of a starship at warp. It was nothing like the sterile, rank-segregated wardrooms of the regular Fleet. This was… earthy. Alive.

  The troopers of the ship’s marine contingent were a breed apart, a loud, profane knot of muscle and menace at a table near the port viewport. I’d fought alongside their kind before, from the remove of a Paladin suit, a god of war raining down judgment from afar. But sharing a mess hall with them on the Valkyrie, a ship that seemed to operate on its own unique, fluid set of rules, was a new and intimate experience. The moment we’d pulled out of the nexus, ironically shepherded by a flock of Petty Officer Reynard’s eerily precise fleet drones, the atmosphere had shifted. The rigid formalities of Fleet life had begun to slough away like old skin.

  Even my name had been a casualty of that shift. ‘Chief Warrant Officer Wasserman’ had been retired in favor of ‘Paladin.’ It had started with a few of the senior NCOs, a sign of respect for the calling, not the rank. Then it had spread through the crew like a benevolent virus. Now, it was just what I was. A couple of the old hands still used ‘Wasserman’ or ‘Chief,’ but mostly it was callsigns and nicknames. It was familiar and alien all at once, a piece of my old life repurposed for this new, strange existence.

  The wardroom, I’d noted, had functionally closed up. Captain Timur, a charming young brunette who presented as a baseline human with the sunny disposition of someone who might actually be twenty, was a gold core cultivator. She could have been two centuries old for all I knew, but she acted her apparent age. Yet, she and the XO took their meals separately, an island of command protocol in a sea of informality. For everyone else, rank at mealtime seemed to be a suggestion, not a law. I’d seen the elf, Dienne-Lar—the one who looked like he’d been genetically engineered by a committee of romance novel cover artists—cheerfully and brazenly flirting with the Chief Engineer, who was now universally known as ‘Kimmy.’ And Kimmy, a woman who could probably recalibrate a warp core with her bare hands, was giving as good as she got.

  The XO, Taera, was just Taera. Everyone knew she was the second-most powerful being on the ship, a fact that needed no reinforcing through stuffy formality. She was also, I’d learned, the ship’s chaplain, therapist, and confessor. She’d announced an open-door policy, and from the steady, quiet traffic to her office, she meant it. This vessel was a fascinating social experiment, a tightly-knit tribe hurtling through the void, its hierarchies based on competence and trust as much as rank.

  It had only been two days since Roisin’s… procedure. Two days since my world had stopped being a constant, grinding agony. The ship’s transit through the warp barely bothered me more than most, a minor miracle in itself. I wouldn’t say Reynard’s unique magitech solution had improved my capabilities; it was more like someone had finally turned off the fire alarm that had been screaming in my soul for years. The necrotic overload was still there, a cold, dormant poison sleeping in my meridians, but its constant, debilitating interference was gone. I was performing near my old standards. Gold core and its potential for true purification were no longer a fantastical dream; it was a plausible goal on a visible, if distant, horizon. I still needed a fortune in resources to regenerate my shattered meridians, but if this privateer vessel lived up to its reputation for frequent, profitable rifting, that fortune might be within reach sooner than I’d ever dared hope.

  I’d also learned a crucial piece of intel from Sergeant Corellia, the grizzled orc in charge of the marine contingent. Fraternization, it turned out, wasn’t the career-ending offense it was in the regular Fleet. Not on the Crow. There were traditions, both written and unwritten, complex social codes governing shipboard affairs. The most important one, the one that was apparently drummed into every new crewmember, was that the higher-ranked individual never, ever initiated it. It was a rule designed to prevent coercion, to keep things… clean. This fact made the incident in medbay—the one where a semiconscious warrant officer apparently decided Petty Officer Reynard made for an excellent stress ball—even more embarrassing. The official report had been stricken, but Taera had made it clear a copy remained on my jacket, just in case 'I ever got ideas again.’ A permanent mark of shame and a running joke, all in one.

  My musings were interrupted by a voice, soft yet clear, cutting through the mess hall din. “May I sit with you?”

  I looked up from my tray of bland, nutritious paste and protein loaf and felt the air leave my lungs. Standing there was Petty Officer Third Class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard, holding a tray so laden with food it was a minor engineering marvel. Mashed illeps, a thick slab of brog-loaf, a small mountain of green fried tullar buds all swimming in a lake of rich, brown gravy. Important life note, I thought, my analytical mind seizing on the most trivial detail to avoid short-circuiting, Maenads are decidedly not vegetarians. It also made sense; drone pilots, like mages, burned a staggering amount of energy just using their gifts. Braxis, her goblin chief, was already on his third heaping tray at the droners' table, shoveling calories into his system like a furnace.

  She’d stopped her rapid physical maturation, it seemed, but where she’d chosen to stop was nothing short of breathtaking. She’d gone from a scrawny, genderless gremlin to… this. A heart-shaped face with high cheekbones, a delicate jawline, and lips that seemed permanently curved in a faint, curious smile. And those eyes. Gods, those eyes. They were a blue you didn’t see in nature, the color of manufactured sapphires, crystal-clear and brilliant, with a faint, captivating hint of emerald around the pupils. They were windows into a mind that was simultaneously ancient and painfully innocent.

  Yep. Focus on the eyes, Wasserman. Focus on the eyes and for the love of all that’s holy, do not let your gaze drop to the elegant line of her neck, the gentle swell of her chest under her shipsuit, or the way her hips… Damn.

  “Please do so,” I said, the words coming out automatically as I stood up. It was an old mannerism, beaten into me by a father who believed chivalry was the bedrock of civilization. A gentleman stands for a lady. Even if the ‘lady’ is a genetically-engineered technomancer-in-waiting and the ‘gentleman’ is a walking necrotic time bomb whose chair is bolted to the floor.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  A dazzling, sun-bright smile broke across her face. “A gentleman!” she said, and the simple pleasure in her voice made my heart do a funny little stutter-step. She slid gracefully into the bench opposite mine, setting her tray down with a soft thud. “Thank you.”

  I sat back down, my mind scrambling for a topic of conversation that wasn’t ‘So, your body is a masterpiece of biological art’ or ‘I’m sorry I fondled you while comatose.’ My brain, in its infinite wisdom, latched onto the most inane, official-sounding thing it could find. I immediately wanted to punch myself in the throat. “So, how are you settling into the droner cadre, Petty Officer Reynard?”

  She nodded, spearing a tullar bud with practiced ease. “Very well, but please, underway rules. Could you call me Gabrielle? It’s my middle name, but my family grew up calling me Rose.” She took a bite, and I tried very hard not to watch the movement of her mouth. It was one of the more difficult acts of discipline I’d performed recently.

  I chuckled, the sound feeling rusty. “At the risk of sounding trite, I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful name than Gabrielle. I’ll be happy to use it. Please, call me David.” I took a breath, steeling myself. “Umm… I wanted to apologize for that… incident.”

  She looked at me, her sapphire eyes utterly serious. “You mean when you were trapped in a neuro-feedback loop by an empathic mirror resonance with no connection to the real world whatsoever because otherwise, your conscious mind would have been irrevocably ravaged by the most complete sensory deprivation possible while we manually re-synced your nervous system to the new implant matrix?” she said, all in one quick, breathless rush. She paused for a half-second. “There is literally nothing to apologize for. You had zero conscious control over your motor functions. I am actually rather irate with XO Taera for filing it in the first place.”

  She took a sip of water. “If you’d done it on purpose, I might have been upset. Not because of the action itself, but because you didn’t ask first. But as it is… I think we are caught in a bit of a quandary.”

  “A quandary?” I asked, my brain snagging on the phrase ‘you didn’t ask’ and worrying at it like a loose tooth. What did that mean? Did that imply the action itself was negotiable? Stop it, Wasserman. Down, boy.

  “Yes, a quandary.” She gestured with her fork, encompassing the ship, our situation, everything. “See, I have no frame of reference for what a Divine Paladin is. My cultural database is mostly pre-FTL fairy tales and Fleet technical manuals. I am also having an enormous amount of trouble not breaking about a dozen regulations just by existing. Thank you for keeping your aura suppressed, by the way… it makes thinking straight a lot easier.” She gave a small, frustrated sigh. “And now Taera is trying to throw us together for some reason I can’t decipher. I don’t even know you, other than our… competitive interactions when you were my superior at J-School. It’s all very confusing.”

  I sighed, leaning back. Straight to the point. No games. It was refreshing and terrifying. “We both have gotten quests. Honest-to-God, system-generated quests. The kind they write legends about. Mine is one of the primary reasons I’m here.” I chose my words carefully, bound by the constraints of the geas that came with such a burden. “Apparently, if you form a bond with the wrong individual—a forced or manipulative bond—they could potentially twist you, your power, into becoming something monstrous. A paladin is… someone who accepts quests like that. To protect people, stop great evils—even if they aren’t directly from the Chaos Lords—and basically play knight in shining armor for a universe that’s fresh out of shining knights.”

  Her brow quirked with open amusement. “Do you have shining armor?”

  A genuine laugh escaped me. “Yep. Totally shining. Not a spot of tarnish from the fact that I have enough necrotic essence crawling through my meridians to spontaneously empower a minor lich lord. It’s a great look.” The humor faded from my voice. “Honestly, Gabrielle, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a walking dead man, I think I probably would have mustered the courage to try and learn more about you days ago. But I don’t want to be the cause of the exact catastrophe I’ve been tasked with preventing.”

  She considered this, her head tilted. “So what is Taera’s quest? And you are sick, not dying. It can be fixed, it’s just a matter of when and resources,” she stated with a conviction that was both endearing and startling.

  “To meddle. I cannot give you details, obviously, but all Taers were inveterate meddlers. It’s what they do, their only pastime. It’s in their foundational code.” I took a bite of my own loaf, the bland taste a stark contrast to the complexity of the conversation.

  “And can you tell me yours? It’s a little insane that you might have gotten a quest involving me. Kind of old-school,” she asked, her curiosity palpable.

  I chuckled a little, “I think, but I am not sure, to counterbalance hers, except that hers involved getting both of us here. Taera is fanatically loyal to the Timur family. The Timur family has made it their personal mission to bring down the slaver worlds. That means that Taera is devoted to that mission. Her quest makes it… difficult to serve two masters at the same time, and I think I am here to help her find a path that doesn’t force a choice.”

  “You are opposed to shutting down the slaver worlds?” Her eyes had narrowed a little, and I could sense a hint of steel in them, a core of righteous fury that was entirely her own. Damn if this girl didn’t seem more paladin than most paladins I’d met.

  I shook my head vehemently. “No. Gods, no. I am desperately in favor of dropping the lot of them into the nearest star. But there are complications. An invasion or a full embargo would wind up hurting or starving billions of their… people, the indentured and the conscripted, without affecting the oligarchs who support the system at all. It might even trigger a rift overload on a dozen worlds. Mass suffering and despair tend to do that. Surgical strikes? Slavery is like a hydra. If you take out one head, two more grow back, and the new management is often worse.”

  “The Captain’s family seems to be honorable folk, even though their motivations might be as financial as they are benevolent,” I continued. “But your background is a powerful attractor. Proof that slaver worlds are using conscription enforcers as a procurement arm for their markets? They could use that as an excuse to not only shut down conscription—which I would personally celebrate—but it would also force a massive backlash from the Church. They would have to declare a crusade.”

  “They’d use you as a political tool,” I said, my voice dropping. “And they’d get you bonded to a member of the family or a key ally as quickly as possible. That way, you are a perfect influencer, loyal to their cause, and potentially someone nearly as powerful as a technomancer under their thumb. They are on the honorable track right now, but that kind of power has a terrible appeal. My job is to stop that from happening.”

  “For how long?” she asked, a faint blush coloring her green-tinged cheeks after my blunt assessment.

  I shrugged. “It’s an open-ended quest. I have no clue. All I know is, if I fail, based on the implications of Taera’s quest, there might not be a galaxy to return to. The Old Empire might have contained a chain-reaction rift collapse, but now? Not so much.”

  She was smiling slightly now, a strange, thoughtful expression. “So you want to stop the raiders, destroy the slaver worlds' ability to be slaver worlds, and the whole time, maybe for the rest of your life, you will be protecting me, my freedom to choose a bond, and my life with yours?”

  I nodded, the weight of it settling back onto my shoulders. “Pretty much.”