Petty Officer 3rd Class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-

  Kushiel. The name echoed in my mind, a solid, darkly elegant anchor in the swirling chaos of my new existence. David. I really liked that name.

  I didn’t know what his ‘real’ last name was, the one he’d been born with before the Fleet and the war and the augments had remade him, but someday I’d like to find out. Someday, I promised myself, a quiet, fierce little vow made in the secret chambers of my heart.

  His attitudes towards bonding, though… they were… odd. It was like he thought it was a form of slavery or something, a chain he’d rather die than wear.

  He couldn’t be more wrong. Bonding is not slavery. It could be, I supposed, if it was a forced bond, a violation of the worst kind.

  But my mother had explained it to me during the long, warm nights on our world, her voice a soft melody against the whisper of the wind through the silver-leafed trees. Freedom, she’d said, was not the right to do whatever you want and never face any consequences.

  True freedom was the right to choose your own burdens, to willingly pick up the weight that gave your life meaning. And bonding, true bonding, was the ultimate expression of that. It was both a burden and a liberation at the same time, like motherhood or choosing to join a military. It was a covenant that helped you and another become greater than the sum of your parts, a synergy of spirit and purpose that led, eventually, to life.

  David’s repairs… a cold knot of anxiety tightened in my stomach whenever I thought about them. They were a stopgap, a tourniquet on a gushing arterial wound. They were not going to save his life, not without finding a way to reduce the necrotic energies flowing through his channels like a metaphysical poison, corroding his soul from the inside out.

  But they helped him right now. At least his nervous system was not trying to overload itself, forcing him to spend the rest of his life in a silent, screaming coma with his spine permanently shut down to prevent deadly seizures. It was a reprieve, not a pardon. And the clock was still ticking.

  “Hey. Mutant. You planning on staring a hole through that bulkhead, or are you going to tell me what’s got your brain gears smoking?”

  The voice, grating and laced with dark goblin humor, snapped me back to the stark, utilitarian reality of the Crow’s drone bay. The air smelled of ozone, lubricant, and the faint, coppery tang of recycled air.

  Braxis was glaring at me from his perch on a stack of drone maintenance crates, his overlarge, lamp-like eyes squinted into a scowl. His large, bat-like ears twitched slightly, catching frequencies I couldn’t even imagine.

  “The Kalisti rift is not a sim,” he continued, his voice dropping its teasing edge for a moment, becoming deadly serious. “We use it for training, but if you get it wrong in there, you will be just as dead as any other rift-jockey who screwed up. So, what is it? Is my mutant friend reliving her first romantic encounter? Smells like… anxious pheromones and expensive med-gel. Wasserman’s signature stink is all over you, kid.”

  I shook my head, feeling a flush creep up my neck. I knew full well that if there had been any actual sexuality, any intimate contact beyond the clinical and the magical, Braxis’s sharp nose would have caught the signs and he’d never let me hear the end of it.

  But if I did convince David to bond with me… Stars, his teasing would be relentless, a never-ending symphony of innuendo and pointed observations. There was a good reason so many goblins wound up as spies and interrogators. Not only were they ubiquitous and easily overlooked, little gray figures in the background, but their hearing and sense of smell were top-notch.

  Their eyesight was crap without artificial enhancement, a trade-off of evolution, but those giant, expressive ears and prominent noses had a purpose. They missed nothing.

  “Then what is it?” he pressed, hopping down with a grunt. “We are hitting the Kalisti rift tomorrow. You DID check the assignments, right? Or were you too busy making cow-eyes at the walking corpse?”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I flushed a little more, the warmth now a full-blown heat on my cheeks. “Yes, I checked. The droners are playing point defense. You, me, Andrea, and Zaddoc. It’s a copper-tiered raid rift, so the majority of the boarding crew will be training inside, along with Dienne-Lar because it’s tech three.” I recited it by rote, the information feeling basic and insufficient.

  He smiled a little evilly, a flash of sharp teeth. “So you haven’t spoken with your boyfriend?”

  “My boyfriend?” The word felt foreign and absurd. I didn’t think of the warrant officer in those terms. He was… Kushiel. A force of nature. A damaged, magnificent weapon. A man I was terrifyingly, irresistibly drawn to. “Boyfriend” sounded like something from a cheap teen drama vid.

  But Braxis kept teasing me about it, a constant, irritating drip of commentary. We had both been… busy in the last few days while the ship shook out its post-refit kinks, our paths crossing only in brief, intense moments.

  He laughed, a dry, rasping sound. “You said that cross-discipline sorcery of yours lets you use drones in a low-tech rift, right? Well, The captain decided that was a claim worth testing. Do you know why we use Kalisti as a training rift?”

  I shrugged, trying to project a confidence I didn’t feel. “Because it’s only a copper, and the loot is crap?”

  Braxis’s grin widened, becoming truly fiendish. “No, you little idiot, it’s got amazing loot, if you are a resource ship packed to the gills with scut labor. At tech 3, you need a whole ship full of convicts or goblins to extract it by hand, especially since golems are crap at fine-motor-resource gathering. Except that we supposedly have someone on board that can run a collector drone crew even in a low tech rift. None of the big resource ships hit it, though, just landers and invaders like ours, because it’s a raid… Running a lander full of marines PLUS a convict labor ship is too expensive for Fleet. The math doesn’t work. Until now.”

  I nodded slowly, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, final thud. “So, after the raid is cleared, they want me to run a collector node? Harvest the rift’s resources with drones?”

  He shook his head, his expression one of pure glee at my dawning horror. “No, think bigger, gremlin. You and Dienne-Lar are going in WITH the raid. Taera wants you to get to at least copper, and you said you can reconfigure on the fly. Guess who gets to pilot the lander?”

  I went cold. A sudden, icy wave washed through me, leaving my fingers tingling and numb. “You want me to pilot the lander? I’m not a pilot! I can drop a drone pod fine, and pulling people out is just all emergency sim stuff, but a combat landing for a raid team? With like… real live, breathing humans on board? Their lives in my hands?”

  He chuckled, thoroughly enjoying himself. “Dienne-Lar has done it several times, and he didn’t break the Kobayashi program. Barely. Plus, you can actually fly it into the rift proper to waypoint 1. That would save the team at least two hours of hiking through sun-baked hell, and you are going to be using multipurpose drones… you can clear the first assault easily for the team, which is where we usually lose a newbie or two. You’ll be saving lives before you even set boot on sand.”

  I was pacing now, a tight, anxious circuit in front of the yawning entrances to pod four and six. The metal decking felt cool through the soles of my ship boots.

  I’d done similar maneuvers, in simulations as well as training drops, but those always had safety nets, emergency shutdowns, and instructors ready to grab the controls. We were talking zero backup, no training wheels, and I might even have to dismount and take part in the actual up-close fighting if things went sideways. The sheer, multi-layered responsibility of it was staggering.

  “But, I mean,” I stammered, “They want me to do first assault setup? With like, trusting me with the fortifications and initial waves and all that? The beachhead?”

  He nodded, his amusement fading into a look of grim professionalism. “Yep. And you get to do it all with multipurpose drones, instead of a full combat drop. Warrant Wasserman and Taera both assured the Cap that you can do it. They stuck their necks out for you, mutant. Don’t make them regret it.”

  I sighed, the sound swallowed by the vastness of the bay. “Crap crap crap. I know what the approach swarm’s going to be, ion wasps, nasty little energy-sappers, but I don’t have the slightest idea what’s inside the rift proper. The mob types, the terrain past the canyon…”

  He chuckled, the sound knowing. “And you didn’t check because you thought you knew what was going on.” He held up a small, black security chip between two thick fingers. “And I knew you wouldn’t. You’re brilliant, kid, but you got tunnel vision worse than a mole rat. Remember, tech 3. That means that both you and Dienne-lar are going to be both running support AND playing healer. No fancy tech to do it for you.”

  “Can I bring some full combat drones?” I asked, already mentally cataloging my available hardware.

  He nodded. “One or two heavies, yeah. No munitions, though. Even if you can get tech drones working, the tech restrictions prevent non-alchemical explosives and beam weapons. It’s swords, spells, and sharp sticks in there. Set up a mission plan, and afterwards, return the security chip to me. Don’t make me come find you.”

  I snatched the chip from the air when he tossed it to me, its cool, hard surface feeling like a lead weight in my palm. Without another word, I turned and practically fled the bay, my mind already racing, heading for the relative sanctuary of my berthing to begin running through the secured archives for known mob types for the Kalisti rifts.