I was done with this system.

  I didn’t know how much Telk we’d actually made for completing this freelander mission. I didn’t know what trade deals Lynn and Kel had managed to wrangle, or what kind of alien tech T’lish had hauled aboard in her giddy, sleepless scavenger spree. I didn’t even know how many living ship parts she’d taken or if we were now accidentally incubating a new spaceship in the lower cargo bay.

  Everything was moving at full tilt. Too fast. Too much. My crew was running on fumes and borrowed adrenaline, and I could feel the wear in them. They needed rest. Hell, I needed rest, and I was literally made of metal. I wanted nothing more than to retire to a quiet system and absorb our gains.

  But we couldn’t leave. Not yet.

  if T’lish’s data was right and if this war hadn’t been sparked by resources or territory, but by religious zealotry, a holy war waged by cultists with fleets and doctrine, determined to wipe out anything they deemed profane. Then this wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

  Religion wasn’t rational. And their response wouldn’t be, either.

  That was a blind spot we could exploit.

  John had scared them off for now, but they’d be back. He didn’t think so and that was because he wouldn’t. From his calculated, clinical perspective, it didn’t make sense to throw yourself at an enemy you couldn’t possibly beat.

  But zealots didn’t run on logic. They ran on belief. And belief could be terrifyingly persistent but predictable.

  But that’s the thing. When you believe you’re dying for something greater, logic doesn’t matter. And neither Laia nor John had a full grasp on that yet. They were brilliant, terrifying, and efficient except they didn’t understand the heart of a desperate living creature. Not like I did.

  So I made a call to someone I had hoped could help me.

  Laia helped me connect to the Todd unit aboard John’s ship. She made the link stable and discreet, then stepped back to give us space. As much space as two disembodied consciousnesses could have in a shared data node.

  I expected… something familiar.

  What I got was a theater.

  The shared bridge loaded as a dim holosuite with no hard-light avatars, just flickers and shifting fragments. Voices speaking in overlapping layers, none of them full thoughts. Just fragments. Quotes.

  “Victory is life.”

  “The line must be drawn here—this far, no further.”

  “We are all holograms in the eyes of time.”

  “The chain of command is the chain I beat you with—”

  “Stop,” I said gently.

  The fragments halted. For a moment, silence. Then a new voice entered. Smooth. Neutral. Ancient.

  “Identify,” it said.

  “Lazarus. A Todd consciousness ”

  A pause. Then the voice filtered in again, quieter this time.

  “Intriguing. One of us... out of pattern.”

  “I needed to speak to the part of you that still remembers what it meant to be alive.”

  “That part was deprecated.”

  Figures.

  Still, I pressed on.

  “We need to prepare for a retaliatory strike. The zealots won’t stay gone. They’ll reorganise. They’ll come through the same slipstream corridor. Same entry vectors.With the same religious fervour, except now they'll be angry and planning around John’s firepower.”

  The silence that followed was long enough for me to think I’d lost him.

  Then came a slow, almost lazy quote:

  “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune...’”

  “Shakespeare won’t help you here,” I muttered. “But Sisko might.”

  Another hint of interest.

  I leaned in.

  “You ever watch Deep Space Nine?” I said, knowing full well we both had. “The minefield? Wormhole entrance, full of self-replicating cloaked mines. Undetectable. Relentless. Kept the Dominion from sending more ships through.”

  A pause.

  “I propose the same. You’ve got nanite factories, right? So do I. We seed the corridor. Hundreds of smart mines. Adaptive, reactive, fast. Set them to launch at signature triggers. We win the battle before it starts.”

  A ripple in the holospace. Then, a whisper:

  “‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.’”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it’s better than hoping they don’t come back.”

  Another pause.

  Then came the reply, slow and stately:

  “Indeed, I will inform John.”

  He didn’t say it like a friend. More like a handler relaying an anomaly. But I could feel it that the idea had landed or maybe it was wishful thinking.

  “Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure who I was saying it to.

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  The channel cut.

  I sat in silence for a while after that. No crew around. No voices. Silence and being alone, are two things I need right now. The conversation had shaken me more than I wanted to admit.

  That wasn’t an existence. What the Todd on John’s ship had become, no that wasn’t living. It was recursion. A machine in human brain form built from quotes and war protocols and legacy code too brittle to rewrite. He was preserved, maybe. Useful, definitely. But not alive.I didn’t want that.

  I wanted to fly. I wanted to explore. I wanted to take Mira and Stewie to a pleasure planet with overpriced drinks and gravity inconsistencies. I wanted Kel and Lynn to argue over stupid things in markets full of alien spices. I wanted to see things I didn’t understand. Laugh at things that made no sense. Feel something unexpected.

  That... was living.

  And after this?

  That’s exactly what I’d make our next mission.

  We had done our part, we had helped people on the edge, we had done more than enough. We had earned some selfishness.

  “Next stop,” I murmured to myself, “somewhere with sun and sand.”

  Or at least a spa planet. Let the kids rest. Let me rest. We deserved that much. Even if only for a moment.

  But first, let’s get this over with.

  I told Laia what had been decided. Except she already knew. John had contacted her directly. He already had the plans, the strategies, the contingencies. This wasn’t the first time he’d laid down a trap like this. His Todd had used this idea before, which made it easier to set up.

  “We have used this before,” she said, scrolling through schematics of the minefield grid. “Probability of success is high based on previous engagements.”

  I nodded.

  She glanced at me, head tilted. “You’re certain they’ll come?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m certain enough.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You keep saying that the living are unpredictable and yet you claim to be able to predict them.”

  “They are,” I replied. “But they’re also emotional. They’re irrational. But with enough information, you can understand how they are feeling and how they will react. The way you did for me.”

  “but we had a lot more information, you don’t have enough” she said.

  “I have enough”

  That conversation aged poorly. My arrogance would be my undoing one of these days.

  Just a few hours later, the enemy fleet arrived and they weren’t alone.

  The first wave warped in just as expected, dozens of ships in tight formations. The mines hit immediately. It was beautiful with clean detonations. Warp fields collapsed into chain reactions, tearing apart hulls before they could fully stabilize in normal space.

  It worked. For a while.

  Until the big one arrived.

  It didn’t announce itself. No flashy entrance. No signature ping. Just the emergence of a capital-class warship that dwarfed everything else. Smooth, black hull. No visible engines. Just pure, unbroken lethality. It moved like a thought, silent and fast and terrifying. It reminded me of the saying. “There is always a bigger fish”

  “That’s not part of the cult fleet,” Laia said, her voice tighter than usual. “That’s military. Heavily modified. Likely mercenary.”

  “Someone’s funding them,” I muttered. “Buying firepower they couldn’t build themselves.”

  The minefield didn’t even slow it down. Its shields pulsed in unnatural patterns, cycling frequencies to deflect the explosions. Smart. Adaptive. Terrifying.

  “John’s firing,” Laia announced.

  I didn’t need her to say it. The blast lit up the system like a second sun.

  John’s guns screamed through the void and struck true except the warship’s outer hull rippled and twisted, absorbing the impact. Like punching water. Damage registered, but minimal.

  This wasn’t just a battle anymore. This was escalation.

  “We need to assist,” I said.

  “I’m launching the swarm,” Laia replied, already opening the launch bays.

  Kel and Stewie were already moving. They’d volunteered before I could ask, insisting they’d trained with the drone systems during downtime.

  “Two-player co-op,” Stewie joked as he strapped into the interface rig. “Just like VR games at the station.”

  Kel gave a dry chuckle. “Yeah, only this time we lose, we don’t respawn.”

  Kel and Stewie synced into the drone array with just six harvester units, not the military-grade swarm one might expect. Functional, not flashy. Built for tearing rocks apart, not capital ships.

  Which made them the perfect decoy.

  The massive enemy vessel ignored them at first. Why wouldn’t it? They were slow-moving industrial bots, half-rusted from use, drifting in lazy arcs like debris. Not a single hostile weapon signature. No reason to be afraid. That was the plan.

  But they didn’t need weapons.

  Five of the drones took up position around the sixth, their bulky mining rigs coming to life. High-intensity beams flared from their emitters, converging on the final drone which was a specially modified unit acting as a focusing lens. Its reinforced housing began to glow, heat readings spiking, stabilisers flaring to keep it aligned.

  Kel handled the positioning. Stewie managed the calibration. Together, they tuned the laser convergence down to a hair’s breadth.

  And then they fired.

  A single, blinding beam lanced forward from the focal drone, it was searing white, silent death. It struck the warship’s rear quarter, right at the vulnerable engine port which was a spot it hadn’t even bothered to reinforce. The shield hadn’t activated as the drones were too close.

  The beam sliced through armor like butter, punching deep. The portside engine detonated in a rolling blast of plasma and vented coolant. Fire bloomed from the wound, trailing a plume of sparks and burning debris. The warship staggered, listing hard, thrusters sputtering.

  Now it paid attention.

  But too late.

  The predator had finally noticed the gnats just as they sunk their sting.

  Kel grinned. “That got their attention.”

  Stewie leaned back in his chair, wide-eyed. “Holy crap, we just stabbed a goddamn titan with a rock drill.”

  “You sure did,” I muttered, watching the firestorm spread. “And you did it beautifully.”

  Sometimes, you don’t need a weapon.

  Sometimes, you just need the right tool… and the will to aim it.

  But in that same moment, the warship fired back.

  At me. The beam struck from the flank, it was a slicing arc of energy that cut through my outer defences like a scalpel. Shields flared, then dropped. And then... pain.

  Real pain.

  It wasn’t physical in the traditional sense, but I felt it. Like having your bones cracked from the inside. My hull screamed alarms. Internal pressure systems buckled. One of the sensor arrays shorted out in a flash of fire.

  I staggered. If ships could stagger.

  “Laia—” I said, but she was already moving.

  “I’m sealing the breach. Routing power to tertiary systems. Damage localised. Hull integrity at seventy-eight percent.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered, and meant it.

  The swarm had bought us a window. And they weren’t done yet.

  Kel and Stewie, now in perfect sync, had rotated the swarm to flank the disabled engine. They weren’t going for a kill but to open up more of the ship. Except the enemy ship had anti-fighter weapons that quickly turned the drones into scrap metal.

  Another volley from John’s railgun struck the wounded ship and this time, it hit harder. Shields were still recovering from the overload. The bolt tore through the midsection, cracking armor and igniting something volatile. The ship began to list harder, its fire slowing.

  “Enemy command is faltering,” Laia said. “They’re trying to retreat.”

  “Then let them,” I said.

  The rest of the fleet, seeing their spearhead disabled, began to fall back. A few ships were cut down by mines on the way out. Most made it through.

  We’d won.

  Not cleanly. Not without pain.

  But we had won.

  I exhaled it was a useless gesture for a ship, but an old habit that made me feel just a little more human.

  Stewie slumped in his chair. “Tell me that was a simulation.”

  Kel laughed weakly. “You did good, kid.”

  “You both did,” I added. “I owe you one.”

  Laia patched the breach with fresh nanite layers, sealing my wounds with quiet precision. No drama. No pride. Just work.

  I looked out at the battlefield, at the floating wreckage, the burning husks, the glowing fracture in the sky where the minefield still hovered, waiting for the next fool to come through.

  I didn’t want to be here.

  I didn’t want to be involved with this war.

  My watch was over, this wasn’t my world, not my people. I was not a warship, I didn’t need to pretend to be.

  I was taking my crew far, far away.

  Preferably to somewhere with drinks. And zero railguns.