13. S.O.S.

  I was joking around with Aster in her room when the emergency broadcast came through. Captain Min-jae followed standard protocol and immediately dropped us out of hyperspace to investigate, then called for a general meeting. Aster and I attended as well, of course.

  “A standard freighter without a soul suffered a containment breach and the chemicals inside were vented into its crew quarters,” he explained. “They experienced sixty percent casualties, while the rest of them managed to get into escape shuttles in time. They’re stranded, and we’re the closest vessel that can support them.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Rebekah asked. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m verifying the data of the broadcast before we bring Yoji anywhere near that wreckage. We’ve already had one run in with bandits, and this sounds like a standard trap to me. By pretending to be disabled and in distress, they lower our guard and literally get aboard out ship. We have passengers to think about, and a life of slavery wasn’t in our boarding manifest,” he explained.

  “If the empire finds out we ignored a distress call, we’ll have some serious explaining to do,” Rebekah said.

  “I’m not ignoring it. I’m having Yoji compare its signatures and security protocols to make certain it’s genuine. Once he’s finished with that check, we’ll get underway,” the captain explained.

  “What? Oh, right, yeah, that’s right, I was supposed to do something,” I said, then I sent my computer-hindbrain in to motion to perform the checks that Captain Min-jae had issued before calling the meeting.

  It took three seconds. “Yeah everything looks right,” I said.

  “No signs of tampering?” he asked.

  “I dunno what that would look like,” I admitted. “But the part of me that still remembers being Artemis says that it’s a legitimate distress call. It’s got imperial signatures on it that say it’s real.”

  Captain Min-jae nodded. “Okay. Yoji, let’s get underway to pick up the survivors. Everyone, let’s start clearing space for them and prepping to deal with any injuries they have. I’ll take responsibility for informing the passengers of the delay and the cause of the delay.”

  They spoke for another five minutes or so while I readjusted our heading towards the distress call and kicked it into high gear. Three members of the passengers volunteered to help, stating that they had some medical training, including one who was a licensed nurse. Lila was quick to take them up on their offers and brief them on my medical wing.

  Somewhere in the din of preparing for our arrival, Ahm Raht appeared on the bridge and promised that, if this were a trap, that he would defend me and my crew with the full might of his power. Captain Min-jae thanked him and said “I hope that it doesn’t become necessary, but it’s good to have you standing behind us in case things go tits up.”

  It only took a few hours for me to arrive near, since, you know, I’m fast. We popped into the dead of space a few hundred kilometers away from the source of the signal and I pulled the freighter up on my external cameras for everyone to look at. I was so focused that it took Min-jae a while to get me to scan for other threats, but aside from four life-pods there weren’t any other ships in detectable range.

  “Okay. Let’s signal to everyone that we’re here,” he said, and he began broadcasting.

  “Survivors of the ESSS Jammerhead, this is the SoulShip Yoji. We received your distress call and are here to help. We’re not search and rescue, so file your flightplans to intersect with us and we’ll get you loaded in our cargo bay. Once everyone is on board, we’ll do basic medical and fix up any of your owies to the best of our abilities, but we can’t promise any miracles.”

  Each of the lifepods signaled receipt of the message. They filed flightplans with me, and I negotiated with their stupid little processors to get them to all land on me a few minutes apart.

  I was so focused on intercepting the lifepods as they came in to my open cargo bay doors that at first I didn’t realize that the occupants of the second lifepod were badly injured. When they did, without even thinking about it, I hit them with Epoch Tide.

  When the last lifepod was loaded, I closed the doors and filled the chamber with atmosphere, and my crew went to work. The uninjured freighter crew members helped us with the injured ones, but not before we ran them through a decontamination shower to make certain that the chemicals which had triggered the evacuation of the Jammerhead were rinsed off them.

  Once they were cleaned and dressed again, they explained that they had hit turbulence in the hyperdrive and dropped out to wait for the instability to pass, then while in regular space they were struck by a micrometeor while their debris shields were warming up. The resulting damage had caused a cascading explosion in their systems and blah blah blah Murphy’s law.

  So, anyway, the people that I hit with Epoch Tide lived, except for one of them who died, but the others lived. And it was sad that the one guy died, but they would have all died if I hadn’t helped, so I was proud of myself.

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  We sent out a broadcast stating that we had helped the Jammerhead and were bringing the survivors with us to our next destination while marking the wreckage for salvage and reclamation services.

  The crew of the Jammerhead were a little angry about that, as some of them were co-owners of the freighter and having it marked for salvage meant that it was irrecoverable to its owners. The more reasonable members of the crew pointed out that it was irrecoverable except to a junker service prepared to handle it, and that if they hurried they could get to it before anyone else.

  The buoy we left behind specified the hazmat protocols that needed to be observed before boarding the ship. Its cargo was effectively lost; it would need to be completely purged and the interiors all washed out before it was serviceable again.

  But although some of them were upset, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

  In the middle of the night, six of the men we rescued sneaked into the crew quarters and made their way to the bridge, where they uploaded a computer virus which, had I still been Artemis, would have given them control over the computer systems. They were completely quiet, and I never once heard them discuss this plan among themselves.

  Anyway, I woke up Aster and told them what happened, and she actually looked a little afraid.

  “Lock down the other survivors in their room,” she said, “And wake up Captain Min-jae and Ahm Raht, I think. Tell them what you told me, and help Ahm Raht and listen to the captain’s orders.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really understanding that I was in the middle of a mutiny.

  The mutineers were busy playing with the computer systems when Min-jae was briefed on the system. He closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yoji, I’m going to ask you to do something. You don’t have to do it, but it’s the easiest way to solve the problem,” he said.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “Lock the doors to the bridge, and vent the atmosphere,” he instructed.

  “But that will kill them,” I objected.

  “Yes. Don’t worry, you won’t be in trouble. If you can’t do it though, I understand. We’ll just have to fight them instead.”

  I frowned, but in the end I did as he asked. Except instead of venting the atmosphere, I just replaced the oxygen with nitrogen until they all went to sleep.

  And didn’t wake up.

  A few hours later, the crew explained to the other survivors why they were locked in their rooms and what their compatriots had tried to do, as well as their fate. They shoved the bodies into one of the lifepods and locked it.

  We arrived at the nearby station, our passengers disembarked, and we turned the surviving freighter crew over to the authorities. They were interviewed for any collusion with the mutineers, but we didn’t stay in the system long enough to hear their fate.

  We purchased a load of electronics and zipped out of the system before the hearings were completed. I had to give testimony about what I’d done, but since I was following my captain’s orders nobody even questioned that I’d done the right thing.

  Or even how I felt about it.

  There were some consequences to the hacking attempt. Among others, one in three of my toilets stopped working. This was a massive inconvenience for everyone involved, as I’d been using the remains of the old Artemis system to deal with a lot of my ‘boring’ systems and I had to erase her and take over my ‘guts and bolts’ entirely.

  Which meant that all remains of my mother were gone from my system.

  Oh, and also I had to deal with the moral complexity of having killed six humans. But I’d also saved them first, and then they’d betrayed me, so it was an entire murky quagmire and I couldn’t decide how I felt about any of it.

  Surprisingly, Captain Min-jae was really supportive through the entire thing, going so far as to tell me that I could come to him to yell at him or cry on his shoulder (metaphorically of course). He said that my actions were justified under the circumstance and that I’d been following orders when I killed the men who’d tried to hack me, but understood that I might be feeling complex emotions which a child would have difficult processing.

  Because I was still a child.

  Oh, and also, the empire put us on a watchlist as a potentially dangerous soulship. I mean, they didn’t know that I could cultivate, but I had killed a few of my passengers, so yeah, they were nervous about me. The passengers were attempting mutiny, and they’d already entered commands to do things like vent the atmosphere in the captains room and lock down the rest of the crew’s quarters, so I was justified in defending myself and my crew. But while I wasn’t impounded or anything, my imperial record had a great big Asterisk associated with it that linked to this incident, and I would never be able to outrun it.

  Which just pushed us further and further into the arms of the Alliance.

  ?