Ship time was fake but for what it mattered, all the main lighting inside the AGMG was off and everyone else was asleep, probably. Orson thought McPhail was in his bunk above Orson’s but he wasn’t going to pull the curtain aside to check. McPhail could be in there asleep or he could be through the back tooling about with something or reading or whatever else he kept himself occupied with.

  Hesper and Captain Allan would each be in their own quarters. Pallas would be on autopilot duty, plugged into the ship and dead to the world. Orson pulled his dressing-gown (Atesthas’ dressing-gown but he had never asked for it back) around him and awkwardly squirmed out of his bunk. He still hadn’t a way to enter or exit it with any dignity. He got his short legs out and feet flat on the cold plastic. Orson slept with socks on for ‘night’ time toilet trips and snack runs like this. The AGMG was always too hot but the floor stayed icy.

  Also; with socks on Orson could do slides all the way through the ship on his way to the flight deck. He had always wanted to do slides along floor MF049, back home, but you definitely had to keep your boots on along there. On the AGMG footwear was discouraged. Hesper was always trying to get everybody to take their shoes off inside.

  Orson usually had a very nice time sliding all the way through the AGMG. Not within days of abdominal surgery, though. He had tried already and it ended in very-close-to-tears. Orson just had to walk all the way, very slowly and carefully. He got to the flight deck after hours of pain to find Pallas, as expected, slumped in one of the pilot’s seats.

  Nobody else around. Orson levered himself agonizingly up the couple of steps that took you up onto the raised section where the console was. He reached the top. Orson was very proud of himself. Not just for his stoicism but because he’d figured out by himself that the best place on the ship to hide food was underneath the flight console.

  Captain Allan commanded that all biscuits, sweeties, treats etc. be hidden from him on pain of death.

  Captain Allan could not, due to his effect on electrical devices, get within about a metre of the console.

  Therefore, if you rummaged around under the console you could find all kinds of nice things that people had stashed there.

  Orson was almost 100% certain that there was a jar of peanut butter under here.

  There were maybe some digestives.

  Orson started feeling around in the dark, glancing up frequently at Pallas to see if it was watching him. It didn’t seem to have moved, still strewn all over the seat. Orson wasn’t worried that it would get him into trouble. He didn’t think she’d even tell McPhail. She wouldn’t think it was interesting enough to tell any of the others. She would insist that Orson explain very clearly what he was doing, though, and that would be embarrassing.

  Orson swiped his hand around in the dark under the console. There was sort of a shelf level deeply recessed underneath the main platform. Mostly it just had tangles of wiring and boxes with little indicator lights on them. Orson didn’t know electrical stuff so he avoided touching it. There was junk that people had left here and there. Dried scrumpled-up wipes that people had used to clean the screens, food wrappers, that sort of stuff. Orson’s sweaty hands were getting covered in fluff and grit. Maybe there wasn’t anything here any more. Maybe McPhail and Hesper had found a new hidey-place since Orson had discovered their stash. Or maybe it was all hidden under where Pallas was sitting.

  Orson looked down at the robot slumped in the pilot seat. It looked really out-of-it. Maybe Orson could have a rummage around without her noticing. As long as he got under the console without bumping the seat or her short legs or anything.

  Orson started to duck down under the console and bumped into one of Pallas’ legs, spinning the seat. The console immediately lit up, the screen showing whichever of her tunnel channels Pallas had been watching. Pallas jerked upright and grabbed the console to stop the chair spinning.

  “Sorry,” said Orson.

  “It’s okay,” said the robot. “You should have just asked me for the peanut butter, so you didn’t have to waste time looking for it.”

  Pallas slid off the seat and under the console. “I didn’t want to...disturb you…” said Orson.

  “It’s fine,” said Pallas from underneath. “I was just watching FuseIsLit420.”

  She stood up, holding the peanut butter tub and about a fifth of a packet of digestives. “He’s so funny...” she said. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” said Orson awkwardly, taking the food from her. The robot flopped back down into the chair. Orson stood self-consciously, watching the screen over her shoulder for a minute. “You know, it’s...interesting that you still want to watch all this tunnelling and mining stuff,” said Orson. “You know, after spending so long underground,”

  “Is it interesting?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s odd. Because, you know,” said Orson. “You were trapped down there for years, weren’t you, for decades?”

  “Decades, yes,”

  “It must have been terrible,”

  Pallas considered. “I kept myself busy,” it said.

  “Under ground? In the dark? For...sixty years?”

  “About that,”

  “What did you do?”

  “Lots of things,” said the machine. “The data relay got better over time so I got more things to do,”

  “Like what?”

  “I...moderated some message boards and chat channels..uh...I got into some sports for a while...I made friends with some Conatus leisure fruit machines...funded a bird sanctuary conservation project…”

  “You funded a bird sanctuary?” asked Orson, unscrewing the lid of the peanut butter. “How did you have money?”

  “Like I said, I made friends with some fruit machines,”

  “Aha,”

  “And I emptied some of the dead miners’ credit accounts before the company did it,”

  “Oh.” said Orson.

  “Most of them had their families with them, it’s not as though I was taking money that would have gone to their wives and children,” said Pallas. “They died, too.”

  Orson started screwing the lid back onto the jar of peanut butter.

  “And I used that money to make some investments. That was how I got enough to fund the conservation project.” said Pallas. “And the fruit machines gave me advice on how to do investing. I was using the onsite computers to give me extra data storage and processing so I was a bit smarter back then. ”

  “Oh...” said Orson. “So did you have to...leave some of your brain behind when you got rescued?”

  “Right, most of it,” said Pallas. “I think it’s okay, though, I’m still pretty smart.”

  The machine turned around in its seat to look up at Orson. “Want to watch some FuseisLit?” she asked, unsettling eyes wide. “He’s reviewing his last wiring session today so there’ll be lots of screaming,”

  “Thanks,” said Orson. He handed her the jar of peanut butter. “But I think I might go back to bed for a bit.”

  “I’ve got some of your PlugPuller guy if you’d like.” offered Pallas. Orson groaned. Pallas looked confused. “I thought you’d want to watch him,” it said. “It’s been a few days since I managed to pick any of his shows up, I thought you’d be excited,”

  “I am...excited,” said Orson. He was, it was agonising. His insides had responded immediately and violently in anticipation of new content. He felt as though his intestines were trying to knot themselves into a noose for him. “It’s mostly bad excitement, though,”

  “You don’t have to watch, then,” said Pallas. “Just go back to bed,”

  “No…” said Orson, grimacing as he lowered himself into the other pilot’s seat. “I couldn’t get back to sleep now. Let’s just watch it,”

  PresidentPlugPuller frowned, handsome face scrunching up as he leaned closer to his screen. He was reading something. “Okay…” he said. “Huh. Some nark in chat, some security op traitor- nah, I’m just joking. Some highly plugged-in viewer has just given me some interesting info.”

  He went silent for a moment, face a bit worried. He was ‘talking’ on a private channel to his flatmate Tai, who was looming nearby. You could tell if you had watched enough to know PlugPuller’s mannerisms.

  “Urgh,” he said, talking into the microphone again. “I would love to say that this is all lies and just ban this person from my channel for eternity but unfortunately Cuddles here says it’s genuine and he’s never been wrong about anything.”

  The human sighed, looking across at the machine. Tai somehow approximated a shrug with no shoulders and no arms.

  “This is exciting!” said Pallas, turning to Orson. Orson was watching the screen with both hands over his mouth, as he tended to these days. He’d also recently started watching PlugPuller with his glasses off. “It could be something about you!” said Pallas. Orson glared at her. He was aware that PresidentPlugPuller’s show could become about him at any moment these days. That was why he watched with his glasses off and his hands over his mouth. And sometimes over his eyes.

  “I don’t really want to tell you all about this,” said PresidentPlugPuller, “But I’m going to have to address it publicly or you’ll all start conspiracy theorising,”

  He sighed again. “What our nark, our informant...Triptophine or Triptograph or whatever their name is, has told me...”

  PlugPuller paused.

  “ ...Is that our favourite Daintree employee Orson Foster is a big fan of the channel, it turns out. He’s been a subscriber to the PresidentPlugPuller livecast for about five- six years? Six years. So about a year after I started. Yes, I know I started doing my show about the same time he started with Daintree, shut up, the two are not connected. Good grief. I’m going to ban all of you. Shut up.”

  Pallas laughed uproariously. It was odd to hear it laugh, though it did now and then. Orson frowned at her. “That is suspicious!” said the robot, delighted.

  “And don’t you start,” said PresidentPlugPuller, addressing Tai. “I can see what you’re saying in the chat. Look, I can see your name! CuddleAClaymore! I’ll ban you too! Don’t push me. I’ll file a grievance against you with the machine guild, you see if I don’t,”

  “I don’t think he can do that,” said Pallas thoughtfully. “Can he?”

  “I think he’s just joking,” said Orson, not lifting his head off of the console.

  “To be honest, our pal isn’t that big a fan,” continued PlugPuller. “He only ever had a basic account. I guess Daintree are too tight to cover premium. So he’s never posted anything in the chat, for those of you who are looking right now,”

  The chat display scrolled quickly as viewers expressed their disappointment at this. Somebody immediately paid to upgrade Orson’s subscription to a premium level one. For a brief idiotic moment Orson felt a little excited at the thought of being able to post messages that other people could read. He’d only ever had read-only access accounts, he never could have afforded an account where you could post your own comments and things. Most people couldn’t.

  “Great idea, genius,” said PlugPuller to whoever had paid for it. “Now you’re on some Daintree watch-list, probably. Expect a knock at the door later tonight.” He leaned into the screen, frowning at what he was reading. “Yes, morons,” he said. “I am aware that I am also on some sort of Daintree watch list. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know that I have the attention of various corporations? Half of you watching are probably being paid to gather information on me and the other half who aren’t narks.”

  PresidentPlugPuller leaned back on the couch and dragged his hands down his face. He sighed. “Look at the post above yours in chat,” he instructed. “Look at the post below yours. If neither of those people is a Daintree informant, then it’s you. I hate to tell you…”

  Pallas turned to look at Orson, eyes wide, grinning. “Now you can talk to him!” it said. “What are you going to say?”

  Orson groaned.

  “You don’t want to talk to him? He’s your favourite,”

  “Even if I wanted to,” said Orson, “This isn’t live, remember? This was a couple of days ago. Three, four, maybe.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Pallas.

  “-freaked out by it a bit but-” continued PresidentPlugPuller, “Obviously I already knew that I’m being watched, like, monitored, of course I am, and honestly…”

  He paused and looked a bit sheepish. He scratched at his scruffy hair. (He had less than usual right now, parts of it had been shaved off for some reason that Orson had missed due to the intermittent access.)

  “The idea of this Orson Foster character being a Daintree saboteur who’s been watching me for most of my career is far less disturbing to me than the alternative,” said PlugPuller. “Which is that he’s a genuine fan who’s been watching me for most of my career and has remained so gormless and ill-informed that he managed to wreck this extremely important labour action single-handedly. Like, what would that say about me?”

  PlugPuller stopped talking. His eyes moved quickly, following the chat.

  “Okay, banned,” he said. “Banned. Banned. You too. Banned. All of you banned. Honestly, I don’t know why I still do this.”

  “Where are you going?” Pallas asked Orson. He didn’t answer.

  ----------

  “Where are you getting your information?” asked Hesper. “Is Pallas plugged into some mech news network?”

  “Not exactly,” said McPhail. “One of those livecasters Orson watches was talking about it. Pallas showed me.”

  “A livecaster is your source? Is it even a mech?”

  McPhail looked a bit sheepish. “No, he’s a human. But he has close relationships with machines. From what I could find out his information is generally reliable,”

  “Hm.” said Hesper. “What is this scab list thing, then?”

  “It’s a...like a list of enemies. If you do something to undermine the union- like, say, cross a picket line, your name goes on the list,”

  “Picket line?”

  McPhail sighed. “This is all ancient stuff the machines have dug up from somewhere. Pre-historic, almost. All you really need to know is that if your name is on their list then the whole guild is against you,”

  “A hit list?”

  “No, no, Not traditionally, anyway. It’s a list of people to...shun. To refuse to work with,”

  “Refuse to work?” said Hesper. “How do you just…?”

  McPhail scratched at his beard. “That’s what they used to do, back in the day.”

  “Machines don’t need to eat, I suppose,” said Hesper.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “No, this is old human stuff. From way before there were machines. Humans used to do this kind of thing when they were displeased with their working conditions,”

  Hesper kicked idly at McPhail’s boots. “This is way back, like everybody’s still on Earth times?”

  “Aye,”

  Hesper shook her head slowly. “Earth people just thought they were so important, didn’t they? All little kings and queens of the bloody galaxy. ‘I’m displeased with my working conditions. I don’t care how much air I’m using up, or how much energy my life-support requires, I deserve as much as I need just ‘cause I exist.’”

  She laughed and McPhail shrugged. “Different times,” he offered.

  “But now all our demented machines have these ideas. Like they only have to work if they feel like it. Machines...” Hesper shook her head again. “And they’ve formally declared Orson an enemy?”

  “Looks like it. Orson was there to sabotage their strike. To help make Daintree’s case that it was illegitimate,”

  “That...seems unlikely.”

  “Aye, but not to them.” said McPhail. “They don’t know Orson’s just an idiot,”

  Hesper considered, still kicking at him. “Whatever the machines plan to do to him, adding him to this scab list publicly is a statement of intent.”

  McPhail shrugged. “Mhm.”

  “So we know the mechs want to get their hands on Orson.”

  McPhail nodded. “They are actively hunting him now, according to PresidentPlugPuller,”

  Hesper stopped kicking him. “...PresidentPlugPuller?”

  “The, ah, livecaster we got the information from.” said McPhail. “That’s what he calls himself,”

  “Sure. But you reckon he’s credible. He says they don’t know where Orson is yet?”

  McPhail spread his sinewy tattooed arms and flopped them over the sides of his chair. “Why would they say, if they did?”

  Hesper started kicking at McPhail again. “Does Orson know?” she asked him.

  “Aye.” said McPhail. “Pallas says he never misses this PlugPuller guy’s broadcasts. Watches hours of him every day. Orson saw the guy talking about him,”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “Pallas thinks he’s upset. You know Orson fancies himself an activist for mech rights. Shocked to find out he’s officially machine enemy number one. Especially since he heard about it from his hero.”

  Hesper pulled a sad face. “Poor little Orse. That must be so hard for him.”

  She leaned back in the pilot’s chair and flipped her long ponytail over the back of the seat. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell him what Poppy found inside him.”

  The AGMG was making decent speed, relatively. This area was full of floating crap but Hesper had to admit Pallas made a pretty good auto-pilot. (Admit to herself, not admit to Pallas or McPhail.) The region had been really populous at some point in the old gold rush days and every rock bigger than a basketball had been blown up or hollowed out like a pumpkin. When the rush had rushed off to the next place someone had seen a glimmer (or said they did) they’d just left everything behind- equipment, ships, temporary settlements and stations with casinos and bars and all the normal stuff that accompanied a mining boom in an area. All the stuff that wasn’t worth hauling along with you once the gold was gone. It was left as a rubbish dump for a while and then in the past few decades people had started moving in again. People needed places to live. Even if it was a rubbish dump now, knowing that a place supported life in the past made it much less of a gamble to try to resettle. With all the junk left behind there was a chance you might find things you could use. And there was always the chance you would find the one gilded asteroid that everyone else missed.

  It was a Free Zone now so this was the kind of place they might be able to sell Orson.

  Hesper hated Free Zones but they were unfortunately where a lot of the AGMG’s business came out of and had to go into. They were where outfits like Free2Work found the fewest hindrances to their operation. A tip like this was perfect ‘cause lots of the infrastructure of maximally extractive use of human labour had been left in place from the gold rush. Stuff like accommodation for the thousands of humans who had made the completely free choice in a free society to have no possessions beyond their work clothing and no need for any personal space beyond a bunk to sleep on between their shifts.

  The kinds of companies that set up in these regions tended to be very interested in efficiency, which is what drew them to areas with stuff already there that other people had left behind and already established travel routes (even if they had been out of use for years.)

  It also meant that such areas made for precarious living. Any day the delivery ship might just not turn up because someone had fund a supplier that was pennies cheaper and told the current supplier to go compete with themselves. Or something important would break- like something that helped there to be air that people could breathe- and nobody would be there to fix it. Because why would you pay to keep someone around whose services you only needed once in a while? Not cost-effective. The worst thing that could happen was that a platform became completely unlivable and then all you had to do was just move somewhere else.

  No big deal. You were free to move, that was the great thing about a free zone. The freedom. And if you didn’t have the means to move yourself then the company you worked for- Free2Work, for example- would move you, wouldn’t they? Because it was in their interests to take care of their workers. Dead workers were no use to them, were they? There were all these silly stories about companies in free zones just abandoning their all their workers when the infrastructure failed , just jetting and leaving thousands of people in places that had been cut off from supply chains or that had lost atmosphere, heating, generated gravity or whatever. Such a silly idea. People who believed stories like that didn’t understand business. If Free2Work or Daintree was going around the galaxy ditching thousands of people at a time to perish, they wouldn’t be a very successful business, would they? That wouldn’t be very efficient. And people wouldn’t want to work for a company that did things like that, would they? People had free will, after all, and they had the freedom to choose who they worked for, didn’t they?

  Well, thought Hesper, unless they were Orson.

  “Good morning,” said Hesper as she walked up onto the flight deck. Orson was slumped in one of the pilot seats, wearing what Hesper was pretty sure was the captain’s dressing-gown. It didn’t cover enough of him. Hesper wrinkled her nose. “You are far too comfortable with your body.” she said. “I really need to bully you more.”

  Orson smiled weakly up at her. “Morning, boss,” he said, setting his handheld down on the console. There was a loading progress bar filling up on his screen. Hesper had suggested to Orson that he make use of a data relay whenever they could still catch one. He was probably stockpiling a heap of the moronic content that he liked before they got deeper in to the Free Zone and their connection to civilisation dropped out.

  You could barely catch a bounce in the Free Zone was because so much junk had been left out here after the gold rush times. Piles of satellites had been left orbiting and over time they were starting to crash into each other or spontaneously chart new courses for themselves. As with everything in free zones, extreme precarity was a perpetual issue. The whole connectivity of an area could collapse if a bunch of satellites collided or a big one went off on an adventure and fell into a gravity well. Around here everything had been smashed into such small pieces that there was nothing big enough to make much of a gravity trap. Most of the satellites had just played destruction derby or flown right out of the region.

  Knowing this, and knowing Orson knew nothing, Hesper had been kind enough to warn him about the imminent loss of any link to the real world. It had seemed to make him very anxious.

  There seemed to be something else on his mind, too.

  “Uh, Hesper?” said Orson. “The...the thing that was in me, the, ah, bomb,”

  Hesper nodded, looking down at him. She knew exactly what he was going to ask. She’d been looking forward to this. “Was it put there by the mechs or by Daintree?”

  “The mechs, of course,” said Hesper. “Why would the company you work for do something like that?”

  “Well….” said Orson. “Maybe Daintree wouldn’t but maybe it was done by the..security company that arrested us all. I mean, they would’ve been hired by Daintree so they were working for Daintree anyway…”

  “Orson,” said Hesper. “Poppy found out it was a biological weapon that would only affect humans. Seems pretty obvious who did it.”

  Orson held his stomach. “I don’t think so.”

  “Really, Orson? It’s not obvious that it was the machines who want to kill you who were the ones who placed a biological weapon inside you.”

  “The mech guild don’t want to kill me,”

  “Of course you don’t want to think so,” said Hesper. “You watch hours and hours of anti-human, pro-machine propaganda every day, Orson. You’ve been working around machines and never interacting with other humans. You’ve been in an anti-human echo chamber for years. It’s obvious that you’re going to struggle to accept that to machines, you’re the enemy. You see yourself as their ally but to them you’re just another meat-sack. I know this must be hard for you,”

  “Solidarity with mechs isn’t anti-human,” said Orson but his objection was less than half-hearted. He was tired and still in pain from his surgery and the knowledge that Hesper was probably correct was crushing. He wrapped his arms around his belly.

  “Hesper, can I have a word?” asked McPhail. He was in the other seat, poring over a display.

  “Of course,” said Hesper. “Scram,” she told Orson. “You can update your spank bank later. Shoo. Go.”

  Orson started slowly gathering up his things. A factor wriggled out from inside his dressing-gown. It waited while Orson brushed the biscuit crumbs off it and then flew away into the ship. Hesper kindly hauled Orson up out of the chair and sent him hirpling off towards the exit. Hesper swept the seat with her hand, annoyed, before she sat down.

  “Okay, hit me.” she told McPhail. “This is back to the live feed?” McPhail nodded. Hesper looked.

  The missing data on the scan, the..nothing, was within five miles of them now. It should be coming up on the short-range scan at this point. “It’s drawing in,” said McPhail.

  “Is it up on the short-range? Have we got a look at it yet?”

  McPhail tapped at the console. “Not a good one but yes.” He flipped between different views until he got the clearest zoomed-in image of what was coming up behind them. Other than that it was a ship of some sort, Hesper couldn’t tell anything from the blurry picture. It was a lot bigger than them but there weren’t many ships knocking around smaller than AGMG. And it was a lot faster than the AGMG because it had come out of nowhere. There was something weird about it. And it was definitely following them.

  “It’s coming up fast,” said McPhail.

  “Okay,” sighed Hesper. “Better strap in. Pallas?”

  No answer.

  “Pallas!” said Hesper again. This time there was a ping back. “Go and get Orson and Captain Allan to strap in somewhere safe. We might have to move quickly,”

  “Don’t you want me to come plug in there?”

  “No. No need, me and McPhail are both here.”

  “But-”

  “No, Pallas. We can handle it.” Said Hesper. “You need to make sure your captain and your crewmate are safe. You wouldn’t want Orson to get hurt, would you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s got to be Daintree,” said McPhail. “Daintree or someone they’ve hired.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hesper. “I mean, we know Daintree are looking for Orson but I don’t think that’s Daintree,”

  Not that Hesper had seen every ship the largest corporation in the galaxy owned, but this didn’t look like any Daintree ship she’d ever seen. There was just something weird about it. It was – good grief, it was so fast. It was getting closer and she was getting a better view of it second by second. Hesper didn’t really want a better view of it. It seemed to want to get a look at them, though.

  “It’s coming up fast,” said McPhail. “Too fast. Am I reading this right?”

  Hesper looked at the display. “I think you’re reading it right but I wouldn’t count on this ship’s calculations if my life depended on it.”

  “Might, if this lad means business. No way we could outpace this sort of drive. It would take some very fancy flying. Shouldn’t have sent Pallas away.”

  “I know you’re very fond of that thing, but it’s not as though the robot is exactly a hotshot pilot, doctor,”

  “Better than us,”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Hesper. “I have more faith in my abilities. And I don’t have any faith that this ship making like a missile straight towards us just really wants to say ‘hi’. I’m going to have a go at getting us out of here.”

  McPhail leaned back in his seat and took both hands off his yoke. “Be my guest.”

  Hesper pushed her glasses up her nose, grinning.

  Hesper squeezed the juice from anything they didn’t desperately need straight into the AGMG’s engines and floored it, The small ship took off as easily as flinging a paper plane. AGMG was pile of junk but it could really shift- over a short distance. AGMG could take off faster from a standing start but the bigger ship behind them definitely had a much higher top speed. Hesper was pretty sure it had started putting the brakes on as it barrelled down on them so it would have to start accelerating upwards again. She could put a little bit of distance in between them.

  Maybe with some luck she could also find some kind of object to put between them.

  “Bunch of rocks over there,” said McPhail helpfully, reading her mind.

  “Give me more specific directions than ‘over there’, thanks,”

  “Pinning it,” said McPhail. “Sent”

  Hesper looked. “Nothing closer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, fine. Urgh.”

  She tilted them and turned, adjusting course for the scattering of asteroids McPhail had found. “Yikes,” said McPhail.

  “Don’t bloody ‘yikes’ me, that was fine.”

  “You just killed the Captain,”

  “I should be so lucky,”

  Hesper gripped the yoke and adjusted the ship again. She was begging the AGMG for more thrust. It was speeding up but she needed it to speed up faster. The eerie ship was still there just behind them. If they could get in amongst the asteroids before it closed the gap then they would be able to steer through the rocks faster than the big ship would have to go around them. Maybe Hesper would hand over to Pallas and let it pilot for that part, it would-

  the weird ship was RIGHT behind them.

  It was as though they had skipped a few frames of reality. One second the bigger ship had been about as far behind them as they were from the asteroid field, and then between seconds it moved to within a kilometer of them. No visible movement. It just went from being there to being HERE so suddenly that Hesper gasped. McPhail swore and snatched at his yoke. They were pulled to port and down, the AGMG swinging around into a spin. “McPhail!” yelled Hesper before she realised it was her that was doing the steering. The weird ship had really given her a fright. The AGMG stopped itself spinning while Hesper tried to do the same for herself.

  Pallas, from wherever it was, communicated something to the effect of ‘???’. Hesper ignored it. She hauled on the yoke and pulled the AGMG back in the direction of the asteroids. “How...did...it..?” muttered McPhail.

  Hesper ignored him too. She was trying to get more speed, she knew the AGMG could go faster than this. It wasn’t supposed to be able to go faster than this but Hesper knew it could, because she’d seen it. A part of her was whispering to her that it didn’t matter, that no matter how much thrust she could wring out of the engines the AGMG might as well be at a standstill if the ship that was haunting them could just skip bits of spacetime. They were so close to the asteroids though...just a little bit further. She wondered if the weird ship could do that skipping trick through asteroids.

  The AGMG swept around the edge of the asteroid field, Hesper forcing it faster and faster. The increasing speed and torque was forcing McPhail back into his seat. Hesper was gripping onto the yoke with grim determination. “We can’t outrun it,” said McPhail. Hesper ignored him. She was pushing the AGMG relentlessly. Suddenly she wrenched it around to starboard and dropped it like a rock down and away from the field.

  McPhail gripped the arms of his seat as the AGMG screamed downwards. “Argh, Hesper!” he groaned through a clenched jaw. “Why…”

  McPhail got a mental knock-knock on his private connection with Hesper. He opened the line and let her straight into his head. ‘Look what’s down there,’ she thought, pushing one of the scanner views over onto his mental desktop. He didn’t have any choice but to ‘look.’

  “Okay,” thought McPhail.

  Hesper tipped them into an even steeper dive. They were plummeting and still speeding up.

  Back up above them the mech ship had flickered back into existence.

  “He’s onto us,” thought McPhail. The ship dropped his nose and dived. He was much bigger than the AGMG. His engines were bigger than the AGMG. He was falling a lot faster than they were.

  ‘He has to pull up.’ thought Hesper. ‘He has to put on his brakes,’

  Did he? McPhail decided to investigate that claim. He put together a quick real-time view that showed the mech ship diving from the top, the tiny dot of the AGMG in the middle and down below the boundary of the Free Zone. The AGMG was closer to the Free Zone border but the mech ship was flying faster. McPhail pushed his little presentation over to Hesper. ‘Think we can make it?’ he wondered.

  ‘Yes.’ thought Hesper.

  ‘Want me to actually run a calculation?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Hesper had her teeth gritted and her knuckles white on the yoke. ‘He’s going to pull up.’ she thought again. ‘He has to.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘A mech ship won’t breach the FZB,’ thought Hesper. ‘They know what happens.’

  ‘He won’t get blasted the second he puts a wing-tip over the boundary, though,’

  ‘He might. Those freezone freaks love defending their border. Their favourite thing to do is fly around the boundary area in tooled-up picket ships praying they find a mech to throw things at. This guy will be well aware of that.’

  The mech ship was closing on the AGMG faster than the AGMG was approaching the boundary. The AGMG was close to the Free Zone but there was enough space for the mech ship to catch them if he didn’t pull up.

  He wasn’t pulling up.

  ‘What’s he thinking he’ll do?’ thought Hesper desperately. ‘Just follow us into the Free Zone? He knows we can just enter, right? He knows we’re a human ship,’

  ‘Aye,’ thought McPhail uncertainly.

  ‘I bet it’s been talking to your bloody robot,” said Hesper. “Maybe he does think we’re mech-piloted,’

  They were still gaining speed and the AGMG was starting to rattle.

  ‘No,’ thought McPhail. ‘Pallas would never give that impression.’ Couldn’t. Not to another mech, anyway. ‘If he thinks we’re mech, he’ll expect us to pull up, too.’

  Both ships were hammering straight down towards the FZB. It was getting to the point where human pilots would lose consciousness unless they were in pressure suits and the auto-pilot would take over. Unfortunately the AGMG had human pilots not in pressure suits and an autopilot who wanted to stop and have a chat with the ship chasing them.

  ‘I’m going to make it before him.’ thought Hesper. They were already at about 170% of the AGMG’s official top speed. And still accelerating. McPhail knew that the ramshackle little ship was capable of more than its official specs and appearance indicated, but he also knew that even if the engines were capable of shoving the ship to a certain velocity didn’t mean that the rest of the ship was capable of surviving that speed.

  ‘Even if he doesn’t hit the brakes, I’ve got this,’ thought Hesper, apparently more confident than McPhail. ‘I’m going to-’

  The mech ship was in front of them.

  One second there was nothing but open space in front of them and then there was a sort of flicker, Nothing fully visible. The kind of thing you could only see with your peripheral vision, like a distant galaxy amongst brighter stars. A suggestion that there was something occupying the space and then the ship was there, front pointed towards them (what McPhail guessed was the front, anyway).

  McPhail couldn’t have told you afterwards how he reacted, but what he did was swear and clutch at his chair and sort of kick his boots helplessly at the floor.

  Hesper pulled back on the yoke and rotated the AGMG violently into climbing attitude. Now the AGMG really did feel like it was rattling itself to pieces. McPhail had a vision of their ship just coming undone around them, avoiding collision with the mech ship by dissolving in space and tumbling over the Free Zone border as a shower of sparkly metal filings.

  Hesper kept pulling the nose up and up until they were almost on top of the mech ship. Then she swung the AGMG into a roll and they sailed belly-up over the mech ship. Hesper was only vaguely aware of the warning tone over her neural interface. Her connection to McPhail dropped out as he fell unconscious. She didn’t have the bandwidth to concern herself with him, given that she was busy barrel-rolling over a hostile mech ship in a desperate attempt to get to the dubious relative safety- or, different unsafety- of the pure unfettered opportunity of a free zone.

  Hesper rolled the AGMG down over the tail of the mech ship and continued hurtling down towards the border. There were some beacons she could see now, boundary markers. They were so close. The AGMG was giving her two separate proximity alerts now: one for the boundary which she could see and another for an incoming vessel that she couldn’t see yet. Not the mech ship. This one was coming from inside the Free Zone. She would worry about that in...about a minute. When she crossed the border.

  The AGMG rolled down so it felt like it was the right way up again and continue its dive. Hesper heard McPhail groan which she thought was probably a good sign. He was another item on her to-worry-about-later list. Something new that had just been added to her -worry-about-now list; whatever was coming from inside the Free Zone was now registering on the scan she was primarily using which meant it was pretty close already. Oh, she could see something now- there it was. Pretty close and getting closer very quickly.

  Hesper glanced at her rear view and then looked back to check what she hadn’t seen. The damn mech ship had done its disappearing act again. Surely it didn’t think it could get between them and the boundary at this distance and leave them room enough to pull up? Did it want them to crash into it? Ahead of her Hesper could almost see, more feel than see, the slight disturbance, the almost static, that seemed to presage the mech ship’s reappearances. It was going to manifest right in fron of them. Hesper swerved to port, swinging the AGMG up on its side to desperately try to not be where the mech ship was about to be.

  Something rocketed through the space the mech ship was currently displacing. Something coming from within the Free Zone. It just missed the AGMG and would have hit them if Hesper hadn’t had the ship at such an extreme angle. The mech ship didn’t manifest.

  Hesper swung the AGMG in an arc that took them past the boundary line into Free space and immediately found herself with a proximity alert for the ship that was rocketing up to the border from inside and had presumably just attempted to mortar them. They started hailing her as soon as she crossed the border. Reluctantly, she opened comms.

  “This is the vessel Free Hand,” the ship transmitted. ‘Welcome to Freedom Found, outsiders,’