Weapons fire burst all around him, elegant colored lines of energy forming complex crisscross patterns in the air. Force fields added a mauve haze to the image. Then came the cacophony of screaming.

He ran, flinging himself across a cluster of wailing children. It was no good. The darkness followed him, flowing across the huge room like an incoming tide. It curled around him. And he felt her hand on his shoulder amid a clash of sparkling colors. The pain began, searing in through his flesh, seeking out his heart.

“You don’t leave me,” she whispered silkily into his ear.

He struggled, writhing frantically against her grip as the pain was slowly replaced by an even more frightening cold. “Nobody leaves me,” she said.

“I do!” he yelled with a raw throat. “I don’t want this.” Away along the fringe of darkness, more garish colored lights exploded. He heaved against her iron grip-

– and fell out of the cot to land painfully on the cabin floor. A weird ebony fog occluded his vision as he tried to focus on the Lindau’s bulkhead. It pulsed in a heartbeat rhythm with strange distensions bulging out, as if something were attempting to break out of his nightmare. He groaned as he squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to banish the creepy intrusion. The pain was real still, throbbing behind his temple like the Devil’s own migraine. Then he remembered a crown of slim silver needles contracting around his head, puncturing the skin, slipping effortlessly through the bone to penetrate his brain, and terrible red light shone into his thoughts, exposing every miserable segment of himself. “Do it,” he yelled into the nothingness. “Just do it now.” Sharp merciless claws reached in and started to rip out the most vital segments. And now his screams were silent, going on and on and on as his mind was shredded until finally, thankfully, there was nothing left. No thought remained, so he ceased to think-

– Aaron woke up with his cheek squashed uncomfortably on the deck, his neck at a bad angle. It was as if he were regaining consciousness from a knockout blow. His skin was cold; he shivered as much from shock as anything. “Oh, crap, this has just got to stop,” he moaned as he slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position.

The captain’s cabin was still a mess. He hadn’t bothered to organize a servicebot to clean up yet. Personal environment wasn’t a priority for him, unlike the other two, who seemed quite fastidious about their small shared cabin. He ordered a fast biononic field scan to check on his captives and relaxed fractionally when exovision displays showed them in the main cabin. Now that their status was confirmed, he followed it up with a review of the Lindau’s systems. Plenty of components were operating on the edge of their safety margins thanks to the damage they’d received back on Hanko. But they were still functioning, still in hyperspace and on course for the Spike.

Aaron took a moment to wipe himself down with a towel soaked in travel-clean before pulling on some clothes he’d found in the cabin’s locker. The Lindau’s captain had been almost the same size as he, so the bots needed to make only a few adjustments before he could wear the conservatively styled shirts and trousers. Dressed in fawn-colored two-thirds-length shorts and a mauve sleeveless sweatshirt, he joined the other two for breakfast.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a sullen glance as he entered the main cabin, then returned to her bowl of yogurt and cereal. Aaron didn’t need to run any kind of scan to know she was hungover. He’d given up trying to stop the one remaining culinary unit from producing alcohol for her; its electronics were in a bad way, and the last thing it needed was a software war raging inside its circuitry.

“Good morning,” he said politely to Inigo. At least the ex-Dreamer gave him a brief acknowledgment, glancing up from his plate of toast and marmalade. Aaron ordered up a toasted bagel with poached egg on smoked salmon, orange juice, and a pot of tea.

“Why do you smell of bleach?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“Do I?”

“You’ve used travel-fresh,” she accused. “There is a working shower, you know.”

The culinary unit pinged, and Aaron opened its stainless-steel door. His breakfast was inside. He hesitated at the slightly odd smell before transferring it all to a tray. The remaining chair at the table had broken as it was trying to retract, leaving a gray lump protruding from the floor with an upper hollow that wasn’t quite wide or deep enough for sitting in. Aaron squirmed his way down into it. “The shower is in your room,” he pointed out.

“And you rate our privacy above your hygiene? Since when?”

Inigo stopped chewing and glanced silently up at the ceiling.

“Corrie-Lyn, we’re going to be on board together for a while,” Aaron said. “As you may have noticed, this ship is on the wrong side of tiny, and there ain’t a whole lot of it working too good. Now, I don’t expect you to be gushing with mighty gratitude, but it’s my belief that basic civility will get us all through this without me ripping too many of your fucking limbs off. You clear on this?”

“Fascist bastard.”

“Is it true Ethan kept you on the Cleric Council because you were his private whore?”

“Fuck you!” Corrie-Lyn stood up fast, glaring at Aaron.

“See?” Aaron said mildly. “It’s a two-way street. And you can’t rip my limbs off.”

She stomped out of the main cabin. Inigo watched her go, then carried on eating his toast. Aaron took a drink of his orange juice, then cut into the egg. It tasted like rotten fish. “What the hell …”

“My toast tastes like cold lamb,” Inigo admitted. “The fatty bits. I used biononics to change my taste receptor impulses. It helps a bit.”

“Good idea.” Aaron’s u-shadow was interrogating the culinary unit to try to identify the problem. The result wasn’t promising. “The texture memory files are corrupted, and it doesn’t look like there are any backups left on board; a whole batch of kubes got physically smashed up. It’ll be producing this kind of crud all the way to the Spike.”

“Corrie-Lyn doesn’t have biononics. She can’t make it taste better.”

“That’ll make her a bucketful of fun for sure. We’ll have to inventory the prepacked supplies, see if there’s enough to last her.”

“Or you could simply connect to the unisphere with a TD channel and download some new files.”

Aaron looked at him over the rim of the orange juice, which tasted okay. “Not going to happen. I can’t risk an infiltration. The smartcore’s in the same condition as the rest of the ship.”

“That was a bad dream you had last night,” Inigo said quietly. “You need to watch out for aspects leaking into your genuine personality.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. “My genuine personality?”

“All right, then, the one that keeps you up and functional. I’m getting concerned about the Mr. Paranoia who won’t risk downloading a food synthesis file.”

“Okay, for future reference, this very same personality has kept me alive through all my missions and helped me snatch you. And that barely took a couple of weeks after I’d been assigned to you, whereas everyone else in the Commonwealth had spent seventy years on the hunt for you. So you might want to rethink your poor estimation of my operational capabilities.”

Inigo’s hands fluttered in a modest gesture of acquiescence. “As you wish. But you have to understand I am curious about your composition. I’ve never encountered a mind quite like yours before. You have absences, and I don’t just mean memory. Whole emotional fibers seem to have been suppressed. That’s not good for you. The emotions you have permitted yourself are abnormally large; you’re out of balance as a result.”

“So Corrie-Lyn keeps telling me.” He tasted his egg again. His biononics had changed his taste receptors. This time the yoke had a mushroom flavor. It was weird, but he could live with it, he decided.