The recently hired hand threw me into an egg. I was picked up a few days later by a survey craft. Got to be a ward of the Holy Empire for a while, in some stupid all-girls school. I was glad to be off on my own. Okay, I admit it, the medic was my first date.

***

I heard a soft whining sound and opened my eyes. The medical pod’s upper shell stood ajar. I sat up. The edges of things loomed at me; everything looked angular, not quite right. I inched my body to one side and placed my feet on the floor. No one was in the surgical room.

“Your scheduled time with us is ending, Daria. Please proceed to the exit,” the computer’s idiotic feminine voice announced. “You are medically cleared to depart, Miss Quinn. Thank you for choosing our medical facilities for your cybernetic enhancements. Please tell your friends about us.”

I walked out into the hallway, hoping to see that hot medic again. “Hello?” I called, but my voice was sucked away by the station’s porous walls.

I looked at my hands and noticed how full of detail they were-they appeared primitive, like the hands in one of those old movies. God, everything seemed so damned close. My stomach began to tighten. “Well,” I whispered, “this is what I wanted.” I felt my eyes welling up.

I heard a noise and turned to see him now dressed in a fancy leather vest and relic designer jeans. His naked arms were dotted with biolumen markings. His black hair was spiked with silver. I saw it, every strand of it. Most of us pilots get jacked eventually, despite the nasty side effects. Helps get the jobs, see. But, I was starting to freak. It was too much.

“Daria, I thought you had left.”

“You never told me your name,” I said, wiping my face. God, I hate crying.

“It’s Axium.” He smiled. “You look like you could use a drink. Would you like to join me this evening?”

I ran my jazzed up gaze down his crisp body. “Yea, what the hell,” I said, “but let’s take my ship and fly around the belts first. I need to try these new eyes in space.” The holographic data stream was supposed to give an “almost preternatural” visual response, according to the ads.

“Lovely suggestion, Daria, lead on,” he said, grabbing my arm.

I had preinstalled one of those on-board navigation systems that allow for an “out-of-ship” perspective. I jacked in and, by the gods, I felt surrounded. It was downright freakish. Coming out of the hangar, we passed a hulking transport ship, a massive freighter and several standard haulers; only when we hit open space could I finally relax. Space looked amazing. Okay, maybe it was worth it, I thought, feeling a little better.

The Holy Moradi stargate was an arched golden thing pulsing with energy discharges,

“imposing as it is elegant,” as the dumb ads boasted.

“A bloody, holier-than-thou, waste of money,” my poppa would say about the look of it. I know why he talked like that. He didn’t much care for the ruling families, and his views on religion were, well, let’s just say he wasn’t the churchgoing type.

Axium was pruning himself. I knew my poppa wouldn’t have approved of him, either. We entered the gate, streamed away, and found ourselves in the next system.

“Very nice ship you have,” he said as he changed the pigment of his fingernails with some fancy pen-like device he pulled out of his pocket. “A recent model I take it?”

I laughed.

“I fail to see what’s so funny.”

“This frig a new model?” I choked. “You don’t know much about scout ships, do you?”

“Warships are a mystery to me.” He stared at me with narrowing eyes.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I said.

“Oh, I just thought since you were full blood you …” he paused.

“Yea, go on …”

“On never mind. It’s nothing.”

“You thought I would be rich or something, right?” I snapped. “Well, I ain’t. My family were roid rats, living in the belts. We used to do okay though.”

“I didn’t mean to assume.”

“Well you did, and …” I was about to let him have it when the comm system chirped up.

“This is the captain of the Stomata. We are under assault. Request assistance …”

“Received, Captain,” I replied, looking at the transceiver. The distress call came from a mining barge. “What’s your status?”

“We got some damned pirate testing our defenses, and we’re not done clearing this belt. Ain’t about to let some bloody Gurns run me out. Can you assist? There’s two-hundred creds in it.”

“You can’t be serious,” Axium said. “You’re taking us into a battle?”

“Damn,” I whispered.

“What? Damn what?”

“Well, it’s my first time, see.”

“First time?”

“Never fought the Consordium before.” I looked straight at him, smiled, and added, “Hey, there always a first time for everything, right?”

That medic turned whiter than normal.

God that felt good. It wasn’t really true. I’d been in a skirmish before, but the care bear deserved it.

“You’re joking,” he peeped.

“Don’t worry,” I told him, “this ship’s been virtually modeled.”

Axium didn’t say much for the rest of the trip. He just changed his fingernail colors incessantly with his dumb pen. I was feeling a little bad about the whole thing, and by the time we got to the belt I was gonna offer to place him in an egg and send him off. Then he opened his mouth again.

“I knew that I shouldn’t have asked you out,” he pronounced. “You did choose a lower quality implant.”

“You’re such an ass,” I said, turning on the afterburner way sooner than I should have, just to watch him squirm. That was a big mistake.

“What are you doing?” he whimpered as his sweet, androgynous body was pelted against the seat.

“Look,” I pointed to the far-off battle scene on the view screen. “There’s our fight. Too bad we don’t have time to land and refit. These armor hardeners aren’t gonna do much good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they’re great against energy weapons but they don’t do much against kinetic charges, which is usually what the Gurns use. Just gonna have to make due.”

“Daria, please. I’ll replace that implant with a better model. You won’t have to wear dark glasses all the time. Just get us out of here.”

“Meh, I can handle these guys. Hold on …”