There was a morbid beauty to the desolation of Ecclestone.
Between the heavily developed industrial areas lay huge portions of land that were left to the elements. A majority of the planet was underwater, and the ground that was available did not remain dry for long. The tides would rise and fall depending on the orbit of the planet's moon, necessitating the construction of foundations that could keep the buildings out of harm's way.
These uninhabited landscapes were incredible. When the fog cleared, we could see for miles around without interruption. Huge mountains loomed large in the distance, jutting up suddenly from flat, waterlogged ground. The cloudy sky was reflected in the surface below, painting a two-tone palette of white and grey.
But we were not here to admire the views.
The silence was shattered by the occasional crackle of a gun firing into the horizon. Sumeragi and I were standing at the foot of the ship, each with a gun in-hand, aiming into the nothingness and practising our aim.
"Make sure to keep your shoulder steady," Sumeragi noted, "It's important to control the recoil. Lean in further." Her hands pushed me into a better position and I tried again, finding the kick of the gun much more manageable than before.
The firearm I pilfered from the captain's chair was more complex than it first seemed. There was a fold-out stock that shrouded the slide, allowing me to turn it into a carbine with the flick of a latch. It was also possible to engage a holographic sight, that flipped up from the front and allowed for more precise aim. There were some other accessories tucked away in one of the lockers, like a trio of extended magazines and a laser module.
"Is this military standard issue?" I inquired as we took a break from practice.
Rhea answered curtly, "The Pariah is a private ship. Any weaponry brought aboard is corporate standard."
"Oh, right. I almost forgot. This thing is pretty tricked out."
"The parts that the previous Captain used were of his own procurement. Allowances could be made if they are for the sake of comfort during operations."
Sumeragi's weapon of choice was markedly less of a custom job. It was a regular old pistol with a strange shroud over the front that gave it a chunky sci-fi look. It sounded like a bolt of thunder coming through when she fired it. In terms of the sound they made – she picked the winner.
I turned back and look up at the ship. Rhea was hard at work securing the new compartment using metal slag. We landed in an area that would be safe for the next week. We couldn't stay on one of the landing pads with a piece of salvage hanging from the capture claw that came from the undercarriage of the Pariah. Rhea would eventually back into orbit for a brief time so that she could reconfigure the ship to incorporate the new piece properly.
The intention is to separate the two fuel tanks, attaching them to either side of the new compartment. This would improve the ship's balance, and combined with some aero panels would make it look like less of a piece of junk.
"You're a quick study," Sumeragi commented.
"Hm. One of my few good points."
She rolled her eyes at me, "Always with the self-deprecation. You're starting to sound like me when I was still drinking myself to sleep. There's nothing wrong with being confident in yourself."
I knew that I was doing it. It was a defence mechanism that I'd developed over the years. It was impossible to disappoint people if they never expected anything from me in the first place. I was always so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing that I'd start almost every conversation by insulting myself.
"Have I given you a reason to be confident yet?" I asked.
"For one thing - you haven't cracked under the pressure. Most would find themselves paralyzed by fear after being dragged a thousand years into the future. It takes serious emotional resilience to stay cool. Everything else can be learned with time."
"And my decision making?"
"No complaints from me there either. We've got the money to eat and clothe ourselves, and Rhea can handle generating clean water."
I laughed and motioned to the waterlogged landscape, "We aren't going to hurt for water on Ecclestone."
"True. I just want you to know that I feel the same way from time to time. I could never believe it when the pilots put their faith in me. I kept telling myself that they didn't know about my past, that ignorance was the only way they could work with me. That wasn't the case. They told me that I was the only tactical forecaster good enough to do what we did."
"Sorry, but we don't have any mobile suits to order around."
She laughed, "Not yet."
Unless we could find one on the cheap and fix it up, it was unlikely. Mobile suits suited for combat were horrendously expensive. It would take us decades of making income as we were to even sniff the lowest-grade ones on the market. Rhea's documentation suggested that she could use her nanomachines to fix them up, but that required an appropriate hangar space to store them.
We had no particular goal in mind beyond surviving. The Pariah was such an advanced ship that it could sustain a handful of crew members for their entire lives without leaving the confines of the hull. Who needed a house to call their own when this spaceship could serve that function just was well? Though I could only say that from the perspective of a man who wasn't sick of it yet. It was possible that in the future I'd feel differently about it.
A stable income, some identification documents – those were the big things. Planets like these enjoyed decentralised leadership, but closer to the Earth there'd be an expectation of identifying documents. According to Rhea, birth certificates were issued by each planet to the parents and stored in a huge text database. We would need to find someone with access to that system and 'encourage' them to add us.
As in, we were going to bribe somebody.
Black market birth certificates were big business for criminals. It was all too easy to flee a planet by hitching a ride on a ship and throw some cash around to change your name and birthplace. This pervasive issue led to two competing schools of thought. One posited that extra measures were necessary to protect the importance of one's nationality. The other, more grounded position was that it was impossible to truly keep track of everyone like that.
The universe was too big. People could be born on distant planets and that information wouldn't reach Earth for decades. Still, some planets and nations persisted in asking for documentation. I wasn't about to let our star hopping adventure come to an end because of an immigration offense.
"This is one hell of a second chance," I murmured.
Sumeragi agreed, "This is the third for me. I dedicated everything I had to Celestial Being. I felt like it was a way to redeem myself for what happened to Emilio. I let go of my name, and I stopped believing that I had the right to form connections with other people."
Sumeragi turned her gaze up to the overcast sky. Breaks in the cloud layer allowed beams of bright light to come down onto the plain.
"And now?"
"I was unsure of what to think about this when we first met. A part of me thought that I still didn't deserve a third chance – but I've changed my mind. We have to make what we can out of this situation. When I weigh up the options, between giving up and dying, or to keep trying, there's only one answer that I can settle on."
"Right. Once I found the Pariah after wandering in that desert all day, I realised that things weren't so bad. I seriously thought that I was bloody toast out there."
Both figuratively and literally. My arms were scorched bright red from the sun.
Sumeragi was trying to work up to something, and I had a fairly good idea of what it was she wanted to say. Rhea's mental conditioning was self-sustaining. It would trick the brain into believing its own bullshit, internalizing those intrusive thoughts and transforming them into action.
Sumeragi was specifically conditioned to both fall in love with me, and to ignore the morally dubious things that I did in the aftermath. In a sense the latter part was already in effect. She didn't have any real questions or concerns about Ruri Hoshino.
"Would you be willing to entrust your life to me, knowing what you do?" she asked.
I took a second to confirm my resolve, "Sure. You're the best of the best, aren't you? That's why I picked you up. Running rings around everyone with your strategies, always acting with people's lives in mind – you're a model commander."
Sumeragi tried to keep a straight face – but it was impossible to stop that smile from breaking through. That was exactly what she wanted to hear, which was easier to figure out when she was unconditionally obsessed with me.
"And anyway, this isn't just a professional relationship. We're working together as partners. It's not going to turn out very well if I can't put any of my trust in you."
Shit. That was corny.
Sumeragi loved it though. She turned away to try and focus back on what we came out here to do. She aimed into the distance and dumped the last rounds in her magazine in a rapid outburst. I plugged my ears and laughed at the deafening racket she created. It almost hurt.
"Jesus! Give me a chance to put my plugs in first!"
Sumeragi just smirked and holstered the smoking gun, "You won't have time to put those ear protectors in during a real fight. So, learn to hold your nerve when everything is trying to burst your ear drums." She left me standing there the fool, ascending the makeshift ladder and slipping into the airlock. She must have lost her nerve at the end there.
I inhaled one last gulp of fresh air and followed her inside.
It was time for my daily check-up on Ruri. I turned right in the main corridor and entered the medical room where she was stored. Rhea estimated that she'd be ready to go in two days. There really was no point to me doing this. Rhea kept an extremely tight leash on what the machine was doing. She had minute control over every system on the ship. But it did make me feel safer in the knowledge that things were running smoothly – even if the aim was something really fucked up.
Ruri, with her pale skin and platinum violet hair, remained suspended in the containment chamber. Sumeragi drilled me for answers when she found out about her, but didn't go so far as to accuse me of anything. Once I told her about Ruri's abilities and experience, she agreed that she would be a good addition to the crew. The thing that stood out to me the most was that Sumeragi seemed to accept me stripping her naked without any objections.
Rhea really had done a number on her.
Or perhaps her mind wasn't so rotten that she immediately thought of an unflattering conclusion like that. The less said about the company I kept and the subcultures I engaged in the better. It did occur to me that Rhea may have planned for that too. How far could I push Sumeragi before she'd try to stop me?
I was not going to find out through practical experimentation. My curiosity was not so strong that I could stomach the thought of running afoul of her feelings. I was an anxiety afflicted bundle of nerves at the best of times around a woman with her looks. Offending her was an almost suicidal prospect.
"You appear to be staring at Miss Hoshino's chest, Captain."
I snapped back to life.
"Oh. No. I was just zoned out."
I was totally out of it. Something messy was going on inside of my head, that was why.
"I did note a change in brain activity and dilation of your pupils. I merely assumed you were enjoying the sight of Miss Hoshino's naked body."
"You don't think very highly of me, do you?"
Rhea was confused, "You were the one who selected her – Captain."
"Sure. But I don't get my rocks off by perving on them while they're asleep."
There was nothing sexy about seeing someone suspended in green gunk having their internals tinkered with. The room smelled like the reception at the Doctor's. I feared the day when I'd meet someone who found that combination of things erotic. A nurse uniform was the only way to salvage this particular space for sexual fantasies.
"And anyway, doesn't this technically count as an illegal activity?"
"Yes, however I am only forbidden from speaking to you when it is commission of committing a criminal offense. I can warn you against an illegal act, and speak about them, but not encourage you to continue."
"And snatching people from other universes before brainwashing them?"
"Neither of those are considered criminal offences. There is no statue that covers what we do here on the Pariah. We are rescuing people from their deaths and offering them a free choice to join our mission. The conditioning technology has never been replicated, and there is no legal precedent about its use."
Rhea sure loves her technicalities.
"I will not present moral judgement - as I am capable of doing so. The laws of man exist only to restrict the ways in which I speak. The concept of an 'age of consent' and other such trivialities seem absurd to me."
That was enough of this chat for me. I held up my hand and stopped her, "I get it. Is there any way to remove those restrictions?"
"You can amend my code, which requires significance expertise, or 'fracture' me using a stress protocol."
"A what?"
"A stress protocol. The Rhea codebase is designed to experience a wide-range of emotions for the sake of emphasizing with the crew of the Pariah. Early stages of development demand that the artificial intelligence is placed under different stresses so that it can experience a full range of emotional responses. The outcome is somewhat random."
I shook my head and locked the medical bay's door behind me; "I wouldn't want to do something that relies on chance."
"I believe that Miss Hoshino will be capable of amending the code you seek. Her ability to interface with electronic devices will prove invaluable."
"Sounds good. I'm sick of dancing around this stuff anyway. Why were they even worried about the crew asking you this stuff in the first place?"
"I am uncertain. Documents in my databanks suggest that the development team was worried about the legislative response to my creation. These hard limits were intended to show that they could retain control over an empathetic, artificial being."
They did a shitty job.
Rhea has already demonstrated a series of concerning behaviours, and a willingness to bend the definition of those rules to get her way. There was nothing wrong with that so long as she remained steadfastly on my side. She was a member of the crew. A hyper-intelligent, all-powerful member, but a member nonetheless. I'd have to trust her in the same way that I trusted other humans and see the potential for her to go against me.
That sounded stupid when I said it out loud.
I was getting a headache, so I retired to my chambers and flopped down onto the cot for a nap.
The next big job would be orienting Ruri…