Now in these days, Ideals were few and far between, and much of the technology of the previous eras had been lost in the rush to flee the horror of the Prions, and the violent mutants they spawned. Humanity tried, again and again to colonize new worlds, and again and again, by some foul means, the disease found them again, and a new world had to be evacuated, the survivors checked, and the mutants that had once been beloved pets, livestock and brothers and sisters to the survivors had to be put to rest. Humanity huddled on ships and stations between stars, and Marines and Ideals stayed to their own vessels, separate, losing knowledge of all trades but those relevant to their grim task.

  But there had been an age of glory, of stellar exploration, of humanity spreading across the stars. No one had feared this horror, no one had dreamed it possible that the idyllic farms humanity had claimed under unknown stars would turn against them.

  Once, there had been explorers. Once, there had been heroes.

  But that was gone now.

  -The Starless Void, Chapter 2

  ***

  Nicola developed a ritual. She didn’t mean to. It wasn’t on purpose.

  She woke up, and kept her eyes closed.

  She prayed that she was home.

  Then she took a deep breath, and opened her eyes.

  She was still on the Renewed Covenant.

  As rituals went, it wasn’t much. It didn’t precisely provide comfort. It was impossible to forget where she was, when her eyes were open.

  The bruising on her knees and elbow got pretty nasty looking. She wore baggy shirts and a jacket every time she left her rooms. She didn’t want to know how Zachariah would react if he saw them. She really didn’t want to know how Raphael would react.

  She hoped the Ideal wouldn’t notice. Probably she was well beneath his notice. Hopefully.

  The fear and the boredom were racing to see which would drive her utterly mad first.

  This place was doomed. If she was here, then she was doomed.

  Her brother had to be so worried.

  But she could not escape this ship, and she could not send a message to her brother. She spent much of her time exploring. What else could she do?

  The Datalink interface at least, allowed her to browse through what little reading material the ship apparently had, but it was hard to get anything that wasn’t combat oriented on it, and before the first week was out she was craving light and claustrophobic. Stupid, to be so in such a large set of rooms, with nothing to fill them but her own rambling voice. If there was some way to do it not standing and plugged into the wall, she wasn’t sure of how to do it. It was a device like a tablet, but every time she pulled it from it’s stand it died, and she was just a bit too short to comfortably read it.

  The food was, and remained, vile.

  She would have gone mad, were it not for Zachariah.

  He had tapped her door the next day, sheepish as a child, and asked if she was okay. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you running around when you were tired.”

  “I… yeah. I’m fine. Don’t apologize, I was getting lost in exploring too.” She smiled, glad she had dug up a jacket to hide from the chill of the ship in. The bruising had painted three of her limbs in exciting shades of yellow and purple. “In fact, I’d like to do it again, if you can spare the time. I don’t want to wander into rooms I’m not supposed to go into but… well, it sounds like there’s a lot of exploring to do.”

  He brightened immediately, the mental image of a puppy growing stronger in her mind. He’d probably be some kind of high energy hunting dog, she thought. A retriever or a pointer.

  It was a really, really big ship, and if she couldn’t escape it, then she could at least explore it.

  ***

  “Not easily dissuaded,” The Lord Ideal commented, the next time Raphael brought the matter up.

  “Really? I haven’t seen her since.”

  “You wouldn’t. I think she’s avoiding the pair of us. But she’s exploring. Reminds me of the star explorers from… nevermind.”

  People did not explore the stars the way they once had. They had not for thousands of years. Their energies were needed elsewhere. Raphael frowned at his leader. They were sparring, or rather, the Lord Ideal was trying to teach him to attack an Ideal. This was… trying for many reasons. He was of course hopelessly outmatched, but that wasn’t the real issue. If anything, that helped with the real issue.

  That the Lord Ideal had mentioned such days meant he was in a very good mood… or a very bad one.

  “… Why would she be avoiding us?” he asked, and tried to feint at an eye. He wouldn’t have dreamed of trying such a maneuver with his peers, and he could not have done it to an ordinary human, but he could just get himself to swing within a few inches of his face. The Ideal smiled, amused.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He stepped into the next blow, and the medic threw himself backwards, cursing, heart hammering.

  His Ideal’s blood painted his blade.

  A cut… not long, but fairly deep, graced the Ideal’s face, beneath one eye, draped over a cheekbone like a ribbon. Logically, Raphael knew that the injury was nothing to the Ideal. Even if he had laid the face open to the very bone, even if he had taken the eye, even so, the Ideal would heal.

  His hands were shaking, and he dropped the knife.

  The Ideal reached out and plucked it’s falling form from the air, as if nothing in the world was simpler. He caught it by the hilt, in the proper position for use, though it looked a toy in his massive hand. “Familiarity does you no favors, old friend.”

  He hated the pity he heard in the Ideal’s voice almost as strongly as he hated his shaking hands. The Aenocyon felt guilty. That he was his Ideal, esteemed and honored and to be obeyed, did not make him less of a fool for that.

  “You are a human,” he said, shutting his eyes and breathing through his nose. “You are a human.”

  “I am an Ideal, and your opponent. Even the Auroch is not so tied by his programming as to be unable to strike another Ideal.”

  “I am a medic. I am your medic, and I know what he and you do not. You’re human. You’re human.”

  The Ideal shrugged, fluid. “It makes no difference to me, old friend. But you knew that.” He tossed the blade in the air, caught it by the blade without hurting himself, and offered it back to the medic. The cut on his face made it look like he was weeping tears of blood with one eye, while amused with the other, like some sort of perverse mask. “You do not have this trouble in the medical wing when your duties call on you to cut into living flesh, or break bones. You know how rare that is. But I find it odd, that you cannot do this. They are both inflicting injury.”

  “It’s different,” the medic said, not to excuse himself-- the Ideal was not angry with him. To try to explain. “That is… an aspect of healing. I can injure to heal.”

  “…. It’s all in the head,” the Ideal said, not as a reassurance, not as an assessment. As a curse.

  “We can try again,” Raphael said, forcing his breathing to steady. “I will learn.”

  “…. We will break first,” The Aenocyan said, and reached up one hand to prod at the injury to his face. Possibly he did that on purpose, because he smiled slightly when the medic cursed at him and threw himself forward.

  “Don’t prod at it, you can’t see it to see if you’re doing damage!” He grabbed the Ideal’s hand, knowing intellectually that the only reason it lowered was because the Ideal permitted him to do so, and did so because he wished to allow him this moment of certainty.

  He noted distantly that he had been nauseous, attempting to spar with the Ideal. He noticed it, because it went away.

  ***

  It was a vast ship, once she’d gotten a tour of most of the used places on it, and a few of the abandoned, derelict zones. Some were easy enough to recognize. Most however were as alien to her as they were to him.

  She’d laughed softly when he’d led her into a dimply lit room, smelling only of dust and sterile air. “Well, it needs a good cleaning. But… this is a bar.”

  “… A bar?”

  She cocked her head at him. “You know, people who are old enough gather round to drink alcohol, or whatever else tickles their fancy, talk, and hang out with friends?”

  He looked utterly blank.

  “… Oh my God, you guys don’t drink,” she said after a moment. “Okay. Um… maybe the alcohol wouldn’t work for you anyway, but most people who drink it aren’t getting drunk most of the time either, plenty like the taste. And you’d want people to keep their heads on the ship…”

  Zachariah continued to look confused.

  “Okay, um…” She had once again, the odd sensation of unexpectedly finding herself talking to a child. She tried to dismiss that-- it wasn’t fair. She knew enough of him to know that he certainly wasn’t kept sheltered.

  … There was more than one way to be sheltered, she thought, and bit her lip.

  “Maybe it’s a civilian thing,” she said, brightening her tone. “But, here-- they make flavored drinks here. People who want more private conversations sit away from the bar. People more interested in drinking more or meeting people sit directly at the bar.” She waved at the bar, the seats. When she brushed a hand over the bar, she lifted a wave of dust, which revealed a rich wood, red and dark and glossy. “Um… oh, they have a dartboard. I bet the darts are still around… oh, metal ones. Nice.”

  They had a nice weight to them too, as she rolled them between her fingers. The place had a feel to it-- not futuristic, not cheap, but luxury. Polished wood, brass, lights behind glass that clouded and diffused it. Warm.

  “Usually people who are very social like the bars, while nerds like me stay at home and read. But—” but it was something familiar. “My brother used to have a dartboard like this, maybe not as nice. You take it and throw—” Her aim was a little off, striking just to the left of the center ring.

  “It is… weapons? In a place of recreation?” Zachariah sounded disturbed and confused. She looked at him again.

  “… Sort of? Not really? I mean… look, you’d have to work hard to really hurt someone with this. Or be appallingly stupid, and in a place like this, there’s supposed to be a bartender there, making drinks, conversation, and making good decisions for the people too drunk or stupid to do it for themselves. Basically an adult babysitter. So if they try throwing them at each other or something, they’d stop them. For my part, I like having both eyes.”

  It was a joke. It was the sort of joke she’d heard and said a thousand times, in the most casual of conversations with the most aloof of acquaintances.

  Zachariah flinched, looking… alarmed. “You play with weapons?”

  “Um.. hey, look, I don’t even know anyone who’s gotten hurt doing this, okay? Everything is okay….” Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. In a later part of this man’s story, he’d taken a near gutting without passing comment on it, holding his intestines in with one hand as he protected his comrades with a gun he’d picked off a fallen ally. He had treated it as something that had to be done. Neither praiseworthy nor worrisome, only needful.

  So why…

  “Hey, if humanity couldn’t manage a bit of pointy object tossing, we’d never have made it to the stars,” she said, lightly, not sure why he was alarmed but wanting him not to be. “Still, we don’t have to play with it. Let me see what it’s like behind the bar, out of curiosity, and we can go on to the next room.” She could come back alone. Judging from the dust, she could be alone here. Judging from his talk, she could be alone on most of the ship.

  The idea was starting to sound appealing. It was like having someone who switched between being a toddler and a veteran in her mind constantly. She wanted a nap.

  But she froze, looking in the doorway. “… it’s not a bar,” she muttered, softly, trying to figure out how much water they would need, how much grain, how much yeast.

  “What?”

  She looked at the vats and dials, tucked farther behind the rows and rows that should have been filled with bottles. Walked further in, leaving clear tracks in the dust. “It’s not a bar. It’s a brewery,” she said, then frowned. “Or a winery? Maybe a meadery? Whatever. They didn’t just dispense alcohol. They made it.”

  “…. Why?”

  “I don’t know. It seems unnecessarily complicated to put on a spaceship. Except….” Except… The ship was top of the line, made in an age of space exploration, of optimism, of glory among the stars. That age had ended with the spread of the corruption, and the ship had fallen instead into the hands of the Lord Ideal Aenocyon, whose mission was altogether less optimistic.

  “It’s an exploration vessel, not a troop ship,” she said softly, wondering. “An incredibly long term exploration vessel. A colony ship. Maybe… a ship meant to seed multiple colonies.” Which meant… what else had they expected to need to make on board? Food? Clothes? Media?

  “Show me more,” she said, and jogged out of the room, a smile twitching at her lips.

  See you Thursday.