The mine we had found was an absolutely nasty piece of work, as we found out once Max had picked through it with the drone swarm. Ultimately it was a cluster bomb, rigged to blast out massive numbers of marble-sized submunitions to turn anyone in the same corridor to paste while also causing a massive hull breach. It was connected to an array of sensors on a closed-circuit system that Max had to physically infiltrate to defuse, and in doing so he’d discovered several other deathtraps connected to this otherwise isolated system. It actually took him several minutes to identify a path to defusing this particular area.

As soon as he came up with what needed to happen, Max informed us “Grom, Madeline. There are three cables that need to be severed simultaneously to defuse this collection of traps, and it’s all just too dumb to properly hack; I’d like to avoid expending any drones if possible, so if you would please use your lasers to do the job it would be appreciated.” while also smoothly highlighting exactly where he wanted us to shoot.

Grom replied “Understood” and proceeded to take aim, even as I brought up the business end of my laser. A few moments later we fired our lasers simultaneously, trains of pulses blasting the indicated spots with surgical precision. There was silence for a few moments, as we all waited with anxiety for something to happen, and Max checked things over to make sure it was defused.

Soon enough, Max replied “Alright, this is clear. Onwards.” and we progressed further down the corridor, trailing a safety line of network cable behind us as we kept our self-streams going to offsite backup drives. It only took a couple minutes to encounter the next bundle of defenses, which lasered a few drones before we pulled back.

Max groaned as he said “Yeah, no. We don’t have the equipment to deal with that from the front. Whoever goes around that corner is getting a lot of really big holes blasted in them.“

I thought about the predicament for a moment, before asking “Max, I’m curious; was it gimballed or a phased array?”

Immediately, Max answered “It’s a phased array laser hard mounted to the furniture. Why?”

I then turned to the guy with the massive spool of network cable, asking “What’s the tensile strength on that cable?”

He grinned, noting “This stuff’s clad in structural-grade arachnoweave; the optic fibers will still fail before the cable as a whole goes, but that’s fixable and it’s really quite strong. Why?”

I simply answered “Because if we can’t get past that turret inside the station we’ll just have to go for a quick jaunt through a couple new holes in the hull. If we show up behind the laser’s arc of fire we can disable it without any additional risk.”

Max agreed “Sound plan, but let’s stow the drones first; they’re not equipped for vacuum maneuvering and I’d rather not lose them if possible.”

This is the point where the guy with the cable spool noted “You know, we could just requisition some additional gear for this? We’ve got an entire Voidskipper full of fun toys within easy travel distance, and a nice high-bandwidth connection.”

I blinked, and Grom waved a tentacle as he noted “Good point. I’ve placed an order for some demolition charges, a length of EVA safety tether, some vacuum-capable microdrones, a pair of portable airlocks to set up in the corridors, and a set of very heavy duty hull patch kits for when we’re done.”

And so we set down to wait for our new gear to arrive. Sure enough it only took a few minutes before a group of agents wearing an assortment of morphs showed up hauling several cases of equipment through the zero gravity corridors. One of them asked “Alright, we’ve got the first charge. Where exactly are you planning on blowing the first hole in the hull?”

We’d already talked about this, and I tapped against a specific spot on the wall as I noted “Here. Minimal risk of damaging anything important outside the station, while also making sure we’re pretty close to the corner so as to minimize the distance we need to EVA.”

The agents nodded and without further delay they got to work on setting up a portable airlock on either side of where we were going to put in a blast. A few moments of stretching smart membranes into place and gluing them in place with spray foam later, the airlocks were in position.

While I was qualified for explosives it really wasn’t my specialty, so I let one of the other agents take care of setting up the high-temperature hull cutting charges. They came back through the airlock, and they noted “Detonation in ten seconds.”

Sure enough the charges went off exactly on schedule, and the corridor noticeably jerked when the blast sheared-through the paper thin nanotube composite hull. Someone handed me the spool of safety tether, and I made my way through the airlock into vacuum. A bit more of the adhesive foam used for the airlocks secured the tether in place, and I clambered out into the vacuum with only the grip pads on my boots preventing me from dangling helplessly in the void.

After a few moments of this I reached the intended point of the second hull breach and secured a point to clip the tether using more foam. A bit of tinkering with carabiners later, and the tether now represented a taut pathway between the two intended breach points with me being able to freely move along its length while also not being free to drift away.

I swiftly made my way back to where everyone else was waiting and informed the demolitions specialist “The maneuvering line is in place; you should have an easy time setting the charges now.”

The agent wearing the multi-limbed utilitarian pod of a morph simply replied “Understood.” and proceeded to the airlock. They clipped themselves to the line, tugged themselves along until they arrived at the second breach site, and started setting the charges. They quickly disconnected the safety line from its second anchor point, and tugged themselves back along it.

There was another blast that we all felt rather than heard, and the demolitions expert noted “Alright, we’ve got the hull open. Go and disable that laser.”

I saluted, made sure my self-stream had good connection quality, and passed through the airlock to the evacuated section again. I clipped on the safety line, and another quick spacewalk late I found myself looking at the laser turret from the side, but something didn’t quite seem right. Thinking quickly I asked “Max, can you please poke around? I want to make sure that I won’t be setting off a massive bomb or something if I just shoot the laser.”

From his position in the back of my mind, Max replied “Got it. I’m going to vector some of the vac drones in to take a look.” as a few dozen of the insect-sized units zipped past us. Several moments passed as Max investigated the various wires linking the laser to sensors and other such things, puzzling out the connections.

Abruptly, Max alerted me “You were absolutely correct Madeline. There’s about a hundred kilograms of plastic explosives stuffed into the base of this laser turret, and it looks set to detonate the instant someone tampers with it.”

I thought for a quick moment, before asking “Can we defuse it?”

Max waffled for a second or so, before saying “I’m willing to try, but only after we get clear to a safe distance. That bomb’s big enough to completely sever this corridor.”

This is about when the demolitions expert chimed in over the radio “Not in vacuum it isn’t! That right there is a concussive bomb without much shrapnel to speak of; those that work by pressure more than anything else, and with the great big hole we’ve put in the hull there won’t be much of that sticking around. The cutting charges I used only sheared through on account of being shaped charges; if they had just been bulk explosive I’d have barely left a dent.”

I blinked in surprise. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? I radioed back “Are you recommending a controlled detonation of the trap?”

There was a distinct impression of a smug impression over the comm channel as the demolitions expert replied “Absolutely. Get everyone to a clear distance and set off the bomb; it’ll make that hole in the hull a whole lot bigger, but primary structural integrity shouldn’t be compromised.”

And so Max and I made our way back to the corridor, passing the airlock once more as we retreated until the demolitions expert confirmed “We’re at a safe distance now; even if I misjudged the quantity of explosives by two orders of magnitude we’d be well clear of the blast. Max, you know what to do.”

My headmate replied over the comms “Indeed I do!” and mere moments later the corridor jolted suddenly.

A couple seconds passed until the vibrations ended, and I noted “Alright then, let’s go check what happened to the blast site.” before going through the smart membrane airlock one more time. Rounding the corner, we were confronted with a sight of total destruction. About half the circumference of the hull was still intact, but the rest was one massive gash through the hull metal.

I idly noted the agent with the massive spool of network cable remarking over radio “Right. That’s a lot bigger than our current patch jobs are good for. I’ve called for a repair crew and they should be along shorty. In the meantime we should really get further in, now that we’ve cleared out that particular batch of traps.”

And so on we went, carefully maneuvering around the hull breach so as to avoid drifting into the void of space and needing to be retrieved. As usual for this sort of environment, Max was checking every single thing ahead of us with micro-drones to check for traps, but if anything the lack of them now was distinctly worrying.

Then we came to a bulkhead door, apparently one connecting to an administrative office, if the signage was to be believed. Still, after how many previous booby traps we’d gone through none of us trusted it any more than we could throw it.

I asked Max “So, think you can tell if that door’s trapped?”

Max obligingly looked over the door for several moments, checking every last thing with his drone swarm before he noted “It doesn’t seem to be trapped at all, actually. That said, it seems to have been bolted shut from the inside, and there’s an airtight seal on it preventing them from getting through.”

Grom then raised one of his tentacles with an integrated laser and started using it to precisely cut through the door, simultaneously saying “We should be careful; there could easily be viable morphs inside, which may reactivate when we breach. Weapons hot, everyone.”

I readied my own laser, even as Max brought the drone swarm into a more aggressive stance and the rest of the agents all drew their own sidearms. Then Grom finished cutting out the door, and with a full-body slam knocked it clear out of its frame even as we all charged through with weapons at the ready, our grip pads and plentiful training enabling relatively easy maneuvering despite the lack of gravity.

Still, when we entered there didn’t seem to be anybody active and doing stuff in here aside from us. There were several server racks, around, but there didn’t seem to be any actual morphs around that we didn’t bring in here, active or otherwise. Meanwhile Max had the drones buzzing around like crazy, looking for traps.

After several moments of this, Max reluctantly pronounced the room clean, and noted “I’ll need to take a look at those server racks and make sure that there isn’t anything hooked up to them before they get brought back to the Loan Shark for in-depth analysis.”

I only needed a moment to ask “Will you require the body for this?”

Max replied in the affirmative, and I switched out of front as he retrieved a mil-spec tablet from our storage and set about trying to interface with the server racks. The very first thing he did was check whether or not the servers in question had a power supply, and the answer to that turned out to be a solid no. Groaning in frustration, Max called out using the body’s voice “Can someone please get a compatible power supply for these server racks? I need to do a field check for malware before we bring them back to the Loan Shark, and I can’t do that if they’re powered down.” while simultaneously sending a data packet with the required specifications.

The guy with the spool of network cable replied “Got it. The gear should be here in a few minutes. In the meantime is there anything else you can do with regards to those servers?”

Max thought for a moment, before noting “Actually, yes there is. The servers on those racks could easily be a decoy set to trigger any number of security measures when they get powered up. They’re not connected to any cables, so that means any signals they would send would have to be wireless. As such I highly recommend putting the server racks in electromagnetic isolation before activating them. Either that, or broadband ECM.”

Cable guy nodded, replying “Right. I’ve ordered a few bolts of superconducting textiles; that should make building an electromagnetic isolation tent pretty straightforward when they get here.”

That’s when I realized something that had been bothering me, and asked the cable guy over radio “Curiously, what’s your name anyway? We’ve been working together for a while and it completely slipped my mind.”

The agent smirked for a moment, before he answered “My name is Not Important; yes that is in fact my name. I legally changed it to commemorate an old in-joke I had with some friends who I used to know. You can call me Not; Important is my surname.”

I thought for a moment, but the only reply I could think of was “Huh.”

Either way, not much else of use happened until the equipment that Max requisitioned got here. As soon as it did, Max started setting up an enclosure for the server racks using the superconducting cloth and a few tubes of utility nanopaste that he quickly programmed to act as an adhesive. A few minutes passed as Max made sure all the gaps where radio waves could slip out were closed aside from the entry flap.

Then Max asked “Madeline, there is a somewhat plausible chance that those servers are full of identity-corrupting malware capable of jumping the gap to our brains. If you want to Mindcast out of our body to somewhere safer, now is the time.”

It took me only a minute or so to decide, before I asked Grom over the radio “Grom, would you mind sparing some processor space for me in your morph? I’d like to come over until Max is done using this body for cyberwar.”

Grom replied “Certainly, Madeline.” and extended a tentacle for me to Mindcast over, a concealed compartment opening to reveal a scanning probe. I accepted, and the next thing I knew I was riding in the back of Grom’s mindspace instead of being partnered up with Max. I watched through Grom’s eyes as Max maneuvered the body I normally wore into the isolation tent, and I couldn’t help but muse “Huh, I just realized that I’ve been headmates with Max since joining up with the Bureau. This is probably the first time in about a Gigasecond that we haven’t been sharing a morph.”

A few moments of mental silence passed, before Grom noted “It’s interesting for me too; this is actually the first time I’ve ever shared my mind with someone else. I’m actually mildly disappointed; I was lead to believe the experience felt a lot more exotic than it actually does.”

I blinked my virtual eyes in mild surprise, before noting “That’s actually a bit odd, seeing as most people are made via parogenesis; how’d you start existing that didn’t lead to you sharing mindspace, then?”

I got the impression of a shrug, before Grom answered “I started out as a partial cast. Mom wanted the experience of raising a child sharing hereditary traits without all that biological complexity, so he copied over his identity vector to a blank morph without including any of his memories. The end result is that I’ve spent the last Gigasecond or so as a singlet and never really thought about the alternative.”

I hummed appreciatively, and settled in to wait. With the isolation tent sealed, no-one had any real clue what exactly was going on in there; radio comms were obviously blocked, and the room still wasn’t pressurized, rendering audio useless. We wouldn’t even know if Max got completely burned out until the agreed upon check time, when a pure biomorph would open up the flap to take a look if nothing happened in ten kiloseconds.

Fortunately, only two kiloseconds later Max opened the flap and noted “We were right, those servers were absolutely decoys. I spent way too long trying to get those freaking things to boot up until I figured out that they’d deleted the BIOS. Even after using some nanomachine paste to forcibly install some firmware and get the servers in a bootable condition, there was no data on them whatsoever. Effectively, they were one massive waste of time.”

As everyone sighed in sympathy, I commented to Grom “It’s been nice sharing headspace with you, but I rather prefer my catgirl morph. So I’m going to be Mindcasting back now.”

Another non-transition associated with Mindcast travel, and I was back in my own body as Grom replied “It was interesting having you over, Madeline. Anyway, now that we’ve confirmed the servers held no useful data, our next priority should be searching the rest of the room for anything else of use.”

I felt Max sliding back into his secondary position, even as I noted “Yeah, that makes sense. Not too likely to find anything, but you never know.”

Everyone here agreed with me on that, and we got down to searching. The very first things we checked were the air vents; in the microgravity environment of this space station, any unattended objects would have drifted to the intakes for the air circulation system. That said, we didn’t find anything of use when we got there; the vents in question looked to have been thoroughly cleaned, and opening them up for Max’s drones to investigate the inside yielded nothing but lint clogging up the filters.

That pattern held for the next several kiloseconds as we tore through every single place something could be hiding, and found absolutely nothing that could possibly be of use. We even sampled the mold we found growing on some expired foodstuffs to make sure there weren’t any encrypted files hidden in its genome, but that turned out to be a bust too. We were also hearing similar reports from the other teams, and after several kiloseconds we had all come to the conclusion that there was no useful information to be recovered.

As such, we were called back aboard Loan Shark, with the ship in question beginning to make her way towards the Red Star Union. Strictly speaking Grom and I could have simply Mindcast back using one of the comm holes aboard the ship, but we both still had a bunch of cool stuff from when we were undercover as pirates that we wanted to keep; the items in question had already been written off as an expense for the mission, so BoSI wouldn’t be asking for them back. In my case there was my huge stash of Alpha Cola, and Grom still had that collection of mechanical timepieces.

About a quarter of a Megasecond passed that way, with us getting roughly halfway back to the RSU in that time. Grom and I got to know each other in even more intimate detail on the way back. I enjoyed some of my Alpha Cola stash, Grom tinkered with his clocks, and we were both looking forward to leave when we got back to the Red Star Union.

Those hopes were dashed when Shen arrived and informed the both of us “Agents Grom, Hadrian, Zargosty. We’ve found Bark’s Finest exactly where the fortune telling equation said they would be, and the Starforce is about to engage the pirates in space combat. We need you there to help process the pirate’s surrender and make sure we aren’t missing any useful information to wrap up the case.”

We immediately started making our way to one of Loan Shark’s many Mindcast bays, grabbing onto the handle-hook system that stretched through the crew quarters to speed our travel. As we proceeded, I asked Shen “Just to be clear we’ll get to keep the stuff from our time undercover as pirates, right?”

Shen’s carapace shifted to a deep saturated purple swirl pattern as he replied “Yes, agent Zargosty. You can consider those items as being a perk of the job. Anyway, we’ll be making a brief stop at BoSI headquarters before we Mindcast out to the system in question. We’re going to patch you into the combat stream for the upcoming space battle in an observer role so you know what you’re getting into, and on top of that there’s good reasons not to arrive until after the fighting is over; it’s still possible though unlikely that one of our ships could be destroyed in the fighting, and needing to resurrect you after the ship you were on got destroyed would be a waste of time and resources.”

As we reached the Mindcast bay I replied “Makes sense, Shen.” at the same time as I climbed into the pod. I lay down in the pod squishing the upholstery in the process. As the lid closed I got a brief look at Grom and Shen also getting into their pods. Then the scanning probe came down, and I was back at BoSI headquarters in a new morph.

Shen was already out of the pod, greeting us with “Welcome back, agents. You’ve got a combat information stream to tap into, and a Mindcast bay to stop clogging up, since we’re going to have a few thousand more people coming through there in fairly short order. Please proceed to Auditorium 509 A in the Eastergem Hall.”

Grom and I both snapped the standard RSU salute, and without further delay we made our way towards the location in question. BoSI headquarters was a campus of around five hundred square kilometers and Eastergem Hall was a separate building from the one we were currently in, so that meant making use of the local tram network.

Grom and I spent the couple minutes riding the monorail admiring the scenery. From here we had a great view of Union Ring, the continent-sized rotating habitat that the Red Star Union used as a center of government. Looking straight up, we could easily see the artificial sun in the center as well as the other side of the ring a few thousand kilometers away; in the background we had a nice view of Reine, the deep blue gas giant we were orbiting.

Scenic view aside, our train quickly arrived at Eastergem Hall. From there it was a fairly simple matter of going through the lobby, taking the elevator down a couple floors to reach the fifth level, and then navigating to our assigned auditorium. There were a few thousand agents already present when we arrived, but there were still plenty of seats left for Grom and I to use. So we sat down, plugged in one of the high-bandwidth connections, and got ready for the stream. Idly, I wished I had one of those bottles of Alpha Cola to drink while I waited.

---

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