Boarding the pirate Skimmer was honestly incredibly underwhelming. The ship was only a kilometer long after all; its entirety would easily fit in one of the reaction chambers of a Voidskipper’s power plant with room to spare. Considering that I was boarding with around a hundred thousand other agents when just counting bodies, that meant there would be one agent for every single compartment in the entire ship. Mix that in with a large number of support drones, and we’d be thoroughly picking over every single weld, socket, nook and cranny in the vessel for more incriminating evidence. Apparently the teams over at Bark’s Finest were doing much the same while they waited for the causality trap to be defused.
With a sensation of bumping and the gentle hum of magnetic clamps engaging, the shuttle we were on docked to the Skimmer. Grom and I shared a look, before disconnecting the seatbelts and getting into position for exiting the cabin. Given that this was a Starforce-issued synthmorph it was entirely unsurprising that it was equipped with a vacuum maneuvering system, so when the hatch opened it was very easy to scoot across the gap and enter the airlock into the Skimmer.
When inside, we were immediately confronted by just how cramped everything was, with a bedraggled-looking collection of a few hundred synthmorphs, interspersed with pallet after pallet of data drives. Looking at this, I asked one of the pirates currently being restrained by three other agents “I’m guessing you archived most of your crew to fit them aboard this ship?”
The pirate nodded in agreement, and I hummed, before noting “Well, that reduces the number of people we’ll need to archive ourselves at least.” as I slotted three drives into my Mindcast probe, along with a non-reproducing nanoweapon cartridge to override the normal protections against involuntary Mindcasting. A few moments later, the pirate’s morph fell limp as the probe indicated that all three drives had up-to-date mind states written to them. I passed the full drives off to a support drone for storage, and then got ready for the next arrest.
Max and I did this for several minutes, archiving pirates in triplicate even as the pallets full of pre-archived pirates were carefully hauled to the shuttles for transmission back to the Red Star Union for trial. We’d cleared out several compartments of the vessel already, when suddenly we heard the sounds of weapons fire and a short burst communication of “Captain Fuller is resisting arrest!” accompanying a snapshot of the pirate captain firing a tripod-mounted particle beam from the shoulder of his bulky synthmorph.
My internal map quickly updated with a waypoint indicating the compartment the captain was holed up in, marked as maximum priority. Grom and I shared a glance, and off we went towards the location in question. As we neared the compartment in question, I noted over the comms network “Attacking the captain from the front is stupid, let’s flank him.”
This prompted a rapid investigation of all the compartments adjacent to the one captain Fuller had holed himself up in, and by the time Grom and I got there it had been confirmed that there was only one door in or out of the compartment, and the pirate captain in question was covering that with his particle beam gun.
No matter, we’d just go through the walls. One requisition later we’d ordered some shaped charges to make our own entrances, and settled in to wait. Captain Fuller would keep in there, we’d already achieved network supremacy over the ship, and we could therefore take our time waiting for the new equipment and demolitions experts to arrive.
This took about a kilosecond; I was already positioned near my planned breach location when the demolitions expert arrived. Idly I asked “Curiously, did we meet on the service gantry?”
They didn’t even look up from their work of setting the cutting charges as they replied “No, that was someone else. I’m officially in the Starforce as part of Madame Relativity’s ISRU crew, not part of BoSI.”
I’d have shrugged, but this morph wasn’t equipped for it. Anyway, it took only a few minutes for the demolitions experts to set up the breach points, so with several agents at each entry, we started the countdown. Five seconds later the charges went off and I rocketed forwards with my pistol armed and ready. Captain Fuller’s particle beam gun explosively disintegrated from the sheer number of lasers aimed at it, the blast flinging the pirate back against the wall.
Quickly six agents tackled the pirate and slammed him face-first against the wall, even as I readied my arrest probe. Drives one, two and three were slotted into it along with the hijacker nanomachines. Then I pressed it forwards into Captain Fuller’s back. Perhaps sensing what was going on, the pirate thrashed wildly in an attempt to escape, but with the massive number of agents holding him in place there just wasn’t much he could actually do to escape.
Gradually the pirate’s spasms grew less and less violent as my cartridge of arrestor nanoweapon stripped away his control of his motor system and started suborning the security of his cognitive processors. Four minutes of thrashing later, Captain Alex Fuller’s morph fell still. Soon after my Mindcast probe indicated that he’d been saved to all three drives.
And just like that, my role in the case was effectively over. It was all done save the court cases now; the pirates of Bark’s Finest had been arrested, the Non-Orientable Wormholes they stole had been (mostly) recovered, and their ship would be salvaged as evidence for recovery to the Red Star Union. The only remaining loose ends were the pirates’ incomplete wormhole factory, but they’d done the smart thing and surrendered as soon as Bark’s Finest Skipped away.
Still, I’d be disciplined for dereliction of duty if I left the mission now, so that meant continuing with my current orders to arrest every single pirate aboard this Skimmer. There were a couple kiloseconds of monotony there while we checked every single hiding place this ship could possibly have for pirates, arresting the ones we found for transmission back to the Red Star Union for trial. Still, that was a process of finite length, and eventually it had to come to an end.
Madame Relativity and the rest of the fleet were still busily setting up the pumping system for wormhole demolition, but they were already working to transmit all the pirates back to the Union using their onboard comms holes. Another few kiloseconds of digging through the station passed, before a message arrived telling me that it was time to go.
And so I made my way back through the corridors of the pirate Skimmer, quickly reaching one of the airlocks leading to the exterior. Another quick journey through open space brought me to a shuttle that had been docked to the Skimmer. I quickly found my seat right next to Grom, fastened my seatbelt, and stowed my equipment all before the hatch closed.
As the shuttle’s engine warmed up and we started flying back towards Madame Relativity’s open shuttle bay, Max asked from the back of our mind “So. Now that the whole mission is winding down, I suppose we had better figure out what we’re going to say at the debriefing.”
I failed a shrug attempt as I answered “The truth, obviously. Shen’s going to pick through our memories on the whole affair and then quiz us on them in exhaustive detail. He’s going to know if we embellish anything or leave something out. It’s just part of the job.”
Off to the side, Grom groaned “I still don’t get why Shen bothers with the manual debriefing given he’s going to be giving our memories of the entire mission to a team of analysts. You’d think he’d get everything he needed just from that level of direct access.”
I thought for a moment, before noting “That’s the thing, it’s not really about the information. It’s mostly for our benefit; both to ensure we retain any new skills we might have picked up, and to mitigate the psychological damage from traumatic events.”
The conversation gradually tapered off after that. None of us really had much more to say on the topic that would achieve anything of use, and the cramped environment of the shuttle wasn’t very conducive to conversation. So we didn’t talk about much else for the rest of the flight, simply waiting in silence as we coasted into the shuttle bay to dock.
Conversation picked up a bit as we made our way through the corridors of the habitat section, and I noted “It’ll be good to be back in my preferred morph. These military morphs are certainly functional, but I certainly wouldn’t want one for daily wear.”
Grom noted “Agreed. I much prefer my tentacles; much more versatile than the limbs these bodies are equipped with.”
I nodded in sympathy as I noted “And I rather like my tail; it’s not as useful, but it’s nice to have.”
I got a vague sense of approval from Max, but he didn’t bother putting it into words.
On the other hand, Grom noted “That said, I’ll probably see about adding EVA thrusters to my normal morph; I make a point of adding every useful capability to it that I can, and this fits.”
I hummed for a moment and replied “Fair enough; my preference for biomorphs kind of skews things there.”
Soon after that conversation we reached the Mindcast bay, and I finally took note of the fact that the pod wasn’t actually equipped for morph printing. Indeed, it just had a scanning probe and manipulators for hauling unused morphs around. Made sense I suppose. Anyway, I climbed into the Mindcast pod and waited for the transfer. The scanning probe came down, and suddenly I was back in my catgirl morph lying on my bunk back at BoSI headquarters.
I hauled myself back upright, enjoying the cushioning of a biological body as I did so. Checking revealed that I’d already been dressed with a standard dress uniform, which was typical for post-mission debriefings. Suspecting what I was about to see, I looked over just in time to see Grom grumpily hauling himself upright, chassis and tentacles all clad in tight-fitting green fabric with shining brass buttons. Listening carefully I caught him muttering “-hate this uniform I can’t move my tentacles properly going to file a complaint...”
Admittedly I didn’t much like the uniform either, but I could at least tolerate the fit. Anyway, we really should have expected it, but Shen intercepted us en route. As the spider confronted us in the hallway, he noted “Your debriefing is scheduled for five minutes from now. Agent Grom, your complaints about the dress uniforms have been noted, and sent to the uniform department. While what happens behind those closed doors is unknown even to me, presumably they have been deleted already. Please, follow me.”, with his carapace shifting to a jovial pink as he spoke.
And so we followed Shen through the corridors of the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence, quickly arriving at an elevator lobby. We rode it down two levels, then navigated through another few hallways to reach the debriefing room. Just before we opened the door, Shen noted “If you’ll excuse me, I have other duties to attend to at the exact moment” before scuttling away to who knew what else.
Neither, Grom, Max, or I were surprised in the slightest to find Shen already waiting inside the debriefing room for us despite having just left in a completely different direction; he’d gotten thousands of himself printed to keep on top of everything he was supposed to manage at the Bureau simultaneously. What was actually somewhat more surprising was Kit’s presence here; we’d never directly interacted with her during the mission at any point aside from our meeting over lunch, and I found myself stuck in a cognitive loop as I tried to comprehend whatever arcane reason Shen had for putting us in the same room. Still, we entered the debriefing room without any serious hesitation.
Getting seated took a few moments for me as I made sure to thread my tail through the hole in the back of the chair. Grom meanwhile only needed a couple seconds to set himself down on the chair, though I caught him grumbling about the uniform the whole time.
We’d barely sat down when Shen noted “Excellent. Now that you’re all here, we can begin.”
What followed was about four kiloseconds of debriefing as we went over our roles throughout the mission. We covered everything in exhaustive detail, starting from our trip to the Conjoined Church of Scensia and brief encounter with the totality of the networked intelligence herself. After that we covered the events that took place in the Bouccan system, including both the sight-seeing we performed to maintain our cover and the running street battle we’d gotten involved with.
This is where Kit provided her perspective on the events that took place on Tide, which turned out to be highly interesting. It began with her saying “In my cover identity as a recruiter, I had a readily made excuse to look around for people with previous pirate experience. As such, I immediately did so, putting out advertisements for prospective crew interested in a stake in Loan Shark’s profits. When looking over the resumes I immediately filtered out anyone who hadn’t mentioned Bark’s Finest, and found a few thousand prospects.”
There was a brief pause as Kit collected her thoughts before continuing “Anyway, what happened next was ordering the list by how recent their job experience with Bark’s Finest was. That left a couple hundred candidates, which I narrowed down to Viyad based on standard psychological criteria for identifying potential informants. I quickly arranged an interview, and things looked like they were going smoothly.”
That’s when Kit sighed as she noted “Of course, things didn’t quite work out that way. A group of red-tops came by and spooked Viyad severely; she thought the thugs were there for her. That’s when I called for a distraction to take their attention off of us, which Madeline and Grom provided excellently.”
The rest of Kit’s experiences on Tide matched the recording I’d already viewed so I wasn’t quite as interested in what she had to say about that.
Anyway, I still hadn’t synchronized my memories with my instances who’d ventured to the surface of Blackwood, and Grom hadn’t actually gone there due to chasing down another lead in the Bouccan system that ultimately turned out to be a dead end. Which actually meant that Kit was the only agent in the room with memories of visiting Bark.
So I actually listened rather intently as Kit described her trials and tribulations in attempting to track down a different Alex Fuller of the number who’d lived on that moon full of crazy at the correct time. Much to Kit’s relief, her particular branch of the mission didn’t result in a need to visit Blackwood’s surface. On the other hand, it did result in an unproductive slog that dragged on for a protracted period of time and ultimately concluded with finding that the particular Alex Fuller she’d been looking for had become a professional athlete.
Afterwards was Grom and I’s account of the events taking place at the pirates’ abandoned service gantry. We covered everything including the traps, the bypass outside the hull, the electromagnetic isolation cage, and the utter waste of time that it had turned out to be.
The only remaining topic was our role in the final arrest of Captain Fuller after the Starforce got the pirates to surrender. We recounted the initial boarding and the several arrests prior to discovering Captain Fuller’s last desperate attempt to avoid capture. The plan to flank him through the walls by using demolitions charges was also described, as was the subsequent destruction of his particle beam gun, and his arrest.
It wasn’t much longer after that when our debriefing ended. As Kit, Grom, Max and I got up from the chairs we’d just spent quite a while in, I turned to Shen. There was a brief pause, before I informed him “Shen, I’d like to take three Megaseconds of vacation time.”
Shen paused for only a moment, before replying “Understood, Agent Madeline Zargosty. Will your headmate also be taking time off?”
I let Max speak for himself over the body’s internal radio “Yes, I intend to. There are seven other instances of me I need to catch up with.”
Shen shifted to a light green coloration as he inquired “You are aware that your other selves who visited Blackwood are currently still under psychological observation, and are likely to remain there for at least half a Megasecond, correct?”
I absently noted that Kit had already left, even as I replied “Yes. That still leaves around two Megaseconds to catch up with them, synchronize our memories, and decide if we want to merge or not. In addition we might get to visit them while they’re still under observation.”
Almost imperceptibly, Shen nodded as he replied “In that case your request for vacation time is approved, Agents Madeline Zargosty and Maximus Hadrian. Agent Grom, will you also be requesting vacation time?”
Grom flexed to imitate a nod as he replied “Yes. I have every intention of taking three Megaseconds of vacation time, which I will be spending with Agents Zargosty and Hadrian.”
Shen paused for the tiniest of moments before abruptly shifting back to a jovial pink as he noted “Ah, I see you have carefully reviewed the fraternization rules. In that case, your vacation time is thoroughly approved, and I have a few recommendations.”
With that, Shen transmitted an encrypted data burst that I didn’t quite crack. Still, given how Grom’s blush lights immediately activated I had a pretty good guess as to what sorts of ‘recommendations’ Shen had shared with him. I had a hard time keeping myself from chuckling at Grom’s reaction to Shen’s prodding, but I managed it.
Anyway, as we walked I noted “So. I think we should be going and visiting all the other mes in psychological evaluation.”
A moment later, Grom replied “Correction. First we get out of these horrible dress uniforms, then we visit all the other Madelines and Maxes. I want to be able to move properly first.”
I shrugged as I said “I guess we swing by our on-base quarters to change into casual wear first, then?”
Grom looked deeply conflicted as if he were considering a much more permanent fate for the hated dress uniform, but eventually he agreed “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”
And so we made our way to the barracks, riding the monorail across the campus again. Grom’s on-site housing was located at a different stop than mine, so I cheerfully told him “See you later at the recuperation center!” as he was getting off the train.
As the train’s doors closed behind Grom, he replied “Indeed, see you there after I ditch this uniform.”
And then Max and I were all on our own as the train trundled along its elevated track towards our stop. We admired the scenery for a bit, but it was barely another minute before the monorail pulled to a stop and the automated announcer informed us that it was our time to get off.
After exiting the train, we quickly made our way to an elevator, and from there we had an easy time reaching our barracks. We opened the door, and I squealed in delight as I saw a clear plastic bag holding a large number of the fancy dresses I picked out as plunder for my cover identity.
In the back of my mind I noticed Max remarking “Right, Shen did say that the items we picked out for that purpose were authorized for us to keep. What do you say about getting into something fancy?”
I replied “Sounds like an excellent idea to me; especially since this dress uniform really is quite uncomfortable.”
And so I stripped down completely, tossing the dress uniform into the bin for the laundry drones to collect. Only now did I start picking out what to wear, selecting a delightful ruby red number. I slipped it on, and then my attention was drawn to the chest freezer.
Anticipating what exactly I might find, I pulled it open to find several cases of Alpha Cola. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a bag and stuck sixteen bottles of soda inside. Two for each of me. Gifts acquired and fancy dress donned, I made my way back to the monorail station and pinged the network for a train that would take me to the Recuperation Center.
It took about a minute of waiting for the monorail to arrive. When it did, I got on, and a few minutes of riding later I arrived at the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence’s mental health department, also known as the Recuperation Center.
When Max and I arrived, the automated desk attendant greeted us “Greetings, Agents Maximus Hadrian and Madeline Zargosty. Why are you here today?”
In response I answered “We’re here to visit Agents Hadrian and Zargosty.”
To the credit of whoever had programmed that totally non-adaptive decision tree it handled the situation with ease, noting “Understood. You will find them in room 7AD31. Please have a nice day.”
And so we made our way to the elevators, taking a ride up to the seventh-Ath floor. From there it was a simple matter of locating room D31. When I arrived outside the door, I could hear gentle humming from inside. I briefly considered making a surprise entrance, but instead I opted to politely knock on the door.
A few moments later I heard my own voice call back “Come in!”
I gently opened the door, coming face-to-face with seven of me. Five of me were on a couch in various states of assembly, one of me with the other four’s heads napping on her lap as she gently petted them. Two of those heads were attached to their bodies and on their sides, while the other two had been detached so as to further stretch limited lap capacity. The two headless bodies on the couch were meanwhile gently cuddling together towards one end. Off to the side the other two of me were busily showing Grom around the honestly pretty comfortable apartment the psychologists had housed them in while under observation.
I’d barely opened the door when the me sitting on the couch greeted me “Hello M8. Nice to see you.”
I nodded as I replied “Nice to see you too. I brought Alpha Cola.”
Immediately all the other mes in the room perked up, one of the detached heads on other me’s lap asking “You did?”
I just smiled as I set down my bag on the table in front of the couch, letting its walls fall to reveal sixteen bottles of radioisotope enbubbled soda in all the different flavors. Immediately the two headless mes sprang into action, grabbing their heads off the lap where they’d been getting petted and re-attaching them.
We quickly divvied up the Alpha Cola at two bottles per Madeline, when one of the Maxes noted “You know, I think this particular occasion calls for something a bit special.”
I asked “Oh?”
The Max who’d spoken up replied “Yes, I propose a toast to a job well done.”
And so we all raised our first bottle of Alpha Cola towards the ceiling and popped the lids off simultaneously.
This is the free edition of In Pursuit of Bark's Finest. If you want to read the whole story ahead of schedule and get access to some exclusive bonus content, you can buy it at Amazon or Smashwords.
Ebook: Amazon | Smashwords
Paperback: Normal Text | Large Text
