I stood facing the open core module, staring down into the slick pool. Collins spoke too quietly for me to hear, but loud enough for my sensors to pick up, "She's actually going in there, isn't she?" She hadn't been conscious to see me dive before. Not that I was going to let her see clearly.

I had no shame about my body. I'd spent so long wandering these halls either stark naked or very nearly so, that I just didn't care that much about people seeing me in the nude anymore. Hell, I'd been held hostage in the buff once. But Collins didn't know that. I told her not to peek while I disrobed and entered my heart, and thankfully, she respected my privacy. If she never got to see me enter the core module with her own eyes, we would be able to stage a final discovery of our 'trick' at the end of this. My clothes were discarded to the side of the catwalk, and I dove.

And when I was inside, when the world disappeared from around me, when my lungs filled with fluid, when my sensory existence vanished behind a curtain of light, I was whole again. I smiled wide as I prepared for that wonderful release of stellar flight.

I went over my pre-flight checklist one more time. Everyone was on board, we had supplies to last the whole trip and half that again, we had weapons and gear prepped, we'd settled all outstanding financial dues, Theseus was in top form on all metrics, and we had a flight plan. We were set.

After six long months laying low, licking our wounds, and building up our resources, watching for the blockade to break, it was finally time to jump back into action and go on the offensive while the enemy retreated.

I brought up the comms terminal to watch Aisling communicating with the port authority. Approximately four minutes until our takeoff clearance, which realistically meant at least twenty minutes if previous experiences with Io's port authority were anything to go by. I tapped the intercom at the helm and asked, "Are you as excited as I am about this?"

"I don't think I could possibly feel half as enthusiastic as you are literally any time we lift off." She rolled her eyes and flicked through her handheld terminal, looking over her own list. "Though, if we actually go through with this raid, we might have a chance to make history. That's pretty exciting."

"That was a lot of conditionals." I couldn't blame her, though. We would need to take a look at the site from orbit, then we had a slim chance that we'd even have an opportunity to get on the ground and see if we had a chance to sneak in, and then there was a chance that what we found wasn't even of significant value. We knew that we would most likely just be retreating before something bad went down, but there was a small chance that we would have the opportunity to pull off a bold heist on the most prolific corp in history.

But for now, I had a duty to report on our most recent fuck-up. "By the way, there is something i need to bring to your attention..."

She drew in a deep breath. "Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like what I'm about to hear. I know that tone."

"I'm synthesizing my voice, I'm not even using a tone!" I complained. Was I using a tone? Who knows, maybe I was, I wasn't actually that aware of exactly what I was doing anymore. "But yeah, probably."

She nodded, closed her eyes and groaned, "Make it quick. What now?"

"So... Collins may have overheard a thing or two."

She turned to glare directly at my sensor array. "Meryll-!"

"We didn't give it away! She was just coming down the hall and caught a word or two and made an assumption! She didn't even come to that weird of a conclusion. We were just talking with her about it."

"And dare I ask what this conclusion was?" She tapped her fingers impatiently against her desk, still glaring right into my sensors.

"Well, we were talking about Lily's ship, and she jumped to the conclusion that my sister's a displaced starship captain herself."

Aisling stopped fidgeting and visibly cooled down a little. "Oh. Well, that doesn't seem like a huge deal. You just told her she must've misheard, right?"

"I was getting ready to say we were talking about Horizon... but Lily spoke first and doubled down."

"H-Huh?" She looked startled, concern returning with a hint of confusion. She probably expected this to be my mess. "What? Why? What'd she... is this a precog thing?"

"Nope. She got blindsided and panicked. She does a great job ad-libbing under pressure, by the way. Sold her on this whole story of how she got here and-"

I watched Aisling's emotions run the gamut from confusion to anger to concern as I described the story until she interrupted me. "Get her up here, now!" She growled, adding a moment later, "Subtly!"

'Uhh, captain's not happy.' I sent Lily over our direct psionic comms. 'Wants you up here. Like, immediately.'

'Fuck fuck fuck. I didn't mean to do this, shit, I didn't see any of this part coming, I'm so sorry!'

'I didn't know you could curse that much.' I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

'I'm sorry! I'm not used to being the one who screws up! I'm used to having carefully formulated plans about what to do next, or at least carefully formulated plans about what not to do next! This one really caught me off guard!'

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I failed spectacularly. 'Lily, relax. You're going to be fine. Aisling just wants to yell at you a little bit and then help you figure out what to do next.'

'I don't like being yelled at!'

'You get used to it. So go ahead and tell Collins you need to use the bathroom, not that you're off on an epic adventure to save the universe from space aliens.'

'My lie wasn't THAT bad!'

'I'm just teasing, calm down.'

Aisling was not happy with us. Though Lily wasn't technically a member of the crew, Aisling needed to give her a dressing down. Her bold improvisation had thrown a new complication into what was supposed to be a simple plan of subtle half-truths. Ray and I would get yelled at later for conversing so loudly that Collins even had anything to overhear, and me for not paying close enough attention to Collins' movement through the ship. But Lily would get the brunt of the lecture immediately.

Even though it understandably took her much longer than the others would to get to the third floor, we still hadn't been cleared for lift off by the time she got to there. The moment she entered the hallway, Aisling sighed and asked, "Okay. First, I need to ask... why the fuck?"

"I'm sorry!" Lily gave a distressed whine, her chair wheeling up to the desk. "I'm not used to improvising, and I panicked and-!"

"Calm down!" Aisling snapped, and the room went quiet. She took a moment to calm down herself before she continued, "Meryll already explained that. I want to know why you chose to make that particular lie."

"I-I don't know, it made sense to me at the time," Lily said meekly, staring down at the desk between them. "I'm used to having a plan for stuff like this."

Aisling closed her eyes and groaned. "This is gonna be a pain in the ass... we'll have to throw out your whole backstory for this con and start fresh. You're good at memorizing shit, right? All those visions in your head?" Lily gives a reluctant nod. "Well you're going to have to keep a lot of things straight. I'll give you a crash course on my job, and we'll have to piece together a lot of finer details for you. We'll handle all that after we're in planetary orbit. You stay right here until we have your story fleshed out, got it?" She didn't wait for an answer, turning sharply back to the comms console. She typed loudly, making a terse request for an update on our launch window.

'She's been working so hard, I didn't mean to make even more work for her.' Lily sent over our personal connection again.

'It'll be okay, Lily. Aisling thrives on overworking herself.'

'I don't think that makes me feel any better. That just makes me feel like I should be doing more to help out around here.'

'I still can't believe you made that lie up on the spot. You delivered it like you had a script.'

'I had to convince the doctors to do all kinds of stuff to navigate my visions back in the lab. They're easier to convince if you sound confident when you're lying.'

'Useful. Seriously, though, Aisling isn't like your handlers, she's not going to cut your rations off or hurt you or lock you up or force you to do anything awful. You'll be fine, I promise.'

'Yeah.' She wrote, but she still looked upset as she leaned back in her chair.

The message came in quickly this time, ignoring Aisling's request with a simple affirmation that we were cleared for liftoff. I got the feeling that they'd forgotten about us. But that didn't matter anymore. We wouldn't have to deal with the Io port authority, hopefully ever again, and it was time to go, so I didn't really care.

Io didn't have a rail system yet, but I was experienced enough from flying around in atmosphere by then to perform an unassisted takeoff in my sleep. I knew my sister was hurting, but I had a job to do, and I was eager to feel vacuum across my wings. "On your word, captain," I said over the intercom.

"Do it." The mood within the helm was tense, but there in the core module, I felt a spike of excitement as I fired up my engines. It had only been a week since I felt flight, but this would be so much different.

"Beginning takeoff procedures. Everyone hold on!" My voice called out to the whole ship. Theseus slowly rose into the air, and as soon as I had the lift I needed, I launched forward, sailing up over the wall of our hangar, my landing gear lifting up as my lower wings shifted into position. I watched the colony move beneath me as I glided along the flight plan sent by the port authority, lamenting that in a few months time, this place would face a slow technological catastrophe of my own making.

But that wasn't important right now, either. All that mattered in that moment was that I'd reached the end of the liftoff procedure and was free to proceed as I wished. So I immediately began orbital maneuvers, building up speed to break atmosphere. The barrier between terraformed planetary bodies and the vast void between felt like a thick but brittle wall against the crashing force of my bulk flying through, and made the moment where the resistance ceased feel that much more meaningful.

The second the air was replaced with nothing, I felt a moment of ecstasy as I lurched slightly, changing quickly to stellar flight engine controls and orienting myself to build speed again. I needed to slip out of Io's gravity well and begin a safe path around Jupiter.

I reveled in that wonderful feeling of freedom, the particulate matter of near-planetary space sliding over my hull like water. I lived for this, and I'd had so few opportunities to feel it for so long, I had to lose myself for a moment in the simple joy of movement. My mind danced around the mechanical and electrical functions of expertly cutting through space like a knife, balancing thrust with reactor stability to accelerate into the revolution I desired.

It felt easier than it had so many months ago. It felt so much more natural. This was no longer a matter of strict calculations, protocols, and rigid programs that did all the work for me. They were still there, but now it felt like managing balance and intuition more than a program. It was as natural as walking or manipulating something in my hands in my human body, making tiny corrections as I went based on nothing but how it 'felt'. I barely had to think about it; I just moved and let it guide me. I wasn't sure if something had changed or if it was just a product of how long it had been since I'd felt it, but the joy of the experience washed over me, and for the moment, all the complications and stumbling blocks in my life washed away. I was just Theseus. A beautiful ship soaring through the void.

"Artificial grav system holding strong in cargo," Mouse's voice came over the intercom, waking me from my reverie, a wide smile on my face. "Everyone report, I wanna know the state of every pad."

"Medical's fine," Ray added next. "That was smooth! I wonder if I could have managed escape without bracing."

"Cutting edge tech," Joel added from his room. "Maybe now Meryll won't be able to throw us around."

"Fuck, I missed this. Wanna test that, Joel?" I chimed in.

"Do. Not." Mouse growled. I wasn't going to, but I couldn't resist being a smart-ass.

"Helm is stable. Good job, Mouse." Aisling still sounded stern, but at least she gave him some credit.

"I'll be around to check the rest," Mouse added. "Meryll, your atmo breaks still need some work. Doing better, though."

"Get me some new sims and we'll talk about practice," I scoffed. He should have known finding something to replace the military grade sims Skygraves broke would be basically impossible until we got to Luna.

"Clear intercom, crew. You can have this conversation over the messaging service," Aisling scolded, and the line went quiet.

I turned my full attention back to the distant stars, clearer than they ever could be from within atmosphere. This was where I belonged.

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