Unfortunately, I couldn't follow the forward team everywhere they went. The paths they needed to take to get closer to the convention center from there went underground, through scattered condemned buildings, over makeshift scrap metal rooftop bridges left behind by the scattered vagrants of the Europa colony, only visible from my orbital photos and improvised into their path the previous evening. I would frequently lose sight and even network communication with them as they traveled forgotten pathways away from even the prying eyes of technology.

I knew exactly where to expect them to pop up next. I passively scanned the next expected checkpoint and any possible alternatives for the network addresses of their comms and handheld terminals, but there was little I could do to assist on this leg of their journey. With the convention center itself now off-limits, that left me with only one task left on the ground to focus in on.

Mouse had been observing from the dark rooftop we had arrived on, watching the group travel their route from an overhead view through the scope of the devastating custom-built bright yellow artillery rifle he affectionately dubbed Thunderbolt. He was prepared at any moment to end any conflict the forward team faced with an explosive punctuation that would cause enough confusion to give them the time to retreat for emergency extraction. Thankfully such measures were unnecessary tonight.

But Mouse's position, clandestine and safe as it was, was now too far from the others to offer meaningful assistance. And so he had broken down his weapon again, and was preparing to move forward himself. He, however, was uniquely prepared to take a different route from the others.

I watched the teenager climb down the same stairs that the others had taken, the massive metal case shrouded in an almost wholly black cloth wrap and strapped to his back. He descended the building almost casually, his expression seeming bored if I didn't know Mouse's intensity so well. He wore a coat that shrouded not just his combat gear, but the subtle hints of his prosthetic arms as well.

Mouse stepped out into the filthy alleyway, walked to the edge of the street, and turned along the sidewalk, joining the scattered few pedestrians in the night and blending into the city like he belonged. He easily could. He wasn't openly carrying any weapons he couldn't conceal beneath his coat, bar one. And while Thunderbolt was concealed inside a conspicuously large case, there was nothing wrong with carrying an equipment case around with you in public. A white printed logo of a stylized telescope would suggest to anyone passing by that Mouse was merely a young stargazing enthusiast out with his equipment.

Mouse looked like a civilian. A particularly grumpy civilian carrying something unusually large, but it was believable enough that no one would think he was anything more than a tired teenager who, perhaps, just left an angsty argument with his astronomy club. Mouse could reasonably move about on his own without most people giving him more than a momentary curious glance. And so the plan was that he would reposition in plain sight once his initial position was rendered useless.

And all I could really do was watch at this point. While the others needed conspicuous 'glitches in the system' to cover their advance, Mouse needed to fit in, and streetlights flickering out when he passed by would be more detrimental than helpful.

Everything seemed to be going to plan for now. My perception fell back from my projection of reality stitched together from compromised security machinery, and I let out a disappointed sigh.

I had really hoped that I could provide more support on this mission. I'd hyped myself up to be by their side the whole time, actively rendering everyone on the crew digitally invisible every step of the way, warning of every potential danger in advance. But now that I'd been crippled by my one electronic weakness, other machine cores, I knew that I would be nothing more than a glorified listening post and an escape vehicle. Having nothing to contribute for this leg of the journey wasn't helping me feel better about that.

I opened my eyes for just a moment, drifting into floating as close as I could feel to laying on my back and casually 'swimming' backward through the void in an effort to alleviate some anxiety without slipping into torpor. It wasn't working. Anxiously returning to the data after a couple minutes,

I checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything, actively listened in for a moment on the security comms about a group of children that had to be shooed away after they tripped a motion sensor crowding around a fence to try to get a good look at what was happening behind the convention center. As far as I could tell, the only thing back there were workers pulling folding tables off a truck.

Nope, there was nothing happening moonside at the moment. I pulled my attention closer, returning to my heart, and saw Doc was entertaining Collins at the moment. Mid-conversation, she asked, "You gonna be busy soon, then?" She was sitting at the edge of one of the examination tables, watching Doc expectantly.

"Possibly." Doc shrugged, staring with eyes half-lidded at my vitals. He didn't care much for this conversation, and was doing his best to look immersed in something else. "I certainly hope not, but this is the kind of operation where I do expect I'll at least be patching *someone* up afterward."

"Still can't believe they dropped out the cargo hatch mid-flght." The ex-captain mused with a nervous smile. "And they're doing a raid on an outer colony city with a strike team. You all are either lunatics or you're a whole different caliber of criminal from me."

"We're nothing that special. Just trying to get by," Doc said dismissively.

She gave an incredulous scoff. "You have a sapient starship, a mammon, a guy with some kind of magic liquid metal, and a kid-" she glanced around for a moment, flinching as soon as she said that word like she somehow expected Mouse to be standing in the doorway to give her an especially vicious glare. "A young man with some crazy cybernetics. Don't think I didn't notice his arms. Your captain's a genius, and while I haven't figured out what's so special about you or the big burly guy yet, I know you've gotta have something special going on if you're here. You're a group of exceptional misfits running a black op on fucking EUROPA!"

Doc shrugged and couldn't help but give a small smirk at Collins' observational praise of the team. "Okay, well, I'm nothing special," he insisted. "I'm just the doctor."

"You're an awesome doctor." I insisted over the intercom.

I had, however, forgotten to make the warning click I'd been giving Collins as a courtesy whenever I spoke, and she jumped in her seat, one of her crutches clattering to the floor while she let out a yipping "Fuck!" when I started speaking.

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Doc chuckled. "Someone's jumpy today," he noted, looking toward the intercom unit. "I'm literally the only doctor you know, Meryll," he reminded me of my backstory. "You've hardly had the experience to hold me to a standard. How goes the ground mission?"

"Turns out we had a bit of faulty intel, and there was that whole enemy machine core snafu, but we're uncompromised, and we're still within mission parameters. I'm not going to be too much help for a while, though," I admitted. I'd leave Lily's indiscretion out for now, especially with Collins present. "Thought I'd check up on the situation here and clear my head a bit."

"Enemy machine core? What the hell are you doing down there?" Collins asked, then closed her eyes, shook her head, and crossed her arms. "No, never mind. I don't want to know."

"Oh come on, you HAVE to be curious," I chided her.

"Of course I am, but if this little op of yours goes belly up, I want to be able to say I wasn't involved." She opened her eyes again, and looked over at the core module, clearly unsure if she was supposed to be looking at that, the intercom unit, or my sensor array near the ceiling. "I've never heard of a starship aiding in a stealth mission, though."

"I can act as their eyes and ears. I'm networked into the entire colony's security infrastructure." I explained, watching her eyes widen.

After a moment of contemplation, her eyes narrowed and her brow tilted down, an accusing glare pointing up at the sensor array. "Okay, that's definitely not something anyone can do, bioprocessor or not," she declared with certainty.

I supposed I could give her a little more immersion into my world. We didn't want her questioning my authenticity that hard just yet. "Got your terminal?" I asked.

She still looked almost offended as she lifted her screen. Her expression turned back to astonishment again as I flooded her screen with every camera feed I had opened in my data stream, the feeds overlapping as the tiny screen failed to hold everything that I had open in my abstract digital space. I piped in the comms feed through the intercom as well for good measure.

"OT9, where's the package?"

"En route, four minutes behind schedule."

"Copy. All patrols compensate for escort procedures."

"Suspicious individual in the alley near thir-Fuck! ... Never mind, it was a cat."

The operator gave an exasperated sigh. "Keep it together, PT12."

That was enough of that, so I cut the feed from the intercom and shifted the cameras on her terminal to show Mouse walking along the sidewalk from two different angles while another two showed the loops I was sending the security systems, the four windows arranged at the corners of the screen. "Don't underestimate me. This is my domain, and this is practically effortless for me. Once I get Izzy to teach me how to handle other bioprocessors, I'll probably be able to destroy Foundation myself..."

Collins silently stared at the display in awe, a hint of terror in her expression as she began to understand exactly what an Arthausen Unit was capable of. "Holy fuck..." She finally managed. I closed all but one of the feeds watching Mouse from her terminal, leaving behind a large smiley face on the free half of the screen just like the first time I demonstrated my abilities to her. I thought it was a cute little gesture. "You're... dangerous," she murmured quietly.

"All computers can be dangerous," I modified the smiley face to make a little shrugging person with the characters.

"Good thing she has a conscience, hm?" Doc asked, standing up and stepping closer to Collins. "She could have easily vented the atmosphere when she woke up. Or turned off the artificial gravity and thrown us around until we stopped moving. Or opened all the doors and let space take care of us."

The little character face on the screen turned to a frown. "Jeez Doc, that would've been mean."

Collins still gawked silently at my cute little expressions on her screen with an unmoving look of pure fear. It only dawned on me then that she was probably having something close to a religious experience. Like a god capable of smiting her at any moment was looking down on her and making playful little computer drawings at her while her follower flippantly explained just how fragile and transient she was in the face of this thing. I didn't have the ego to play into that. I didn't mean to scare her that much, just show off a little.

Doc could tell that perhaps this was becoming too serious as well, and he pulled a chair up near her to try and give her some closer company.

After a few more silent moments in which I changed the screen again to show a neutral expression, she finally managed to stammer out, "Y-You don't... have any kind of limitations? To... To keep her in check so she... can't do that?" she whispered, as if I wouldn't be able to hear her through her own terminal's microphone.

Doc shrugged, leaning in to the table and rolling his eyes at the little expressive touch I was making on her screen. "I don't think anything short of slaving her to a standard machine core could do that. And at that point, that would kind of defeat the purpose, don't you think?" That didn't make her feel any better, lowering her head as her eyes lost focus again. "We put our lives in each others' hands a lot. If you think about it, any of us could destroy this team if we wanted to. I know enough to be able to poison everyone on this ship before anyone could realize what's happening. Mouse could demolish the hull with explosives, Ray could overpower everyone here if she did it in the right order, Joel could gun down all of us, and I know both Aisling and Shaw could easily come up with some ingenious way to pit us all against each other. I'm sure it was the same on your ship."

Collins blinked a few times at that thought, coming back to her senses at least a little, fear replaced with an uncomfortable reality of people she had trusted herself. "I... guess?"

"That, and I was a wimp back then," I admitted with a shy-looking side-eyed emote.

"Yeah, she had a full-on existential crisis the first time she was forced to kill an enemy combatant. It took months after we got to Io before she let us train her to use a handgun," Doc explained. "I don't think she's capable of that kind of betrayal. Meryll's pretty innocent by nature. Just a pure little gay starship," he smirked.

The absurdity of that statement seemed to shock her back to reality, her expression slowly softening as her jaw hung open in awkward contemplation as the image of Ray and me making our very public displays of affection in the mess hall caught up to her. She blinked a lot, her mouth closing again while her brain short-circuited. "I'm inside a gay starship," she muttered flatly.

"Hell yeah." I changed the emote to a winking smiley face before I asked, "Does it help knowing you're my type?"

She screwed her eyes shut, her lips quirking upward until she couldn't help herself, and she let out a choking laugh. "Fuck, this place is absurd!" Doc smiled alongside her, and I think we were both glad to see her come out of that particular spiral. "Meryll, you are... ridiculous. No one with this much power should get to have a sense of humor."

"You say that like being strong makes you evil." I did my best to add a bulging bicep to my little character, but I couldn't manage to get it to look right, so after a few attempts, I just switched it back to the smiley face. "I'm not gonna be like those corpo bastards."

"So benevolent. Our mighty machine overlord has spoken." Doc said with melodramatic flair, eliciting another genuine laugh from Collins. I was chuckling silently in the core module myself at this point.

That is, until the older woman glanced back down at the screen, and her expression went rigid. "Wait wait wait..." she let out a stabilizing breath, and pointed down at the camera feed, her finger tracing down to the street behind our young friend.

I blew up the screen in my digital space. I saw what she was gesturing to, and my own levity vanished as well. A man in a Foundation security uniform was walking through the crowd with purpose, civilians making room for him as he started to approach Mouse from behind.

As he lifted his hand, an almost bored voice sounded over enemy comms. "Suspicious individual nearing main street. Moving to question civilian."

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