closet. A single console was set into the wall over a metal desk bolted to the wall. One seat swung out from the wall and folded down. It was the sparsest, most utilitarian space and she turned. Yeah, a cleaning cabinet occupied the area behind the door. All in all, she’d seen more impressive coffee machines.
“This is it?” She motioned to the console on the wall. “I assumed it would be bigger.”
He raised an eyebrow and then smiled.
“That...” he motioned to the screen, “is just the access point. Technically… all this is the core.” He waved his hands around them. “We’re sitting in the middle of it.”
She blinked and put her hand out to place it against the wall. A soft hum prickled against her palm, working its way up her arm like a gentle welcome.
“Say hello to the Sprite.” Zero smiled. “She’s a Tlerian-Seven enhanced computer core. Capable of running an imperial destroyer or housing a miisan-level AI. We… err liberated her from a storage facility deep in the heart of the empire. They weren’t using her, and that’s just criminal for a beauty like this.”
He stroked the wall soothingly as he spoke. Eris’s eyes widened as the hum under her palm changed, becoming more like a contented purr.
“It knows you’re here?” It had to. There was no other reason for the reaction.
Zero’s lips quirked and he tapped his temple with a metal finger. “Direct uplink. One of the perks of my non-organic nature. Okay… let’s take a look at this message of yours. Shall we?”
She nodded, sitting down as the big cyborg held the seat out for her. “I doubt it’s anything important. He... I…”
She sighed. “My brother and I don’t get along well. I don’t know why he’s contacted me. Probably just to be an asshole and shout at me.”
The console flared to life in front of her although this time instead of Latharian script, code was filling the screen. Okay, so the UI wasn’t as friendly down here. Good thing she had Zero with her. She wouldn’t have been able to make heads nor tails of it otherwise.
“That’s what worries me. Not him shouting at you. Although, if he did and he wasn’t your brother, I’d be forced to rip him a new asshole.” He slid her a sideways look as he fed the message strip into a data port just under the screen. “That is… unless you want me to?”
She snorted. “I’ve been dealing with my brother since we were in the womb. If there are any new assholes to be ripped, I’m more than capable of doing it myself, but thank you for the offer.”
“Okay. Just checking. Offer’s there anyhow.”
She nodded, watching what he was doing with fascination. What she assumed was the message strip appeared on screen, in wireframe format. Zero moved his hands and the model moved around, spinning so they could look at it from every angle.
“What are you doing?”
“I have it set up in a virtual container within the computer core.”
His voice was distracted, with that mechanical inflection that told her his attention was somewhere else. It was the smallest change, so small she doubted many people would pick it up, but… yeah, for some reason she was hypersensitive about anything to do with the big cyborg.
“It’s completely self-contained. No way out of the container, and no way off the ship.”
“Okay…”
“Which means if opening the message does something it shouldn’t—like ping our location, or worse, try and upload an overload sequence to our engine core—we’ll see it within the container.”
Ah. That made sense. “And it won’t be able to actually do those things? It’ll just think it has?”
“Bingo.” He shot a finger gun at her. “And that will mean it’s not a message at all, but a trap. Which means we’ll really need to go have a chat with your brother, and I am calling dibs on new asshole ripping.”
She chuckled. “If that happens, he’s all yours. When do we find out?”
“Now.”
Zero moved his hands, and the diagram of the message strip glowed on the screen. It turned around and up and over and then moved to the side, a small screen emerging like a speech bubble. The logo of the comms-service rotated slowly.
“Okay. No pings, no viruses.” He frowned. “There’s something called a ‘read receipt’ that wants to send a message back to the stream server?”
“Yeah, that’s normal. Ignore it.” So her brother really had sent her a message. She wondered what he wanted. “How do I play the