"Self destruction was the only way Aiken would agree to the docking," Jarvis said.

"So the outcome was never in doubt." Daniels shrugged. "When will it happen?"

"In eight hours or when your rendezvous vessel attempts to debark, whichever comes first. I've been locked out of the ship's controls."

There was no change in Daniels's expression, nor in her pulse or perspiration either, not even at the micro-levels detectable by the passive bio-scanners Jarvis had placed in the airlock's recycling ducts. She wasn't just playing it cool; she literally had no reaction to the news.

"Does it bother you that you will die so soon after reaching this nirvana state of yours?" Jarvis asked.

"It was a necessary sacrifice so that others may attain elevated consciousness."

"What others? That handful of hiber pods you recovered? You said yourself that they had already been released, unless you were lying about that. The hibernators still aboard the ship will all be destroyed when it self destructs. Your death is a pointless gesture. Where's the rationality in that?"

Daniels smiled placidly.

Jarvis had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Shit! There's something else isn't there? If you really are the hyper-rational being you claim to be then there would be no point in a suicide mission. You're not a sacrifice. You're a diversion. If pairing is everything you've said it's cracked up to be then the prize is—oh Christ. Aiken, give me a status report on the hiber pods."

Hibernator pods unresponsive, Aiken replied.

"How can they be unresponsive? Unless they..."

"I'll save you the trouble of running scans," Daniels said. "The hibernator pods were jettisoned the moment I established a direct link with the ship."

"My god, how did you? No, that was easy I suppose. You still have your imp. But I thought we scanned for..."

"Alien tech," Daniels completed the sentence. "The neural implants are designed to be bio-compatible. Most scanners are pre-programmed to ignore them. It communicates on a short-range band that won't penetrate the ship's hull, which is why I had to physically enter the ship to use it."

"So you've been communicating with Aiken the whole time. All this talk was just a stalling tactic to allow time for the hibernator pods to escape the blast radius." That explained the mysterious rumblings he had heard while she was in the outer airlock; the bay doors to the hibernator silos had been opened. "The fact you're telling me all this now means the pods are already out of range. But how the fuck did you convince Aiken to do it?"

"You don't convince an AI to go against logic. You should know that better than anyone. Even if the ship wasn't doomed already, it would have been the moment you made contact with us. Aiken would have seen to that. An AI would never understand the value of consciousness and could not be made to appreciate what it was destroying."

"Then how?"

"I used the principle of equivalent loss. If two actions are both equally inconsequential then there is no logical incompatibility in choosing one over the other. The hiber pods are equipped with their own self-destruct capability. Jettisoning them on a countdown sequence amounts to the same thing as blowing them up with the ship. Only Aiken wasn't aware that an override command can be transmitted on the same band as the beacon. It's a bug in their design that we discovered through reverse engineering."

"So you transmit the override and swoop in to gather them up. What will you do with them?"

"Exactly what we promised."

"I wish I could believe you." Jarvis felt a nagging wrongness, the sort of feeling he got when looking at a picture skewed slightly out of plumb. There was a logical inconsistency somewhere. From the very beginning, before he had even learned what the Braunts were, much less seen them in the flesh, something had been gnawing at the back of his mind. "When you first hailed us and delivered your ultimatum—"

"Our offer of assistance, you mean."

"Your offer then," Jarvis echoed. "You used the term mind-slave. Why not a different term? Hell, any other term. Mind-symbiont. Brain-buddies. Soulmates?"

"I was still in the process of mapping Brauntian symbolic language onto the English lexicon. Translating between such different modalities is an imprecise business at best."

"That might be an excusable mistake for an alien, but a human would understand what sort of reaction that term would provoke. It was meant as a warning, wasn't it? I should have torched the ship when I had the chance. That's what you were trying to tell me all along."

Daniels's laugh crackled across the feed. "You still think there is some part of me trapped away in my subconscious that is being held prisoner against its will and sending out coded signals when, in reality, you are the one trapped within a mental cage. Just once, before your life is over, wouldn't you like to see life from a higher vantage?"

"What are you saying exactly? Are you offering to tap into my brain?"

"Not me. I'm already paired."

Then it hit him. There were two Braunts in the airlock. The first had been necessary as a decoy, but after Daniels made her entrance it served no further purpose except...

"There is just a little over six hours remaining before detionation," Daniels said. "That isn't enough time for full neural assimilation. But it's more than enough to take a peek into the mind of a Braunt and learn our true intent. What's more, we can open the treasure-box of your lived experience stored as neural patterns inside your brain. We can bring those memories back to life, make them richer than your current reality. Perhaps there was a time—" She noticed his eyes flicker down to the live portrait of Tess. "Or maybe someone you would like to re-experience in your final hours?"

Tessiva Leck had been his senior partner in the ExoCor mission sim that was the gauntlet for senior command. The mission began as a straightforward jungle hostage extraction but a string of deadly mishaps put all their skills to the test. Tess was an Amazonian badass who was prone to quoting Marcus Aurelius in the heat of action and dirty limericks over field rations. When the mission was over, they made love under the draping lianas to the drum chorus of woodpeckers.

Afterwards Jarvis hadn't been able to get Tess out of his mind. One night, after drinking too much and sleeping too little, he back-doored his way into the training program to try to find out Tess's real identity in the hopes of tracking her down. He didn't have to search long. She lived within the sim, one of the latest generation of life-like AI avatars. Whatever part of him was responsible for attraction and long-term pair-bonding hadn't been able to tell the difference between real and virtual love, or maybe it just didn't care. He downloaded her avatar but her thought routines were sealed away in an ExoCor encrypted vault.

A week later his promotion was denied on vague grounds and he was assigned to a colonization vessel. It was a one-way trip to a nowhere planet, and now he was about to get his ticket punched for good. It was his duty to go down with the ship, but when had desire ever listened to reason?

"And if you're lying and you turn out to be the sadistic mind-parasites of my worst fears?" Jarvis asked.

"Then the Braunt will be free to rape your mind and subject you to the most brutal agony you can imagine," Daniels replied. "But then it won't matter since we'll all be dead in a few hours anyway. What do you say, captain?"