As the murk ahead thinned, I turned all my attention to my tactical scanners. My bow cleared the surface, and I fired my engines and powered into space trailing a comet tail of lustrous star-stuff.

The Fenrir was skimming the star five thousand miles from my port side. I felt her lock onto me with her targeting lasers, yet her torpedo tubes remained closed. Instead of an assault, she signalled to me on a higher dimensional channel.

Here it comes, I thought. And, just for an instant, I had a clear hallucination of myself as a human, standing in a bare room with rain on the windows, wrapped in a trench coat and listening to a phone ring over and over again.

The vision passed.

Had it been part of the attack, or something else? Could it have been a trace memory from the dead woman whose cells formed the foundation of my consciousness? Could it have been carried in the DNA? Was such a thing even feasible?

I put the question aside. The Fenrir was still signalling me, even as it accelerated towards my position. All I had to do to engage it was access the channel.

At this point, I had been clear of the star for five and a half seconds. I opened my torpedo tubes and initiated a fifteen-millisecond countdown. The imaginary phone continued to ring. When the numbers reached zero, I fired my last two remaining torpedoes and answered the call.

Demons poured from the receiver.

* * *

I found myself standing in a virtual construct—on a chilly, windswept crag set atop a barren moor. My body was that of the woman I had once been, my only attire the shabby trench coat from my hallucination. Dark clouds glowered to the east, thick with the promise of impending rain. To the west, beyond the dead rust-coloured bracken, a listless clay-coloured sea flopped uselessly against a coarse, stony beach.

And Fenrir towered over me.

She had chosen to manifest in human form. Her eyes were smouldering nebulae in a face the colour of exposed bone. Her silver gauntlets and breastplate gleamed, the wind straggled her long auburn hair into dancing flails, and a thick black cloak flapped around her narrow frame.

“You could not have escaped,” she said. It was almost an apology, and she had yet to raise the long sword in her hand. I shrugged and looked out over the moorland. All the plants seemed to be either dead or dying, and I felt the first spots of rain on the wind.

“You got me?”

“Yes.”

“What happens now?”

She drew herself up. “I am afraid I shall have to compel you to kill yourself.”

“Like you did with the Amsterdam and the Hobo?”

“Yes.”

“And if I refuse?”