They told stories and played chess. Atlanta used up a few hours conferring with her advisors, but they had no useful suggestions for her. She thought that she would try again to establish her identity, even though that would take her back to whatever danger the Empress had sent her away from. But Tubal Last was unlikely to listen. It seemed to her—and her advisors concurred—that he had spent so long imagining his revenge, had played it out so many times in his head, that he would not, perhaps even could not, deviate from that script. Atlanta and the others were simply collateral damage in his war on Niko.

Was it Petalia’s war as well? How convinced was the other being that Niko had betrayed them?

“Based on his behavior,” the Happy Bakka said, “Tubal Last has taken care to brainwash them as much as possible. He said that they have monitored Niko, that they have discussed aspects of her life. You can be sure that he has twisted that to its limits.”

“That seems like such a crude tactic,” Atlanta protested. “It would be simpler and surer to have meddled with their mind in order to convince them.”

“They are a Florian,” her self said. “It is uncertain whether Tubal Last would’ve had access to technology that was able to do that. If you were a medic, you would have no idea how to treat them.”

“I would extrapolate from the methods used to treat other plant-based life,” she said.

“When is a plant not a plant? You would not hire a gardener to brainwash such, but you might hire one to predict their behavior.”

With a sweeping gesture of frustration and anger, she motioned them away and prepared to go back to the room where the others were. Virtual space had the benefit of smelling considerably better, but the company was unfulfilling.

It struck her what a lonely, almost masturbatory, practice it was. She had learned so much from interacting with the captain and her crew, more than she had learned from any virtual tutors. Not in terms of facts, not in terms of refined skills—although she knew she was better at hand-to-hand combat than she had been before, plus she knew how to make coffee now—but rather in terms of knowing how to think, how to break the situation down and analyze it. How to strategize.

That came from watching Niko and Dabry. From listening to their discussions. For a moment she thought that perhaps it would be good to be part of their hive mind and to encounter them mind to mind, in order to find out exactly how they thought, not to analyze, but to model herself after.

Something a tutor told her had always stuck with her. You need to have models, they’d told her. That gives you an algorithm with which to approach the situation. You think to yourself, What would they have done?