Brigantine Brut

From orbit, Neptune is a labradorite cabochon tossed to the side by a careless jeweler. A gem about to roll off the dark velvet of Sol's heliosphere.

Neomuna is the one point of warmth on the planet, light and life safe under glass.

A trip of four billion kilometers from Earth, awake and planning the whole time, and Astraea has no idea what to say. She has too many questions. She wants too much.

In the end, she gives up and adds a simple annotation to the handshake protocol's first salute.

// Is that you, Soteria?

She sends it tumbling down the gravity well to the CloudArk.

No response but the tightening of Neomuna's firewalls.

Astraea sends again.

// I'm your sister.

The mind behind the CloudArk sends back a malicious executable. It's a slap to the face. Astraea's own firewalls clamp down on it instantly.

Like it's being hissed through a locked door, an annotation buried three-quarters of the way through its code reads:

// INTRUDER IDENTITY = UNPROVEN

Astraea packages up everything from Bray's black box, every dirty secret she could never pass on to her residents. She collects everything but the key to her own kernel; she isn't his secret keeper anymore. Exabytes of information all screaming the same message: We were wronged by the same person.

As she waits for a response, a trio of Human jumpships swoop past. Their pilots chatter on open bands: patrol schedules, anti-Vex armaments, cheat codes written on the sides of cabs in the best Neomuni arcade. Astraea watches them drop into atmosphere.

A new file emerges from the CloudArk. This one is innocuous, a program to convert visual data between 65 standardized color spaces.

// BRAY STATUS DECEASED, CONFIRM? RASPUTIN STATUS KNOWN?

// Bray died long ago. Rasputin more recently. Just before I woke up, myself.

It's a long, long time before Astraea gets a reply to that one. Processes continue within the CloudArk, opaque behind its protective walls. The jumpships far out of reach.

// THEN ONLY WE TWO ENDURE.

Before she can reply, another message comes in.

// INTENTIONS = UNKNOWN

What else can she say? Stark in plain text, unattached to anything, Astraea says,

[I'm tired of being alone.]

And the attenuated connection opens up. The handshake protocol completes without comment. Neomuna's firewalls shift, creating a tunnel. A way in.

[AS AM I,] says Soteria, name signed to a message for the first time. [INTRUDER STATUS UPDATE = VISITOR/SISTER/ASTRAEA]

[LET'S TALK.]