The members of the Raza still standing; FIVE, FOUR, THREE, and TWO stared at the variations of grey displayed by the medical bay monitor. The Raza's quarantine scanners painted a flickering impression of a human skull. The frilled contour lines of the brain fluttered with a living pulse; the edge of the jaw bone was drawn tight with distress… and across the living nuance were several hard white lines. They looked like a child's addition to a page in a picture book. THREE cursed under his breath and leaned closer. "That one just moved" He whispered into the white noise of the silent med bay. With a creased brow, FOUR nodded that he had seen the movement. TWO put her chin into her shoulder to direct a question to the android behind them, "What is it?"

The android cocked her head towards the ceiling panel to mimic thought. "I am still searching for an exact identification, but they seem to be a form of biometric technology."

"Like nanites?" TWO asked thinking of her own biotech.

"No, your nanites are an extension of your sympathetic neural system," the android answered "These do not integrate with any of ONE's existing biology. It would be more accurate to describe them as a synthetic parasite. They appear to be modifying and in some cases counteracting his body's natural responses."

FIVE gave the android a horrified look, "How do we get them out?"

FOUR countered, "Even if we get them out, has ONE been compromised?"

The android seemed to consider a moment while she cross referenced the data from the scanner against the million's of bio patent specs available in her backup RAM. "An electrical shock would be the most expedient means to terminate them," She chose to literally misinterpret the more disturbing implications of FOUR's question. "However, ONE would not survive the electrical current level required. I have attempted to communicate with them but have not achieved a response."

"Is that even safe?" FOUR charged, "They look aggressive. What if they are a weapon?"

That caught FIVE's attention. "That's horrible, why would someone do that to ONE? Hemb is a doctor, right? What if they are medical and we are overacting thinking they are weapons?"

THREE huffed in disbelief. "We ain't that lucky," he muttered. TWO sent him a warning look. None of them had filled FIVE in to what they had seen on the Purveyor.

TWO hated herself for vocalizing it. "We can't risk this corrupting the Raza's systems."

The déjà vu moment felt like a bizarre role reversal from the infectious bite she had gotten from their last salvage job. But she had been in containment and ONE had been advocating for her release despite the risk to the Raza. She shook her head with frustration as the comparison highlighted how inadequate she was at playing his role. "What about using the damaged synth we pulled last minute from the Purveyor as a buffer?" TWO thought aloud.

The android seemed to brighten "If they are indeed part of the Purveyor's network, FIVE and I would likely be able to issue a command to disengage and power down."

"So, what next?" THREE asked scrubbing his wet hair and sending water flying.

FOUR wiped the resulting spray from his shoulder with a look of suffering. "First, stop leaving puddles," He growled.

TWO agreed with a hint of a smile, "Then help FOUR drag the synthetic here." She turned to FIVE, "We fried the wireless transmitters to isolate the system. You'll need to hardwire it and have the Raza build redundancy into the firewall." FIVE nodded eager to get working on a solution." TWO palmed the specimen tube that now held the parasite from the shower and walked to the doorway, "Keep me updated," She directed, "I'm going to give Dr Hemb a chance to answer for this."

"Wait! That sounds more fun than hauling robot parts around." THREE complained rubbing a muscle barking in his back. "Can't FOUR handle the bot on his own?" The others ignored him and left for their assignments without a response. Finding himself alone, THREE stepped to the edge of the containment field. ONE lay unresponsive on the table. Drugging him had been the only way to get him still enough for the scanners to get a clear picture and now the slow rise and fall of his bare chest was the only evidence of life. "How many more times you gonna put me thru this?" THREE muttered under his breath, reliving the sleeping beauty moment from the Perveyor and checking his six to make sure there weren't any synthetics bearing down on him this time. "Damn robots," He muttered turning for the exit.

VVVV

TWO's skin gleamed beneath the overhead lighting of the unused storage room. She moved with oiled grace and predatory efficiency. Her audience of one was spellbound despite the personal cost to his physical well being.

Dr Hemb rolled his tongue and spat to clear the metallic slurry flooding his mouth. He wore his admiration in hues of red, black, and blue. She had marked him bone deep and he ached for more. "My turn," he gasped, "Truth or dare?" TWO's answer was a wicked left hook that left static in his vision. Truth, he translated, taking a moment to catch his breath. "The leader of the Raza, the darkest beast to roam the black, a name so fatal grown men act like children; refusing to speak the name… is auditioning for the role of protector?" Dr Hemb shook his head no. "What is a single crew member in relation to your tally of dead?"

TWO smiled in threat and hiked her steel tipped boot into his groin. With imminent threat, she polished blood off the two foot specimen tube, before sliding it up his shoulder to his neck. The liquid inside sloshed, causing the thin metallic worm to dance in suspension. "The worth of a single life depends on the value it offers. Yours holds none without an explanation of what this is?" she reasoned, leaning her weight into his sensitive region.

"An adaptive multimodal biometric probe for the basal ganglia" He answered tailing a groan from the pressure she was exerting. TWO dug her fingers into the column of his throat feeling his pulse flutter beneath her strength. "It's not meant as a criticism," he added, "You and I are more alike than you may care to admit. Just because we aren't something, doesn't mean we don't hunger for it." TWO judged his pale eyes for anything that could pass for common and found them lacking. Sensing her withdrawal, Dr Hemb gambled, "He shines so bright, sensitive, sweet… still trying to do what's right against all odds," Dr Hemb licked his lip slowly. "…can still divine the possibility of good in this existence." He whispered. "But this isn't about him, it's about your pursuit of redemption."

TWO laughed darkly, "You seem familiar with our record but somehow, you believe the Raza capable of regret?"

Dr Hemb swallowed, his Adam's apple struggling against her grip. "Be honest, you want a way out of the pit. You need someone who can see the path."

TWO kicked the chair backward, she was too revved up to care if she damaged his hands. His words left a residue that slid her past caring whether there was any of him left of value to trade when they dropped out of FTL. The crash and resulting yelp of pain felt cleansing. She couldn't bring herself to recount how many days ONE had been left to his corrosion. Rage arced her system leaving little patience for his verbal foreplay. She took the length between wins personally and the doctor was the last man standing between her and a finish line they had to reach. They needed ONE back. They needed him to be ok. She didn't see a way back if they failed this one. She violently rejected the way Dr Hemb's words resonated by sending the doctor sliding across the floor with a kick.

"How do we remove them?" TWO continued.

"Wrong question," Dr Hemb panted out. "What do they do is more important. It's why you are going to leave them in place." The chair back pinned his arms against the flooring leaving his boots in the air.

"That doesn't sound like me," TWO responded pulling a blade from the top of her boot. She stood over him so he could watch her toy with the weapon. Haloed against the sparse lighting, blood lust lacing her grace, she was the Christian god's fallen arch angel; a vision that aroused Dr Hemb's reckless curiosity. TWO trailed the tip across the nubs of his boot's sole. The shank's weight caught on a ridge beneath the center of his foot's pad. TWO looked him in the eye, her eyebrow raised in query. He bit his lip, "My research will make humanity more humane." His breath hitched in anticipation. With one fluid thrust, TWO penetrated the rubber and buried her blade to it's hilt. Dr Hemb physically shuddered embracing the sharp sensation.

In a husky voice he gave to her, "A synthetic parasite… programmed to identify and dissect. We both want what's in his head. Imagine the good it could do if I could dig it out and make it available? …a pharmacologic formula for enhancing the more charitable side of human nature. I'm only making available what his family is paying me to remove. Everyone benefits." TWO couldn't listen to any more and dropped her knee onto his throat to stop the flow of words. She was intimately aware of the personal cost that fueled scientific advancement.

The door slide open and THREE leaned in with a grin. "Hate to break up the bonding session, but thought you would want to know the wiz kid came through and our computerized cruise director cleared ONE from quarantine. Plan is to catch a few Z's before we arrive."

TWO stepped back and rolled her shoulders to relax. THREE stepped into the room and glanced at the heap on the floor. "Are you saving anything for us to sell when we get there?"

"Is he alright?" TWO asked, turning her eyes on THREE.

THREE shrugged and looked away. "Pretty boy says he's up for the next round of action, but…" THREE didn't finish but TWO got the message.

Dr Hemb shifted against the floor. He looked betrayed. "Don't rely on him," the doctor warned. "Without the tech to enforce sequencing on the overlapping memory sequences I'm surprised he's standing let alone sane."

THREE shook his head in disbelief, "I don't get it. What's so smart about spouting a bunch of gibberish knowing no one is going to understand? Sounds more like failure to me."

Dr Hemb put aside his frustration to explain, "I've been giving Derrick's body a series of neural drugs to force reconstruction of the data that a transfer transit withholds when it prematurely terminates. Then I split the unit's output so that his conscious would be streaming simultaneously. In deep REM the human brain is extremely flexible about time tracking because the physical senses are repressed. Our bodies are not as flexible, they tend to hard code a timing sequence. While he processes the two experiences the tech would have suppressed the physical side effects of memories tagged with conflicting hard coded physical timelines."

THREE scrubbed at the scruff on his jaw. He got the gist the doc was getting at but refused to give the doc the satisfaction. So he shook his head. "Nope, still nothing. But hey, if it's important you can keep trying after I grab a bite to eat." TWO shifted to hid her amusement from Dr Hemb. She made a mental note that THREE was good at interrogation and chose to leave with him to let their prisoner stew.

VVVV

The android looked up eagerly seconds before the ship's control console blipped an alert that the inner door to the aft airlock had been cycled. She turned but found that TWO had left and she stood alone on the bridge. She cocked her head to the side accessing the locations of all the crew members. One was in his quarters. TWO and THREE stood outside ONE's sleeping quarters. Four and Five were together in the physical training center. With a blink she ran a full diagnostics on the airlock's door systems, the ship's alert systems, the decompression system and found zero anomalies. So She blinked again and ran a full system analysis of all onboard life support systems from the overall system job schedule all the way to the minutia of the real time CO2 filtering monitors and found a .03 elevation in the airlock's vicinity prior to the door's activity. She recorded a message to alert TWO that she was investigating who had opened the airlock's inner door and scheduled it's delivery for 3.6 seconds after projected arrival at the airlock. Then she turned and left the bridge.

The airlock door was sealed and a scan by her optics detected a .0001% probability of malfunction in the door's seal. Stepping up to the window she peered inside to find ONE seated in what her human factors logic filter classified as emotional distress. She stepped back, cancelled delivery of her initial recording and recorded a new message for TWO. Stating that the ship systems, operating within system norms, had alerted her to activity of the inner door of the aft airlock. That she had investigated and found ONE without his ship communicator – which was cause for the initial assumption that he was in his quarters. She hesitated a nanosecond debating between immediate delivery or implementing a human factor's emotional sensitivity protocol that would delay delivery.

She set the delay timer and cycled the door open. Efficiently, she stepped into the airlock and seated herself a comforting 2.3 centimeters to his left. She adjusted her smile from attentive to compassionate and monitored ONE's biorhythms to detect a next course of action.

"Go away," ONE growled.

The android weighed the command against a .01 decrease in the Alpha waves coming off ONE's brain initiated by her arrival. That combined with a slight increase in Theta wave activity indicated a .0001% probability that her presence was having a positive impact. So she remained.

ONE pressed his back against the outer door of the airlock. The vacuum on the other side sucked greedily at his body heat. The perilous situation served it's purpose, his body kicked over to fight or flight and the resulting adrenaline shut down the circus of horrors running on loop in his head. He closed his eyes to shut out everything, the Raza, the android, his own trembling and he concentrated on pulling air into his chest.

A series of snuff films playing out of sync on the same screen. The horror was lost in the discord of the mashup. But the moments of harmony were devastating; the feel of curling a cold dead infant into his arms; the icy beauty of Catherine's eyes as she crushed his airways; the ticking staccato of Dr Hemb's antique stop watch counting the seconds as chemicals ate pathways into ONE's crucial organs. Like shredded flesh, none of it hung together in any semblance of sense. His blank slate had been replaced by one mass of indecipherable gore.

Derrick Moss was supposed to be better than being Jace Corso, but reality had a twisted sense of humor. His broken laugh would have raised the hackles of anything living. However the android was not bothered. She kept her vigil and eventually his laughter turned to tears, then exhaustion. When ONE's warmth slumped against her side the android kept watch as ONE finally slept.