Pilot was sitting on a soft, alge-covered rock in his home estuary. His tendrils drifted lazily in the current, filtering out nutrients. He felt peaceful, relaxed, but he couldn't shake the sense that something very trying had just happened to him. He wondered what it had been. There was heat, he remembered that. Maybe Moya would know more.

Moya! It all came rushing back: Roelim, the mercenaries, the stunner.

Groggily, Pilot opened his eyes. His arms had been chained to the console while he was out. He pulled at the bonds a bit, testing them, but quickly decided that was a bad idea. It hurt to move. Everything ached.

Moya was still out, and probably would be for at least another arn. She had taken the brunt of the stunner burst. He had just been hit through his bond with her.

He saw five people in the room now: the two he'd met earlier, the one who had been carrying the stunner, and the two that had been unloading something large from their transport pod. Whatever it was they'd been unloading, they'd brought it here. It was on a low cart and covered in blankets. A thick blue fluid that to Pilot looked uncomfortably similar to blood oozed from it.

"Hey, Garvet!" Danten called to one of the men with the cart. "Is this a drill?" He held up an auger-like device. "If so, we're up to six already!"

The one he'd called to looked, dumbfounded, at the mountain of hand tools and the DRDs furiously adding to it. "What the frell is this?"

Danten looked crestfallen. "The ten drills you said to bring back here?"

"Ten drills? What made you think - no, I don't want to hear it." Garvet sighed and walked past him toward the center of the chamber. Garvet appeared to be local to this system, and had the the typical Dymarian greenish skin and long cranial quills. He walked with an urgent purpose, as though determined not to let Danten, or anyone else, get in the way of whatever his plan was. Pilot suspected he usually walked like that.

Garvet knelt next to Pilot and opened an access panel in the deck, revealing a tangle of tubes and wires connecting Pilot to Moya's ancillary systems. He sorted through them, selected a handful, and in one fluid motion, yanked them out. Pilot let out an involuntary shriek as he felt them pull away from where they had embedded into his exoskeleton. They were only surface-level connections, but it still stung. Blood began to drip down his side. The action was repeated in a few more locations. Wincing, Pilot took stock: he'd lost access to all scanners - internal and external, communications, DRDs, and a few more minor systems that he suspected had been unintentional such as passenger deck thermostats and the lights in all the hamman-side heads. Cut off from sensors, his world shrank to the size of the chamber.

Pilot took another look at the blanket-wrapped bundle on the cart. It was quite a bit closer now. There was something familiar about the outline. Suddenly it hit him. It was another of his species. They were planning to replace him. That was blood on the cart after all. Why were they bleeding?

"Is this a bad time to tell you that he managed to get a message out?" Danten asked.

Garvet stood. His jaw clenched and a muscle in his neck twitched. Some limit appeared to be reached. "Danten, please come here," he said in an eerily level voice. Danten approached cautiously. Garvet threw an arm over Danten's shoulders and leaned in close. "Danten, this is an incredibly time-sensitive operation, so I'm not going to waste time berating you for your mistakes."

"Gee, that's awfully kind of -" began Danten, but he was interrupted by a blast of yellow light. His lifeless body collapsed against the console.

Garvet put away his pulse pistol. Casually, he flicked a few switches to purge the particulate filter in the environmental system. The chime stopped.

"Well there's two annoyances out of the way," he said. He turned to Pilot. "Thank you for your cooperation with my former associate's garbled instructions. What I would actually like you to do is to withdraw all your tendrils from around the ship."

"I see. That does make more sense." Pilot said.

Garvet stared at him expectantly. There was a long pause. His eyes narrowed. "Then why aren't you doing it?"

Ah. Pilot had hoped he wouldn't notice that so quickly. He looked nervously at Ankar, suspecting he would use his heat projection again after what he was about to say. "Because I believe you're going to kill me once I do. It's clear that you're planning to replace me."

Garvet put an arm around Pilot, much the same way he had just done with Danten. Pilot tensed.

"You're right that we're going to kill you if you after, but I think you need to consider the alternative. You see, we're going to replace you no matter what, but we'll only kill you first if you cooperate. If you decide not to withdraw your tendrils, and we're forced to go crawling around through conduits clearing them out by hand, delaying the new bonding and dramatically increasing the risk of infection to Pilot here," he gestured to the cart, "well, then I'm going to be sure you're alive to feel every connection ripped out of you. Then we'll find some empty rock where we can leave you to die. Slowly. Painfully. Alone."

Pilot cringed. He knew he couldn't let these people get their claws - hands - on Moya. He really wished they didn't have their hands on him though. He'd been disconnected from Moya once, and even with a generous amount of extremely strong drugs, it had been enormously unpleasant. He could still remember the sickening feeling of the primary connections being removed. Those ones went deep, interfacing directly with major neural clusters in his body. He didn't want to experience that again, certainly not unmedicated.

But he didn't want to die either.

Garvet was watching him, occasionally glancing through the grating of the deck to check for compliance. He had such cold eyes.

"You still aren't withdrawing," he said.

"No, I'm not," Pilot said with a great deal of fear and a hint of surprise.

Garvet clearly didn't like this answer, but rather than saying anything, he turned and walked away. Ankar glanced up at him, but Garvet didn't ask for his help. The Scarran shrugged and stayed where he was sitting on the cart with the other Pilot, gently stroking the blankets. Garvet went to the pile of tools from the DRDs, which by now had grown quite large, and grabbed something. Pilot squinted. It was a clamp of some kind, such as one might use for woodworking.

"This is going to be more difficult for both of us if you don't cooperate, so I'll tell you what; I'll give you four more chances to reconsider," Garvet said as he walked back to Pilot. The meaning of the threat became clear as he placed the clamp over his rightmost claw and began to tighten it slowly.

Pilot looked away. Panic surged through him. Why was this happening? This wasn't how this solar cycle was supposed to go. He could feel his thoughts beginning to unravel, becoming disparate strings untethered to one another. Most of them were about what was going to happen if Garvet kept tightening the clamp.

There was a voice from the blankets, familiar and female. "Garvet, let me try talking to him." She lifted her head. Pilot looked at her in surprise. She seemed weak and her eyes were glassy, but it was unmistakeable. She was the Pilot from Roelim.

Despite everything going on, Pilot couldn't help notice that she was even more beautiful in person.

"Pilot! Please go ahead. I didn't realize you were awake," Garvet said, stepping away.

"Most of me is," she said. She turned to Pilot. "You're worried for Moya, aren't you? That's why you're holding out?"

Pilot's thoughts began to knit together again. Fear of Garvet, estimates of how soon Commander Crichton and Officer Sun could get here, and a non-trivial number about how much he would love to watch over a nest with the woman speaking began to condense, growing aligned towards a common purpose: getting Moya out of this situation.

Pilot nodded.

"I promise you, we have no ill intentions toward her," she said.

"Garvet stopped when you told him to. Why did he do that?"

"Because if he didn't listen to me, I wouldn't pay him," she answered.

"You hired him?"

"I hired all of them."

"Why?"

"Roelim is dying," she said. "He has less than half a cycle left. I can't bring myself to die with him. I need to bond to another Leviathan. We've tried to find an unbonded one, but we're out of time. Moya is my only option."

"But it doesn't work that way. You've already bonded to a Leviathan, your body will reject another."

"That's why Garvet is here. He's developed an immunotherapy that will allow Pilots to be moved between Leviathans. After half a cycle of injections, my immune system has reset."

"Leaving you free to take Moya, leaving Roelim and me to die alone."

"Don't act all high and mighty. It's not as if you and I are all that different. I know the elders wouldn't have let you be bonded at your age. It's obvious you got here through Peacekeeper meddling. Tell me, was Moya unbonded before you?"

Pilot flinched like he'd been slapped in the face. He didn't respond.

"That's what I thought," she said haughtily. "She'll have a good life with me. Roelim and I carried cargo. We were quite successful at it. There was peace, safety, freedom. She'll be happy."

Maybe she was right. Certainly Moya's life with him so far had not been peaceful or safe. Maybe someone more experienced would be better for her. Maybe with someone more competent she wouldn't have been enslaved for so long and experimented on. Maybe her child wouldn't have died.

"Moya likes passengers," Pilot told her. He was almost ready to admit defeat, but a tiny spark of a loose thought was rattling in his mind, vying desperately for attention. Pilot tried to pull it in to see what it was.

"Really? Roelim can't stand them. Still, that's an easy switch," she reassured him.

He found the thought. His eyes grew wide with horrifying realization as he examined it. A sudden resolve filled him.

"You said yesterday that there was an instability in Roelim's treblin power link," he said accusingly. "It's Inghezic disorder, isn't it?"

She didn't respond, but there was alarm in her eyes.

"It is, isn't it? You let him carry mutometic spores! And now that they've made him sick, you're just abandoning him to die alone."

"They were well packaged," she said, her voice bitter. "It shouldn't have happened. I don't even know how it happened. We never had issues the other times."

"Other times! I'm sorry, is there something unclear in the term 'forbidden cargo?' You killed your Leviathan, and somehow you're still acting like you're the victim in all this. I will never let you near Moya, Ex-pilot."

Everyone who could follow the conversation fell into a shocked silence at the last word. Admittedly, the people who could follow the conversation were just be the two Pilots and Garvet, but they were so shocked and so silent that it was obvious to everyone else that something very serious had just been said. A cold fury grew in the eyes of the female Pilot. She turned to Garvet.

"Please continue."