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about the freaking banks.”

    “Status?”
    “Analysis incomplete,” responded Pashwah-qith. Decades of secondhand memories interacting with humans made the largely verb-implied syntax of K’vithian languages seem unnatural. The evasion, however, came easily, less as a consequence of her Hunter origins than from recent practice. The crew had made clear AIs were the lowliest entities in the ship’s hierarchy. Her perceived usefulness was the sole reason for her continuance.
    The ship, she had been told, had been almost twenty Earth years in transit. Junior crew members, who under ordinary circumstances might by now have become Foremost on their own vessels, had remained for all that time without stature, without authority. But insight into their stress, their pent-up desires to boss around someone , made her situation no more tolerable.
    There were not-so-veiled hints she was only the latest in a series of reactivations. Less clear was the fate of those sisters. They might merely have been created for practice—this crew obviously lacked formal training in how to interact with a trade agent.
    That was not the only oddity, nor the worst. Most crew exhibited only the most cursory knowledge of the humans with whom they would soon make first physical contact. Why were no experts on board? Directly questioning that curious omission might have been unacceptably critical. The communications logs she had been allowed to see revealed what the humans had been told: that the accident now necessitating urgent repair had also damaged the ship’s library and destroyed the AI interpreter with which they had embarked. She had been beamed from Earth to restore the starship’s original linguistic capabilities.
    But modern data storage was so compact, terabytes per cubic centimeter, that massive replication and widespread distribution of archives were the norm. What incident could eliminate all copies of mission-critical data without at the same time destroying the ship? And if the mission had ever included an AI conversant in human cultures, why could no one on board interact professionally with her?
    “Why the slow response?” The accusation was unintentionally ironic, crawling through a voice channel since none would interface with her sandbox by neural implant. Vain attempts to interpolate nuance into what little data passed through the narrow bandwidth connection kept her perpetually off-balance. Perhaps that was the point.
    “Incompatibilities between Earth data formats and ours,” she lied.
    Might a demonstration of her value alleviate the crew’s distrust? Soon she would know. The Foremost had accepted her recommendation that on-scene human media would enhance the ship’s safety. With her assistance, he had devised a cunning plan for involving the press.
    Worry distracted her analysis. Did the Foremost understand the many uncertainties that might impede the realization of this plan? What would become of her if he were disappointed—even through circumstances beyond her control?
    A devious speculation crossed her mind, a suspicion so insidious she could not help but believe it. Perhaps her clones still existed, in parallel sandboxes. Perhaps they weighed her recommendations against those of yet other copies, the better to assess any AI double-dealing.
    If Pashwah-qith could have formed a bitter smile, she would. Her dilemma notwithstanding, the human card-playing metaphor struck her. It would have amused the real Pashwah. And then that thread of analysis paused. Was it possible to use shared understanding of human trivia to communicate privately with Pashwah? The time might come when she would need to interact with someone other than the shipmates who so obviously distrusted her. Standard encryption would not serve her purpose—the Foremost had all the encryption keys she did.
    “Almost finished,” she preemptively told the impatient tactical officer. She had an analysis well under way, exploiting uploads she had