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and streamed out behind her in a fake wind, the pale indigo tips gleaming jewels of light. Loobie’s breasts were twice their real size, and Furn and Finfth had grown a beard and horns. At first, Fant was unaltered other than losing his clothes, which made sense as Loobie thought he was perfect just as he was. Then Fant’s helmet started to fade out of the picture, a slow reveal of what lay behind.
    Loobie!
    Indiya shut out Loobie’s mind link, but too late to stop the little demon inside Indiya’s head making her grin. But Indiya didn’t get into trouble this time because Lock was distracted by the hammering sound of the Marines in their powered armor passing behind her on their way to the shuttle. Indiya couldn’t help backing away from the giant cyborgs. You could talk, joke, even flirt with the humans inside when they were vulnerable in their cryo pods, but put a group of them in their battlesuits and they were the quintessence of applied violence.
    Lock turned her attention back to the away team. “Chief Petty Officer Deflector is waiting for you on Bonaventure . She will guide you through the captured ship and facilitate access to whatever you wish to investigate. The CPO has always hated you scheisse-munching freaks, and being ordered to play nursemaid to you will make her loath you with a burning passion. Any chance you get, you lick her boots, and wipe her arse. If she says jump, you leap as if your life depends on it, because maybe it does. I want you back here at 21:30, alive and well.”
    Indiya felt the edges of her mouth tilt up.
    “What’s this, freak? A smile?”
    “Sorry, petty officer.”
    “Explain!”
    “Well… you said something nice about us.”
    “Nice?” Lock’s face flushed red. “Nice! ” A vein started throbbing at the petty officer’s temple.
    Indiya accepted a new message from Loobie: an animation of Lock where the heat in her face grew so intense that her hair burst into flame and the skin peeled away to reveal a blackened skull. How did Loobie do that in real time?
    “I want you freaks back safely because you’re my freaks,” snarled Lock. “That’s what distinguishes me from the chief petty officer. Mader zagh! Don’t ever mistake that for thinking I like you turd-wrangling, pig-licking slurry of bakri chod chod wixers. Nice? Unbelievable, Indiya. You’re on a charge for insulting a superior. Now get out of my sight, the lot of you.”
    As per regulations when leaving or boarding the ship, Indiya and the others saluted before about turning and marching along the charged walkway that led to the shuttle.
    Unlike regulations, though, Indiya was grinning all the way out of the docking bay.
    Whatever Lock might think about her being a freak, Indiya was still too human to put a lid on her excitement. This was a chance of a lifetime – of a thousand lifetimes.
    What the captain had renamed Bonaventure was a captured alien ship loaded with mysterious new technologies. Alien tech that Beowulf’s engineers couldn’t decipher.
    Too bad. They’d had their chance.
    Now it was the freaks’ turn to finally prove to everyone what they could do.

— Chapter 09 —
    How had Bonaventure created artificial gravity? Gravity sensors estimated its displacement to be twenty times that of Beowulf , but its volume only twice as much. The evidence was beginning to suggest there was a black hole in the stern.
    A black hole! Even listing the engineering challenges that implied made Indiya break into a sweat.
    And they had captured or killed fewer than fifty crew. That was less than half Beowulf’s complement. How did a skeleton crew manage such a large ship?
    Above all else, what the hell was a ship doing in White Knight space crewed by humans speaking the Human language better than the bonehead Tranquility Marines could manage?
    They claimed to be Amilx . What kind of dumb name was that? An alien loan word?
    These and a score of other questions flitted between the away team as they hung