Back in his berth, Rich has a look at his stash of blocks. The box initially held thirty-six, and he's got about thirty left—a few got eaten by folks on the Genesis before Liam let him have the rest, and he's had a couple himself, and he is getting enough at meals now. And he's way more than halfway through his jug of vodka already, he hasn't been sticking to his budget as well as he'd intended. He can spare twelve blocks, it'll be okay. He's not going to go back to starving tomorrow because he spent a little more than a third of a supply of calories he's hardly even using. It'll be fine.

He doesn't have anything to carry them in but his Fleet-issue duffel bag, though, and the blocks all slide around loose inside it until he gets annoyed and packs them more neatly into one of his pillow cases, then knots the open end shut. Maybe he can get a tote bag or something at the Mall.

He does find the oldest, tightest, thinnest black t-shirt he's got left though, and puts it on, tying his overshirt around his hips instead of trying to hide in it like usual. It's apparently a good look, because when he shows up at the deck-hoppers Anton gives him an absolutely blatant once-over and a double thumbs-up.

"Good," he says, when Rich comes in range. "Nice, great, awesome. Also: holy shit."

Rich grins shyly and tugs at the hem of his t-shirt. "Not too much?" he asks.

Anton snorts. "Exactly the right amount of everything," he says. "Be glad I'm not Liam right now, kid, or I wouldn't be fit to steer this fucking hopper. Now c'mon, get on if you're getting."

"You know Liam?"

"Buddy, everyone knows Liam. Especially us guys who just so happen to have a preference for other guys. That man's a born angler."

Rich climbs into the second seat, making a note to maybe coincidentally happen to be wearing this exact shirt next time he might be somewhere Liam could see him. He's got a pretty solid preference for men, himself, especially if that man is Liam.

The flight over to the repurposed mega-tanker that serves as the Fleet's trading outpost with the confederated gangs of Chicago is a lot longer than any boat-to-boat hop would be traveling within the body of the Fleet itself, and Rich finds himself nervously eyeing the deck-hopper's charge percentage a couple times.

"Cut it out," Anton tells him finally, reaching over to rap his knuckles against Rich's chest. "You're not so big that we're gonna sink halfway there, buddy. We'll just charge the hopper while we're shopping."

Rich huffs, embarrassed at his own anxiety, and settles back in his seat to behave himself for the rest of the way. He distracts himself by taking in the scenery, such as it is: the lake spread out all around them in a vast, rumpled grey-blue sheet, the sky arching a brighter, smoother blue overhead, with thick clouds massing up in the east. The shapes of boats going about their business, scattered far enough out from each other that each individual boat is little more than a dark, distant crumb against the water. The angular yellow flecks of other citizens on their own hoppers, making smooth, straight journeys compared to the wheeling silvery glitter of the gulls.

There's a pod of selkies, too. Rich points it out to Anton when he spots them, and, nearly as curious as Rich, Anton heels the hopper over to skim a couple meters above the waves. They hum over the water's surface and watch the citizens of Lake Michigan's other society swim busily in an unknown direction for awhile, before one of the selkies, breaching, barks something to his—her? their?—friends, and the whole gang of them start jumping and barking and waving.

"What's up?" Anton calls, lowering the hopper into shouting range.

"Hey! Hi!" One of the selkies calls back, a big fuzzy blond one with deep, lake-blue eyes. The selkie's got an almost human face, but shaped into something half-cute, half-scary, the nose too flat and the mouth too wide, and covered in golden velvet fur all over, even on the eyelids. Rich can't help but marvel at how magical selkies look, like something out of a fairytale, even though they got made the same way as supersoldiers. This one's grandparents came out of a lab, not a legend, just like Rich's did.

No one in their right mind would use selkies to fight wars, though. They'd just lie there laughing the whole time, and then splash whoever tried to give them an order. Selkies have no work ethic at all.

"Hey, guys, you want any weed?" the blond selkie calls up. "We got weed!"

"Oh, hey," Anton says, and gives a furtive glance back at Rich. Rich gestures that he doesn't want weed—it doesn't do much for him unless he eats an entire fistful of buds—but Anton's totally cleared to get some if he wants.

"Can I borrow a couple blocks, man?" Anton asks. "I'll pay you back."

"What, these guys don't take credit?" Rich asks dryly, already pulling two food blocks out of his pillowcase and handing them over. Anton snickers, and nudges the hopper down further until Rich has to tuck his feet carefully up on the seat to keep his jeans dry from all the splashing. A small brown selkie with bright coppery eyes and startlingly round, human-looking breasts jumps up and grabs the rear bumper of the hopper with thick, webbed fingers, shrieking with laughter and kicking a long, fat length of seal-tail back and forth in midair.

"Fuck, get her off!" Anton snaps, struggling with the controls. "Deal's off if we fucking drown, guys!"

"Oh, hey, lame," the blond selkie says. "Cola, get down!"

The brown selkie makes a rude noise, but drops back into the water with a splash. Other selkies boil and bark and shriek all around their fallen buddy, jumping out of the water to slap at the bumper with their own weird fat flipper-hands.

"Here," the blond selkie says, tossing a clear plastic water bottle on a woven plant-fiber cord up to Anton. There's a couple green, glittery-looking buds rattling around inside it. Anton unscrews the cap, sniffs at it with the air of a professional who apparently buys weed from selkies all the time, then nods, tucks the bottle into Rich's pillowcase, and tosses down two nutrition blocks.

One of them the blond selkie catches between fat webbed hands. The other block goes into the water, and all the blond selkie's friends immediately dive for it.

"Fuck!" the blond selkie yelps, hastily stuffing the one block into a mesh tote bag, then dives too. Inside a few seconds, they're all gone, and only the churning surface of the water gives evidence to whatever scuffle is going on beneath.

"So," Rich says. "The Mall?"

"Yeah, the Mall," Anton agrees. He lifts the hopper and gets it turned around, pointed in the right direction. It's only a few more minutes of flying before the Mall comes into view.

Rich always forgets how big she is when he's not staring at her. The only other boat in the Fleet that rivals her for size is the Washington, both of them looming larger the closer you fly until you feel about the size of a midge in comparison. The massive, imposing, black and rust mountain that is the Mall was made from the biggest oil megatanker that old Admiral Clearwater was able to capture before landside powers managed to sequester the rest. As far as Rich is concerned, it's made from the biggest oil megatanker in the world. It's impossible to imagine anything bigger.

In a move just as clever and practical as trading useless warplanes for hundreds of functional boats, Clearwater consolidated all the oil from her other captured tankers into just one single, defendable mountain of a ship, then anchored that mountain a mile offshore of Chicago and signaled to all the petty landside gangland would-be kings that the Fleet was open for business. Careful, mutually armed business, conducted no closer than that one single mile offshore, but still: business.

The megatanker's stinking, toxic supply of an increasingly obsolete fuel was gladly exchanged for food and supplies to support her growing population of refugees, and as word spread beyond Chicago, more and more cities started to show up for a piece of the action. By the time all the oil was gone and the Fleet was a self-sufficient political entity, the megatanker had been renamed and established as a more useful trading outpost than anything else she could have been refitted for.

Today, the unbelievably wide expanse of the top deck swarms with what's got to be hundreds of people, maybe thousands, and what looks like millions of different kinds of hovercraft, like swarms of insane bees covering an enormous rust-red table. A chunk of the top deck is for unloading bulk imports like salt and metal, and another chunk is given over to the kind of food stalls that serve fresh, flame-cooked fare, so all the shoppers on the lower decks don't get choked out by the smoke and the smells, but almost all of the rest of the top deck is roped off just for parking.

Rich stares unashamedly as they swoop over the deck. There are hovercraft of every size and type, from the Fleet's sturdy, ugly, interchangeable yellow deck-hoppers to the sleeker personal crafts of its more important citizens, to the totally feral builds that people ride over from Chicago. And the merchants' flyers, too; cargo-carriers and long-haul rigs and something that Rich would swear up and down is just a forklift with an honest-to-god jet engine welded on. Rich tugs urgently at Anton's sleeve and points it out and Anton grimaces and heads down the deck, settling down to park far, far away from that particular disaster waiting to happen.

Rich had forgotten just how crazy the Mall could be, how thrilling and how intimidating. Even though the majority of the trade is just from the Fleet to Chicago, a whole lot of what's left of Middle America comes through here. It's neutral territory, or it's supposed to be, and the Fleet provides enough Security personnel that no one who starts shit at the Mall gets very far with it. But there's still that thrill to see so many different kinds of people all milling around and buying and selling a thousand different things.

"I want bacon," Rich says, as soon as Anton shuts down the deck-hopper. He can smell it from here.

"Fuck, me too," Anton groans, and hops down to the deck. Then he staggers, and Rich jumps down too—

"WELCOME To the MaLL, CITizenS DuCHAMP, MARLLLLLLLLLLnbMerrill," the Mall tells them, way too loud and all jumbled up, and Rich curses breathlessly and clutches at his cranial implants.

"That's a little worse than usual," Anton says. "Fuck, she didn't even get my name right! They need to do a rollback on the poor thing already before she fucking fries someone."

"A little worse?" Rich demands. "Fucking—shit, god, ow. I don't remember her being like that when I was seventeen!"

"I'm betting you didn't have the full implant suite when you were a fucking intern," Anton says. "You've been handling the Sympatico on your own for the last three or four years, haven't you? If you've been upgrading your comm system to handle the input, your sensitivity to AI interfacing has probably gotten really skewed."

"Oh." Rich thinks about this. "Shit."

"Have a talk with Ben about it when you get back to the Reliant," Anton advises. "And in the meantime, mute your shit to person-to-person only. I'll handle pinging the Mall for anything if we've gotta."

"You're the best," Rich says gratefully.

"You're buying me bacon," Anton says, and slaps his hip. "C'mon, I think I see the booth."

The food booths on the top deck all take Fleet credit with no problems, so Rich does buy Anton bacon, and then an even heftier portion for himself, delighted with the heady thrill of having some goddamn income for once. They eat the strips still steaming-hot off skewers as they walk through the crowded aisles down from the top deck's food vendors to the lower decks' goods and services, taking detours from one stall to the next as Rich's pillowcase-sack gets slowly fuller and fuller on a whole bunch of impulse buys from anywhere that also takes credit, which Rich has, and has a lot of.

He gets a blue-green bedspread for his bunk, a pack of t-shirts that actually look like they'll fit and come in colors, a couple cute little stress toys, a thermos with a heater built into the bottom and a tea-strainer built into the top, a dozen brightly-colored tins of tea flavors named after Spellcraft weapons. And then there's the snack cartons of crispy fried frogs from Cleveland, the pack of playing cards with sexy naked ladies instead of just card suits printed on them…

Rich is maybe kind of mad with freedom, so he also buys himself chocolate cookies and carbonated drinks and a whole lot of dried, sugar-coated fruit, and enough to share with Anton each time. And also doubles back for another pack of sexy cards, this one with naked guys. He can shuffle them together, he figures, and manage to annoy everyone he's playing with, regardless of their personal preferences in naked people.

There's a booth that sells art supplies, and Rich buys a set of clever, portable little leather-bound journals that have their own loops and straps for pens to fit right into the spine, and a pack of colored paint markers, and a tiny fold-up watercolor kit and a pad of watercolor paper, which feels luxuriously fancy and thick, and then a rainbow fistful of colored pencils, too. All the while he's thinking of Trimmer and all the cool little monsters Trimmer would draw on scrap paper with shitty pens, and Rich feels stupid and giddy and defiant and wistful because…someday they'll be off parole, and Trimmer isn't dead or anything, he's just away for awhile. Rich will be able to give him this stuff eventually. And in the meantime, when he cleans his berth, he won't keep wondering where he put Trimmer's journals, because now he has some and he'll know.

"You draw?" Anton asks.

"No, uh—my friend does," Rich says. "He's really good, but he doesn't let anyone see it. I miss having his stuff around."

Anton pats him. "Nice. Hey, that booth's got licorice chews, can you get me some?"

When they get to the nastiest, lowest deck that no one under eighteen gets admitted to, Anton leads him straight through the seedy, sticky, glittery booths of sex toys and drug stuff and unlicensed sex-workers and also various combinations thereof, like sex-workers on drugs waving sex toys at him, wow, okay then—anyway Anton tows him right through the chaos to a comparatively wholesome booth that just sells alcohol. Rich assumes the enormous black plastic dildo parked in with the wine bottles is just for fun.

No, okay, it's apparently hollow and you can fill it with your drink of choice. Cool. That doesn't look like an infection waiting to happen, or anything. The lady running the booth has an eye patch and still manages to convey that she's winking at him, and he puts the drink-dildo right back down, fast.

Anton picks out a few bottles of stuff in wine bottles that probably isn't actually wine, and then introduces Rich to eye patch lady, who's got an incongruously sweet, friendly voice and is named Doreen. She's from Chicago, apparently, and her husband brews half the stuff in the booth himself, and does Rich want a taste of anything?

At this point, Rich wants to try everything she's got. His brain feels like a wine bottle someone smashed across several different bulkheads and then tried to sell weird dildos to.

He hesitates before trying the first drink he's offered, though, lifting the shot glass towards the side of the ship with an inquiring look to Doreen. "Should I go, uh?"

"Oh, don't worry," Doreen assures him, "I give the lake her due every morning, and the evening too, some days. No sense tempting fate, right?"

Rich agrees gratefully, and takes a drink, the first of many samples of an excellent and educational range of flavored vodka, while Anton does the haggling. Turns out it's possible for vodka to taste like something besides 'mouth death', which is exciting. It can also taste like 'mouth death but cake is there,' 'mouth death but there's maple syrup in here for some reason,' and 'this time it's apples that want your mouth to die'.

"Do you actually like vodka?" Anton finally asks.

"I metabolize anything under 40-proof too quickly to be worth drinking it," Rich tells him, wiping his burning mouth with the back of his hand. "Vodka's about the most efficient way to deal with my whole fucking life."

Anton pats him sympathetically on the lower back and lets Doreen give him a taste of mouth death plus cinnamon.

After a bit of haggling, Anton establishes that a big fucking jug of 80-proof mouth death, regardless of additives, is gonna be a flat six blocks and no more and that price'll hold steady for future jugs too. Rich gives him a careful, grateful pat on the back while Doreen fills up the big fucking jug in question with blackberry-flavor vodka, which is frankly a delicious variety of 'your face IS going to burn though'. Despite the hot ache of his mouth and throat begging for mercy, there's now a pleasant softness over everything else in the world. Rich is free of the Sympatico forever and he's got friends now and nobody wants to fuck his face as payback for basic favors anymore, and he has food and snacks and enough vodka to last him for months and it tastes good even, and he can come right back to get more when he's done, and—god it feels good. Everything feels so good right now.

It all feels good enough he might maybe make some slightly stupid decisions. Decisions Anton doesn't in any way whatsoever help, having had two or three vodka samples himself.

"They bring out your eyes," Anton says, still half-laughing, as they head back to their deck-hopper. Rich glares at him, starts to reach up to his ear and then forces his hand back down.

"This was a dumb idea," he grumbles, and then gives in and reaches up, twiddling with one of the small, green-glass studs through his earlobes. They still sting like a pair of absolute bastards, but the feeling is so weird and foreign, he can't stop poking at them. "...You really think it looks cool?"

"For fuck's sake, buddy, yeah, it looks pretty goddamn cool," Anton says, and elbows him. "Is that numbing stuff working yet?"

"No," Rich says, determined to still be grumpy despite the hot, spreading flush that's heating his cheeks. "Pretty sure that was basically hand cream, it didn't do shit."

"Just trying to gouge us, then," Anton sighs, and shakes his head. "Well at least they did a good job on the piercings. They're not, like, uneven or anything."

"Thank fuck," Rich laughs. "I'd look like such an idiot!"

Anton grins and waves his hand broadly up and down at Rich in a clear 'As opposed to now?' gesture, and Rich huffs and rolls his eyes.

"You said I looked cool," he reminds Anton.

"You look terrifically cool," Anton says. "You're just also maybe not the brightest boat in the Fleet when it comes to long term planning."

"Shut up," Rich says. "I have so much vodka now. That's my long term plan."

"'Be the guy with the vodka'," Anton says slowly and self-importantly, miming typing something into an invisible screen. "Yeah, there's your life all set right there, big guy."

Rich elbows him, and then cackles like an absolute moron when it knocks Anton clear into a heap of pillows.

Back at their deck-hopper, Rich carefully piles his various bags into the larger tote bag he bought, arranging them so nothing gets crushed or cracked or anything. The tote bag is awesome, and he's looking forward to showing it to Basil, because it's got Rich's favorite character from Family Fleet on the front: Facsimile Fact, the Know-It-All Cat, who pretends to fall asleep anytime someone asks him a question he doesn't know the answer to, then wakes up after the kids have figured the answer out themselves to declare he knew it the whole time. He's kind of an asshole, which Rich approved of a lot as a kid and even more now. The picture is of Fact loafing around on his stack of books, and underneath there's a slogan in his handwriting—paw-writing?—that says "If I Agreed With You We'd Both Be Wrong" and it made Rich laugh even before he started drinking.

Then Anton goes to climb into the driver's seat and hisses, grabbing at his head, and gasps out "Abort, Mall, fuck! Shit—decline, decline procedure—yes I'm fucking sure! Decline! Abort scan!"

"What?" Rich asks stupidly, and then remembers: as Fleet citizens, they gotta submit to at least being forcefully recommended an implant decontamination before they head back from the Mall to their home boats. The state the Mall's AI is in right now, they might as well take a bath in an oil slick with a handful of garbage as a loofah, and come out cleaner.

Rich braces himself and opens his implants to public-access, because the deck-hopper's Fleet-issue and hence not going anywhere until he's at least officially registered a big No Thanks to—

"TechNICIAN MER—MERRrrrrrrrill," the Mall says. "Thank you for visiting Me! It is STROngly rec—"

"Abort," Rich gets out, clutching at his head.

"-COMMENDED THAT YOU UNDERGO DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES PRIOR TO RE-ENTRANCE TO THE—"

"Decline procedure!"

"MICHIGAN FLEET. YOU ARE ADVISED THAT—"

"Decline procedure, effective immediately, authorization: I'm a fucking tech, I'll do it myself!"

"...Promise?" the Mall asks.

Rich shares a deeply unnerved glance with Anton.

"I promise," he says, and switches his comm system back to private-only before he can get any more high-volume crazy poured into his nervous system.

He sits on the deck-hopper a lot more heavily than he'd meant to, and it rocks alarmingly on its skids, sending Anton flailing for a grab bar.

"Fuck, kid, don't knock us overboard before we've even lifted off!" he snaps.

"Sorry!" Rich says. "Sorry, god. My head." It's like he's getting the hangover up front. He takes a steadying nip of vodka and adds, with feeling: "Bleargh."

"Well, sit tight and don't toss your guts just yet," Anton says. "I gotta get us back home. Uh—don't look, for a second."

Rich looks, of course, and watches Anton furtively dismantling the automated drunk block.

"I said don't look!" he says, when he notices Rich leaning in over his shoulder to see how he's doing it.

"What, do I keep my eyes closed the whole time you're drunk-driving us home?" Rich snorts, and rests his chin on Anton's narrow shoulder.

"You can get out and walk," Anton says, trying to wriggle free.

"Great idea," Rich says, resting more of his weight on the guy. "I'll take all my candy and vodka with me." He holds the bottle in front of Anton's face and waggles it, then laughs when Anton gives a big sigh, takes the bottle, and helps himself to a drink while he finalizes the hilariously illegal override. Completely assured that both passengers are sober as Security, the hopper obligingly turns on.

"If you crash us into anything we're fucked," Rich says idly. "And also I don't know you and I've never seen you before in my life and definitely have no idea how either of us managed to be in a hopper with a broken drunk block, like, coincidentally—"

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"You wanna drive, smart guy?" Anton demands.

"Only if you want me to crash us into anything," Rich says, and lounges back in his seat. He fumbles for the safety belt, then gives up when he can't get it to fit. Anton doesn't even bother with his.

"Speaking of crashing, you need to go get your bugs cleaned out," Anton says. "Just because the Mall can't do it herself doesn't mean you should skip it."

"Okay, mom," Rich snorts.

"Don't sass me or you're grounded, son," Anton says. He's snarky when he's drunk. It's cute, but Rich still sticks his tongue out, childishly, when he takes his vodka back.

Anton pilots them back home with an impressive minimum of swooping or bobbing, while Rich has another drink and starts in on decontamination procedures.

"Someone put a fucking tracer on me," Rich complains. "What the fuck is that going to accomplish? Wow, I sit on my boat and do fuckall, big whoop, that's some valuable goddamn intel!"

"The idea, I think, is that landside military intelligences want to know how the Fleet as a whole moves," Anton says thoughtfully, and swipes the vodka out of Rich's idle grasp. "If they manage to bug enough of its citizens, they'd have a fine-grained picture of where the Fleet is at any given time, and could probably even make some guesses as to our like, our shift schedules, stuff like that? Who's going where, when…I dunno. I'm not a Spook, I don't have to know."

"Yeah, shit, no thanks," Rich says. "Well, run your own decontam and no one in New York has to know exactly when and where we take a dump."

"...What really bugs me, though," Anton says, a bit later, "is—"

"What bugs you about bugs?" Rich interrupts.

"Yeah, that, thanks," Anton says. "Anyway the Mall's not competent to run the decontams anymore and most citizens are barely competent enough with their implants to like, y'know, check their texts and sometimes crash their local intranet for funsies because they thought turning off all the security cameras on their deck is a foolproof plan for sneaking out to go party, or whatever—"

"Yes, I was sixteen once too," Rich says, and takes his vodka back.

"Okay well anyway so who the fuck let the Mall get so crazy?" Anton demands, and lands the deck-hopper back on the Reliant with a bone-rattling thump.

"The Mall has a shit-ton of alcohol," Rich points out. "Like, we were there, and got some of it. Maybe Security's also noticed this. And like, y'know." He gestures the obvious conclusion, then licks spilled vodka off his arm.

"Man," Anton says, and staggers off the deck-hopper. "Fuck…shit. Am I drunk? I think I'm drunk."

Rich blinks at him. "Yes," he says gently. "You parked us backwards, man. You're pretty fucking drunk."

"Fuck!" Anton says, and throws his hands up in exasperation. "I'm going to bed. You can—you can go fix this. And your brain. And whatever."

"What, I'm not invited to bed?" Rich asks. "I thought we were besties now."

"You can come sleep with me but you won't fucking fit," Anton says.

Rich looks him up and down pointedly. "Liam didn't have a problem," he says.

"I meant—I meant in my fucking bed, you smartass, because it's—oh my god. Friendship rens—rescinded. Canceled. Abort. Goodbye." Anton flips off Rich's general direction, and wobbles away towards his berth.

Rich laughs at him when Anton wobbles right back, after a minute, and retrieves his plastic bottle of selkie weed.

"Good night," Anton says, with grandly intoxicated dignity, and staggers off again, bottle clutched to his chest.

"It's the middle of the afternoon!" Rich calls, just to be the jerk who gets the last word, then heads for his own berth, giddy with triumph. He went to the Mall, and made a friend, or at least enough of a connection with a crewmate that they can joke about being friends, and he's got a ton of vodka and new toys and cool earrings and everything feels great right now. He makes it almost all the way to his berth, except Basil's door is open, and Mitch is leaned against the doorframe, talking—presumably—to Basil.

"Hey, buddy," Rich says, and raises his vodka in cheerful salute. "Turns out vodka comes in flavors now!"

"It all tastes awful, though," Mitch says, shifting around to look him over.

"Yes," Rich says, and has a very smug drink. "Yes, it sure fucking does. This stuff's blackberry, though."

"Hard pass, thanks," Mitch says, grimacing exaggeratedly. "Unless you've got some coffee in that bag, in which case feel free to bribe me, y'know. As friends. You went to the Mall?"

Rich looks from his new vodka to his new tote-bag full of new crap. "No," he drawls, as sarcastically as possible. "What could've possibly given me away?"

"Earrings," Mitch says, and points at one of his own ears. "You know us trained Security officers have to have an eye for detail."

Rich nods solemnly at Mitch, attempts to tap his implants with an air of knowing wisdom, and clocks himself in the jaw with the vodka jug. Mitch starts laughing at him, which is completely fair.

"Is that Rich?" Basil calls from his room.

"Yeah hi is that Basil?" Rich asks, and pushes past Mitch to help himself to some of Basil's personal space. Basil's sitting at his desk, wearing a Family Fleet t-shirt at this very exact moment, so Rich sprawls back on the bed and puts one of his boots in Basil's lap to see if he can get away with it. "Hey so, look, I got a tote bag. We match now!"

Basil looks at the tote bag. He doesn't seem to get the connection. Rich offers him the vodka.

"I wouldn't, bud," Mitch says warningly.

"Yeah, you wouldn't, you weirdo coffee fiend," Basil says, and tries some. Then he makes a frankly adorable hacking sob of pain and almost drops the jug—Rich has to grab for it fast. "Holy shit is it supposed to be like that?!"

"Yes," Rich says, and takes another drink to prove it. "It's vodka, baby boy. It hates you. You have to agree to that before you start or you never get anywhere with it."

"Fuck," Basil says, and tries to wipe his tongue on his arm. Rich watches this with interest, until Basil catches him watching, flushes faintly, and swivels his desk chair around the other way, letting Rich's heel drop heavily against the deck. Rich puts his foot back up and tries to see if he can swivel Basil back the rest of the way around, and it turns out: yes. Yes he can.

"I hate you," Basil says, when he's rotated to face Rich again.

"There's a lot of that going around lately," Rich says, unperturbed. "Oh hey! I just remembered! Do you know—okay I remembered another thing, which is your room is disgusting." Rich points, illustratively: "That is the exact same goddamn sock I used when we had sex."

"Oh my god," Basil says.

"Oh my god," Mitch says. "You never said socks were involved in sex, cupcake!"

"They're not supposed to be, shithead!" Basil shrieks.

"Yeah, if you had hygiene wipes in your desk like a civilized goddamn human being," Rich says.

"Oh my god," Mitch repeats. "Basil."

"I didn't know it was—I didn't know he—oh my god!"

"Yeah see, if you did your fucking laundry, again like a civilized human being, it wouldn't matter if the sock had come on it or not, because it would not still be here, on the deck, like a week later," Rich says. "I can't believe I thought you might have thought I was the nasty guy in that particular encounter."

"Oh my god," Basil wails, and goes to grab the sock. Then he just stands there like an idiot, looking around like a laundry hamper might materialize out of nowhere. Because he doesn't even have a laundry hamper.

"Okay, no. You know what, no." Rich points at Mitch. "You, go get a laundry bin, and one of the cleaning caddies out of the washroom—and maybe a couple empty ones, too, so he's got somewhere to sort all this crap into." He points at Basil. "You, clean your fucking room."

"Wh—now?" Basil squeaks.

"No, five years ago would be great. Yes, now!"

Mitch gives him a snappy salute and dashes off down the passage.

"I don't want to clean my room," Basil says. "I—I have everything how I like it!"

Rich looks Basil dead in the eyes, then says, very seriously: "I don't care."

This argument seems to crash Basil's brain, which is great, because Rich didn't have any follow-up remarks prepared for if it hadn't worked. Basil starts sulkily rearranging his action figures and stuff on his shelves, and Rich lounges back on Basil's bed and supervises.

"You can't just shuffle everything around, genius," he says. "You have to take everything off the damn shelf, wipe it down—hey, cool, here's Mitch, he has a scrub brush and shit—and then put stuff back on in order, sorted by game or type of piece or whatever. Mitch, are you actually recording this?"

"I've known Basil since we were tiny babies and I've never gotten him to clean his room," Mitch reports from behind his screen. "Some of this junk has been rotting in place since I got assigned here a year and a half ago. The rest has probably been rotting for longer. This is better than pornography."

"I could take my shirt off," Rich says. "Then it'd be pornography too."

"Don't!" Basil says.

"Too late," Rich says, and takes his shirt off. It rips halfway through, though, because it's small and old and he's drunk. "Hey, I'm drunk," he reports, and throws the remainder of his shirt in the new laundry bin.

"I mean, yeah," Mitch says.

"Don't be a smartass," Rich says cheerfully. "I get to be the smartass, because I'm bigger and got here first."

Mitch salutes him again, sarcastically.

Still looking sulky, Basil wipes down another shelf and starts rearranging the toys on it. Rich catches a dark look shot in his direction.

"What?" he says. "Man, look at that pout."

Basil glares. "For somebody who said he wouldn't go treating me like a kid anymore, you're being really bossy," he grumbles.

Rich snorts at him. "Trimmer's like five years older than me and I still get on him to clean up after himself. Deal with it."

"Who's Trimmer?" Basil says, frowning.

Rich finds himself weirdly, ridiculously shocked by the question. Somehow he hadn't realized that of course his new friends don't know about his old friend, not that Trimmer was even his friend. They never hung out like Rich and Basil and Mitch did, they never played games or horsed around laughing in the sunlight or teased each other with open, honest affection. Rich never got him art supplies, or even told him how much Rich liked his drawings. What they had together was all sharp edges and clinging for protection and trash-talking because they didn't want to be the kind of guys who had actual feelings, or were really scared, or sincerely lonely and sad and hurt. Everything on the Sympatico was so much darker and sicker and more violent than the Reliant, right down to the pathetic substitution for friendship that was the best Rich could get out of a guy who only needed him for protection.

Rich takes a breath that shakes more than he'd like it to, and then a long, graceless pull of vodka. He doesn't want to talk about Trimmer right now, doesn't want Basil looking at him the way Basil looks at him, at how fucking sad he is sometimes. He's better now, things are better now. He's getting better now.

He shrugs. "Get your laundry already," he says, instead of anything about Trimmer, and Basil, brilliant sweetheart that he is, takes the goddamn hint. Mitch brings over the laundry basket and there's a couple minutes of not entirely awkward quiet.

"Oh hey," Rich blurts out, sitting up fast enough to make his head spin, "okay, I remembered the thing I forgot before I got distracted by your fucking compost heap of a deck. So you know how the Mall is fucked?"

"Yeah," Basil says cautiously.

"Wait, fucked like sexually?" Mitch asks.

"Not everything fucked is sexual," Rich says.

"Yeah, says the guy who just did a strip-tease," Mitch says.

"Oh my god no he didn't!" Basil wails.

"You don't get to stop cleaning just because the guys who know what soap is for are talking to each other," Rich says, and points sternly at Basil's trash-heap desk. "C'mon, keep going."

"I'm just saying, Rosemary, some people have weird cybersex with the ship AIs, that's a thing," Mitch says.

"God!" Basil moans. "How do you know that?!"

"You know what's worse?" Rich asks. "Actually most of the AIs people go and cyber with are just other people who get off on pretending to be AIs, like, getting cybered. The rest are sex workers who specialize in cybering."

Mitch looks at Basil, like he's trying to check if Rich is bullshitting him.

"I am not in fact bullshitting you," Rich says. "The Fleet's founding technicians had to set it up this way because of how many horny fuckups kept trying to interfere with the actual AIs that run our actual ships. They aren't really people, you know?"

Mitch shrugs, looking uncertain. "I mean, they talk, though," he says. "You can talk to them and they talk back, and they've got personalities. Right?"

"Kind of," Basil says, waggling his hand back and forth. "Sort of."

"Yeah, sort of," Rich agrees. "They're these incredibly complex assemblages of automated processes, so when they get glitchy, when stuff starts getting jammed, they look like they've got personalities, it seems like they have preferences, when really it's just like how a dented deck-hopper might pull to the left. The hopper doesn't want to go left, it's not fighting you or making a free decision, it's just…quirky.

"An AI isn't a sentient, self-aware mind any more than an engine is a living heart, the ships aren't alive, but most people don't get that these things they fall in love with can't actually reciprocate. So citizens in the early days kept crashing shit because they jerked off into a light socket or whatever, no matter how many times the techies at the time tried to explain…So now if you try to get too emotional with your ship's AI you get re-routed to forums specifically for other humans who can help you get your weird little robosexual rocks off without shorting out like the whole entire goddamn Washington."

"I can't believe you never told me that, Parsley," Mitch says to Basil reproachfully.

"It's like literally the worst possible thing you learn when you become a technician, Mississippi," Basil says grimly. "I was never going to tell you that, ever."

Rich salutes all the poor dead technicians who had to deal with this issue for the first time, and takes another drink.

"So anyway the Mall's fucked up," he says, trying to get back to his original point. "Nonsexually, I mean. Like, she's barely coherent, she misidentified Anton, she pretty much ignored us until we were yelling when we told her to skip the implant decontam—it's not great."

"Misidentified him?" Basil repeats, pausing in the midst of kicking some clothes into a pile to stare at Rich instead. "Both of you, or just him?"

"Just him! Me, she got right," Rich says, and frowns, something about that niggling at him. It takes a minute, and then it comes to him. "Huh." He gestures for Basil to keep cleaning, then tips his head back and stares at the ceiling, which at least isn't gross like the deck or the bulkheads or basically every other part.

"The last time I saw this, someone had introduced a number transposition glitch to get the Sympatico's AI to read their ID as someone else's. They didn't limit the glitch, though, so anytime she ran into that particular number string in anything, from cargo manifests to location calculations, she substituted the other number string. It fucked things up so bad, we were dead in the water. I was laid out in my bunk for like twenty-four hours straight, untangling all the bad math and misidentifications while she just kept iterating more...it was a complete nightmare." He waves his bottle of vodka absently, then takes another drink. "By the time I got my brain to myself again, I was so fucking hungry and tired I could barely make it to the mess. Didn't even get credit for it. Hendricks disappeared the whole thing right out of the logs because the guy who fucked everything up in the first place was in good with the Captain, and I got in trouble for 'missing' a day of work."

"That sounds completely awful and really illegal," Mitch says. "But—what do you mean, you were laid out in your bunk? For twenty-four hours, like the whole twenty-four hours, four work shifts in a row? I mean, I'm not a techie, but I thought that was really dangerous."

"It is really dangerous," Basil says, straightening up. "Rich—"

"We were dead in the water," Rich repeats, feeling a little defensive now. "A problem like that, you go as deep as you have to and you don't come back up for air until it's fixed."

"No, you don't!" Basil says. "You really don't! I mean, I've heard of techies getting pulled in too deep for big problems, but that's why we're supposed to trade off when we're working directly with ships' deep processes! You gotta work in teams and you gotta keep to single, maybe double shifts, otherwise your implant sensitivity ends up all skewed, like your communication implants start taking over too much of your actual brain…You can't just go diving in all on your own, not without serious limits in place, or the ship could keep using your implants even after you pass out, and boil your fucking head! Rich, tell me you weren't taking a risk like that."

Rich scowls. "Not every ship has as many techies to share the load as the Reliant does, baby boy, or as clean and bug-free an AI to handle her shit with. I did what I had to do for her. No one else was going to."

"Rich, people can die from working solo for too long," Basil says, very quiet and serious.

"Yeah, well, I didn't, so who cares," Rich says, a sulky little growl roughening the edges of his words. "Drop it already!" Basil's eyes widen and Rich breathes out hard through his teeth, helps himself to another shot of vodka to try and get some amount of his warm, happy buzz back, and goes on, "On a way cooler subject than how sad my life used to be, I bet I can figure out who's responsible for that glitch."

"Okay," says Basil, and takes what looks like a careful breath in and out, before forcing a smile. "Okay, cool, sure. Here, I can—"

"Ooh, see, there he goes," Mitch says, apparently to his recording screen, sotto voce. "He's completely distracted. Can Technician Merrill salvage this situation? Let's find out."

Rich laughs at that, his good mood snapping back into place now that everyone's on the same page again.

"Screw you, man," he says with only the slightest internal flinch at back-talking to Security, and stabs a finger at Mitch. "I can totally keep Basil on the path to not living in disgusting squalor." He turns to Basil, and if he doesn't manage stern he can at least do amused but firm. "C'mon, baby boy, you're doing good. Keep it up and people will even be able to focus on how cute you are when you invite them in for the night, instead of wondering what they just stepped on and why it was so damn squishy."

Basil huffs at him, then starts picking up clothes from every surface and dumping them into the laundry bin Mitch brought for him.

"Like your room's so clean," he grumbles at Rich, then points at his friend. "And I know yours isn't, darling."

"It's way nicer than yours, cherry-pie!" says Mitch cheerfully, and directs the camera in the direction of the pile of open games on Basil's desk, wiggling his eyebrows hopefully at Basil before going back to the clothing situation in a long, dramatic pan shot. "I think some of the clothes on the bottom of those piles have been there since Basil was deck-handing here, folks, this is a historic day. I'm—I'm tearing up a little bit, I just—" he makes a few overwrought sobbing noises, and then ducks out of the way as Basil throws a pair of pants at his head.

"And my room is 'so clean', thanks," says Rich. "You've seen it."

"Yeah but, what, all the time?" Basil demands, and kicks the laundry bin in the direction of the door. There's still crap everywhere but without the clothes there's significantly more deck space visible, and the berth feels bigger already. "I thought you just cleaned up that day, or something!"

"I clean up every day," says Rich virtuously, and goes back to hunting through the Mall's ID database, feeling pretty clumsy now with all the extra drinks he's had but confident he's on the right track. "Sound mind, healthy body; clean ship, healthy crew."

"Right?" says Mitch. "Nice, you tell him."

"I hate both of you so much," says Basil, and goes sulking over to his desk to shuffle decks of cards together and put them in boxes.

"Aww, my grumpy little sweet-potato treats me so mean sometimes," Mitch coos, "but he loves me, really!" and Basil flips him off without looking over.

Rich snickers. "Okay, so," he says mostly to himself, "Mall residents whose ID shares an integer-string with Anton's…"

"Wait, how do you know it's a resident?" Basil asks, looking up from sorting games.

"It's a lot of trouble to go to if they'd only need it on occasional visits," Rich says, shrugging. "And a resident tech has way easier access. I don't know for sure, but it's a safe bet that at least one of the Mall techies are permanently hiding themselves from the ID system, and that's what caused the whole mess with the AI."

"Oh, shit," says Basil. "So—"

"You can play with your friends after you're done cleaning your room!" says Mitch, in a startlingly good imitation of Family Fleet's Alfred Otter, the patient and no-nonsense dad stand-in. Basil glowers at him, and Mitch gives him a thumbs-up.

"You're so close, buddy!" he says. "Don't stop, come on!"

He sounds genuinely supportive this time, and Basil glares at him for another second before slumping and giving in, stacking the first few clean and closed games on top of each other.

It takes Rich another few minutes of sorting carefully through a bunch of different search functions, but then he sits up triumphantly. "Got her! Technician Diana Stratton has the same integer-string that gets transposed, she's in the system as some other guy named Darren Holloway, who's actually assigned…to a houseboat, looks like? The Invincible Mark Two…Fuck, I bet this wouldn't work as well if Stratton wasn't part of a mixed-gender crew. She's probably not the only one, she's probably got buddies with transposed re-routes loaded too—the Mall is way too confused for this single one to be the whole problem, but that's a start. So now I just have to figure out how to limit the transposition to that particular instance—"

"But she's not the only one?" Mitch asks, and Rich blinks over to see that he's all straight-backed and laser-focused on Rich and suddenly very Security, which would be unnerving even if Rich hadn't been drinking right in front of him. Since Rich has, it's completely intimidating, and he nods carefully.

"Can you find the others?" Mitch asks intently. "We should dig up everyone who's doing this."

"Yeah, yes, no problem! You got it!" Rich hastily gets back to work, using a relay protocol through the Reliant's AI to forge himself a more intimate connection to the Mall, and plunging himself headlong into the chaotic, tangled streams of the Mall's processes.

"WELCOME to, welc—REASSIGNMENT to me, CONGRATULATIONS!!!! Request maintenance on maintenance on MAINTENANCE TASKS high PRIORITY??" says the Mall jubilantly. Her AI pokes quizzically at him, makes a few half-hearted attempts to sync with his implants and then retreats when he smacks at it.

Rich is distinctly reminded of the single time in his entire Sympatico assignment when Schwartz dragged himself into Rich's berth and made a strange, guilty, drunken attempt to be a helpful mentor. It had been more of a hassle cleaning up his pathetic, fumbling attempts to code than just doing it by himself the first time. Schwartz had put his arm around Rich and told him he was a good kid who was doing a good job, and Rich had been young and lost and miserable enough the positive reinforcement had felt good, despite himself.

Rich can still remember how it felt, the revulsion at Schwartz's unwashed stench of sweat and booze and the intrusive weight of his clammy, dirty arm around Rich's shoulder, mixing with the weird, cautious rush of something like pride, or desperation to please, or he didn't know what. That sick mess of feelings is ringing unsettlingly close to what he's feeling right now for the Mall. She's so broken up and so totally bent out of shape, but now he can help. She wants him to help.

Richard Merrill, IST: query

"QUERY!!!" The Mall shrieks back at him, a sharp spike of input that makes Rich's temples throb. Okay: he takes a deep, practiced breath, and breathes out through the pain, steadying himself. It's not like he doesn't have experience with ships that have been pruned into demented knots by a bunch of screw-up techies who want an accomplice more than they want an AI. Rich reconsiders his approach and settles gingerly back in.

Richard Merrill, IST: hey, can you help me find something?

The Mall keens happily. "TechniiiiiiiIIIICIAN MERsxkskkhsh—" a rush of ugly mental static. "InputputputputputTELL me what you Need!!!!"

God, this poor ship. She's in even worse shape than the Sympatico was. Rich grimaces, raising his hands and pulling up a handful of screens to lay out the processes he's about to run.

Richard Merrill, IST: show me the calculations for your cargo imports

"NEW EXCITING! Imports DAILY!!" the Mall informs him.

Richard Merrill, IST: yeah they're really nice! Show me your calculations for them, please.

"Okay!!!" says the Mall, and caves like Security protocols aren't even a thing, data flooding through Rich's implants and filling every screen.

"Got it," Rich says, focusing hard to make his mouth move, feeling his brain slosh with data and vodka both. "Okay. We're going to watch the Mall doing calculations for cargo imports, and when she does something fucked up—see, there—" one screen is already starting to fill with flagged math errors from his filtering protocol, "—we can see that she's not just transposing that one set of integers, she's got other reroutes in place too, other ways she's—see, she's reading nine-three-two-six whenever she sees five-seven-nine-eight…So then we look for other residents with those integer sets…and we get..." he patches together a quick little algorithm to automate the search process, and a second screen starts, slowly, to display one flagged ID after another.

"Shit," he says, surfacing after a minute or two. "That's a lot of techies. How many techies does the Mall have?"

"Forty," Basil says. "Ten per shift." He's drifted closer, leaning on the desk to get close in to Rich's screens, watching the data visualizations tick along. "How is it possible that none of them have put a stop to whatever's going on here? I mean fifteen—okay, sixteen—techies, that's a lot of people to go running around invisible and unrecorded, but that means there's twenty-five…twenty-three…people who aren't in on it, right?"

"Would anyone who noticed anything wrong feel like going against eighteen and counting techies who were up to something?" Rich asks. "I sure wouldn't. If people can make themselves disappear, they can sure as shit make you disappear." He taps his sixth screen and sets it to scanning for recent crew turnover, then shows it to Basil: there's been three technician deaths in the last two years, which seems to be as long as this substitution scheme has been running. Each time Security reported the death as due to an attack by foreign visitors, and each time Security requested more funding, more personnel, and hazard pay for the investigation—and got it two times out of three.

"How likely is it that a technician would get randomly stabbed by a visitor?" Rich asks. "They don't need to go outside of the secure, Fleet-only areas of the boat. They got axed by their crewmates for not minding their own fucking business, I'd bet the Washington on it."

"Holy shit," Basil says faintly. "But that's wrong."

"It's how things work on boats that aren't all sunshine and sing-alongs, man," Rich shrugs, and closes out the screen of dead techies. "Now, there's a way tidier variant of this transposition glitch that assholes on the Sympatico used to smuggle contraband around, that didn't spill over from identification routines. I can fix this with a simple bit of code replacement, as soon as I can talk the Mall into giving me admin privileges..."

"No," Mitch says, and Rich looks up at the hard, cold tone. He'd forgotten the guy was still there, distracted by the data and the need to solve the problem…The way Mitch is looking at him, fierce and disappointed, makes him cringe right back against the bulkhead, putting an arm up defensively.

"Hey, no, if you say no, that's cool, man!" he says, voice gone croaky. "Whatever you say!"

"Mitch, hang on," Basil says.

"He just found twenty criminals, and he wants to help them out?" Mitch demands, rounding on Basil—who doesn't flinch, and actually straightens up and shoves him away from Rich, whose heart shoots up into his throat and dies at that.

"Basil, hey," he says weakly. "Don't—"

"Mitch, you're scaring him, back off!" Basil snaps. "He's been fucking knifed for getting in the way of people doing illegal shit, you heard him—this is just how he thinks things work—"

"Yeah but it isn't!" Mitch says back. "We can arrest these jerks, we've got data on them, we've got proof! We can take this to the Washington and give it to the Spooks and clear the whole mess of corruption out!"

"Yeah and that's great, but you're scaring him," Basil repeats, and shoves him again. "Back it the fuck up, pumpkin."

Mitch looks angry for a second more, then slumps, sighing, against Basil's outstretched palm. One of his hands comes up and squeezes Basil's bare wrist, and he looks past Basil's body to where Rich is frozen on the bed, wide-eyed and breathing hard and completely embarrassed under the suffocating haze of fear.

"Sorry," Mitch says. "You don't have to be scared of me, man. You don't have to be scared of anybody about this, nobody's getting stabbed. You did good here, okay? Send me those IDs and some kind of summary of the way you figured out who was doing the—the stuff—and I promise it's gonna be alright. We'll bring them to justice and save the Mall and everything."

Rich breathes in, and the panic slowly scales down enough for him to register what Mitch is saying. "Oh," he says, because…that makes sense. It makes sense that Mitch would think to go arrest people for screwing up their ship's AI and also getting people murdered and whatever else they were getting up to. And…Mitch might be right, maybe this will fix it. Hasn't Rich been learning that even if parts of the Fleet are rotten, even if things are toxic and painful and shitty on some boats, on others everyone's plenty damn nice, and Security actually does what they say? Maybe not everyone in the Fleet does the right thing, maybe not even most people, but if enough people go and try...

"Yeah," Rich says, swallowing hard once or twice, "okay, here." He sends the files over, details as carefully and correctly illuminated as he can arrange for them to be.

"Thanks," Mitch says. He steps forward, too fast, and Rich flinches back. Mitch falters, hand half-lowering, then he pushes forward a final step more and claps Rich on the shoulder. "You did good, man, this was really good work. I didn't mean to…to yell at you, that was lame of me. You're a real good guy."

"Thanks," Rich says carefully, and holds still until Mitch nods and backs off.

"Basil, I'm gonna go report this to the Washington," he says, giving his friend a quick, sidelong hug. "You should like, y'know, keep Rich company while I'm gone. Reward him for his service to the Fleet. Have sex without a sock this time."

"Oh my god! Shut your nasty face!" Basil says, ducking out from under Mitch's arm.

"My face is adorable and you know it, Saffron," Mitch says, and gives him a pinch on the cheek. "Just not as adorable as yours! Don't miss me too much, bye!"

He dances backwards through the door before Basil can shove him again, and Basil leans out after him to shout a last few insults before slamming the door closed.

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