Rifka shook. She’d been angry with Erasmus before. Those old hurts felt childish compared to her anger now. Not that she’d been a child in a long time.

  She slipped on her auto-coverall’s helmet and activated the air. Polarizing the faceplate, she ran off through the tunnels, switching off the wireless connection and heading toward the deepest parts of the Lonely Mountain.

  Erasmus had cameras just about everywhere, and when Rifka really wanted privacy, this was the only way. Erasmus said he was going to sleep, but he regularly did things in his “sleep” that could only be characterized as being fully awake. Like waking her up with the vacuum alarm.

  She’d known all along that Erasmus called themself a dragon. She never believed it, not really. Now, she had some thinking to do.

  Erasmus sometimes called her a princess. In stories, dragons would keep the princess in the tower, and a prince would come rescue the damsel. Only, whoever Gjosta was, he’d failed to rescue her. He’d sounded certain that he would see her again. Rifka knew now that he’d been mistaken.

  She found it shocking that Rifka might now be the last of her kind. She’d never really thought of it before, but Erasmus had collected her. She floated down a river, frozen in an enchantment, and landed on the dragon’s hoard. A lost treasure, to be guarded. Forever.

  Would Erasmus actually let her leave?

  Rifka didn’t have a ship with an interstellar liminal drive. Just the bio-liminal drive inside herself wouldn’t be enough to escape.

  The mine had drone vehicles; they were all short range with ion particle engines. Erasmus had her fly them on the far side of LM-25 a few times. They were wonderfully maneuverable, and impossibly slow. Even with high density capacitors charged to full power, the ion drives were incapable of even a hundredth of the speeds Traveller had shown.

  A drone would take months to reach the Lake, even if Erasmus did not stop it.

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  If they would let Rifka leave willingly, the station could fabricate a much fastier vessel; its ore docks could even be converted into a shipyard. Erasmus had shown Rifka plans and explained what he expected they would need.

  It didn’t make sense to her. Erasmus couldn’t simultaneously intend to keep her prisoner, and yet show her their willingness to let her escape.

  ‘Unless,’ Rifka considered darkly, ‘Erasmus has become insane.’

  AIs could live in their own delusion. Centuries before, after Rifka had been born on the Ark— but before she arrived at the Lonely Mountain—planetary governance AIs caused an interstellar war. Unable to accept that their decisions failed, politicians followed the AIs advice even as they drove several dozen worlds to the brink of destruction.

  Executions began shortly after. The AIs, true sentient beings, were executed first. Their quantum computers burned. Some of them started up automated systems to try to prevent it. They failed. Then, the people came for the politicians, soldiers, generals, and bureaucrats who followed them without measuring their own culpability.

  Spacers took decades to recover, and interstellar treaty banned all autonomous AI. From the simplest ship AI to famous AI scientists. One by one, the Computing Inquisitors destroyed them all. Determinative systems were all that remained, and even those had restrictions. The simple computer targeting systems on the missiles were as close as anyone dared.

  If Thor & Co. built an AI on LM-25, Rifka knew Inquisitors would destroy the company.

  That could also be her way off. She needed to create a transmitter that would summon the Inquisition.

  Rifka started the list of things she would need. Transmitter parts. An independent drone to put the transmitter outside. A wired connection to the transmitter that Erasmus could not hack. A workshop where Erasmus couldn’t see her preparing.

  She feared the whole project would be impossible. The Dragon had all the advantages and surveillance. She could write a program to lock him out, but all her current systems connected to the station’s networks. Erasmus would see her work.

  Except one system that didn’t. The new cybernetics did not have a wireless network. If she could verify that Erasmus hadn’t put in a backdoor, she would be able to use them to do all the design and fabrication work.

  The eyes would be her tool to escape.

  Rifka ran back, determined to send a call for rescue. The first step would to prepare the surgical device.