All those glinting implants tracing over the surface of her skin, all that tech and there wasn’t room for one stinking comm link on or in her?

She said she could not risk an external distraction while linked in to a ship.

“War ship?” I ventured a guess.

She nicked me lightly with a claw. I got the message: Off limits for discussion.

I still thought about it, though. A lot, I thought about it. She interfaced with a ship’s system to look at the stars. What must that be like?

I dared to ask her.

“Pain,” she replied. She looked down at her forearm; turned it so the ambient light caught the gleam of copper wires beneath her fur. Those wires traced over her whole body. “Much pain.” When she looked up, her large, amber eyes had gone remote, as if she were looking into the depths of the universe, “Can feel the emptiness and see very far. See all the things that fill the space between points.”

Her mind was out there right then in the deep dark, untethered from the limitations of mind and body. Alone in the vastness.

I had barely brushed that terrible cold and solitude once in the Corp, during a near-disastrous planetary maneuver. I flinched away from the memory of that terrible sense of vulnerability. I mean, I shut it down fast. Yet she seemed to relish it, staring into it, seeking a way through it.

I shuddered.