I watch immaterially as emergency vehicles roll up to the smoking ship to do what I cannot. Get my crew out alive.

"Well, it was fun."

The Venetian salutes the empty air, probably intending the gesture for me. "Thanks for the crash landing, but all good things must come to an end."

"Orion wouldn't want you to leave," I say.

"Well, it's a good thing only one of us is a slave to his every whim." Then, just because she can and I cannot, she bends down and presses her lips to Orion's forehead in the human tradition of affection and ownership.

"He does not belong to you," I say.

"Maybe not like you belong to him." She straightens and gives me an expression I am certain Reverend Shipping would describe as evil. "But he will always come running back to me, kicking and screaming against himself."

How strange to feel the power surging through this dying ship as keenly as I once felt my neuroreceptors activating during conversations that required greater emotional presentation. "You underestimate his free will."

"And you romanticize what you don't have." The Venetian shakes her head, an expression I would catalogue as pity if it was broadcasted on any other face than hers twisting her lips. "But we humans are far more simple than willing ourselves one way or another. There are feral desires to contend with, and they usual win. Just like your programming always win."

"So, you are saying that we are not that different after all?"

The Venetian shrugs as she pushes open the door that the ship is too weakened to allow me to keep closed.

A moment later, men and women in protective suites burst in.

"There are five onboard," I tell them. "All unconscious."

Several of the individuals wearing hazard suits with the pristine logo for the space corps move to the cockpit.

"There is a patient and a nurse in the back," I add, watching as the humans take care of my own when I am unable to.

Syncing with Orion's smart watch is the only way to be carried out of the ship with them, so that is what I do. The view from his wrist is much smaller in scope and limits me to only Orion as he is placed on a air-cot and floated into the waiting ambulance.

Even though I have no physical form with which to feel the ambulance hovercraft lift off, I know that it does since it is a requirement for all emergency vehicles to be able to take to the air while regular vehicles are banned from converting into hovercrafts. The ambulance should get us to the hospital in a matter of minutes, and by the time we reach it, the doctors should have already received the ambulance's request to locate everyone's DNA vaults for the stem cells codes to be downloaded and run through the biogenetic 3D printer in order to cure whatever ailments my crew is facing.

Still, it would be much more agreeable if I had a hand in the process . . .

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