(First published ‘Ghosts in the Machine’, AAA Press, April 1990)

"What did you say was in here?" The voice of Lieutenant Boomer drifted from behind the massive storage container, and Corporal Komma fought down the impulse to throw something at it. He had been quietly looking forward to the end of his shift, planning a comfortable evening cleaning the antique chrono that he had recently managed to add to his collection, when the Lieutenant had arrived in the middle of the computer section, scattering printouts in several directions. It appeared that Colonel Tigh had requisitioned certain items that were clearly recorded by the computer as being in one storage area, only to find that they were in fact somewhere else altogether. This had resulted in a huge uproar in which Tigh had accused the Head of Support Services of inefficiency and he, in turn, had laid the blame on the computer. Eventually Adama himself had interfered in the ‘discussion’ occupying his senior officers and suggested, quietly, that perhaps a random check between the storage chambers and the recorded data was in order. When Adama ‘suggests’ something in that tone of voice it becomes an order carved in steel; Tigh had called for the duty officer (who happened to be Lieutenant Boomer) and ‘requested’ that he find a volunteer and carry out a series of spot checks down in the storage and cargo levels. Komma, half-asleep in front of a long and distinctly uninteractive system check, hadn’t moved fast enough when the Lieutenant swept into the center; the three other technicians (all, he grumbled to himself, junior in rank) had quickly pleaded important duties, leaving the portly Corporal to accept his fate with patient grace. He had keyed the requested random sample, together with a more detailed listing in case it should be needed, and followed the impatient warrior down into the desolate bowels of the GALACTICA.

The Battlestar was a large and rambling ship, a city of metal containing a labyrinth of passages and chambers. Many of the storage areas could remain unvisited for sectars until some specific item was required. Even in the cramped and crowded conditions of the Fleet, the lower chambers of the GALACTICA were unpopulated and rarely visited; despite the need for living space, it was just not possible to release the storage chambers for other purposes, since the stores were needed, even if infrequently called upon. The Lieutenant and his reluctant assistant were faced with a mammoth and thankless task, climbing in and out of stacks of spares and equipment, checking random items against a catalogue prepared with even less enthusiasm by the original task force. Komma was already bristling at the idea of the data being inaccurate. He’d been part of the original team assembled after the destruction of the Colonies, and he was sure that the Colonel’s misplaced supplies had been the result of laziness on the part of the stores technician responsible for maintaining the update on the catalogue. He began to bristle even more as Boomer, his mind scarcely on the matter in hand, began to find reason for diversion, searching among the various items just for the sake of it, and slowly driving the normally patient Corporal to the end of his tether.

"It’s supposed to be empty." Komma answered the Lieutenant’s question through clenched teeth, wrestling with the sheets of printout and resisting the impulse to kick the boxes of ‘ladder rungs (100)’ that he was marking off on the manifest.

"Then why is it sealed?" The face of the GALACTICA’s second best known Lieutenant reappeared from around the container and regarded his companion with expectation.

"How the frak should I know?" Komma regretted the remark even as he said it. He wasn’t the type to indulge in insubordination, and he rather liked Lieutenant Boomer in normal circumstances. He sighed and looked contrite, which brought the first smile to Boomer’s face since they’d started on the whole affair.

"Getting to you too, huh, Komma? Cheer up - the Commander suggested the Colonel agree to a whole secton’s furlon for whoever got landed with this job. I didn’t mention it back there - thought it might get me the wrong sort of volunteer."

"A whole secton? For a few extra centars’ work? That I can live with."

"M’m. Me too. We’d better check this chamber out - everything else has matched the manifest so far, but I can’t see anyone sealing the door to an empty room."

Komma scrambled across the boxes and followed the warrior round behind the large cable container. Tucked away in a corner was a small door, an unobtrusive flicker of light on the panel beside it proclaiming it to be locked. Boomer was trying an assortment of combinations, to little avail. Eventually he cursed softly, drew his laser, and fired one short shot into the electronics. Komma winced as the charge slammed home. He knew the Lieutenant had orders to be thorough, but surely that was taking things a little too far!

Behind the door was a chamber almost large enough to hold a pair of Vipers, lit by the dim glow of standby lighting, and containing several strange and indeterminate shapes placed carefully against the walls. In the centre of the room was a cube, standing waist-high and flickering softly with faint internal lights.

"What the ...?" Boomer stepped into the room cautiously, eyeing the weird cube with suspicion. "Would you look at this?"

Komma looked. Small alarm bells had begun to ring at the back of his mind: something about a chamber being requisitioned by Wilker for the storage of alien artefacts. "Ah - do you think this should be here, Lieutenant?" he asked, watching as his companion peered curiously at one of the machines lined against the wall.

"How the frak should I know?" Boomer deadpanned in reply, turning to grin at the Corporal in the doorway. "I don’t think this belongs anywhere. Come and look at this."

Komma stepped into the room, then jumped as the automechanism slid the door shut behind him. The room was in semidarkness, the coloured lights in the cube brighter now the illumination from the outer chamber was extinguished. There was sound, too, a faint tinkle of tiny bells, like an extremely small mechanism working somewhere very close. Boomer bent over a strange device that looked vaguely like an armchair with its legs removed. The computertech edged his way around the central cube to join him, a wary eye on the lights within. If you looked sideways at it, just so, you could almost see images ...

"Komma!"

He jumped again, recalled to where he was with a suddenness that felt almost nauseating. "Lieutenant?" he queried, looking for his companion, and was surprised to find he had moved on to the next device.

"This shouldn’t have been left down here like this. Are you sure there’s nothing on the manifest about it?"

"Positive, Lieutenant. This whole section is supposed to contain nothing more than spares for the ship’s furniture. I guess someone was looking for an empty space to store this stuff and the computer threw this chamber out as the first available."

"Yeah." The dark-skinned warrior sighed, running an absent hand over the curved device in front of him. "That must be it. But why store something that isn’t inert? This stuff is drawing power from somewhere - whatever it is. Ouch!" His hand drew back as sparks spat between his skin and the dark surface beneath it. His elbow caught the man behind him hard in the stomach, driving Komma back a step in reaction.

A hand, a hip brushed the quietly sparkling cube. There should have been resistance, should have been a hard edge, a sharp corner meeting flesh; instead there was a nothingness, a cold sensation of absence enveloping, engulfing. He cried out in alarm, was pulled in, swallowed by a sudden intensity that seized and imprisoned him. Boomer turned, alerted by that brief, choked-off cry, in time to see Komma merge into the cube, step through into an inky blackness. There was a flare of brilliant light that blinded him. When he could see again, blinking to clear the afterimages that danced in his eyes, there was no-one else in the room.

"Komma? Komma!" He stared in total disbelief at the faintly pulsing cube in front of him. Blue and silver light chased across its features, interlaced with sparks of red. He reached out a hand, then withdrew it just as cautiously. He really didn’t believe what he’d just seen, couldn’t accept the reality of it. One moment the man had been there, the next ...

As he stood there, totally nonplussed, something stirred within the cube, something fought for tangibility. A hand reached, grasping, through the seeming solidness of the surface. Almost without thinking, he caught it, held it, pulled as it pulled. There was another blinding flare of light, a rushing sensation of movement towards him. Then he was standing there, his arms full of a startlingly beautiful woman, who appeared to be wearing Komma’s uniform.

There was no up and no down. He was floating and falling, all at the same time. He opened his eyes carefully, the merest crack, then crammed them shut, appalled, terrified. A brief glimpse was enough: a nightmare view of fire and darkness, a vision of hades or heaven; either one was unendurable. He shivered, curled into a ball, and fought for inner control. He had fallen - no, he had been pulled, down, through, into ... the memory refused to make sense, his situation irreconcilable with the moments that had preceded it.

Muscles tensed as something, someone, touched his shoulder; a hand ran over his skin, caressed the curve of his arm. Distantly he heard the barest of giggles, a sound which registered as curious, then startling. The voice made him jump.

"There’s no need to be afraid, you know. It’s quite fun when you get used to it."

"Wh - what?" The sound of her words was an orchestra of chimes, a sound he would forever hear in his dreams. Slowly he opened his eyes a second time, meeting silver sparks of light in the depths of hers. "Who ...?" He breathed the question, as though even the slightest disturbance would shatter the vision before him.

She laughed, a shimmer of bells, danced away from him, twisting, turning, as though she hung suspended in liquid light. She was a shape and a shadow, a darkness rimmed with starlight, her hair an impossible shimmer of silver drifting around her darkened features. Behind her, lines of fire sped in seeming chaos, wrapping them in a framework of colour that seemed to go on forever. Komma huddled into himself, unwilling to cope with the unreality he faced. The world around him contained no familiar points of reference, and the girl, dancing on air with no respect for gravity or direction, seemed only to magnify the impossibility of the situation. He was definitely floating, or falling - the two seemed synonymous here - suspended in a landscape of light and darkness, a network woven from strands of fire against which she moved, shadow and starlight ...

A rush of sound behind him made him jump. He turned, startled, only to set himself spinning, tumbling over and over without control. Hands held him, spun with him, laughed as they lazily spiralled together; another figure in his landscape, gold and amber, equally beautiful, equally strange.

"Welcome, stranger." Her voice was lover, a murmur of horns and thunder, laughing softly as she brought them to a halt. "Pay no heed to Sound. She was first, and remembers least what it is to come here."

He was caught in her eyes, the image of her laughter cast in bronze relief, his own reflection mocking him from the amber depths. His own reflection! An image of a stranger, a tawny lion of a man rimmed in echoes of sunsets. Yet the face was his own, familiar features twisted in puzzled confusion.

"Where is - here?"

"Where you were." Silver bells and higher harmonies; the creature called Sound drifting at his shoulder, smiling, sympathetic, reassuring. "Show him, Sight. You have the way."

"When the others come."

"Others?" Things had ceased to make sense a long time ago, and the thought that there might be other creatures such as these ethereal, exquisite creations, was less surprising than it might have been a few moments before. Already his mind had accepted the warmth of their touching him, the shiver of energy that each contact sent through him. It no longer seemed important to consider the embarrassment of seeming nakedness, overwhelmed as it was by incomprehension. Sound rested her chin on his shoulder, wrapped a languid arm around his waist, the fall of her hair raising myriad tiny sparks across his back. Sight still held his other arm, hanging before him the way stars hang in the vastness of space.

A flare of light along the gathering of the network, a mutter of sound and energy, and there were three, the third a fragile thing of curve and colour, silver greens and misted blues. She arrived feet upended, hair spread out in a halo of shimmering fibres, and slowly twisted in a balletic curve until she sat on nothing at all, resting her back against the side of his leg.

"Scent I am, and sent I can be," she breathed at him, head tilted back over his hip, eyes a sparkle of emeralds. Looking down, he missed the final gathering; when he looked up, the fourth was already there, warm browns and polished blacks, no less beautiful than his companions.

"And Savour makes four," Sound giggled in his ear. "Now we are complete. Show him, Sight, so that we can show him. Help him understand."

The amber eyes smiled, the gold-touched lips parted, smiled. Still holding his hand, Sight spun them all sideways, moved out of the line of his vision, and he saw ...

The cube was a pool of white light shot through with colour, centrepiece to the chamber in which they gathered. Beyond it, images moved as though obscured by shadows. Two figures, defined more by the light that shone within them than by the shapes that held it, one warm and scarlet, the other purple, calm, both dim and intangible in this world of light and energy. Yet he could see them, and, when Sound laid gentle kisses against his cheek, hear them too, distantly, their voices harsh and discordant after the breathless chimes of his company ...

"Just who in hades are you?" Boomer demanded of the unexpected stranger. He had stood her up and held her at arms’ length, unsure if he could cope with the sensual impact of her presence. She had curves in all the right places, and then some; she was strikingly beautiful, and she oozed energy as though she had enough to give away without thinking about it.

"Sensation," she answered him, a voice full of resonance and warmth. She had coal black eyes, he realised, eyes in which ruby sparks drifted like tiny flareflies.

"You said it, lady." He swallowed hard, trying to regain a grip on the situation. "But where did you come from - and where in hades is Corporal Komma?"

She tilted her head to one side, watching him with innocent curiosity, as though his concern were incomprehensible to her. Perhaps it was. "Within." She smiled, looking him up and down with interest. "I chose to come without."

"I noticed," he growled, almost absently. It was definitely Komma’s uniform she was wearing; it didn’t fit the same, but it was his. The problem was that Boomer suspected that the body inside it might be his as well: a thought which worried him for several very good reasons. "Look - I don’t understand any of this. One moment I’m in this room with a bored and harassed Corporal by the name of Komma, the next there’s this beautiful brunette wearing his uniform standing in front of me and telling me she’s a sensation ..."

"No," she laughed. "I AM Sensation. It is what I am called in the net. I have no other name now. You sent us your companion. I merely borrowed his form to repay the compliment. It has been so long since any have shared the net with us, and so long since any of us have come without, to the world of texture and mass. I mean no harm."

"No harm - ! Now, hang on a centon. You just said you borrowed his form - are you telling me you ARE Komma? You sure don’t look like him."

She thought that one over, then slowly nodded her head. "The flesh is only a vessel, shaped by the spirit within. HE is within the net, and his flesh holds my spirit for the time we share. But his is his form. There is no other."

Boomer’s hand dropped to his laser, dropped away to his side. What good would threatening to shoot her do? She’d just admitted she didn’t own the flesh she was wearing ... "So you steal someone’s body - for what purpose? Why?"

"Not steal." Her voice sounded hurt. "Not exactly ... When I return to the net, then he can return to this flesh. It will reshape to his spirit and take no harm from it."

"Right." Boomer set his shoulders and tried to assume a businesslike tone. "Then you can just go back to your ‘net’ and let Komma come back where he belongs. Right now."

"Oh, no." She seemed amused for some reason. "I can’t do that."

His hand crept back to the butt of his laser. He couldn’t risk damaging her, but he might just be able to intimidate her into co-operating. "You just said ..."

"Yes. I can go back. But not yet. Not before the transfer system is fully repowered."

Reflexively, the warrior glanced at the cube. It pulsed as before, but now he could see that the sparkle of lights within it was slower, less intense. He sighed and stared at his companion in total complexity. "And how long will that take?"

She was amused. Her face lit up with a broad and very becoming grin. "A centar or two. Long enough."

"Long enough for what?" He was really suspicious now, eyeing her with puzzled caution, not sure where events were leading him.

"Oh ..." She shrugged. "For a meal, things like that. Physical experience. I have been discorporate for a long time. I have to touch as much as possible, take those memories back into the net, share them."

"Share - you mean there’s more of you in there?"

Her laugh was seductive; it sent shivers down his spine. "Not in there! In the net. Everywhere. That’s just a gateway. We occupy the same space as you do."

He looked behind him; he couldn’t help it. Apart from the dimly looming shadows of the unfamiliar equipment, there was nothing else in the room. Certainly nobody else. He looked back at her and frowned. "But there are others?"

"Of course." She moved sideways and sat on the edge of the cube, subtly reinforcing her stated inability to re-enter it. "You don’t think I would abandon your friend to the net alone, do you? They welcome the company. They will look after him."

That hadn’t been the main reason for his query, but it was reassuring to hear nonetheless. He leaned back against the wall, watching her, and wondered what he should do. His first impulse was to take her to the Commander, make a full report and let someone else decide what happened next. Except ... well, it had sort of been his fault that Komma had been swallowed by this transfer process, and, now he thought about it, the report he would have to make would sound quite fantastic, and then what if others did come out while he was away, and no-one would know about them, and ... frak, why did she have to smile at him like that?!

"You are confused," she murmured gently, slipping off her perch to slink closer. Slink. There was no other word for it. It was hard to remember that the body she was wearing belonged to a stockily built Corporal who was both decidedly male and hardly what Boomer would describe as attractive. Not to him, anyway. She was neither male, nor unattractive, now that he came to think about it.

"Ah ... yeah, I’m confused. I don’t know what to do with you. I ought to report this to someone ..."

"Don’t do that." Her advice was gentle. "I intend no harm to this vessel. It is my home now, as well as yours. Others would want to question me, investigate me. All I want is a little company before I return to where I belong. I couldn’t tell them the how of things, nor the why. I only know the what. And they might not let me return."

"No," he agreed faintly. She was right, of course. If he reported this there’d be a full-scale science team in this chamber before anyone could count to ten. Wilker would demand the right to probe the artefacts that he had probably abandoned here in the first place. He’d probably treat this exquisite creature as just another piece of machinery to be examined, and without an understanding of the processes involved he might just ensure that Komma would never be recovered from wherever he had gone. Boomer wasn’t sure he’d like to be responsible for that. He rather like the unassuming computertech, whose innocent gullibility had provided the perfect touch for Starbuck’s conniving charm, and whose dedication to duty and patient acceptance of his lot was almost inspiring, in a quiet way. He wasn’t a Viper pilot, true, but not everyone could aspire to that brilliant existence, and he was a warrior, a fellow Galactican. Boomer couldn’t just abandon him to fate without trying to do something about it himself.

"Okay," he breathed, aware of her closeness, the warmth of her next to him, "maybe my report can wait until I get Komma back. I mean, you don’t look like a danger to the ship, and if I take you into my custody then you won’t do anyone else any harm ... But we’re staying right here until this thing gets back to full power. I’m not leaving this equipment, or you, unattended for a micron."

"Fine," she said softly. "I don’t mind what we do. As long as it’s together ..."

Voices faded, the vision dissipated into faint images of light moving against the glory of the net. He knew what it was now, where he was, in a strange kind of way. He was still aboard the GALACTICA, precisely where he had been before he had entered the alien cube. Only now he was part of it in a way he couldn’t quite understand. The net, the interweaving of fire that made up his landscape: that was the passage of power through the ship’s systems, each channel of light an active transmission that carried it. The ghostly shadows were the warrior and the creature that was Sensation: he was seeing their inner energy rather than the cloak of flesh that contained it. He had become a ghost in a world of ghosts, a spirit liberated from its prison to experience another kind of perception.

"Your mind interprets what it sees as best it can," Savour told him quietly, in warm and rumbling tones. "Within the net, true experience is felt and not explained. This is a world of impression and sensation, not logic and laws. If it feels right, it happens. We do not work, we dance. We do not consider, we do. We are part of it, in harmony with it, and we maintain that harmony in instinctive fashion, saving thought for appreciation and experience."

"Experience." Sound echoed the word in his ear, and then giggled. "I like you."

"Oh." He considered her silver eyes, trying to comprehend what had happened to him. Everything had happened so fast, everything was so overwhelming ... "I - I think I like you, too."

"Don’t think." Scent slid up his side and shook an electric shimmer of hair over his shoulder. "Feel."

"While she is gone ..." Sight drifted in front of him, "you are Sensation." So saying, she leaned forward and kissed him gently on the forehead. Sparks of light exploded into his mind and he gasped, the shock akin to the one gained by standing in a cold turboshower - unexpected, neither painful or pleasurable, but a little of both together.

"Please ..." He felt suddenly overwhelmed by their presences, unwilling to let his situation overwhelm him completely. "This is too much - I - I’m not sure ..." His feelings were in total conflict; the warm sensibility of their touch stirred things within him he had no idea how to surrender to, and that embarrassed him, tightened knots of fear and tension in his stomach. He had never felt at ease around women at the best of times, always awkward, tongue-tied by a fear of rejection. He liked to watch them from a distance, admire beauty for beauty’s sake, but if one ever stopped to pass the time of day he would stammer and blush and curse himself for a fool. He had female friends, of course he had, but not many, and most of those were fellow workers, relationships established by the requirements of common industry, intellectual rather than emotional friendships; if he had ever felt attracted on a more personal level, he had never had the courage to mention it. Now here he was, closely surrounded by three very attractive, almost unreal creatures, who felt no inhibition in their sharing, their closeness, and that coupled with the sheer need to cope with the unexpected change in his environment, was almost too much to bear. The worst of it was that he felt guilty about it. They really seemed to like him, and he wanted to respond - hades, they made him feel that he wanted to be really alive, as though he had never really experienced anything before - but ... but he didn’t know how, couldn’t relax into the sensual undertones that washed over him. He was drowning, and he didn’t know how to swim.

"Later." Scent brushed his cheek with her fingertips, smiled, and was gone, leaving a cooling warmth on his skin where she had been.

"Free yourself." Sight blinked eyes of gold and amber, gathered herself up, stretched, and vanished upwards in a blaze of light,, leaving afterimages that showered him with tiny sparks.

"I always liked you," Sound giggled from behind him. "You have warmth in your soul." He turned, but she too was gone, echoes of bells and cymbals. He hung, suspended in the net, alone except for Savour, who sat in empty air and considered him with thoughtful intent.

"We embarrass you." The dark-skinned figure rose and moved towards him with easy grace. "Our apologies for that. It is not so easy to remember how it is without. Many cannot cope with the directness of the light within. Here there are no secrets, no self-delusions. The spirit reveals itself; the colours of the soul are clear. It is easy to hide from the truth when enclosed by flesh; impossible when the truth is all you have."

"I don’t understand," Komma sighed, wrapping his arms around himself in unconscious withdrawal. "This place - all of you - I don’t belong here. I’m not like you. I’m nothing special, nothing at all."

Savour smiled, shook his head slowly. "You have lied to yourself for so long you believe it. Why should we like you when you do not like yourself, that is what you wonder. But you have more in you than that, else you would not be here at all." He extended his hand, offering it in friendship, warm red chasing across purple-brown skin. He was full of colour, like his companions, outlined in light of his own making. Komma hesitated, then found courage and uncurled an arm to offer his own hand in return. He halted there, hand half offered, for the first time seeing his own skin in the revealing light of the net. No, not the light of the net: his own light, his own inner self shining through. Orange fire played across bronzed flesh, tinged with an unhealthy grey, as though the light were dampened, muddied out with conflicting shades.

"Fear, uncertainty, tension." Savour laid his hand in the hesitant palm, curled strong fingers into a warm and reassuring grip. "The colours are easy to read if you know how. But under it, strength and vitality, an intuitive and sensitive soul. We know you all, you who live within the net and yet without. We watch you, watch over you. Each soul tells its own story. The colours are glorious to see."

Komma looked again at the ghostly images that moved together on the far side of the chamber: red and gold shimmering with hints of other brightness, blues and greens tinged with shades of red and brown. Through Savour’s touch he began to understand a little of what he could see. The colours were the play of feeling and emotion, a summation of character and mood; harmonised and clear where the inner self was balanced, conflicting and muddied by negative feeling and conflicting emotion. Right now, for instance, the Lieutenant, who was so clearly the Lieutenant despite an inability to distinguish physical features, was torn by opposing desires, the calm, rational side of him darkened by worry, his self responding to the sensual warmth of Sensation by a surge of passion. And then there was Sensation herself, brighter, less shattered by rainbows, her inner self laughing, uninhibited, clearly desiring the hesitant warrior, amused at his inner conflict. She moved closer; their auras touched and flared together with brilliant sparks of red. Suddenly embarrassed, Komma turned away, looking at Savour with new eyes.

"People are complicated things." His companion was smiling at him. "They hide themselves from themselves as well as each other. That may come to something - it may not. Let me show you more of our world, and you may understand a little more of your own."

Komma nodded slowly, looking down at his hands where they grasped each other, his own colours brighter as his inner tension relaxed, Savour’s strength feeding his own. "How?" he asked. "Do we walk, or fly?"

"Neither," the spirit before him laughed. "We simply go!" And they went, a breathless movement like water poured from one vessel to another, a heady rush spinning them from resolution through dissolution and back again. When everything sorted itself out again and the exhilaration passed, allowing him to breathe again, Komma was somewhere else entirely: a jewel-encrusted cave, woven from intricate pulses of light through which ghosts danced. Only he knew it, recognised the place with the intuition of instinct. This was home - the spartan calmness of the computer centre revealed for the scene of endless activity that it truly was. Savour released his hand, but he scarcely noticed as he moved like a fish along the banks of equipment. Ordered, regimented activity pulsed beneath their surfaces, combining together to create an impression of eternal motion, liquid light flexing and shifting as the power passed from terminal to memory to storage and back again. Without thinking, he plunged his hand beneath that fluid surface, feeling the flow of energy pass through him, insistent and irresistible. The data it carried shot undemanded into his mind - something about system statuses and memory allocations. He withdrew his hand in wonder and looked at it, seeing the images of the impact scattering across his skin like a shower of tiny stars. Then he grinned and plunged his hand again, stirring through the liquid information, trawling for scattered data he could identify. Savour laughed and dived after his passage, catching his shoulders and holding him back from a headlong plunge.

"Don’t," the warm voice rumbled, "they’ll notice. Besides, you can get lost in there, and there is so much to show you yet."

"That’s how, isn’t it?" Komma had found an enthusiasm that outmatched the overwhelming nature of his new world. "That’s how you know so much about us. You can read our files, assimilate our knowledge ... what do you mean, they’ll notice?"

"We are part of the net. We can affect it as well as move through it. You can feel the pattern of the information, but you must be discreet, otherwise you will add to or change the pattern in some way. That will be noticeable to them." He indicated the shimmer of ghostly lights that clustered around a complex interweaving of light on one side of the room.

Komma frowned, momentarily missing the image because of the intensity of colour, and then perception shifted and he realised what and who he was looking at. Halcyon was immersed in the interactive simulation that was currently challenging the skill of all the games players aboard the GALACTICA. The rest of the duty techs were gathered behind him, urging him on as he neared the level of the record score. Their enthusiasm was a bright shifting of overlapping colours, his halo a shimmer of scarlet and pink as he poured his energy into the fast-moving system. Behind him Kalith radiated envy, overlaying his normal bluish melancholy. It was strange how easy it was to recognise each familiar individual from the shifting patterns of light and colour, how clear the underlying tensions of the workplace became.

"They shouldn’t be doing that," Komma muttered absently. "Captain Psion will kill them if he catches them doing that on duty."

"Then perhaps you should do something," Savour suggested softly. "I believe he comes."

He looked up, looked through - there were no such simple barriers as metal walls or doors within the net - and saw, moving towards the glittering centre with cold inevitability, the angled, hard edges of the infamous Captain Psion, a man few people liked, mainly because he seemed to hate everybody. It was clear now, the brooding anger he carried, a dark red stain laid over a grey soul. Komma shivered involuntarily, seeing truly for the first time the ruin the man had made of himself, eaten up with self-hate and distrust. He was a cold, hard man, and he would take great delight in punishing the young technicians clustered around the game; he would do it simply for the sake of it, not for any notions of duty or responsibility, making himself more enemies and growing more bitter with it. Komma was afraid of him, always made a point of making himself as unobtrusive as possible in his presence. He looked once on the glowing enthusiasm of the group, again at the approaching storm, and made a quick decision. Leaving Savour drifting above the consoles, he turned and dived into the active terminal.

For a moment the impact of power and data together was almost too much to bear; then he had what he needed, and Halcyon’s winning ship disintegrated into an electronic storm as Cylon attack ships impacted against it. The game ended, the group relaxed and scattered, so that when Psion loomed through the doorway it was to find an industrious group of technicians engaged on their allotted tasks. He glowered at them for a thoughtful moment, then moved on through the centre and into the duty office. You could feel the universal sigh of relief that went after him.

Komma was shivering, drained by what he had done. He felt disorientated, shocked by the overload of power he had experienced. Savour’s arm was a warm and comforting weight around his shoulders; he leaned into the offered strength and slowly recovered himself.

"You do to much for them," Savour was saying, watching the busy technicians go about their business. "He takes advantage of it."

"Halcyon? Komma identified the man in question, shrugged self-consciously. "He needs looking after. He’s young."

Savour laughed, hugged him with affection. "Young and enthusiastic, inconsiderate and selfish. Let him fall on his face occasionally. That way he will appreciate you more when you do help him. Don’t let that streak of self-interest take too firm a root, or he will become manipulative for the sake of it, and have no concern for the thoughts or feelings of others."

Komma frowned, watching the ghost that he had befriended betray the colours of his selfishness in the rainbow that surrounded him. Savour was right: there was no concealment in the net, no cloak to cover a man’s true self.

"How do you know," he asked plaintively, "so much about me? I know about US, about the data flow and the ship; I mean, me personally. About Halcyon and - well - everything."

Savour loosened his hold on tense shoulders, offering his hand again. "We all have our chosen people," he explained good-naturedly. "Sight was watched you, and we share. We always share." He smiled. "There are those who stand out among the shadows that walk our world. Those we watch over, learn about. We do not have favourite places, as you do; the net is the net and is complete wherever we are. But we do have favourite people, those who can inspire, comfort or amuse us with their company. Our beloved, if you like."

Komma blushed a little, a flare of darker orange over a bronze skin. Savour was not using the word as a trite explanation; he meant it. In the net, the warrior was beginning to understand, there was only honesty of feeling; and friendship and love were only differing degrees of the same thing.

"Would you like to see?" Savour was asking, tactfully ignoring the ripple of colour. "Would you like to share?"

Komma turned and looked again at the crystal cave that was his workplace, at the bustling colours of his fellow technicians. Never again would this place seem cold and unfeeling; never again would he take for granted the life that moved around him every moment of every day.

"Yes," he breathed, finally knowing, finally wanting what this world had to offer him: the deeper understanding of his own; the deeper understanding of himself. "I want to see. I want to share."

Laughing, Savour caught his hand and they were gone, leaving the familiar ghosts unaware of their passing.