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"Entering infected zone. Activating neural firewall."The information was relayed to him over the ship's intercom in her soothing but obviously automated voice, the one he preferred her using and was most familiar with, it being the default for human-bioship communication, and that she agreed was the simplest to use when conveying information to humans in an emergency. The comforting voice and the expedient timing only helped a little with the ordeal he knew he was about to endure and, despite extensive desensitization training for this specific mission, still hated. It wasn't supposed to be pleasant, though - it was a necessary safety procedure, better than the alternative, a risk of viral corruption. She disliked it almost as much - she didn't enjoy losing a near-constant close bond with her pilot to a simulated reality designed to be utilitarian and absolutely watertight - but if he got infected, the virus would almost immediately spread to her next and be even more dangerous for a bioship than their pilot. She had her own antivirus procedures, of course, more literal, obvious firewalls and scans running on her main biocomputer. While they were emotionally neutral for her, as much a part of her functioning as a healthy human's antibodies were for them, it was still tiring. These scans would have to be the full version, so they would take up a lot of her processor's resources. Reinhart had asked her if it felt like getting a cold. Sort of, she had explained, probably a mild one though. She still had to be battle ready, after all. This system almost certainly had physical threats as well as electronic. To call them 'defences' would be to imply purpose, maybe even sentience, about them. Nobody had put the virus there, as far as they could tell. In fact, these infected systems were often closed off to an extreme degree, beyond that which would make sense if another civilisation had quarantined them. It felt more like the local reality field had panicked and walled itself off, knowing that it couldn't fight a virus this potent. Then the worldsystem had been corrupted to the extent that it couldn't bring the wall back down again. Often, they'd had to fend off the antibodies as well as the disease, being mistaken for a disease themselves. Sometimes the antibodies even got corrupted and started acting hostile themselves. Sieglinde had been there during the first mission to the Sol system, where there'd been several interplanetary visitors who had fallen into the system and been trapped there by a restrictive reality that was trying to spread and absorb everything else, being stopped only by an equally hostile firewall. The whole thing was a chaotic mess where the only certainty was that everything except Sieglinde and her fleet, and maybe the refugees, were trying to kill them.This was another closed system, so Sieglinde didn't even know what to expect of it, other than that it didn't occupy anything like as much space as Sol, so it was probably a smaller job. Probably.Cloaked up as usual, engines running silent, sensors sweeping as much of the area as they could in as much detail as they would be able to get away with before they ran the risk of picking up viral taint, Sieglinde slowly approached the border of the infected sector and waited for Reinhart to re-acclimatize to the limits of the Safe Mode.To the pilot, it was not unlike starting up a VR game, except quite suddenly and against your will. While the graphics were too simple and abstract to be mistaken for anything but a simulation, the direct neural interfaces to it caused him to experience the game more vividly than anything in the natural world, with all his senses and a few that Sieglinde had mistakenly programmed in after forgetting that humans didn't normally have them. Some of the objects floating around in the surprisingly multi-layered darkness that, due to a processing error, he was seeing move backwards through time in three probability arcs at once, he didn't actually recognise. There'd deliberately been a lot of stimulus programmed into the simulation that was unique to Sieglinde's home world. The idea was for Reinhart to interact with it in a way that involved as much deliberate immersion as possible, having faith in its continued existence, as the first tactic of most viruses was to try and replace the reality system of the victim with their own and then spread until it overwrote an entire other reality. In fact, the way to tell someone was infected was usually their lack of ability to use the normal pathways to shift to other reality systems. This was why the Safe Mode simulation usually linked together around three to check how easily the pilot continued to travel between them.After that, of course, the actual flight path of the ship had to be available to the pilot, with some way to make course corrections, without exposing the pilot to the dangers of a potentially virally infected outside world. In a mission like this, the course would inevitably require them to cross over the boundaries of several realities, one of them hostile, at least once. It was a delicate balance. Neither ship nor pilot could break concentration or let their will falter for a microsecond. Reinhart hated these missions. Sieglinde didn't exactly look forward to them either - she'd much rather be exploring some unknown and exciting area of space than scouting somewhere they knew to be a bad idea to go anywhere near - but she was honoured to be chosen for this mission, for Reinhart's sake as well as her own. Not every duo were considered to be safe to enter an infected sector, even if it was only to scout the place out. A duo wasn't chosen just on a high success rate in training or on missions - that was only the first prerequisite. It took an exceptionally strong bond between ship and pilot, a kind of compatibility that went beyond being suited for each other at the start, beyond even Reinhart's natural talent for staying true to himself despite the damage that the virus and the firewall had both done to the human race, his effortless adaptability during conceptual travel and the utter trust they had in each other, but it was also something they spent every second of the day building upon and improving. They'd been given a crest each to commemorate the recognition of their bond. The Duality Crest, it was called - an interlinking bright green and red spiral of scales that ringed Sieglinde's identification number in a whorl on the side of her hull, with a matching raised tattoo in a half-circle above Reinhart's right eye. It stood out from his smart black flight suit and short-cropped blonde hair, and her glossy black beetle-like carapace and smooth contours. All of this was only really visible during dress parades, of course - in a mission, he was inside a booth and she was almost always cloaked. Her thoughts of pride were cut short when their proximity to the viral sector raised several alarms, even though she already knew what she was heading towards. The spread of the virus appeared on her radar like an angry writhing red snarl, even though its actual appearance would probably look the exact opposite, like a subtle draining of colour and slowing of movement, a kind of slick, crawling quality to the space, as if it were made of water that was being badly rendered in early 3D. It spread faster than it looked, though; Sieglinde was ready to hit top speed at a moment's notice if the thing became aware of her presence. Already, just from its distorted reality brushing against her object-space like an irradiated wind, she was picking up all sorts of garbled nonsense on the radar that she tried to glean some sense from without opening herself up to the virus. As usual for invasive realities, she was completely incompatible at every level of her existence, such that a total infection would reduce her to component parts as she was unraveled in an attempt to make sense of her. Reinhart's fate would be less drastic but probably worse as local reality was warped around him. Probably not Reinhart - he was strong and would fight until the thing's security systems were forced to erase him too - but most pilots would simply lose signal and forget who they had been.Several new, fast-moving blips appeared on radar. Things made of strange, rubbery, colourless primordial matter, set into simple shapes but covered in ridges and scales that probably hid all sorts of powerful energy weapons. Gargoyles, they'd been designated. Wheeling towards her in what was unmistakably an attack formation, they already began firing. Her own hatches opened up and a swarm of scarab-drones buzzed angrily to her defence, even as a cluster of blood-red lasers bristled from her carapace. A tactical grid appeared in front of Reinhart's eyes. This was a patrol that had automatically sensed something moving, not a directed attack on her, so if she lost them one way or the other, she should have a little more time. They'd evade where possible, try to get their mission done, return fire as much as they needed to, then get out of there before the entire sector turned against them.The light of the nearby solar system's moon glinted off her Crest as she spun around and fired another volley of lasers. Somewhere deep within her central nervous system, Reinhart began humming a battle anthem.