Hellflower (v1.1) by Eluki bes Shahar

any cubic tonight. I sat under Firecat’s hullports and watched Tiggy breathe until I fell asleep.

Insert #4: Paladin’s Log
    It was my fault that Butterfly broke into the Wanderweb Justiciary to steal Valijon Starbringer. And from the moment that she made the choice to do so, it was inevitable that she would not abandon him.
    I say that now, with hindsight. One may always desire facts to be other than they are. But the facts touching on this matter unfolded in inevitable progression over a span of years.
    From the time Butterfly and I met on Pandora the problem of reliable communication has been a concern. Unless Butterfly and I could share information while she was away from Firecat , we were extremely vulnerable. Clandestine communication would markedly increase our joint chances to "live to get older."
    I had originally thought that arranging this communication would be a simple matter, but the equipment I described to Butterfly did not exist. She attempted to construct some components, but even the tools did not exist-an entire technology had been destroyed in the unreasoning backlash against fully-volitional logics. At Butterfly’s urging we began to search for something available in the modern world that would meet our needs.
    When we finally determined the existence of the RTS unit, Butterfly had a number of reasons we could not acquire it, but as the Library at University I had incorporated several important studies on human behavior, and retained enough of that information not to find her actions inconsistent.
    The implant operation would be a source of emotional trauma to any organic of the galactic culture. For a Luddite Saint from Granola, worn to pastoral simplicity and no technology more complex than the lilt-board plow and the waterwheel, it would be an even greater one. Butterfly is not as indifferent to the mores of either her natal culture or her adoptive culture as she pretends.
    So we delayed. Eventually we came to Wanderweb-having carried the RTS unit with us for over a year-and the surgery was accomplished. Emotional backlash and suppressed cultural bias did the rest. A course of action undertaken in mutual willingness to provide greater safety to us both-the transponder implantation-leads inevitably to an action of great risk to us both-the jailbreak of the alMayne. If Butterfly considered her reasons for insisting on that course of action at all, she might have articulated them as being "to prove that she still had it." In reality, it was to prove that she still was it.
    By the very nature of what I was, Butterfly was cut off from even the society of criminals and outlaws. An escaped slave, even an illegal emigrant, can find peers and socialization in the nightworld society.
    The possessor of a fully-volitional logic, a Librarian, is outcast by every thinking being. There is no one in the Imperium so depraved as to knowingly offer a Librarian sanctuary, and no one who would keep such a thing secret.
    On the fringe of the Phoenix Empire, away from the deadly cataloging bureaucracy, the two of us were safe. But what at first had seemed limitless freedom I discovered to be circumscribed indeed. We could go no closer to the center of the Empire than the very fringes of the Directorates. Any thorough medical examination would reveal what Butterfly was, and any cursory technical inspection would uncover me. The penalty for either discovery was death.
    It was a death only slightly more certain than that which was the consequence of Butterfly’s chosen profession-but illegal pilot was, in all fairness, one of the few ways of acquiring credit she could espouse.
    Piloting is a marketable skill-and she had been trained, if not certified, by Market Garden as part of her processing. A trained pilot willing to take considerable risks to maintain his freedom quickly becomes a darktrader.
    If he has the money to purchase a ship-or can find a sponsor. The Pandora business venture on which Butterfly discovered me