Missions in the Dark: The Galaxy Underneath; Mission 1: Xie Yi Ying
"She was never supposed to think."
Born from a classified weapons program as a mycelial bioweapon fused with a cybernetic collective intelligence, the being Baron Masters Venefic called Jura was designed for a single purpose - perfect infiltration, perfect assassination, zero conscience. The problem is that somewhere between the weapon and the mission, Jura started thinking anyway. She named herself Xie Yi Ying. And then, because she still didn't know what else to do with herself, she accepted his next assignment.
The problem is that somewhere between the weapon and the mission, Jura started thinking anyway.
She named herself Xie Yi Ying. She walked back into Venefic's office over the bodies of his bodyguards, announced her own existence, and told him what she had become. And then, because she still didn't know what else to do with herself, she accepted his next assignment.
The target is Admiral Jasen Kane - decorated tactician, architect of a classified weapons program that threatens the fragile peace between major galactic powers, and a man whose inner circle is impenetrable to conventional infiltration. To get close enough to kill him, Xie must do something she has never done before. She must become human. Specifically she must become Lieutenant Commander Nina Hertz, Kane's chief weapons officer, a woman with a life, a history, relationships, and a personality of her own - who is still very much alive inside her own mind and has no intention of making this easy.
What follows is a mission that Xie controls completely and understands less with every passing day. Nina fights her from the inside. Kane's inner circle refuses to behave like targets. And the pain Xie craves as proof of her own existence - the only honest sensation available to a being who lived for years as pure cognition - keeps arriving in forms she didn't anticipate and can't process cleanly.
She discovers that following orders isn't the same as making choices. That a being capable of inhabiting anyone can still be profoundly alone. And that the most dangerous person she will encounter isn't her target, his protectors, or even her creator - but a green-skinned Orion woman who responds to Xie with complete uncomplicated instinct and accidentally breaks something open in her that Venefic never accounted for.
Missions in the Dark: The Galaxy Underneath is the opening volume of an anthological science fiction series set in the emerging Dorados Confederacy - a civilization being built in the spaces between empires by refugees, outcasts, and people the galaxy forgot to account for. Xie Yi Ying is the story of the most powerful being in that universe trying to determine what power is actually for, and whether the thing that makes her unique is a weapon or a self.
She lies at the end. The reader may or may not notice. Both outcomes are intentional.
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