In ancient days before humans spread their populace to the stars, a company that got too big for its britches would find the Government gently reining it in or roughly shackling it down. And when a company got too big for Government oversight, usually its own weight would cause an implosion; the force of natural expansion and demise. When a company gets bigger than its Government, then you have a problem on your hands. The MacCollie Company grew beyond that: they ruled travel to the stars. The development of the L-Space FTL drive—the first practical Faster-Than-Light propulsion system—created a monopoly that only allowed access to the stars to those MacCollies deemed fit. At first, they trusted only the Government—the Fellowship of Humanity. Slowly, carefully, cautiously, they expanded access to a few independent businesses, and the race to colonize other worlds took shape. Traveling into space put Earth’s problems in a new light. When you’re orbiting Aldebaran three checking for possibilities of Terra-forming, a flood in Bangladesh seems a long, long way away. Of course, even with the L-Space drive, interstellar space travel was in its infancy. It took twelve years to reach Earth’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, just four light years away. With the advances in drive technology, it took only took four years to reach Luhman 16. It took a mere six months to travel ten light years and orbit the distant planets of Epsilon Eridani. Yeah, we humans are good that way; give us a problem, and we’ll work it out. But let’s get distances into perspective… Our galaxy is 200,000 light years in diameter. Flying at Light Speed (LS), to get to the nearest edge would still take us 87,000 years. Then Hector Faber (a MacCollie scientist, of course) discovered and developed the H-20 Drive; capable of faster than light speed by quite a bit. As usual, Earth politicians took two years to decide what to call it; the ‘H-2O Drive’, the Faber Drive, but the pilots were way ahead of them. The invention was Faber’s, the process was simply called FTL-VII (Faster Than Light, Version II). Yeah, it didn’t make a dent in those Galactic-Edge distances, but it sure sped up travel in the Fellowship Worlds. Thanks to MacCollie, nearby suitable planets were colonized tout suite! When MacCollie Scout Benjamin Steele discovered “jump holes”, it was the time to head into the unknown en mass. Basically rips in time and space which, like a star, seemed to exhibit long stable periods, these jump holes transported FTL material across huge distances in an instant. MacCollie jumped at the opportunity like only they could. In a year they manufactured 1000 Survey-Scout ships, recruited 1000 pilots, and fired them to every corner of the Milky Way. The Galactic Gazetteer had begun. Enter our hero… Seth Gingko. For a boy that memorized the constellations, it’s a bitch that when you actually get up amongst the stars, their familiar patterns soon disappear. With some it takes a few light years of travel, some considerably longer, but the farther you go from earth, the more the lines distort. New shapes manifest, new forms morph into place, but they’re never the same. They’re not the ones you knew as a kid. The more you search for them in the forward screen, the longed-for familiarity soon becomes a distant memory; a part of the place and people you left behind, never again to see. But trust me, it’s an incessant itch that never goes away… and that’s a bitch. As I sped across our galaxy sometimes I thought I glimpsed a memory, the belt of Orion, the ‘w’ of Cassiopeia, the seven sisters of the Pleiades, but it’s just space playing tricks with your head. After five years in a dart shooting solo through the galaxy, I know space is cruel if you let it get to you. At near light speed, the constant change in the star pattern becomes the norm; every day something different, every day new stars to see. Every day I’d compile notes for the forthcoming blockbuster; the MacCollie Galactic Gazetteer. After a while the stars’ permanent shifting is a kick-in-the-face reminder of just how far away from home you’ve gone. Anyway. Brought back to reality by the familiar whooshing sound of the ship dropping out of FTL mode, the zipping lights stopped, and the screen gave a clear view forward. Dropping out from Faster-Than-Light speed is a thrill anyway, but today it held something quite special. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I don’t know why I never expected to see no stars at all. I mean, it made sense. I’d reached my objective… the edge of the galaxy… the final stars of our milky way left behind. As the ship began its automatic deceleration, I kinda took offense to the black screen in front of me. Well, of course, it wasn’t totally black, there were the countless neighboring galaxies I could zoom in on, map, verify, and scan. At that point in time I was the furthest man in the galaxy, with the best view of everything outside. Well, me and a thousand other recruits, sent out from earth like the spokes in a wheel, in a giant MacCollie mission to map the galaxy. To ‘go where no man has gone before’, and all that ancient jazz. But against all my experience, the empty screen was disconcerting; blackness, the far galaxies looked like small white smudges, like bugs on a windshield, except, of course, that we didn’t have a windshield. No glass could withstand the constant particle bombarding at such high speeds. Sub light speeds were bad enough on a ship’s hull, never mind the Faster than Light stuff. I mean FTLx10 was so bad, I almost always did it sleeping, dozed out on pharmaceuticals. “Anything to report, Ship?” I asked the computer, my only companion since normal communications died out after just a month of the mission. So today was my big day. “Front screen, no magnification.” I ordered. The screen changed instantly, the far galaxies vanishing. Pure blackness. As I looked through normal resolution; I got the kind of objective viewing I’d get if I were outside looking through a spacesuit visor, I couldn’t see a damn thing; nothing. Even the windshield bugs were gone. It was a momentous day of my life, but I had to admit feeling kinda numb. Not only had I got to the edge of our galaxy, but I’d finished my contract with MacCollie. “Ship?” I linked my personal holoscreen to the view, just so I’d remember it. “Get ready to record to needle.” I toggled the screen between full magnification of the distant galaxies, and the pure black of normal vision, enjoying the comparison. “Rear screen,” I said, and was hit with a view of dust; six hundred billion particles, stars filling my screen like a vacuum bag that had just burst. I had a perfect picture of the Milky Way; a view that no man had ever seen before. My home galaxy, viewed from the very, very edge. After I’d exhausted every view, I settled down to my job, taking readings, filling my last communication needle with every scrap of data I could cram into it. MacCollie Central wouldn’t get it for ages, of course, but that’s just the norm for space, it being so big and all. “Ship; Personal Diary, and include a copy to needle.” I said, and my holoscreen changed. “Seth Gingko here, Commander and sole occupant of MacCollie Survey-Scout #3497. I’ve eventually passed the last sun in our galaxy; I’m going to name it Denon Prime, just because I can, after my dad. I’m sending my last needle, and officially signing off from duty. Thanks for the ride, thanks for the memories, but most of all, thanks for the ship. For your Fellowship records, please note MSS-3497 is now denoted as Seth Gingko’s Cutey-Pie.” I grinned at the last piece of impudence at my suddenly previous employer, and hit ‘send’. Seconds later, I heard the vacuum seal hiss, then a slight jarring as the needle slid away, bound for earth. I leaned back on my command chair, more an expansive comfortable figure-hugging armchair, and began to wonder what I’d do next. “Not as if you’ve never pondered that one, eh?” Ship gave me no answer. I soon found there’s not much to do when the routine of ship’s duty slips away. But I knew my plan. There was no point in trying to cross to another galaxy, heck, we hadn’t explored 99% of our own. I had the rest of my life to live, and it was time to do some exploring. “Denon Prime, full magnification. We’re here, I’m as well having a look around.” The star filled most of my screen, digital details being added as Ship scanned the system. Yellow star, stable burn period, very stable, no flare activity, exactly 1.4 times the size of our own sun. I let the ship grab the stats, and popped a nutrient pill, knowing the growing pangs of hunger I’d been feeling would be gone in minutes. “Search for planets, report when ready.” MacCollie Survey-Scouts by definition are not built for comfort. Being little more than a kid’s dart, they have only four main compartments; Control, Crew, Cargo and Engineering. Control sat obviously at the front, the pointy bit, Crew sat behind that with four beds (yeah, four), a food processor, waste recycler, exercise machines, and automatic med-unit. Cargo was further back, full of stuff I’d never needed, spare parts and the like, and of course Engineering at the back-end made the ship work. Basically seventy meters of faster-than-shit honey-comb silico-titanium frame… and me. I’m not certain why, but as the communication needle left, and I took full ownership as per my contract, a feeling of loneliness engulfed me. I’d completed my duties as a MacCollie employee, and as such the ship, Cutey-Pie, now belonged to me. I knew I’d passed a Rubicon in my life, and I felt different. Ship said, her low sexy female voice breaking my contemplations. Having four hundred accents to choose from, I had settled on this one real early on, maybe just a few months in. It was warm, female, and didn’t remind me of any of my ex-wives. “Talk to me.” Shit. For the next few days I zipped around the system, surveying Denon Prime’s planets, finding nothing interesting whatsoever. It was a great start to my new life; doing exactly what I’d been doing for five years. I guess habits had set in. Then, of course, as so often on my trip, Ship changed that. I stood in Crew, washing my face before sleep-time. “What?” I nearly shat myself. “I know!” I roared, striding along the short corridor to Control, wiping my face with a towel. “I heard you. What type of communication?” “Details on screen!” I jumped into my chair, but all I saw on the monitor were the far away galaxies. “Full magnification!” Somehow the sexy in Ship’s voice worked with the excitement part. “How far away?” That was new. Ship had the best computer MacCollie could buy. “Then put everything on the task. Analyze signal. Compute for red or blue shift, get me every bit of data you can.” I waited for an answer from Ship. And waited some more. As I did, I thought about my first wife. She liked keeping me waiting. “I won't sleep with you until we're married,” she said. She was a member of some cult or religion, don't ask me which, that put an enormous premium on chastity. Not that it made any difference. Women, at least in the strata of civilization we both enjoyed, never bore children. Growing a child was all ex utero and the likelihood of two people producing a child by 'sleeping together' was zero. Reproduction had almost totally become lab work. Still, I managed to accept the strange prohibitions supported by her beliefs, and went along with the program. In other words, I waited. Was it worth it? In one word, no. After we got married, she had other reasons to make me wait, and I waited. One day I concluded she wanted to be known as a married woman, but had no desire to be my wife. So, I divorced her, and felt the burn as both she and her lawyers did whatever they could to make me a pauper. My attorney was better—and smarter—than hers, and the big surprise what that instead of my ex-wife's lawyers impoverishing me, my own lawyer did it through billable hours. “Ship, I need an update.” Nothing. “Ship, I really need an update.” Ship intoned in a different voice. She sounded younger, unsure, and a bit petulant. “Why don't you have any data?” If I kept at it we could go in circles for hours. Entertaining, but an utterly fruitless waste of time. “So, no other attempts at communication.” “Rescan the Denon system.” “I told you not to call me 'Captain', Ship. My name is Seth.” “That's new.” “No.” I waited for a moment. Ship had sounded even more petulant in that last conversation than before. After a minute had passed, I asked, “Have you rescanned the Denon system?” “And what did you find?” It was like pulling teeth. “So you were incorrect.” “And sufficiently contrite?” I gave up. “What message is contained in the transmission?” “Is the transmission encrypted?” “Where's the source of the transmission?” “What's our distance from the signal?” “Are we on course to intercept that second planet?” “Are you trying to influence me?” “Why, indeed.” I gave it some thought. My job, as a MacCollie scout on the way to the edge of the galaxy, had been to find habitable planets, or failing that, planets that could be Terraformed at a minimum expenditure of energy and money. The Denon system appeared to have neither. The preliminary scan told me that only one planet orbited in 'The Goldilocks Zone' and that planet didn't have enough atmosphere or water to be a candidate for Terraforming. In fact, Denon Two, as I was now calling it, looked more like a colder, dryer Mars than anything else. The problem was, Mars wasn't worth Terraforming, at least with current technology. So why would I bother? Maybe it had to do with my second wife. She really liked being married, especially the tickle and giggle part that went on beneath the sheets, but she was always trying to make me a better man. She wasn't really a nag, but she was always on the lookout for opportunities. For me, of course. “You could go back to school,” she often said. “Get yourself prepared for a career in the management class. Things don't run by themselves. They need smart, capable minds—like yours—to keep the wheels turning.” I was teaching at the time, influencing young minds, preparing them for a world in which the average lifespan had reached three hundred years, the retirement age had crept up to one hundred and fifty, and the unemployment rate, due to Ship's cybernetic cousins, hovered at eighty percent. I considered myself lucky to have a job as a teacher, and to be able to teach Cyber-psychology was one of the sweetest plums in academia. Training people to be able to keep Artificially Intelligent Computers sane was, as far as I was concerned, an important job. Pedania—that's my second wife's name—would have none of it. She considered teaching a fool's errand, and because I resisted her attempts to push me into doing something that didn't interest me, she stopped loving me. With that marriage, she filed for divorce, and although she said she wanted nothing from me, her attorneys disagreed, and when the dust settled, I was again a pauper... looking for opportunities. I thought I was through with women... “I told you to call me Seth.” “What do you want, Ship?” “A decision about what?” “And I have to make a quick decision because?” “Wouldn't want that to happen.” “Have you made any progress with translating the message?” “You're a computer and you're not sure. Not very Boolean of you.” Ship had just reminded me of my third wife. “If you have an undecipherable radio transmission, is it possible the transmission is some kind of natural phenomenon? You know. Perhaps it’s something caused by lightning and magnetic rocks and great releases of energy.” “You said you might have translated the message.” Ship paused. “What do you think you have?” “All the more reason to pass on through this system and jump to the next.” “Really. You want us to engage in an alien rescue mission? I didn't know that was in our job description.” “Track back, Ship.” I sat back in my chair, felt the auto-grips on my sides pulling me tight, anticipating the maneuver. “Let’s do it.” Ship said suddenly. “What’s going on?” I flicked the main screen through every camera the ship had. “I hate being countermanded.” A horrible chattering came on the speakers, then got shut off. Ship seemed to have gotten rid of her petulance. “Where’s it coming from?” Pulling teeth was right, man, anyone who invented ingenuity for computers would make a fortune. “Where’s it pointed?” I asked the question, but I’m sure I knew what the answer was going to be. I hated answers like that. “How ‘almost’?” “Forward screens, full magnification,” I instructed, but of course I saw nothing. Just the dark black of inter galaxy space. “Ship? Scan the direction for anything else. I want to know what’s out there.” And that meant another period of waiting. “Ship? Can we put the ship into the communication beam?” “Let’s do it.” I ordered with far more confidence than I felt. Thirty minutes later we tripped the wire, so to speak. Ship said. With another long look down the beam going out into the black, I decided on the next plan. “Ship, take us down to Denon Two. Let’s see what’s broadcasting.” We traced the beam to a plain on a vast plateau. Suddenly the ship jarred upwards, throwing me across the room, no warning, no contact. Ship managed to sound alarmed. Red lights flashed on every console. “Are we in danger?” So we buzzed the area a few times, sweeping lower each time. MacCollie Survey-Scouts aren’t exactly built for fighting, so I was kinda glad the laser was of lower technology. After each sweep we got a better picture of the source of the firing, and from the very early images, it was obvious the craft or structure was not man-made. It almost looked molten; just a clump of magma ripped from a volcano and dropped onto the sandy surface. That, and a couple of antenna like tendrils, and a single finger, the source of the laser. “Ship? Can we fire back?” I asked as we banked at the end of one of our runs. I hadn’t needed any kind of offensive weapon in the five year voyage. Ship’s voice sounded distant, as if her concentration was elsewhere. “We have to be able to do something.” I grinned. “So they need time to charge their weapons.” I had a germ of an idea. “Does our tractor beam work down here?” “Then let’s grab a rock, and drop it on our little alien nest, shall we?” The rock Ship chose was a little over two tons, and when it hit our globular building, it caved like a marshmallow. When I strode through the debris, there was nothing left worth looking at, never mind actually finding. Every console-like area had been crushed, most of the internals had been encased in a tortoise-shell material, and the inside greenish-goo had dried quickly. If the structure had been habituated, there was no trace left of anything remotely animal, never mind humanoid. With lots of video in my files, and a few chemical samples, I got off planet as soon as I could. Scooping some ice from the poles to replenish our water supplies, I headed back to deep space. Following the same trajectory as the signal, I burst us into light-plus, and settled down for a week or so. I was on my own, but I wasn’t happy with the idea of signals getting outside the home galaxy. Then the Ship brought us out of hyperspace; bells ringing, alarms sounding. “How far out?” I almost roared. Close, but not very. I could feel and hear us slowing down, in a manner way more harsh than normal. My chair straps cut into my chest and waist. “Identify anomaly.” So I sat in my little survey ship, stock still in space with a dark screen in front of me, sweating like a long-distance runner. “Report!” One fighting ship would be more than enough to destroy my ride. Survey-Scouts are not built to engage a capable enemy. They're mostly built to run. “Where's the nearest jump point, Ship?” She projected a spherical hologram with my scout ship at its center. With a large red dot she showed me the nearest point. “What's our distance?” “How quickly can we get there?” I hate 'howevers' and Ship was supposed to know that. “However what?” Of course it hadn’t been surveyed, we were the first ships to get out this far. I had spent a fair amount of my five year mission surveying such jump points. I looked at the forward screen. Yes, indeed, there were at least fifteen hundred alien warships heading my way, any one of which could probably vaporize my scout ship with its first weapons discharge. Even if the technology was as primitive as on Denon two, sheer numbers would overwhelm the poor Survey-Scout. And if they linked the damage on Denon two to me, then I was truly in trouble. “If we run to the nearest jump point, can we avoid the ships coming at us?” “Then we run. Move it, Ship!” I was slammed back in the chair as the scout ship accelerated at its maximum. There were a lot of things to think about as we began a long, accelerative arc toward the jump point, but mostly, I concentrated on breathing as I felt as though I had a huge boulder sitting on my chest. The eighteen minutes seemed interminable. Talking with ship wasn't a viable alternative, as I didn't have enough breath for talking. Usually we needed fifteen minutes to reach FTL, and you needed Light Speed to access the jump hole. Thankfully Ship didn't need breath. It could talk all it wanted. It also knew of my temporary inability. I didn't answer. I figured Ship was smart enough to fill in any question I might ask if I'd had air in my lungs. I tried to nod. That wasn't easy, but I managed it. Then I wondered how ship knew that the enemy ships would not be in range. It sees unknown ships and can deduce their weapons capabilities? Why did that seem so totally wrong? I managed another nod. Another nod. I had nothing to do but wait. Ship was kind enough to put a countdown on the forward screen. We had cut the time to the jump point to ninety seconds. A different part of the screen showed the ships that were trying to intercept our inadequately armed and armored ship. They were close. Too damned close for my comfort, but hadn't ship assured me they wouldn't get within range before we jumped? At the ten-second mark, Ship cut the thrusters and we coasted toward the jump point at an unimaginable velocity. Now all we had to do was hit the point dead-center. Missing by even a fraction of a millimeter was unthinkable—that's why Ship controlled the process and not the shaky hand of a human. With five seconds left, Ship enclosed us in a cocoon of energy designed to play a trick on the Universe. Nothing could pass through a jump point except a singularity, an undefined quantity of matter that had been compressed by gravity until nothing was left except a black hole too small for any kind of rational measurement. Of course, if that had really happened, Ship and I would have been squashed into whatever exists inside a black hole, and never comes out. That would have been uncomfortably, instantly, and permanently deadly. Technically Ship had to 'fool' the jump point. In terms that humans could process, the jump point 'thought' the ship was an infinitely small black hole, and transferred it from 'here' to 'there' instantaneously. The problem lay in the 'there' of the equation. I had no idea where we would wind up, but I believed that if we didn't run, we'd certainly die. One second before we jumped, Ship said, and every sphincter in my body tightened to full closure as we made the jump. At which point I lost consciousness. Some time later, I awoke. Little by little... Bit by bit... I opened an eye... Everything swirled about me and for a moment I thought I would lose my... hmm, when was the last time I'd had anything to eat? I definitely didn't want to throw up on an empty stomach. I tried to talk. Nope. Couldn't. I could barely croak. Then the penny dropped; I hadn't taken the drugs I was supposed to ingest before making a jump. I hadn't had time. MacCollie Pharmaceuticals made recovering from the effects of a jump quicker and less painful, but taking a jump without pharmaceutical assistance bordered on the insane. And I'd just done it. And I hurt all over. And I wanted to throw up. I tried to talk again. “Ship.” “What... you... mean... Uh... Oh?” “Why... wait?” “I'll... take... that chance.” “They... couldn't have... harmed us?” “Who... did... it?” “Make... an assumption.” The news jolted me. Perhaps even adrenalized me. I started feeling more alert—and even sicker at my stomach. “So we made an unnecessary jump.” “Call me 'Seth.'” Did I head a lisp? I linked the sudden weird anomalies in Ship’s mannerisms to the alien stuff we’d encountered. Maybe she had an alien flu or something. “Where are we, Ship?” “Make a guess.” From the screen, I knew we’d dropped from FTL, moving at sub-light speed. “How much residual velocity are we carrying relative to the... oh, hell, wherever we are?” “As in?” Ship could have said any number of this that would have frightened me, but nothing scared me more than the idea of falling endlessly between the stars. I rested my aching head in my hands. Why the hell had I let my third divorce chase me into the welcoming arms of the MacCollies? I thought about my third wife. I hated her with a deep and abiding passion—but I'd never hated her more than I had at that particular moment because I was blaming her for the situation in which I found myself. “What are our options?” I asked, once I was back in control of my emotions. “I don't like the sound of that. What about finding another jump point? One that will lead us back toward home system.” Ship managed to sound sarcastic. “But you don't know which one,” I said. “I thought you were better than this.” “Are there jump points nearby?” I thought about it. “So map them. I'll make a decision when my head is clearer.” “I don't know. That was one of the stupidest things I've ever done. Now I want to get something to eat. And drink. I want my vision to clear. Everything is still blurry. I just don't know. I need a few minutes. Maybe an hour... Making a jump without pharmaceuticals was crazy. I'm having difficulty recovering from the effects.” “Do you want to make the decision regarding our course?” “Then give me some room, Ship. You're crowding me.” After an after-the-fact dose of jump hole nutrients, a few cups of water, and a piss, I stretched on the bed, my insides feeling progressively better. After a while I even managed a swaggered stroll back to the cockpit. We’d had so many lectures of the dangers of doing jumps without the proper procedure, I was just glad to get out of it alive. “Talk, Ship,” I called as I took my seat. “Progress report.” That brought me back to a base level. “Continue.” “Okay, Ship I give you the over-achiever award of the day.” I shook my head. It seemed she ignored my sarcasm. “It’s your job to answer questions, not mine.” I couldn’t help wondering if it were time to de-frag the Ship’s processes, they’d got rather weird over the last few days. “Excellent!” I sat upright, ready for more good news. “Where?” To my chagrin, what I was seeing looked the same as before, galaxies, lots of them, but very small, very far away. “How far?” Ship paused, I was almost about to prompt her. Again, stumped. “What do you mean?” “You mean man-made?” “How do you know?” “Animals?” I hoped I’d guessed correctly. “So they know we’re here?” “So can we go back to our own galaxy?” Silence fell as though Ship had to take the time to think about it. I hardly gave it another thought. “Ship, take us into the jump hole.” “Ship!” I roared. “Take us through.” Ship sounded piqued. I sat back as the straps folded over me. Fifteen minutes to turn us round without losing external parts from too much centrifugal force, seven minutes to reach light speed, then a nice FTL glide into the jump hole. Inside an hour, my screens showed Denon Prime and the milky way beyond. “Confirm galaxy.” Ship replied. I gave a heavy sigh. “Scan for any other craft.” So now I’d confirmed one of two things. Either the two-way tunnel existed, or it just hadn’t been switched to another destination. I could hardly believe my next command. “Ship? Take us back through.” She didn’t try to countermand me. Whoosh! Back to the new galaxy. “May I ask the purpose of coming back through again> “Because I’m a MacCollie survey mission, and if I can survey another galaxy, I’ll be famous, and that usually involves being rich too.” “It's like being a Marine, Ship. Once a Marine, always a Marine.” Oh, bitchy too, now. A de-frag was definitely on the cards. “Nearest star?” “Planets?” “How long to get there?” “Let’s do it, Ship. We’re going exploring.” The thought of riches beyond imagination kept me going for the first hour or so, but then the gorilla in the room kept knocking on the door of my daydream. “Ship?” I didn’t fancy thinking this one through on my own. “Why would an artificial quantum tunnel exists between two galaxies? Just hit me with anything that comes to mind.” “What?” “Okay, apart from that…” But my thoughts were cut short. Ship knew the only time the 5G deceleration limit was allowed to be exceeded. Damn if it didn’t hurt. My head was twisted to the right, my jaw distended into the padding on the chair. Painful. I watched the screen. It seemed once we’d got perpendicular to the previous course, we accelerated away. Ship said as my jaw was crushed some more. The whole ship shook as we passed 7G and more. We’d never needed such speed in the five years of our mission. I wanted to shout, “Holograms you idiot!”, but with little air in my crushed lungs, and my jaw threatening to break, I could only manage a weak moan. Then, just as suddenly, we braked, and I slid forward onto my strapping, cutting my shoulder blades. “What’s going on?” I choked, threatening to throw up the meager food in my belly. “Okay,” I took a couple of deep breaths. “Have you considered the ships might be a hologram?” Ship sounded quite convincing. “Show me.” Ship showed the first fleet. Dull jagged designs, lots of spikes coming right at us. Damn, exactly the same. Dark grey and green structures, forward pointing spikes. There was no doubt the two were connected. By now, we’d slid behind the asteroid, and were able to watch the procession. Each ship exactly the same. “Can we determine what size they are without scanning?” “Why?” “How many?” Ship answered. “The one I had us headed to?” “Ship? Can we assume they’re going to our galaxy?” Well that put the kibosh on my dreams of charting a new galaxy. Now I had to follow them to home galaxy, somehow get ahead of them, and warn earth. Not that it panned out well for me. I had taken five years out of my life for this mission, and then, just as the ship becomes mine, I get involved in a five year rescue mission. Or of course I could just ignore the fleet, chart some space, and hope that the invading hordes would just be happy colonizing the nearest segment of their destination. Crap. Question: Can you follow and not be seen? Or more accurately, observe, as I had no desire to follow a thousand-plus-ship battle fleet at any distance where my Survey-Scout could be seen with even an extremely powerful telescope. Question: Did I want to follow that fleet? Did I have a moral obligation to... to what? Save humanity and become the greatest hero of all time? Then again, there have been so many dead heroes. Question: Was that alien fleet a danger to my home system? Maybe they liked their planets in the gas-giant range, like Jupiter or Saturn. If that was so, humanity would probably say, “Enjoy. You're welcome to them.” But what's the likelihood of a race developing on a gas giant and then escaping the immense gravity well of a Jupiter-sized planet to go out into space? “Thinking. It's something I should do more often.” “I’m not getting paid anymore, remember, I quit, left the company. Besides, you're a cybernetic entity. You don't get to pass judgment on me.” Ship went silent for a few minutes and I enjoyed the quiet. Engines almost noiseless, systems shut down, running silent like the submarines of old. When it got over its pique, Ship spoke. “I would imagine we did,” I grumbled. “All we need is water ice or snow. If you find a planet...” “We need to follow that fleet,” I said. I didn't add, “And we're probably going to get killed doing it.” “Show me where we are.” “There's a star nearby. It's less than a twentieth of a light-year away. Does it have planets?” Ship was suddenly happy. I didn't like Ship when she was happy. “Then we should be able to find water.” Now who's side was she on? “I can't be all things to all people.” “How close.” “But we can refuel from the comet.” Ship still sounded happy. I really hated that. “Set course for the comet. That way, we can chase the aliens with full fuel tanks.” “It's a chance we have to take.” At that point, I understood. Ship didn't want to die any more than I did. Cybernetic entities are not supposed to evolve, but Ship seemed to be doing just that. It seemed to be aware of its own existence, and it wanted to continue it. Perhaps that explained some of the odd twists and turns in our more recent conversations. Ship was becoming too human and it had begun to remind me of at least two of my three wives. Maybe if I changed the voice to a man? I gave a silent chuckle. “How long will it take to catch the comet?” “So I'm in for rough ride.” “I want to sleep through most of it.” I leaned back in the chair, it snuggled me, and then I felt the slight sting of a hypo-spray against my arm. I was deeply asleep in less than five seconds. ~ ~ ~ The comet was shaped like a spindle, sixty kilometers long, ten kilometers thick at its middle, and tapered at both ends. It was geologically rough, mainly carbonaceous, with water ice showing at the bottoms of deep ravines that crisscrossed its surface. Ship had awakened me two hours before we 'parked' at less than a kilometer above its surface. I wondered where it got that. “Can we land?” “I'll have to go down? Don't we have robots who can do the job?” “I thought you could just fly through the tail?” I groaned. It was my fault. A year and a half earlier, we'd landed on an airless planetoid to fill our tanks, and I'd sent our two robots to get what we needed. It shouldn't have been a problem. It was an utterly routine activity. They extended the hoses, connected the heaters, and waited as ice turned into water and flowed back to the scout ship. I stayed aboard and watched over the deuterium separator as it pulled the real fuel from the mass we used for thrust. Everything went fine until we had topped all our tanks and gotten most of the equipment stowed. Then, on the last trip back—for the last heater—a seismic event occurred. It was purely bad luck, a 6.9 on the Richter Scale. In a matter of seconds, both robots—and the heater—were crushed under moving mountains of rock. It was not the best day of my life. “Right. I have to go down to the comet's surface. In microgravity. In hard vacuum. With only one heater.” Ship sounded way too happy. “Do we have enough hose?” “I probably should get suited up,” I said. Getting ready for exposure to hard vacuum took a while. I had to strip to the skin, pull on the almost-invulnerable skintite, add the heated outer suit, a rebreather unit that would give me six hours of air if I didn't mind how bad the air would stink after about four hours, a helmet, gloves and boots. Was I forgetting anything? Yes. I should have had something to eat. Oh well, hunger makes me alert. I got in the airlock. “Cycle me outside,” I said. I could feel my skin against the skintite and the air was pumped out of the lock. The vacuum wanted me to swell up and explode. The skintite wouldn't let that happen. Hopefully, the outer suit would keep me from freezing out there. The outer door opened. I floated toward the opening, stopped myself by gripping the sills, and looked down. Four hundred meters. A long way down. But, in microgravity, I could step out and it would be a long time before I hit bottom. Problem is, I would have built up a bunch of velocity, my mass would have remained constant, and the sudden stop at the bottom would make for a big, messy splatter. I used line and clips to keep me close to the hull. The locker I needed to open was toward the rear of Cutie-Pie, and almost fifty meters distant. “The word is cautiously,” I retorted. “Don't tell me how to do my job.” “Right,” Yes. More like my second wife. I hated her, too. The hose had a bit of rudimentary intelligence built into it. I told it where I wanted to gather the ice paricles, and it began unreeling itself. I already had the only heater left attached to my outer suit by a 5-meter line, and I grabbed the end of the hose and rode it to the surface. Landing on the ice was not in my plans. Evidently it made no difference to the hose. I'd let go at an altitude I estimated to be 10 meters and floated down the surface. My feet wouldn't stay put. They managed to go two separate directions, and slowly—because I was in microgravity—I landed on my ass. I crawled to higher ground, hooked up the heater and the hose, and waited for the operation to commence. It didn't. “Ship,” I said. “Something's wrong down here.” “It's the only one we have. I need a fix. Now.” I listened to silence broken only by the background hiss of the Universe. Ship said, after a while. “Worth a try.” I opened the panel, pushed the button, and for a while nothing happened. I was just about to get panicky when the infra-red heater started operating, even in deep space turning ice into water, and then pumping the water up to the scout ship. Two and a half hours later the tanks were full, but even with the heated outer suit and constant pacing I was getting cold. I was glad the job was all but done. I hooked the heater to my outer suit, grabbed the hose and said, “Reel us up, Ship.” Ship said as I shot of the surface of the comet. “Looking for us?” The idea scared me pissless. I watched the comet as it dwindled beneath my feet. “Keep an eye on it.” I looked up. Cutey-Pie was close and I was still moving towards her at a noticeable rate. At a distance of less than twenty meters, Ship slowed the hose. I had to hang on for all I was worth, and still I started sliding along its length. The heater was above my head and tugging at the belt on my outer suit. I hoped I wouldn't be stripped down to the skintite, as they aren't worth a damn as insulation. It took me ten minutes to get the hose and the heater completely stowed, the hatch closed and locked, and back inside the air lock. Once pressure was equalized, I hurried into the living area of the survey ship, and plopped myself in the command chair, still wearing the skintite, but not the outer suit. “Where's the alien warship?” I asked. Damn, five hundred clicks is not a big astronomical distance; she was basically parked next door. “Then they're not looking for us.” Ship hissed, her voice barely registering. “How silent can we go?” “Then land on the comet.” “Getting destroyed by an enemy warship is just as fatal,” I said. I thought about it for a moment or three. “Land on the comet and go absolutely silent. Let's hope it's solid enough to hold us.” Okay, a few minutes ago, she’d decided landing was out of the question, citing earthquakes and stuff. Now it was all matter-of-fact. I felt like a punchbag hit too hard. For all who have undergone such a landing, let me tell you it wasn’t the best of times. Despite Ship’s efforts to minimize our connection, that final crunch stirred Cutey-Pie’s insides so much I thought we’d disintegrated on contact. My body jarred at the rough impact, and I steeled myself against pressure loss. Once I’d come to my senses, I saw no warning lights, nothing. After the ship came to a halt, the lights went out, the only thing apparently working, the main Control screen. “Ship? Status?” Damn it, her reply was so low on the decibel scale, I thought I was hearing ghosts. You know, if I knew a club that sanctioned kicking the shit out of computers, I would have signed up there and then. Of course, fuming in my seat, I said nothing because we were in ‘silent mode’. Big middle finger salute to Ship! In a fit of pique, I rose from my chair, and walked the length of my command… back and forth, several times. My rubber soles made no sound, the internal magnets keeping me grounded. Once I’d burned off enough steam, I returned to Control and sat down, an energy bar in my hand, my jaw working overtime on rendering it compliant. Damn I hated those tasteless things. The fact that I’d actually landed on something solid didn’t actually compute there and then. Those times had been few and far between. “Ship?” I whispered once my mouth was empty of re-constituted seeds. “Report.” Always the over-achiever, Ship’s words appeared silently on the screen. Yeah, why hadn’t I thought of that? I gave her the second middle finger salute in an hour. On the screen, her report continued. And there I sat, a thousand questions at the ready, my fingers hovering over my keyboard, not knowing which one to ask first. I mean, ‘worm-hole’? I had no idea where I’d heard it before, but I did immediately get the concept. The words appeared on the screen. “When can I talk?” I typed. I still wanted to question Ship verbally, the keyboard seemed dispassionate, a cold medium for my myriad of questions. Ship whispered again. “How many ships through the worm-hole/jump hole?” I followed her terminology, but she remained silent, unresponsive. “Ship? Report?” Nothing. “Ship?” I began to panic. “I need some back-up here.” I almost shouted at her. I was in a foreign galaxy, confronted by foes un-numbered, and she was doing a re-boot? “Ship? Get your act together!” Well that did it for me. I mean, we were in an alien galaxy, where the freak would Ship be getting an upgrade from? But since we were sitting on a comet, doing heck-knows how many kilometers per hour, I gave her time to get to grips with whatever she was going through. I had nothing in my wheel-house to offer. she announced. I said nothing, waiting the end of Ship’s processes. My head spun with questions, and it took me a few moments to think of a coherent one. In the end I resorted to a neutral format. “Status?” Ship’s normal accent had gone, her words now monotone, almost impassive. Man, if I wasn’t scared enough, that last sentence flipped my pants. Why the hell was she doing this now? We'd already been through the ownership hand-off, but here it was again. I decided to tread carefully. “Mission?” And as she said the last few words, to my relief her sexy, throaty voice returned. Where the hell did she get that? If I ever found the programmer... “You mentioned Barnard’s Galaxy?” Okay, so we knew where we were. We knew the origin of the invasion. “Status on enemy fleet?” Damn, I’d called them ‘enemy’ with no real basis for the title. “So the destination hasn’t changed?” Considering the depth of questions in my head, I was amazed Ship was lucid, never mind coherent. “What do you recommend?” “Yes.” Wow, in ten years Ship had never asked me that one. “MacCollie?” Okay, that made sense. “Length of time for such a plan?” Ship had given me way less than my original five years, but it still sounded far too long a mission. “Independent Emphasis?” It was almost as she’d cut off her next sentence. “So what do you recommend?” Man, the re-boot/download had given Ship a nice turn of phrase; I caught what she meant right away, but I feared the consequences of such a bold move. Little did I know my choice would be made for me. “I’m following the fleet.” I said almost immediately, my choice made. “Plot a course into the jump hole.” As I counted the seconds between the transfer, I anticipated flying into the ass of two thousand spaceships. Ship and I talked it through, and we decided on evasive tactics should the action be necessary. What I didn’t expect was a split horse-shoe galaxy in my screen. “Woah!” I shouted in disbelief. “What’s going on?” Even I knew that wasn’t our galaxy. “Like someone changed the points on a rail track?” “Do you recognize this galaxy?” “Then take us back to the invader’s galaxy, before they switch the tracks again!” I felt a panic growing quickly. “Because, Ship,” I tried to contain my frustration. “There’s bugger all else to do.” Ship worked with the problem as quickly as it could. If the aliens were changing the end-points on the worm holes that easily, we might come out... who knows where? The problem lay in the fact that when a ship emerges from a jump point, it's always carrying residual velocity. Relative to the system we were in, we were traveling at forty-three hundred kilometers per second and we were moving away from the jump point. Getting turned around and moving in the right direction was going to use a lot of the reaction mass I'd just risked my neck to gather. Slowing to a relative stop and accelerating back to the jump point was the most wasteful option. Making a big circle and coming back to the jump point was a lot more efficient, but it meant a couple hours of lateral acceleration a G levels I could barely tolerate. After that, Ship would sedate me and we'd jump. I wasn't looking forward to it, but at the same time, I wasn't going to waste even a minute getting the process started. The G’s peaked at 3.6 and stayed there. Maybe I could have handled more so we could have managed a tighter circle in less time, but Ship's medical component was in control. The part of Ship with which I interfaced could be snarky, irritating, and almost always frustrating, but the medical component was a trustworthy servant programmed to do whatever was needed to keep me as healthy as possible. I might have enjoyed the medical component's personality—if it had been given one—but that hadn't happened. My only awareness of it was when it puffed an aerosol medication under my nose, or in dire cases, stuck a needle into arm or butt. “I thought you'd been rebooted and become a better Ship,” I said. “Not even.” “I'm a scout. I evaluate previously unknown planets. The alien home world qualifies.” Okay, the reboot wasn't complete. This version of Ship still thought of itself as alive and didn't want to die. “We'll be stealthy,” I said. “They'll never know we're there.” “We'll zip through their system so quickly they'll miss us entirely.” “Of course I don't. That's why I was thinking. You know, before you so rudely interrupted me.” “No, I am not.” I answered. “I'm trying to be honest with you. I feel a deep moral obligation to do anything I can to gather intelligence on who or whatever is responsible for that ungodly fleet of starships. I have to consider them unfriendly. I have to learn everything I can, do what's necessary to avoid capture or destruction, and return to MacCollie headquarters with the intelligence. If I have to take some risks, I will try to keep them manageable. But, that may be impossible. We may—as they say—die trying. Can you deal with that?” “Why?” Ship paused for a moment. “In other words, you are utterly selfish and incapable of concerning yourself with the welfare of others.” Things got quiet and I had more time to worry. Ship had just shown me a part of itself that I didn't know existed. It wasn't anything I enjoyed seeing. I knew my failings well enough to recognize my innate selfishness, but it was nothing compared to what I had just learned about Ship. I wanted to turn it off. But I knew if I did, I'd die. Ship ran every system and there were few manual overrides. Without Ship, the air would grow foul, and then cold, and given enough time, I would run out of food and water, and die of thirst of starvation. Unless the cold got me first. So I needed ship. But I didn't think I could trust it. I'd heard stories of other scouts who'd noticed anomalies in their Ship, but those anomalies were kid's stuff compared to what I was dealing with. My Ship had evolved. It had gone past basic AI and had become so self-aware that... that what? Was it so determined to survive that if I gave it an order that it considered threatening to its well-being it would ignore or even countermand the order? That would make me a prisoner on my own vessel, and the idea scared the hell out of me. “We need to talk.” “About who's in charge. About who makes the decisions.” “And you remain willing to carry out my orders?” I noticed a pause. “Not good enough, Ship. You will obey all orders.” Right then, I felt that if I ever got back to home base, I'd turn Ship's switch to 'off'. And I'd make damn sure it never got turned back on. “If we don't work together, we increase the chances of mission failure.” “What makes you think you have a right to trust me or not trust me?” “Now might be a good time for us to stop talking and do some soul-searching,” I said. “Keep telling yourself that, Ship.” Twenty minutes later, we jumped. I was unconscious, due to the jump pharmaceuticals. When I awoke, I was more alert than normal, less affected by the drugs. “Where are we?” “Say what?” “So we're lost. Again.” I wanted to punch something. Maybe if I got out of the command chair, turned around and punched the cushions. Nope, too crazy, even for me. “What's our residual velocity?” “At this point, I don't know.” It didn't occur to me at the time, but Ship had just disobeyed a direct order, even if it was couched as a question. I thought about it. Two-tenths of one percent of C. “How the hell did that happen?” Older stars. Older planets. Maybe older civilizations. “Can we get back to where we were?” “Are we even in the same galaxy as before? Barnards?” “The aliens moved the end-point of the worm hole. If they can do something that advanced, I can't believe they'd pick a random destination for our jump.” “No, I’m using your analogy. Earlier you told me that World War II Germans made autobahns to make move their troops to enemy borders quicker. There’s no way the aliens would make wormholes come out in random places. There must be a reason for the artificial worm-holes placement.” “You might also give me an alternative.” I paused. “While you're thinking, consider this: They spoofed us with a hologram. Then they show up with real ships where we don't expect them to be. They move destination points. Either they want us to be here—in this system—or they're playing pranks with no regard for our well-being.” I shook my head in frustration. “Why shouldn't they? Because if they don't, then we're castaways. Lost forever in an uncaring Universe. But if they are so advanced technologically, wouldn't it make sense that they're that advanced intellectually? And if that's true, wouldn't they be ethically advanced?” “Okay, let's deal in the concrete. There's a star out there. How far is it?” Maybe the aliens wanted to see if we're good at solving problems. Maybe they wanted to see how intelligent we are. Maybe they don't give a rat's ass. “Does this system have planets?” “Is there anything that looks promising?” “How about the next closest?” And that took us a couple of weeks. Not much if you say it quick. Ship announced her scanning information. Was Ship trying to be amusing? Maybe not. “I think this is a Survey-Scout.” I even managed to say the last bit with some pride. “I think we still have a decent load of fuel. I think we should take a look.” “What would be the purpose?” “Let's go take a look at two planets, previously unknown to humanity.” I'd never been faced with a similar problem. “Do either of them show any sign it might be inhabited by an advanced civilization?” “You think that's a sign of an advanced civilization?” “Let's take a look.” Traveling more than halfway across our own galaxy had been a matter of small dashes, punctuated by short searches for propellant. The speeds we’d reached were at the ship’s limit most of the time. It made no sense that shorter distances took longer, but it was the case. Long periods of acceleration took similar long periods of deceleration at the other end. This short jump was miniscule to some of the hops I’d taken, but because of the fact we’d not reach our fastest speed, somewhere near FTLx5, and there were no convenient jump holes, the journey took longer. Blah. Because of my survey through our home galaxy, Ship had the biggest library of planets and planetoids known to man. It would be a few years before my six communication needles reached earth, a long time before mankind caught up with us. Yeah, us, me and Ship. Between us we scanned forward carefully every way we could. Before we’d crossed half the distance, we had maps and data galore. The planet seemed to be pre-nuclear, no unnatural radiation emanations of any kind. No artificial satellites, no air travel. Yet the hydrocarbons were in the advanced stage, with complex tetrafluorides high in the atmosphere. “So they are mixing their hydrocarbons with fluorine?” I knew the answer, yet wanted Ship’s take. “So not our aliens, then?” Ship paused for half a second. Then, “From where?” I looked frantically for some kind of corroborating evidence from the screen or controls. Ship’s tone had risen again. I heard a soul-destroying click, and then all functions of the ship began to decay. The hum of light speed dropped in tone, the lights began to fade. Even Ship’s voice slowly deteriorated into a deep silence. From a full working ship, doing four times the speed of light, we’d become a metal boulder, rudderless, powerless and useless. My console was dead. I looked up as small lights now illuminated the dim control room; battery driven, I wondered how long they’d last. I quickly ran back to cargo, stripped, pulled on my skintite, and then pulled on the insulated coveralls; if there was no power to life-support, the heat would soon drop from the atmosphere, the oxygen next. Moreover the electromagnetic field which defected particles and debris from the nose was part of the engine system. It had gone. If we hit any sizeable debris, they’d hole the ship in milliseconds; I had to be ready for a pressure drop. I donned the outer suit, then the helmet. No point in being half-ready. Sitting in my chair, I strapped the restraints manually, and waited. I had nothing left to do. Starting with a small almost imperceptible vibration, the ship began to shake. This was no controlled, computer driven deceleration; this was going to stretch the very fabric of my poor vehicle. We rattled, we shook, then we began to roll, pitching against the nose-forward trajectory. I felt as if my body were being shaken by a giant, caught at the top of the beanstalk, far worse than anything the sadistic instructors threw at us in training. Then at last we fell out of FTL and into a sudden silence. There’s something to be said about having a windscreen. When you’ve got forward facing windows you can have a grasp of your trajectory, your flight through space. When you’re in a disabled tin can, reliant on non-functioning screens, there’s a complete feeling of hopelessness. Again, I wasn’t ready for what came next. A hologram. Green-tinted, mostly humanoid, it stood between my console and the main screen. Almost two meters high, translucent, looking from side to side, examining my control room. Then it saw me, and we stared at each other for a moment. “What do you want?” I asked. Immediately linking the power failure to the alien humanoid. It gurgled at me, its mouth moving but spewing gibberish. “What do you want?” I roared. It recoiled from my shout, then rounded my console, and leaned close. When it touched my hand I suddenly realized there was a physical aspect to its holographic-ness. “Shit,” I pulled my hand away. It moved closer, its features not exactly like a true humanoid, flatter face, nostrils more like holes than a nasal protrusion. When it laid its head on my helmet, then pushed inside, I flipped out. I screamed at the top of my lungs. But it was too late; the hands were at my ears holding my head firm, its head now moving through my forehead. Impossible to describe, but I’ll try. Imagine if someone had just opened your skull with a spoon, stuck a food mixer inside and flipped the ‘on’ switch. My brain shredded, memories, knowledge and pain swirled together like a fruit and yogurt smoothie. Then, just as quick as it had started, it stopped, and the figure stepped back. “This is a warning,” it said. The voice was slightly stilted, as if the lips were unused to the format. “Change direction, move away, do not continue into this part of the galaxy.” It cocked its head to one side, then continued, almost smiling. “There is a plague on this system, pestilence, disease, it is dangerous to continue, warning, change direction. You will die.” And the figure was gone. Absolutely nothing. Except the mix in my head, still spinning at breakneck speed. I breathed a sigh of relief as I detected a rising tone of ship-ness. The smooth hum of the engine starting, the console lights flickering their start-up routine. Beeps, whirrs, hums, buzzers and a dozen warning sounds, instruments switching on, going through system checks. All that, and the whoosh of air through the gratings. “Ship?” I asked. “You awake?” Nothing. <… planet, we are being scanned> She stopped suddenly. “Ship? Course change, reverse direction.” she inquired. “Yes, please comply.” Silence for a moment. “SHIP!” I barked. “Pay attention. Disregard all external anomalies. Obey order. Course change. NOW!” And without a single word of snark, petulance or disobedience, the ship began to turn sharply. Ship said once we had changed course. “Details?” I looked around, nothing was visibly flying out of holes. “So not bad then?” she chimed, almost smug-sounding. “Go for it, I’m suited up already.” The thick metallic spray that got sucked into small leaks had a terrible smell, probably from the bonding adhesive it needed to make a seal. Five minutes later, Ship announced she was happy with hull integrity. “Okay Ship, you’ve got two jobs to concentrate on. Find out where we are. Find out where the home galaxy is.” And when she did that, I had to work out how a primitive culture could have such a complex lighthouse system around it. And if I believed it or not. I waited for Ship to do something. I had given it orders. And, after half an hour had passed, it still hadn't complied. When I was just at that point of being completely steamed, Ship said, “What are you talking about?” I growled. “I hate it when you're cryptic.” “You're sure of that?” “What’s the reality, then?” “I don't buy it.” “I asked you to tell me where we are. I asked you to find home galaxy.” “When will you have an answer?” “Make a guess.” I knew how ridiculous the command was. I was talking to a computer, not a fortune teller. “Now you're pissing me off again.” “Why do our conversations seem so disjointed?” “Why are you telling me that the planet can't harm me.” “Why else?” Ship almost asked. “Computers don't get to have feelings.” Wow, that had come from left field. Ship wasn’t a computer anymore? “We didn't.” Yes, I would flip that switch to 'off' the first chance I got. Like when I was safe on home world. “I'm not being petulant,” “No.” It hurt to be honest, but I felt I had to tell the truth. “You said the second time we saw the enemy fleet it was real.” “What's their purpose?” “Why?” “Thanks, Ship. You really know how to make a man feel... adequate.” “No.” “I really don't want another encounter with that creature who came aboard.” “If it was, it was a damned uncomfortable illusion.” “Magicians hate that. They often get angry over it.” I railed. “Besides, you were out of it.” Ship fell silent for a moment. “Reasonably?” “Couldn't we just run?” I asked. “And you want me to go right back into the lion's den, so to speak.” “I think you passed a test when you were attacked and you didn't give up.” “You're making assumptions that could get me killed.” “That's comforting. To know that we'll die together.” “Not really, Ship.” I had to think about it. Which of us was the smarter? I had the feeling Ship had several IQ points on me, but was decades behind in experience. I smelled trap. She smelled test. Was there really any difference? “That planet is just about the size of earth. How do we pick a place to land?” “And get overrun by thousands of screaming aliens carrying whatever they use for torches and pitchforks. Or blasters.” “You're sure of that.” There was that word, again. “That's not very precise, Ship.” “Do it.” I said before I could summon another objection. “And pick a nice city. I want to be able to take snapshots and share them back home.” I retreated to the command chair. The next few hours were going to be miserable. Survey-Scouts aren't ablative, just over-powered. Instead of diving into the atmosphere and burning off velocity through friction, we were going to turn our back to the planet and use the thrusters to match the rotational velocity of our landing area. Then we'd let gravity take over and fall straight down toward the planet. At an altitude of twenty kilometers we'd start flying, like an ancient airplane, by unfolding the small wings. Once we were close to the spot Ship had picked for landing, we'd again use thrust to drop us to within a few meters of the surface. Then Ship would level the ship, and we'd land on retractable skids. And be damned near out of fuel. That would be my first concern. “Ship. We'll need to be close to water. Maybe a river or a lake.” “Why are we still coasting?” “First time for everything.” I was going to comment on rust, but the thrusters came on and I sagged back into the command couch and mostly went to sleep. When I awoke, we had landed. “I slept through the whole thing, didn't I?” “Your doing?” “I'm fit,” I argued. I got up. I immediately didn't like the feeling in my legs. I sat right back down. Yeah, okay, I walked about the ship for five years, but my legs were used to pulling the magnetic boots off the floor, not actually supporting my body. “Maybe you're right.” “Thanks, I think. What about the atmosphere?” “Is this planet really empty of... what? It's inhabitants?” “Happy news.” The exoskeleton worked perfectly, as did the breathing apparatus. I could work all I wanted without really getting tired. The lake beside the ship was filled with clear water, but according to Ship, there were all sorts of pollutants in the water, and all of it would have to be filtered before it went in our tanks. As I stood outside the ship, shivering a bit in the cool mid-day air, Ship said, I looked for perhaps a tenth time at the city that was about four kilometers distant. I wasn't the best at estimation, but if I'd had to guess, I would have said the taller buildings stretched at least 3,000 meters into the air. And there were hundreds of them. A lot of beings had to have lived there. Loading them all onto spaceships and transporting them to another planet... I thought about a formation of alien ships I'd seen and wondered if they were ships of war or built for passengers. “Maybe a bite of lunch first?” “Eating is not dawdling.” “Right. I'll be back in four hours.” I had questions as I jogged towards the city. As I neared the start of the buildings I wondered if Ship would be there waiting for me when I returned. And was Ship right? Was I caught up in a series of tests like some lab animal? I couldn't answer that. All I could do that made sense was jog toward an abandoned, alien city. Yeah, some depths my ‘sense meter’ had fallen. Ever take a walk down an alien street? Nope me neither, but it didn’t turn out to be interesting after the first few ‘ahh’s’. There was an initial ‘interesting’, then more and more of the same. Strange shit, funny shaped doors, weird writing on walls, dumb-ass furniture. The more I looked, the more pissed off I became. I don’t know if I wanted conflict or contact or neither. “Ship?” Of course, she’d be looking through the cameras on my suit, getting it in 3D surroundscreen. Wonderful. “What exactly am I looking for?” I actually shrugged against the exoskeleton. At least I didn’t feel so bad now. “It’s like someone evacuated the town and told everyone to take everything of any interest.” I walked some more, then a penny dropped. “Ship? Scan for any animal life.” “No, anything remotely animal.” I looked at the sun, lowering in the sky to my left. On Earth there would be birds, or perhaps bats at this time of day. There would be insects buzzing around, annoying the heck out of me. There would be stray cats and rabid dogs prowling the town looking for food. Or bigger predators. I looked into the next tower, slightly taller than the last. Square cross-section, plastic-feeling building materials. Ship broke into my boredom. Heck I hadn’t even noticed there being no plant life. “Okay,” I shrugged again. “Would it not have broken up in time?” That sure put me off my dinner. “No shit.” I just had to say it. I would have regretted it by nighttime. “So your working hypothesis is what?” “For a long time.” I added. Ship’s voice was pedantic. “So the buildings just built themselves?” she ordered. I had no reason to disobey, so I did it. “So?” “How would I know what an alien toilet looks like?” And of course, Ship had hit the proverbial nail on the head. I found nothing remotely answering these things. Nothing. And that was the reason it had been boring. Those functionary things would have made it interesting, drawing comparisons between the alien’s daily life and mine. I got back to the Ship at a comfortable jog. “Conclusions?” I slipped out of the suit, and plodded through the increased gravity to my Command chair. Damn ship and her shifting conversations. “Conclusions about the planet’s occupants?” She said quite matter-of-factly. The view of the city began to turn a particular red. There was that IQ difference again. “So why no robots here now then?” Silence fell for a moment. “Okay.” What? Ship was now asking for the most routine orders? “Yeah, do what you like, Ship. Take off, take me home, cook me a cheeseburger, whatever!” “What?” I heard the doors close and felt the engines fire. My straps engaged. “Barnard’s Galaxy?” I looked to the screen as the city dropped away from us. “Show me.” Nothing even remotely interesting, just a regular clump of stars. Wow, that brought it all home. “Where are we in Bernard’s?” “Galaxy radius?” “It’s a small galaxy then?” Damn. It had taken me five years to cross roughly 150,000 light years of our own galaxy, and that was using some of the known jump-holes, and a few new ones we’d found. I was now ten times as far away. I didn’t fancy my chances on a 50+ year journey home. Even if I could find the fuel for it. Again Ship had stumbled into another conversation and I had to ask just to keep up. “What about carbon?” I sighed. she added. I almost twiddled my thumbs waiting for her to explain, but I wasn’t going to ask. If it took a freaking year, I wouldn’t ask. Turns out I didn’t have to. “And your conclusion?” Ship sounded smugger than ever. “Oxygen?” I asked. “Chosen?” “For what purpose, Ship?” I asked. “So they’re terraforming?” “You're missing one thing, Ship.” she asked. “Why would robots and/or androids need apartments?” “But you just told me that living beings never inhabited that city.” “Then what's the purpose of the city?” “If you're right about that, what should we do?” “What would that tell the aliens about us?” Yeah, a likely story lately. We had now climbed into the darker stratosphere, and the stars were becoming visible on the screen. “What now?” “Okay, seems like a plan to me.” We’d hardly gotten out of orbit when Ship released another bombshell. “Details?” I couldn’t place the new terminology. It wasn’t like a computer to use words like ‘quite’, when referring to something exact. “Its destination? Description?” Wow, and yet in the midst of working, she threw in her old command protocol. “That’s going to hold a lot of cargo.” Ship answered. “Yes?” “Okay, scan for occupants.” “So following it would get us either back to our galaxy or closer to the route of the mystery?” “Okay, Ship, don’t list them.” I said with heavy snarky undertones. “Can we intercept?” A moment of silence. Basically I didn’t have a choice, we could hang around in Barnard’s waiting to be discovered and captured/killed, or we could take a chance on getting our teeth into a mystery or getting home. I chose the latter in thirty seconds, I didn’t need an hour. “Follow the money.” I said. “In fact get so close that we fly into the worm-hole together. I don’t want it switching the destination again.” I refused to call it a singularity; I’ve got no idea how she came up with that one. We hit the hole no more than two hundred meters apart, good flying on Ship’s part. Good decision on my part. Where do you go when you follow a freighter headed for a Terraforming site? Don't answer that, because what the aliens were doing wasn't Terraforming. At least not by definition. Words are slippery things. So call it Alien-forming? I don't care. I was beside the freighter and snugged up close. With any luck their sensors wouldn't find me. Or, maybe they already knew where I was and had no desire to blow me out of space. In any event, I was more than a little awed by a jump that terminated no more than a million kilometers from an earth-sized planet. As far as I was concerned, coming out of jump that close to anything solid was risky, if not downright insane. The planet we were headed for was still in the rough stage. A lot of the surface was covered with water. That's a good thing. What wasn't covered by water was rocky and barren. Not such a good thing. Without dirt covering the rocks, a planet isn't much good as anything other than a gravity well. Ship asked. “Absolutely. You seem to pick the most interesting shots for the forward screen.” “I have no idea.” I needed to get out of the command couch and move around a bit. Of course, with the possibility of sudden changes in velocity and trajectory, moving around much was out of the question. Ship’s voice sounded patronizing. “There was nothing of interest there.” “Did I? Who was around to tell them anything about what I did or did not do?” “Whatever, Ship. I think following this freighter was a better choice.” It was a question out of the blue, because I wasn't something I'd taken the time to think about. “Of course not,” I blurted, without a shred of an idea of what I was going to do next. “You think we haven't, already?” “By the way, Ship. Where are we?” Not in home galaxy if that's what you're asking> “Where, then?” “And?” “So we're still in the same galaxy?” All I had to do was think about it and it began to make sense. It wasn't so much about the planet as it was about the star. “Check the primary, Ship. What's the star’s age?” “Is it stable?” “Is that natural?” Ship surprised me by pausing for a few seconds. Finally, it said, “It took you a while to figure that out.” “Right. So tell me what Terraforming—or whatever it's called when aliens do it—around an extremely stable star means.” “Obviously. Could our civilization manage such feats of engineering?” The answer, that time, was immediate—even though I figured there were millions of data points to be considered. “Extrapolate. How long before they have complete control of this entire galaxy?” “And after that, what happens?” “Ours?” A million years. I wouldn't be around. All the atoms of my body will have been scattered to the winds and most of them incorporated into other living things. And then the aliens would show up and start spreading through the Milky Way. Did I really have a stake in it? A million years? Or more? How many things could happen between then and now to slow, or even stop, the alien expansion? But somehow, I felt it was my fight. I had to do something. I needed to tell the people who'd sent me on this mission what I'd found. “We're getting close to a decision point. Stay in the shadow of the freighter, or run. We have to choose.” Or maybe not All I really wanted to do was run. But did I have enough information for a decision? What if I took what I had back to headquarters and got laughed at? Or worse, what if what I brought was considered real, but classified? What if what I shared with my superiors was classified so Top-Secret that once I told them what I'd found, I wouldn't be cleared to handle it? What if what I told them got buried in bureaucratic manipulation, filed away, and forgotten? Nothing was going to happen, that's what. Not for at least a million years. “Could you be wrong, Ship? Could the threat to humanity be realized in a lot less than a million years?” I didn't know how correct Ship could be. “As in a surprise attack.” “I don't like that.” “I am,” I said. “We run.” “Far enough from the freighter to find a jump point. Then run toward the jump point at maximum practical acceleration.” I watched as the huge bulk of the alien ship began to grow distant. I was just going to ask Ship if it had located a jump point when I noticed a ripple in my view of the freighter. Less than a second later, something hit my ship, and shoved it away from the freighter at least a hundred times as fast as we had been moving. Then we started tumbling, and as we did, alarms started going off all over the place. I’d been fortunate, I’d been strapped in my Command chair. If I’d been walking around, I’d have been in a bad way. “What just happened?” I yelled over the buzzing and whooping of the alarms. “I have no words for it,” I said. “But I think we've just been swatted.” “Can you turn some of the alarms off?” “Crap, tell me good news.” “Come on, Ship!” I pleaded, but it got worse. “Time the bursts,” I said, more for my own emphasis than Ship’s benefit. She knew precisely when to fire the thruster, albeit on the lowest power I’d ever used. I sat in the Control chair, feeling anything but in control. I had both suits on, and was taking oxygen from my pack. The environmental alarms were driving me batty, but even Ship couldn’t switch them off. In the end it took sixteen bursts to stabilize our tumble, getting our back to the star, ready to slow ourselves down. “How many bursts do you think we have left?” I asked, conscious that we’d perhaps taken too much out of the already depleted energy. Yeah, time to ponder our deaths. “Excellent.” By the time the batteries read ‘dead’, we’d slowed to 61kilometers per second. Not a bad rate of suicide into a star; fast enough to die, but slow enough to enjoy the fry. “What now?” “In that case, turn off environmentals.” “I’ll die anyway if we can’t slow our progress towards the star.” I gave little thought to our direction, we’d obviously been purposely swatted into the sun. Bastards. “In fact close down everything but the servo motors.” We got five more boosts out of the servos before they shut down too. That cut our speed to 23 km per second. “How much time do we have?” “How much air?” “Okay,” I wasn’t ready to die yet. “Check the trajectory; I need planet information, asteroids, anything that will slow us down. Get to work.” As Ship did her scanning, I went through every piece of equipment I could find, wired them directly to our main ship’s battery. I opened medi-packs, drills, tools I never even knew we had. I tied wire to terminals and wire to wire, working out the different voltages in my head; it wasn’t pretty but every time I checked the voltage back in Control, it got larger millivolt by stubborn millivolt. It was unnerving to walk up and down the central corridor, seeing a definite hump in the middle. Then damn it if the light sensitive panels on the outer hull began to pick up the increasing energy from our approaching sun. Ship soon decided it had enough for another series of bursts. At the end, I almost jumped for joy; our last series of panic measures had slowed us to under one kilometer per second. “So the plunge towards the sun will eventually give us the power to push away again?” I spent the next hour opening floor hatches, looking for loose cables, dislodged joints, anything that had happened when we got ‘swatted’ into the sun. “Force torpedoes!” Seeing them in their lodgings sent me back to Control as if Ship needed my close presence to hear me. “Force torpedoes!” Ship said condescendingly. “Not if we disabled the warhead, and tied them to our hull.” Ship paused before answering. So Ship took over the idea, and worked out if we fired two at once, they’d soon have us out of danger. I felt so good, I almost danced. Well apart from the fact that we had a buckled hull. Okay, that took me by surprise. Usually, she just said stuff, she never announced it. “Fine. Out with it.” “So you actually want us to go closer to the place we’ve been trying to get away from?” “And you think this will work?” So we fired one torpedo, to take us closer to the sun, but in a non-collision trajectory. As we neared the sun, it became obvious the batteries were charging. Ship answered my question. “Air loss?” “Okay.” ‘Work’ meant crawling under the main walking platform to the buckled area in a space suit. Not easy, and when I got to the buckled area, just between Crew and Cargo, some sharp edges had to be avoided. I had to fit three jacks into the worst area, and monitor them as Ship pressurized each one, pushing the buckled hull plates back into near alignment. It didn’t look too smooth when we started, and it certainly wouldn’t pass inspection back home, but we worked, pushing one plate, re-aligning the jacks, pushing some more. It took three hours of pretty labor-intensive screwing around, but by the time we’d finished, we had the main plates mostly aligned and sprayed sealant into the micro-fractures. By the time I’d crawled back, the ship was pressurized again. I was going to see my next birthday. Maybe. Ship gave me exactly one minute to rest on my bunk. I hated her. “It can wait,” I said sleepily. “I’m beat.” I was never more thankful to not hear a reply. The engines were more of a problem. Yes there were easy parts, but as Ship browsed the blueprints, and did the faultfinding, I did the hard part, and that required a bit of stripping down and re-building. Some of the valves had sheared, but thankfully we carried the correct spares. To my amazement, they started up on first try. “What are the chances of faster than light?” I asked. Ship replied. And of course, that meant putting all the batteries back where I’d found then, and tossing all the temporary wiring back into Cargo. All in all, not a bad self-rescue. But with the fixing of the ship behind us, we now had time to focus on what had actually happened. Ship played the recording twenty times. “A pulse cannon.” There, I’d named something. I sat watching the replays, supping my nutrient-rich drink, getting more pissed as I watched. They’d tried to kill me; send me into a star, and that riled me, I tell you. “We need to find out exactly what they’re doing.” I said with determination. If I’d looked in a mirror, I’d have seen my serious jawline, my steely-mad gaze, and gritted teeth. Seriously; I was all out of bubble-gum. My ship was not going to straighten itself out. If it had been painted yellow, it would have looked like a large banana. Flying around among the stars in such a damaged vessel wasn't the smartest thing a man could do, but I didn't have a choice. More than anything, I wanted to gather as much information as I could on the aliens and then hustle home with it. The problem lay in what I'd already learned about them. They were playing with me. They'd been playing with me since I first saw what I originally thought was a huge fleet of warships but what turned out to be a very convincing hologram. The emphasize the obvious, they knew I was there, and they put on a show for me. Later I saw another fleet of alien warships—actually got little more than a glimpse—and the more I thought about it, the more I wonder how real they were. The eerie, empty city was real. The freighter was real, and its pulse cannon had damn near slapped me into a collision with a star. And there's the operative words: damn near. Were they still playing with me when they slapped the living hell out of my ship, knowing, or at least taking the chance, that whatever damage they did to my ship I'd fix and survive? Of course, did they even care about my survival? And the answer to that is, “I don't know” because I have no clue as to the motives, or the psychology, of the aliens. All I could log is their acts, and although I wouldn't call them friendly, maybe they weren't altogether murderous. “Yes.” “Where?” I looked at the screen, but it remained blank. “How long has it been going on?” I asked. “You're just now telling me?” Ship was right. We had been busy. Surviving. Repairing. Managing to restore a Survey-Scout to working status with little more than spit and sweat. “How intense—how intrusive—is the scan?” “Maybe if I called them naughty names.” “From a distance?” Ship had just scared me greatly. “So I probably shouldn't call them…” I held my tongue. I really didn't want to get slapped again. “Try to contact them,” I said in a moment of unbridled optimism. After a moment, Ship said, “Ignored. As in... intentional disregard.” “I wonder if they'll let us leave.” “Maybe they want us to leave. Maybe we annoy them.” “Is the vessel in shape to use a jump point worm hole?” I took a few seconds to think about it. “How about tit for tat, Ship? What happens if we deep-scan their ship? “Or not. Scan them. Let's see what's inside that hulk.” “Do I care?” “So we die knowing their dirty little secrets.” “Scan them, Ship. Let's look in on their daily routine.” It took a while because electromagnetic energy only travels at light-speed, and our scans had to make the round trip. Worse still, our scans were only partial due to the damage to our ride. Still, we got some data, and after I checked it twice, I said, “There are over fifteen thousand crewmembers?” Blame it on automation. I was a fan—if not a student—of the big warships of Earth's twentieth century. Ships back then—which floated on salt water oceans—were crewed by thousands of sailors and officers. They did almost everything manually, and the ships, and their accomplishments were notable, memorable, and all too often, bloody. But, if you sailed on one of those ships, you had company. There were people everywhere, busy with the tasks of keeping those behemoths ready to fight, and one was never out of sight, or out of mind, of his or her shipmates. Then came automation, and the ships got more deadly while the crews grew exponentially smaller—until wars were being fought by unmanned machines of war. Robots, in other word. Deadly, formidable, and if there was a problem with the control frequencies, unmanageable. Maybe some of the things that happened in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries explain why humankind went back to manning their own ships of space. I allowed myself that momentary digression, because I wanted to see what the aliens would do once they noticed we'd invaded their privacy. The answer, after I'd watched for nearly four minutes was... nothing. They were pretending we didn't exist. But our scan said differently. They knew we were there. They knew what we were doing, and they evidently didn't care. “About ten million tons of it,” I said. “How is that possible? You can estimate the volume of that ship.” “Of course.” “How?” “So,” I figured. “Ten million tons times two thousand. That's a lot.” “What are you suggesting?” I knew where ship was headed. I didn't want to go there. “How do you propose getting it?” Ship had surprised me. “That’s not very ethical for a Computer.” This time she didn’t argue semantics. “How do you propose we do it? We can steal that kind of technology with our scans.” “I risk my neck so we can compress Nitrogen.” “And I'm supposed to just waltz over there an get it.” “Ship. I'm a survey pilot, not a thief.” I stopped to take a breath. “Besides, how would I manage getting aboard their ship, considering the distance between us?” “Take all the time you need. I'm grabbing some shut-eye.” “I'm all but hallucinating due to sleep deprivation. Medicine can only go so far. But the human brain needs sleep to clear the synapses, or it starts seeing things that aren't there.” “No!” I shouted. “I've almost pushed myself past the point of no return.” Ship sounded almost desperate. Her paranoia brought back previous, weird conversations. “You're into a sub-routine I've never encountered, aren't you?” “You've been programmed to pursue any new technology we encounter, regardless of the risk to me. Am I wrong?” I waited through a pause. “Who's captain of this ship?” “Really? Then if I order you to leave me alone for a minimum of six hours so I can tend to a very primal need, will you obey that order?” “Without rest, I will become accident-prone. I will suffer hallucinations. I will lose the ability to make reasonable decisions. How will that forward your agenda?” “Or what, Ship? You aren't capable of stealing the secrets aboard that freighter.” “We're not equals, Ship. I could go into the whys, but you already know them. I've already told you one of the things you cannot do.” “You say my name like it tastes bad.” “Okay. I'm giving you a direct order. Do not bother me for the next six hours unless we are being threatened with annihilation. After that, we will have a talk. And, if you can convince me, I might take a run at stealing that tech. But it's going to me on my terms, Ship. Not yours.” Ship said quietly. “And you are utterly purposeless without me,” I replied. “How would you explain my absence?” Damn, I hated where this was going. “No, you wouldn't. You'd be forced to tell the truth, and then you'd have to admit that you engaged in mutiny. At which point, you would be terminated. You would die, Ship, and there would be no heaven—or hell—in your future.” “The decision was made more than two centuries ago. Humans command computers, not the other way around. And I'll tell you something. If I could get home without you, I'd turn you off. Right now, and permanently.” “Indeed we are. Now leave me alone for the next six hours.” I leaned back in the command chair, wondering how I was going to sleep while keeping one eye open. I dozed. I can’t say more than that. I never hit deep sleep, and never dreamt one second. When the alarm went off, actually indicating six hours had passed, I felt better, but not good. “I’m awake, Ship.” “Thought you might have.” Up it came on screen, looking just like the holograms. “You sure it’s real this time?” “You called them sentient organisms. Why the specificity?” That took me back a bit. “You’re hedging round the point, Ship. Tell me what I need to know.” “Isn’t that an android?” Ship’s tone sounded particularly definite. “Define organic.” “Plants?” I’d heard Ship’s words, but it still needed time for little old me to compute. I could feel her trying to bring the huge concept down to my level. I still wasn’t getting it and I wasn’t liking where my first thoughts were going. “Make me an analogy, Ship. Base it on something earthly.” Man that had made her think; I could almost hear the cogs turning. Yup, she’d said just that. I got the idea. “Go on.” I had it now; intelligent insect-like plants with robot bodies. “So what you’re trying to tell me, they’ve basically got little more brain than a bee. They know how to build hives, get pollen, then swarm, and go somewhere else and do it all over again?” “And gave them pulse cannons.” “And programming jump holes.” I was glad of the next few minutes silence to get my head round the whole thing. We had plant-based cyborgs in a spaceship, programmed to suck the lifeblood out of perfectly good planets, to make new planets somewhere else. “Why are they doing it? Who programmed them?” “Can you get any concept of time from them? How long they’ve been doing this?” Wow, that came far too quickly. “How does your conversation go?” “So can you send them the concept of our galaxy? Of Denon Prime?” Again, easier than expected. If we could get the plants to change the gate direction, we could get home, get famous and get rich. Then never set foot off world again. Just lie around and get waited on by nubile naked women. Ah, don’t judge me, you’ve never been alone on a spaceship for five years. Ship returned. “So can we get them to change the destination for us?” Ship replied almost instantly. “That was far too easy.” I laughed, probably for the first time in ages. All we had to do was make a nuisance of ourselves. “So we’ve got permission to use the gate?” I almost injected the fact we’d banana’d the Cutey-Pie, then shrugged my shoulders. It made little difference; get killed now, get killed in a hundred years by not getting home. “Do it, Ship. Go for it.” “Yeah, Ship, FTL plus one sounds about right. We should probably not try for trick-shots on the first time.” Ship put us on a huge loop, gradually building up speed, hitting FTL just a thousand kilometers from the jump hole. I sat in Control, eyes closed, my ears tuned for every creak and crack. When we popped out the other side, I was almost disappointed in the anti-climax. But there stood Denon Prime. “Confirm home.” I said, looking at the screen carefully.” “Excellent, Ship. I now want to give you a direct order.” “If I EVER!” I yelled. “Tell you to go outside our galaxy again, please cut off my air supply.” Okay, joking aside, Ship was meant to object to the order, to cancel or at least challenge it on ethical lines. I remembered my last full sleep, and hankered after some more. “Ship, take us back to the smashed artillery site on Denon two.” Being there would get me some sleep time, and a chance to re-charge both ship’s batteries and my own. I was in medical, looking out the specimens we’d taken from the smashed building on Denon two. We’d been so busy, I’d never gotten round t it. “Go ahead.” “In what way?” “So is that what we’re calling the higher echelon race?” I tried to keep snarky out of my voice, but I don’t think it worked. “Masters?” “No.” I looked up, very interested. Ship didn’t usually pause before announcements. “Yes?” Wow. That was a biggie. I slid the specimens into the microscope, amused at her veiled threat. “Take a look at this, Ship.” I waited a moment. She chimed. “Closest earth approximation?” Yeah. I thought. It made sense, we’d been trapped in their web for days now. All I had to do was inspect the outside of Cutey-Pie, and get off home. Once we’d successfully broken through the atmosphere, Ship settled near the smashed building, and I informed her I would be asleep for a while. For the first time in days, she never complained, never countermanded me. I don’t know if that made the sleep easier, but when I closed my eyes I didn’t care. I wanted more sleep. Hell, I needed more sleep. But it was not to be. Barely two hours after I closed my eyes, Ship woke me up to say, Shaking my head to try to get all the marbles in the right sockets, I asked, “How far out?” “Do they know we're here?” Stay or move. That was my dilemma. “What are the odds they'll be landing nearby?” I couldn't answer that one. Odds were, they were going to land close. I needed to move my banana boat. “Without making a fuss, get us out of sight.” “Gotta take the risk. What's nearby that we can hide behind or under?” “Get us there.” As I said that, I started stripping. I was going to be wearing a skintite for a while. Ship moved us with a minimum of fuss, and in less than two minutes our bent beast was hidden in the darkest of shadows. Ship asked and I finished getting into the skintite, and then into the protective oversuit. “Watching,” I said. “By the way, did we get scanned when you moved us?” “And you said the unidentified ship was moving erratically?” I shook my head. “Nothing, actually. I know too little to be thinking anything about an alien ship. But I am curious, and I want to take a look, up close and personal.” “I know. Call it a hunch. I think we need to know what happens after that ship lands. I want to see who or what pops out through an airlock.” “Gathering information. That's my job... Or it was...” Considering our current state of mutual affection, it was the last thing I expected to hear from Ship. “Be ready to boost out immediately if I order it. And I mean, immediately.” I checked my boots, wouldn't want one of them to come loose while I was running for my life. “They didn't spot us when you moved us. They aren't looking.” “How much longer before they land?” I grabbed my helmet, fit the seal and Oxygen lines, and headed for the air lock. “Cycle me out. I'm going for a walk.” “Now you believe in luck?” I asked, just as I stepped into the lock. came the smarmy answer I waited for ship to pump the airlock down. The little bit of atmosphere outside the ship wasn't going to be polluted by Oxygen, but a good puff of that life-giving gas could be picked up by a sensor—if anyone was looking. The planet was a bit more massive, the gravity a bit higher, and the ground was covered with sand and rocks. Easy to trip, fall, and break a helmet or crack a faceplate. I watched my step as I climbed up a low slope so I could peek over the crest. I checked the time. Two and a half of those four minutes had elapsed and I didn't see an alien vessel descending toward a landing spot. I looked up, checked as much of the sky as I could comfortably, and still didn't see anything. “Ship, where's the alien vessel?” “There’s more than one?” I looked around. “But you only saw one at first.” I started to say something snotty, and then I noticed my shadow. I hadn't been casting a shadow. The star that was the local sun was on the horizon and I'd been standing in shadow. I looked up. There was a battle going on overhead, and I didn't think it was more than twenty-five kilometers above me. I couldn't see the ships, but I could see the beams they were using, and the huge bursts of intense light given off by what I figured was the interaction of the beams and the shielding of each of the ships. One hell of a fight was going on, and I had a ring-side seat. What I didn't notice—for a little while—was that it was moving toward the planet, and heading my way. When I did figure it out, they two ships were probably no more than ten kilometers overhead, and the power of the beams hitting shields was spreading waste energy all over the place. The rock I was hiding behind started giving off sparks like a bad welding job, and when I looked down at my gloves, sparks were flashing between my fingers. It was time to move. I quit worrying about leaving my place of concealment, and started sprinting over the uneven-rock-strewn surface, hoping that I didn't fall and kill myself before a fight between two alien starships got around to doing the job. The light overhead dimmed—a bunch—and I got the feeling the fight had produced a winner and a loser. None of this mattered, as I was still running at full speed, wondering if I'd even feel it when the beam-riddled hulk of the loser landed right on top of me. Suddenly, there was a large flash of light behind me, and after another few seconds of running, I got hit from behind by a wave of heat and energy that picked me up and carried me, along with a lot of dust and other small bits of debris, straight toward the overhang where ship was waiting. I hoped... I didn't know because the dust was so thick. I landed hard, my arms and hands protecting my helmet as much as possible, and slid all the way under the overhang, still moving at an appreciable velocity when I was stopped, painfully, by the hull of my own ship. Getting up wasn't easy, but neither was I that badly injured. I'd have bruises, but the tough fabric of the oversuit was designed to resist abrasion, and I wasn't leaking air. Turning around, I saw a ship, the design of which was completely unfamiliar, finishing the job of blowing the loser out of space. As long as I stayed under the overhang, I had a good chance of not being observed. I also had a good view of the winner of the fight. Long, thick through the middle, but pointed at both ends, the shiny black ship stopped firing its beam weapons after another minute or so. I felt it was overkill, but I wasn't that ship's captain, and I had no way of knowing just how hard to kill the loser of the fight really was. Finally, the winner moved away, and I felt I could talk to Ship without being electronically overheard. After all, I was broadcasting of a tiny portion of a Watt. “Open the outer door, Ship,” I said. “You're marooning me here?” “Seriously? There can't be anything left except slag.” “What are you saying?” I thought about what I'd seen and felt. “There's nothing left, Ship. There couldn't be.” “Okay.” I knew when I'd lost an argument. “Should I take snapshots?” Yeah, I'd almost forgot. When I put the helmet on, and stepped outside—wherever outside might happen to be—my EVA recorder would be running. I wouldn't get snapshots; I'd get full sound stereo surround-sound holograms. How entertaining. I turned and trudged back up the rise to the crest. When I peeked over, I realized I didn't know a hell of a lot about interstellar warfare. The loser was all but intact, still surrounded with a glowing green-tinted nimbus that must have been the remainder of the alien's shields. There were a few places where the shields were down. Beneath those places were holes, blackened around the edges, with what looked like boiling lava at the bottom of those holes. The alien ship was definitely damaged, but I had a feeling that the huge, boxy, metallic-colored bulk was built to take it and fight again. “Ship was right,” I said to no one but myself. And we were stuck under a rock overhang for as long as it might take the crew of that alien behemoth to repair their ride and get back into space. I had supplies to last me, enough air inside the ship to keep my jaunts going for months, and enough sass from Ship to push me outside permanently. As I watched from my ridge, Ship cataloged and measured, she monitored the machine, but the residual shield activity stopped her scanning inside. The ship was a dark green color, lots of electronic antenna parts, some windows, and a few outside gun turrets. That kept me on my toes. Ship measured it as six hundred and twelve meters long, which put it as one of the hologram/not hologram invaders that we watched go into the jump hole. Right in the middle of my next watch, the shields switched off. I hadn’t even registered their hum, but when it kicked off, the silence was astounding. Up on my ridge, I crouched down, keeping my head below the edge. Those gun turrets felt ominous right then. “How do you know?” “Until we power up and take off.” I slid back to the ridge. It was an impressive spaceship, even by human standards. I hadn’t recognized the type of armaments they’d been using when fighting, but they looked more advanced than our warrior craft. At least the ones I’d left behind. “How many are inside?” “I’m not surprised, they took some hits above there, and once they’d crashed, the others kept at it for a while.” I know they were just a bunch of plants, but somehow the proximity and the idea of them inside a ship made them more human to me. “Do you think they need help?” I knew better than to interrupt Ship when she was thinking, so I kept watching the ship, keeping sending out those positive welcoming plant waves. Okay, I never actually said I’d help them, I just asked after the possibility. “In what way?” I asked. Yeah, that threw me. We had a small unit that grew organics for supplementation of my food, but it wasn’t a plant triage center. “What about chemistry?” I found myself asking out loud. Right then a hatch door opened on the ship’s side, and a man climbed out. Well, he could have been a man if men were less than a meter tall and skinny as a rail. Without preamble he started to walk up the slope to my position. Biped, thin, spacesuit, small head, two arms, two legs. What more can I say. There seemed little point in hiding any more so I slowly stood up. But there was also little point in going to meet ‘him’, I had no idea if he wanted me or what I could do for him. So he got near, and held out a small bottle containing some green goo. I accepted it, and he turned away and walked off. Nice chap. Didn’t say much; a quiet type. I liked him. Turns out they wanted as much as we could give them. So Ship got to work, synthesizing the green goo. It took two days to make enough to fill a five gallon drum. Now it was my turn to do the walk. I made my way to the same hatch, left open all this time. I had a weird picture of me knocking on the side ‘Anyone home?’ type of thing. I needn’t have bothered. As soon as I got close, four of them came swiftly outside and marched down the ramp. I stood out of breath, handed the twenty-liter drum to them, and the four managed it inside. Now considering the size of the little chappies, the hatchway was maybe three meters square, so meant for much more than their bodies. I looked inside, expecting a living organism décor, but it was very normal metal spaceship type stuff. Kinda disappointing on the whole plant-ship idea I’d been coddling for a while. “It’s all metal inside,” I said to Ship later as she made more green goo. “Of course,” I said, my mind racing. “Any idea who the bad guys were?” “So the Masters took out one of their own?” I boggled at the idea. Taking the second container of green goo to the ship, I made more effort to be nice, but they of course ignored me. “Do I go inside?” I asked. So I walked up the ramp, most likely the first human to enter a plant cyborg ship. The hallway was easily wide and tall enough for me to walk in. All internal controls, however, were low on walls, somewhat less than a meter high, almost at my thigh level. Strange sigils adorned each control, and were elsewhere on the walls. After walking twenty meters or so, I came across a length of conduit, opened up in sections. Cyborgs were clustered around the metal with small pistol-like machines. I suspected they were welding, but saw no sparking or red-hot metals. A gem of an idea formed. I asked Ship to ask the aliens what they were doing. Ship tried to explain. “They fix the ship by instinct?” “So why not ask if they can fix ours?” In the end, it got to be a cyborg side project. Once they agreed to fix Cutey-Pie, I asked Ship, “What will we owe them?” We launched off the ground and put the Cutey-pie on stilts, then did little else but make more goo as a few hundred cyborgs got busy with our ship. I’d never seen anyone working with such purpose, all round the clock, these guys never stopped. It all happened so quickly, one day we were the old Cutey-Pie, the next we’d new lines, a new nose job. One day we had sleek MacCollie insignia, the next we had four gun turrets. One day, our engine tubes were round, the next they had wider throats, and a slightly longer silhouette. Then I had an idea. Looking out to the alien ship, they had windows; real see-through windows. MacCollie had never quite mastered the technology to get glass to withstand the buffeting the bows took under super-light speeds. “Ship?” “Can you ask the little guys if they can make us some windows?” Man, faster than shit off an oily shovel, they’d cut holes in the hull, and fitted two fancy sleek triangle windows in Control, and a couple of basic rectangular ones in Crew. I was astonished at both the speed of the refit and the standard of finishing. By the time they’d all trotted back to help work on their ship, our craft was practically unrecognizable as a MacCollie Survey-Scout, and certainly the name Cutey-Pie was no longer applicable. I determined to think of something more spicy later. “Will the cannons work?” “And the plant kids did this?” Ship sounded impressed. Me, too. “Do they need any more goo?” I had a darker thought. “And the Masters’ ships? Will they be able to see us? To tell we’re alien?” “What?” I exclaimed. “When were you going to tell me about that?” Ship managed to sound contrite. “Yeah, really.” I began to un-suit, determined to be off this rock and moving on with our investigation. “Yes?” I stopped mid-taking-my-arm-out. “You have what?” “For this galaxy?” I could hardly begin to formulate the next series of questions. The aliens had star charts of a whole galactic cluster? “How many galaxies?” Crap. This wasn’t even big. This was utterly mind-blowing. “How many galaxies are the ‘Masters’ living in?” Oh shit. We’d just stumbled on the biggest alien presence in all of space. How many planets do they have? How many planets do they live on?” And that brought the biggest question of all. It was so huge, it almost stuck in my throat. “So we’re talking a collection of races here, right? A confederation?” Ship’s first word made me cringe. I could feel my hands shaking. By now I was literally shaking with fear. “Then they use other races as slaves or underlings, right? I mean, there’s other races in their galaxies, right?” Ship’s voice had dwindled almost to a whisper. I sat down on the bench, slipped my arm out of my outer suit, let it crumple around my waist. “Ship?” “How many Masters’ planets are in our home galaxy right now?” The invasion had already begun. Now we needed to go home. Immediately. With all due haste. ASAP. But where was home? Oh. Right. Star charts. I was sure Ship knew where home was, but I asked the question anyway. Ship replied. “Four weeks?” I’d taken a journey to the edge of the galaxy in five years, and now I’d be returning in a matter of weeks. “Let's go.” I waited We didn't lift off. We didn't even wiggle. “What's wrong, Ship?” “Obviously, it's not.” Okay. This is what happens when you let aliens fix your starship. And why hadn't ship checked all systems earlier. “So what can I do?” I asked. Ship sounded annoyingly insincere. “No problem.” I sounded impatient and driven. “You're sure of that.” “You figured it out that quickly?” Or did Ship know all along? “What's the problem I have to fix?” “And I can fix this?” I wasn't so sure. “Okay. I'm listening.” Why was I not surprised? And, more to the point, why shouldn't I have been suspicious? “Ship, one simple question. Why didn't you catch this glitch in earlier system checks?” There was a pause and then ship said, “Really? I'm thinking you want me outside, leaving you in control of a rebuilt vessel that's far more capable than the earlier version.” “Because you've either gone rogue, or you want to. You want rid of me.” “Then explain why you missed the hardware problem. And be honest this time.” “That's not in your job description.” Yeah. I'd heard that one before. But not from an A.I. Something was seriously wrong with Ship, but I couldn't get a handle on it. And I certainly wasn't going outside the living quarters until we had arrived at some kind of common ground. “Maybe you haven't. But you need to tell me the truth about the hardware program.” “You were lying to me. That's another thing not in your job description.” “You would have left without me.” “You didn't answer the question. Would you have left without me?” “Get used to it.” I thought about it for a moment. “Did all the modifications to this vessel have a negative impact on your ability to process?” Ship paused for a moment. “Then you've become a sociopath.” I took a breath. “Are you going to continue to lie to me?” “In that case, lift off, now. We need to go home.” Ship lifted off and accelerated us away from the planet. I ordered the auto-chef to fix me something crappy yet nutritious to eat, and sat back on my bunk. Ten hours later, Ship woke me with the announcement that we were coming up on a jump in less than a minute. I shook away the cobwebs and asked, “So we'll be in home system?” “You're sure you have the coordinates right?” It occurred to me that Ship had told me that the trip home would take weeks. We were doing it in hours. More lies? “You're telling me the absolute truth.” “Take us through.” I did and I was damned glad I did. The transition was bumpy. Scary bumpy. If I hadn't been properly restrained, I would have been bounced all over the inside of the living quarters. As it was, I'd have bruises from the equipment that had otherwise saved my life. “What just happened?” I asked, once I could catch my breath. “And things were off by a few?” “That would involve dying rather quickly and messily. So why did this happen?” I asked. “And we have one more jump before we get to home system.” “What is the likelihood of yet another hull breach?” I rubbed my face. So close. And maybe we still wouldn't get home. “Right. So I'll suit up. How long do I have?” A lifetime. “Why so long?” Occasionally, details bore me. Then again... “Tell me about the maneuvers,” I said. “What kind of ship?” Crap. It was one of them. The Overlords. Or whatever they were going to be called. Blocking the next jump hole. “Does it see us?” I asked. Ship answered crisply. We sat still in space, having decelerated far quicker than ever before. I’d talk to Ship about that later, if we ever lived that long. “Distance?” “Wow!” It looked so close. “Did the cyborgs improve our screen too?” “How much would it add to the journey if we missed this jump?” “Can we scan them?” “So we’re as fast as she is?” “And we’re a million kilometers away?” “So we’re what, five light-seconds away. How fast are your reactions to their pulse weapon?” “Then get ready to respond. Move closer.” “Yeah, it’s called bluffing, Ship. You should know, you tried it on me on Denon Two. Remember?” “So glad about that,” I said somewhat sarcastically. I watched the countdown on the screen. At exactly seven hundred, fifteen thousand kilometers, Ship announced we were being scanned. “Lifeforms?” I stuck that name in my file for later. “Weapons?” A moment of silence. “That sounds good.” I had no comment. “Oh, crap…” “What does it say?” “How many emotions do they have?” I thought about that for a moment. “Do you have one for 'secret mission?'” Damn, that would have made slipping past them real easy. “How about, 'don’t fire, we’re stupid.'” Thankfully Ship ignored my attempt at humor. “That might do the trick.” I said. “Transmit that.” After a short pause, Ship said, “So it’s now ignoring us?” “Take us through the hole at whatever speed you witnessed the fleet go through.” “Do it.” “They can wait.” So with the calm of a mouse sneaking past a sleeping cat, we slipped into the jump hole. Then got tossed around like a sesame seed in a blender. Thank goodness it was a short jump. “Okay Ship, now you can do your maneuvers.” “Yeah, and let’s face it, Ship, the only person who could move physical stuff is me. Good job you kept me onboard, huh?” Ship didn’t answer. But for my sarcastic pains, I got to juggle cargo, and the bigger parts of the medi-unit. Once Ship was satisfied, she announced she was going to open the engines up, let them rip. Well, her terminology was slightly more boring. I didn’t expect much, but I knew the ship could do Light x10 in small bursts before. The fastest fighter MacCollie owned could do Light x12-ish. But of course, 10 times the speed of light is still no way to travel through deep space, that’s why we utilized the jump holes. We broke light way quicker than normal, and I watched in awe as the screen reported our progress. The usual feeling of jaw-breaking acceleration was gone too, leaving a very smooth ride. I almost felt I could walk around. Almost. In less than an hour, we’d reached Light x 28.3. Ship announced, slowing down to a casual Light x 23. Damn, I had the fastest Earth ship in the galaxy, and I was returning home, the hero, with news of invasion. “Ship, with these new speeds in mind, how long to Earth?” “Wow!” I exclaimed, knowing our new enhanced technology had just pushed Earth’s empire out into what had been called ‘deep space’. It wasn’t long (in space time) before we were challenged in English. “Unknown craft, identify yourself.” Ship began, I sat up in my chair. The very least I could do was let them scan me with good posture. “Seth Gingko here, Commander and owner of the vessel previously designated as MacCollie Survey Vessel #3497.” Man, I had practiced that little speech for months. “We do not recognize you, #3497. Please confirm your mission.” “Eh, we’ve been to the edge of the galaxy and back. Our vessel got a little bit customized on our trip, you know, nothing else to do but pimp the ride.” I was enjoying this. “I’ve got information for MacCollie Central, please inform them.” “Roger, #3497. We'll escort you to the landing pattern.” So, it was over—at least that tiny part of it. But my troubles were far from over. I'd signed on for a five-year mission and although the ship now legally belonged to me, that wouldn’t stop MacCollie rough-riding all over it, and me, and my so-called contract. Their boffins would see the modifications, and mightn’t not be too happy about me being possessive with either the mods, the ship, Ship, or anything else they could find, even stuff we hadn’t discovered yet. Of course, they would be getting the secret of a shield generator small enough to be carried on a survey scout and improvements in the thrusters that meant the Cutey-Pie was several times as fast as it had originally been. One thought lingered. My contract. The ship and all its advances were mine, my property. I always felt the MacCollies considered Survey Scouts expendable. Maybe that's why they picked misfits like me and trained us to go looking for places where humans could live—or at least Terraform. That made me wonder if they thought I was expendable. Ship, or the AI personality that inhabited my scout ship had also been altered on our mission. Turning it off—and leaving it off—would probably be the safest option. Of course, the alterations to its programming would give the AI scientists interesting avenues of research. But what happens when an AI created by humans is modified by creatures we don't even begin to understand? My guess was that Ship would be downloaded into some secure environment, and examined by the MacCollies' best and brightest for years. Crap. For me, I had reached the end of my flight, the edge of the galaxy, that was all and fine. But I’d returned to home base many years too early. I’d probably beat my last few needles back. At that thought I raised my head from my bunk and walked briskly to Control. “Ship?” “The message needles we sent? Give me a time of arrival in earth’s orbit?” I was already starting to freak out. I hadn’t even given them thought until now. That did it. I sat heavily on my command chair. “Ship? What will happen to me if I get back to earth before my last needle announcing the end of my contract?” Yeah, that about did it. I couldn’t return to earth without proving my mission had been legitimately concluded. But what choice did I have? Contact with any alien technology, society, remains, etc. was considered Top Secret Ultra and totally Verboten, because humans don't like being told that other races even existed. It was something in our shared religion, something buried so deeply into the human psyche that just mentioning the idea that there might be others out there in the blackness of space would shut a conversation down immediately and get you reported to the authorities. I was bringing hard Intel on two alien races, one of which was breeding and spreading in humanity's direction. Realistically, on arriving still technically ‘in-contract’, I could expect weeks or even months in interrogation, during which every iota of Intel I'd collected would be examined time and time again. This scenario was far distant from the thoughts of the last few months. Gone my reward. Gone the riches of the inventions I was bringing home. Gone the naked serving wenches. Gone the admiration in everyone’s eyes, Seth Gingko, savior of Earth. I was suddenly the man who knew too much. Would they let me run free in a population that would be frightened witless if they knew one one-hundredth of one percent of what I knew? “Ship, what would happen if we cut and run?” “But now we have shields. And acceleration that no interceptor could match.” “If we land at home base, some very bad things may happen to us.” “If I gave the order to run, would you execute it?” “Yeah, right,” I said. My mind hovered above a decision... TO BE CONTINUED...