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 got bigger than that: they ruled travel to the stars. The development of the L-Space drive—the first practical FTL drive—created a monopoly that allowed access to the stars only to those the MacCollie company felt they could trust.

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.

That 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. With the advances in drive technology, it took only took four years to reach Lushman 16. It took a mere six months to orbit the 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, 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, they 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-Scouts, recruited 1000 pilots, and fired them to every corner of the Milky Way.

Enter our hero… Seth Gingko.

This is the second novella in the Star-Eater Chronicles and to be honest, you should read book 1 first…

…just because.

However, for those who won’t, or those who have forgotten, here’s setting the scene…

Seth Gingko is a MacCollie Survey-Scout. Sent to map to the edge of the galaxy, he is promised his ship as payment for his contract. But on taking command, he finds two new alien races, one of whom is taking over the galaxy at an alarming rate. Armed with crucial intelligence and an alien hybrid ship, he races home to help earth win the fight. Then he remembers he’s going to arrive before his messages; to the MacCollie Corporation on Earth, he’s in breach of contract.

Book 2 continues the story…

You’ve just found out that an alien race is invading your home galaxy, but you can’t report to Earth, because you’ll be put in jail.

You’ve got the fastest ship in the galaxy, modified by friendly aliens, but you can’t show it off—or even enjoy it all that much—because the greedy MacCollie Corporation will steal your ship, rip it to bits to study the technology, and you’ll still end up in jail.

Add to that, you’ve got the only star map of the nearest sixteen galaxies, but you can’t bring it to Earth because greedy MacCollie Corporation will steal your ship, stick you in jail, and smash your only friend to pieces.

It’s called a dilemma, and since I was shooting through space at 1.6 million kilometers a second with an Earth interceptor by my side, I had a decision to make.

“Ship?”

-Yes, Seth?-

“How easy would it be to break formation, pull the tightest turn that wouldn’t kill me, and piss off into deep space?”

-You want to lose our escort?-

“Yes, very much so.”

-Such a maneuver is within my operating parameters. Just give the command-

I gave it another moment’s thought. The idea of interrogation and prison didn’t sit well with me.

“Do it.”

I felt safety straps slip over my body, and the chair tilted back; that was a new one. Man, those alien plant-hybrid cyborgs had been aboard the ship for a couple of days, and we still hadn’t worked out all they’d done.

Bam!

Acceleration unlike anything I’d ever felt before. Stars slid from left to right on my screen, then started shooting past at an unbelievable rate. When the digits started showing us in excess of Light times 10, I called a halt. Well, I called a slight deceleration. We’d shot off like a cheetah, leaving the lowly house cat light years behind.

-What now, Seth-

“How long before they get our last message needle?”

-I told you already…-

“Yes! Tell me again!”

-Two years and three months-

Yeah, that was the camel that broke the straw’s back. “So we’ve got two and a half years to potter around before my contract’s actually over.”

-As far as your employers on Earth are concerned, that is correct-

“And you have the most advanced space map ever seen by Earth science.”

-That too, is an accepted fact.-

So, yes, I quite fancied the idea of darting round the galaxy, but no, I didn’t want to do it on my own, and I sure didn’t want to tell Ship I was bored with her company. She was way too unpredictable for that kind of admission.

“Take us out to…”

I was about to say ‘the edge of the galaxy’, but Ship interrupted.

-Emergency beacon, distress being called-

You know, there are times when you just wallow around like a butterfly, and there are times you’re on a mission, head down, charging forward. There are also those times when you instinctively know you should ignore the obvious, and times to go with your gut.

My gut said ignore the call.

-Seth? Did you hear me?- Ship insisted.

“Yes, I heard you.” I know I sounded annoyed.

-Don’t you want details?-

“Only if you must.”

-MacCollie Survey vessel designation #1753. Hull breach. Limited air-

Crap, that made a difference. Basically it was one of my own. “Distance?”

-Two hundred and eighty million kilometers-

“Wow,” I said, quite surprised. “Right in our own neighborhood. But how the hell...?” Someone had been way off course. No MacCollie survey vessel should have been within light-years of our position.

-The signal is coded as EXTREME NEED, FATAL CONSEQUENCE WITHOUT ASSISTANCE-

“Go for it.” What the hell. I would hope that any other scout would do the same for me.

-Course already plotted-

And then we did the acceleration, braking thing again. A little more of that an I'd be seeing spots before my eyes.

“Open channels,” I leaned over my console. “MacCollie #1753, do you hear me?”

“ Receiving you,” A female voice, husky, sexy, but probably dying too.

“I’m a MacCollie scout. I’m on my way,” I stripped, jumped into a skin-tite, and a padded oversuit. I clamped the helmet on but left the faceplate open. I’d close it at the last moment. “Ship. Get us side by side, open both air lock outer doors.

-I comply-

I did clip a wire just in case, but I needn’t have bothered. When the hatch opened, Ship had me so close, I could have stepped over. Inside her air lock, it took precious seconds for it to normalize pressure and open the inner door. Finding her, clipping myself to her bunk, and fixing a new oxygen tank took another minute. I turned the oxygen on and slowly the perspiration cloud on her helmet diminished. When it did, I saw a smiling face.

Well, she was definitely female, of that there was no doubt. Husky? By the sound of her labored breathing, she’d probably be husky for some time. Sexy? Definitely a no-no on that side. She had a cute smile, but that was as far as my fantasies went. I’d say more ‘homely’ than sexy.

“Seth Gingko,” I said, looking down at her, trying not to be disappointed.

“Carol Myerson,” she lifted her gloved hand into mine. “I’ve heard of you. And thanks for the save.”

I caught an accent, but didn't ask what she’d heard. I left it with, “You're welcome.”

By time she’d taken off the restraints, and sat up, she seemed to be getting her breath back okay. “So what happened?” I asked.

“One in a million.” She grimaced, clutching her side. “We took a communications needle. Radar didn’t see it coming quick enough. Took us right through the port side.”

I shook my head. “Wow, never heard of that happening before.”

“No hope of getting it fixed; the hole’s way too big. It was a wonder I made it to my suit in time. Computer’s gone, haven’t heard a word since the collision.”

“What were you doing out here?”

“Charting pulsars; it’s a new initiative.”

“How long have you been out?”

“Two years three months, and a couple of days.”

“I have to ask,” I began, sheepishly. “Where are you from?”

“Britain,” she answered, offering no more.

And of course, I did the knightly thing and offered sanctuary aboard my ship.

Blah.

So we transferred her essentials. Dried protein and carbs for food, personal stuff, a couple of spare suits, and a better and more up-to-date medi-kit than mine. Seems the aliens hadn’t bothered with that.

Two hours later I sat back in control, getting ready to shove off.

We sat.

Damn, I had a crew-mate, a British one.

The question was, what did I want with a crew mate?

Did I even need one?

I had to think about that one while I was thinking about what I wanted to do with the fastest ship ever in human possession.

“Seth?” my new crew mate asked. “I know you’re a scout. But what’s your mission and why are we in a MacCollie scout ship that’s been heavily modified?”

“Long story, Carol,” I muttered. “Thing haven’t been going smoothly, lately.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. What can I do to help?”

Grinning slightly, I said, “It’s not your fault.”

She had that look that women sometimes get. “Is there any chance you could get me back to home station?”

I shook my head. “That would be a tough one.”

The look changed a bit. It made me think of my first wife. Eccccchhh. “Do you want to tell me why?”

“Maybe later. For now, just think of me as not the most popular person at home station.”

“So we’re going to be spending some time together.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Now she looked suspicious. “How would you describe my status here?”

“Right now, you’re my passenger. Later, maybe a crew mate.”

“On a ship built for one?”

I shrugged. “There’s more room aboard than you might think. And we’re not going to run out of supplies. We’re well-stocked, and the recycler is amazing.”

-Where are we headed, Seth?- Ship asked, interrupting the first human conversation I’d had in a long time.

“We’re going scouting,” I said. “That’s my job. And yours, Ship. Remember?”

“Do the two of you have a problem?” Carol asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Think of it as the old-married couple syndrome.”

She laughed. A tiny bit. “I was getting that way with my Ship. Of course it was more like two spinster sisters bickering.”

I smiled in her direction. “So you know the problem.”

“I do.”

-There are two Fellowship frigates headed our way- Ship interjected. -They appear to be on an intercept course-

“Distance?”

-One hundred and ninety million kilometers-

“We need to be on our way. Ship. Head for the nearest jump point at maximum acceleration.”

-You might find that uncomfortable. And for our passenger, it could be fatal unless she is restrained in an acceleration couch-

I looked at Carol. “There’s a spare couch. Second cabin on the right. Wait!” I’d started keeping pharmaceuticals in my pocket at all times. I flipped a pack to Carol. “You’ll need this.”

“Seth, why are we running from Fellowship vessels?”

“It would take a while to explain. I really need you webbed into an acceleration couch.”

She gave me a very straight look, sighed, and then said, “Okay.”

As Carol headed toward her cabin and couch, I asked, “Ship, what’s the distance now?”

-One hundred seventy-seven million kilometers and closing-

I popped a pill and waited a few seconds. “Is Carol secure?”

Ship answered, -She is-

“Then, go.”

The acceleration was as brisk as it had been earlier, and even with the compensators working at the maximum, I was shoved down into the cushions of my couch. I heard Carol let out a scream behind me. I knew she’d never experienced anything like what she was now feeling.

“Where does this jump point take us?” I managed to wheeze.

-I don’t know- Ship said. -It doesn’t appear on any chart. Not even the charts given to us by the aliens-

“How long to jump?”

-Five seconds. Relax, Seth. Everything is under control-

The jump came and went. When I stopped seeing bright spots of light and hearing strange noises, I asked, “Where are we?”

-Calculating- Ship replied cheerfully. -The new charts tend to make things easier-

“I’m waiting.”

-We seem to be in a different spiral arm. We jumped to a system that's ninety degrees spinward along the horizontal plane of the galaxy-

“That doesn’t mean as much as a graphic might, Ship. You should know that about me.”

-I was preparing the graphic-

After another moment, Ship projected a hologram of our home galaxy, a multi-armed spiral consisting of billions of stars. A bright spot well out from the center on one of the spiral arms showed the position of our home world. Another bright spot, much nearer the center appeared in a spiral arm that truly was a quarter of the way around the galaxy.

“We’re a long way from home,” I said, half scared out of my mind.

“Can we find our way back?” Carol had returned. She looked suitably gray and groggy.

I nodded. “I’m reasonably sure we can. When we want to.”

“So you’re going to complete your mission?”

“Yes,” I said. “And no.”

Carol shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“I barely do. I had an assigned course. Events caused me to deviate from that course. But it really doesn’t free me from my basic obligation. I was originally tasked with finding planets fit for habitation, or failing that, planets that can be terraformed to the point that humans can live on them.”

She sat back in the chair. “No surprises there. That’s what I’ve always been told that scout-survey’s do.”

I tried to place the accent in the few movies I’d seen with British actresses, but there was something odd about it. I let it lie, determined to get to the bottom of it one day. “Of course, right now, I may have gone a bit too far. I don’t know that human colonists would want to live this far out from homeworld.”

After studying the graphic for a few moments, she asked, “Does it matter? If you’re a hundred light-years from Earth, or 10,000 light-years, what difference does it make? You're definitely not walking home.”

I chuckled. “Good point. I guess. So I guess I could get back to doing what I’m getting paid to do.”

“But now you have me. A shipwrecked castaway.” She looked around. “I was good at my job, Seth. Let me earn my keep.”

“Maybe you won’t want to once you’ve heard the truth.”

She exhaled slowly. “I’m listening.”

“You’ve been alone in the darkness. Did you ever see anything that made you think we might not be alone in the Universe?”

“Are you recording this conversation?”

“No. The idea never entered my mind. Besides, the one thing I’m not is sneaky.”

“I’ve heard that’s a good quality,” she said.

“Have you had a chance to look at this ship?”

“I have. It’s very non-standard, inside and out.”

“You’re right. It was extensively damaged, and then repaired by friendly—although I use the term guardedly—aliens. It’s a scout ship with shield generators. I have as much firepower as a Fellowship destroyer. Maybe even a cruiser. As you witnessed, I can easily outrun any Fellowship vessel. This ship is a result of my encounter with aliens—who, by the way, aren’t the aliens that scare the hell out of me.

Leaning forward, she said, “You’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve been consorting with aliens.”

“Consorting? Now that’s a word you don’t hear much these days.”

“Give me another word for whatever it is you did with these aliens to convince them to modify your ship.”

I smiled at her. “I talked to them nicely.”

“You’re serious.”

“Never more so.”

“Are we in what they consider their part of space?”

“I don’t know. I have no reason to think so.”

-I hate to interrupt again- Ship said. -But there are three spaceships in the vicinity. And they aren’t Fellowship design-

I looked at Carol. “We may have a bit of a problem.”

“Tell me they’re Floran. Please?” I asked Ship.

-I can’t do that Seth. They’re definitely Master-race. One occupant per ship-

“Is that normal?” Carol looked on to our conversation, mouth opening wider by the second.

-Thus far- Ship answered. -The aliens are roughly humanoid, and seem to be sleeping, or perhaps unconscious, but that’s as far as my sensors can penetrate-

“How big are the ships?”

-Standard size. Six hundred and twelve meters long-

“Do they know we’re here?” I asked.

-Yes, but I just hit their computers with the ‘specialized mission’ protocol, and their AI’s seem quite satisfied with that-

“Onscreen for Carol's benefit.”

-I comply-

The three Master-ships were maybe fifteen centimeters long on-screen.

“The image is fuzzy,” Carol said, siding close to me. I’d been alone for so long, I wasn’t sure I liked the maneuver.

-At full magnification the source gets pulled around by so much interference- Ship explained before I could think of what to say. -The new scanners have three times the range of the best MacCollie machines, but even they have their limits-

We looked at them in silence for a moment. “I need to see a History.” Carol turned to face me. She looked quite determined. “I can’t process all the change if I don’t know the History.”

-Seth? Do you authorize this- Ship sounded a bit unnerved.

A History?

Basically a Seth’s mission’ documentary.

I felt I had no alternative. At best, Carol would climb onboard with my new ‘passing time until my last needle got home’ mission. At worst, I’d drop her off near a Fellowship base, and she’d tell my story to the officials. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if they got my truth as well as their perceived version of it. “Sure, Ship. Use one of the screens in Crew. I don’t need to see it.”

And I reckoned it would get Carol off my shoulder for an hour. At least the rudimentary questions would be answered by Ship’s disclosure.

I set Ship’s course to the edge of the galaxy again, and sat back in my chair, relaxing. Once Carol didn’t show, I trotted off to Crew. She was watching the aliens.

“Quite something, huh?”

She nodded, grinning, then I noticed her hands on the screen, directing Ship’s cameras. “See, they’re adding a new box to the food replicator.”

Actually I hadn’t noticed any difference to my meals since the renovation, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Why?”

“I’m not sure. They certainly gave the ship a good going-over.”

She paused the image and crossed to the replicator. “Do you use regular commands?”

“Yeah, just ask for anything.”

Carol nodded and turned to the small screen. “Six ounce beef steak, cooked medium well. That’d be hunky-dory.”

I laughed, shaking my head at her attempt. “It won’t…” Then the screen showed a steak. “What the hell?”

The usual white numbered countdown started. Well, when I say ‘usual’, it wasn’t really. My requests for nutrition bars usually had a three minute countdown, this started at seven, but it showed a steak!

Carol turned to me with the face of a rapt child.

“I was just joking.” She gave a chug of stifled laughter, clapping her hands together.

Then blow me overboard if a steak didn’t appear minutes later. The aroma filled the room in seconds. We looked at each other as though we’d discovered the wheel. Gingerly she took it off the plate, her fingers getting used to the heat. “It’s hot.”

“And moist,” I added, then remembered that most women hated that word. That’s me, I only open my mouth to change feet.

I almost danced on the spot with anticipation. Damn, I’d lived on energy bars and pills for five years; this was an intense moment.

Okay, to be truthful, it probably wasn’t good compared to Earth beef, but it sure tasted better than re-constituted beef should.

Then I felt us decelerate, not braking, but definitely slowing down. “What’s up, Ship?”

-Seth- Ship sounded somewhat alarmed. -I have physical contact with an Earth ship-

“Out here?” I mean, we were on a different spiral arm, and I’d sent us heading further out still.

-It’s not complete, Seth. It's wreckage-

That threw me; I walked back into Control, chewing the last piece of steak. I found the screen already up.

-Seth, I’ve already tractor-beamed it in, but there’s more-

The screen showed pieces of Scout survey, very much like my own before the modifications. “Can you identify it?”

-It contains biological debris-

I winced at Ship's words.

-Its commander did not survive-

Carol stood at my side; again, I wasn’t liking her idea of personal space. “Was it an accident?”

-No- Ship’s tone was conclusive. -There are indications of structural contusion suggesting that a pressure weapon was used-

I felt Carol’s hand on my arm. “Ship?”

-Yes, Carol?-

“Scan all parts for identification. Work out from their speed and trajectory the blast site.”

Clever, I wouldn’t have thought of that. “Yeah, scan to our furthest, see what other pieces we can find. Start collecting.”

The idea of a guy like me, way out here being hit by aliens bugged me. Up to now, I’d considered myself ordinary, maybe a bit lucky to get a new, better ship and get away alive. With this debris, the fight was getting more personal by the minute.

-MacCollie Survey-Scout….- My heart sank. -…MSV2611-

“Do we have a pilot’s name?”

-His name was Daniel Contessa-

I was kinda glad I didn’t know him. “Mission?”

-Much the same as yours, but in a different direction. We are in his assigned sector-

Damn. My plans had changed again. I had thought to go to the galaxy’s edge, then slip round the side, get near the Master’s planets and have a sniff around. Now it looked like they were here too.

I love it when a plan comes together, but I hate it when one turns to shit.

Suddenly the little bit of steak weighed heavy and cold in my gut.

All of a sudden, I had a mystery on my hands.

Who killed Daniel Contessa?

The Masters?

One of the three ships we’d just avoided?

But the occupants were slumbering. Would the defensive—or offensive—systems have acted while the Masters weren’t awake?

Who else could be the culprit? A Fellowship destroyer? Or even a cruiser? Such an act would make no sense at all, but I’d heard worse about them. Too much power, too much authority, and space is a very large place in which to commit a crime that no one ever knows about—except for the victim in the last micro-seconds of his or her life.

“Ship. Tell me what you've found so far.”

-Nothing new in any way. I've found debris and some human remains-

“We already knew that,” I said. “Don’t be so damned literal. What caused a perfectly good scout ship to get spread out into a field of drifting junk?”

-I don’t know- Ship said. -The more I learn, the more puzzled I become-

Carol wasn’t talking. She was still holding on to my arm. Much more and it would go numb.

“What’s so puzzling, Ship?”

-If the scout ship was destroyed with lasers or particle-beam weapons, I’d find burnt slag. Lasers make holes through things by melting whatever happens to be in the way. Particle-beams are a lot more energetic—they tend to blow right through anything that isn’t shielded in an awful hurry—but they still leave slag. Then there’s the question of explosives, but I find no chemical signature that explosives have been used. That leaves a small nuclear detonation, which would leave a trace—or more—of radiation. But again, nothing. It’s as though the scout ship was first crushed—wadded, actually—and then ripped apart but some force that leaves absolutely no trace-

“Adaptation of a force-field?” Carol asked.

I thought about having my ship bent like a banana. I wondered if that left any traces. As I was thinking, Ship was talking. -It would have to be technology beyond my knowledge. Force-fields tend to be electromagnetic in nature. I would think that such a massive expenditure of force would leave some kind of evidence-

“Where did this happen?” I asked.

-An interesting question- Ship answered. -I can show you the direction in which the wreckage has been traveling and I can extrapolate backward in time to show you a course. But with so little to go on, I can’t tell you exactly where the scout ship was attacked and destroyed-

“Can you get close?”

-Yes-

“Show me,” I said.

Ship prepared a hologram. I looked at it, thought about it. “Now we know which way not to go,” I said. “Let’s take off in a wholly different direction.”

“It sounds as though you’re running from a fight,” Carol said.

“It’s exactly what I’m doing,” I replied. “I have no desire to end up like Daniel Contessa.”

She finally took her hand off my arm. “So no one avenges his death.”

“No,” I said. “Running toward a fight without knowing your opponent—his strengths and his weaknesses—is a fool’s errand. There’s something nasty out there. It killed a scout pilot and ripped his ship into little chunks of debris. I have no intention of fighting whatever’s out there until I’m sure I can kill it and turn it into little chunks of debris.”

“But it still seems that we’re running.”

Did it?

Was I that out-of-touch with my own inner workings that I couldn’t be sure of my motives? Growing up, I had gone through that early-adolescent period when, in my imagination, I saw myself growing into some great hero, a stalwart and handsome fellow who would, on one of his better days, save humanity from ugly, vicious aliens who’d crawled out of the deepest, dankest holes in outer space.

Then I grew up. I never considered myself handsome—nor did any of my three wives. Was I stalwart? If I had a choice, I’d always prefer lucky over brave and true, because history is replete with those who aspired to heroism and died trying. If I had to face someone—or some thing—who wanted to kill me, I wanted to get the first shot off and right on target.

-I’m waiting for instructions, Seth- Ship grumbled.

“Calculate a parallel course in the reverse direction. But keep us at least fifty Astronomical Units from the path of the debris field.”

-At what velocity-

“Light times twenty. It’ll make us a difficult target to spot, let alone hit.”

“So you are going looking for whatever killed Daniel Contessa?” Carol asked.

“You could say that.”

-Please get in your chairs. Acceleration begins in thirty seconds-

I got snuggy and waited. Then Ship poured on the coal. We raced forward, and spent the next few hours being reasonably uncomfortable. When we had reached our coasting speed, I got out of the chair and realized I’d gotten over my short bout of indigestion. I was thinking of food when Carol returned.

“How long will be coasting?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. I looked at the speed, man, we were almost at light times twenty. “I have no idea what we’re looking for. Even if we find something, will we be able to recognize it as a threat in time to do something about it?”

“You don’t like the idea of shooting blind, I guess.”

“Exactly.” I had no reason to tell her I don’t like killing anything or anyone that doesn’t deserve it. If she didn’t understand that about me, I’d have to wonder about her morality.

Carol asked, “What do we do while we're coasting?”

“Other than look?”

“Yes. Aren’t there shipboard duties to perform?”

“Your scout must have been one of the really early ones.”

“It had a few years on it.” She paused. “Make that a few decades.”

“First, I have a very competent Ship who takes care of everything shipboard. Second, this ride has been totally revised. There never was much to do. Now, there’s nothing.”

“I have a very low boredom threshold,” she complained.

“Ship has an extensive library to keep you occupied,” I said.

“What is there left to see or read? I’d been on my scout ship long enough to put a serious dent in its library.”

“You’re getting my best offer,” I said. “Or you could opt for cold-sleep.”

“No chance. I am not going into a freeze-box. Not no, but hell, no.”

“Claustrophobic?”

“The psychics don’t have a word for it. Cold? Confined? Frozen stiff as a board? No thank you, Captain Seth. I’ll swab decks before I’d even think about cold-sleep.” Damned it if she hadn’t slipped into a British pirate accent, perfect, straight from the movies.

“Swab decks?” I asked with a chuckle. “I have absolutely no idea what that means.”

“And well you shouldn’t. You’ve probably never heard of walking the plank or hoisting the Union Jack, either, have you?”

I shook my head. Obviously, some part of my education was utterly missing.

“Just exactly where are you from?” I asked.

“Oh, you wouldn’t know it anyway.”

“Okay,” she shook her head, “Abingdon.”

My turn to shake mine.

“Near Oxford.”

Still shaking, “I mean I’ve heard of Oxford, but have absolutely no idea where it actually is.”

“Just outside London, outside the new M26…”

-We have a contact-

“Distance?” I asked, turning to the screen.

-One fifth of a light-year-

“Is it moving?”

-No. And I find that odd. Everything in the Universe is in constant motion. And yet there’s something out there that’s quite stationary-

“Can you get a visual?” Carol asked, though she probably shouldn’t have. After all, it was my ship.

-Not at this distance- I was a bit surprised when Ship answered her so readily. Seems like our relationship had gotten complicated.

The actual distance was growing noticeably smaller as we spoke.

“Hmmm,” I muttered. “Are we headed straight at this object?”

-No- Ship said. -Your choice of a parallel reverse course means we will miss the object by a considerable distance-

“Meaning fifty A.U.”

-Yes. But for a very brief time. We will approach it, we will be at that minimum distance from it, and we will move away from it. It will all happen very quickly-

“Right.” I could visualize what Ship was telling me. But what would I learn from a point fifty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, especially when we were coasting at light times twenty?

“Change our course a bit, Ship. I want to pass that object at a distance of ten A.U.”

-Do you wish a change in velocity-

“No,” I said after thinking about it for a moment. “I’d prefer remaining a very difficult target to hit.”

-I won't capture that much data traveling at our rate of speed-

“Caution is sometimes preferable to valor.”

-You do realize that the location of that object almost certainly identifies it as the entity or mechanism that destroyed Daniel Contessa’s Scout-

“I wouldn’t take that to a courtroom” I replied.

-I didn’t ask you to- Ship sounded a bit out of sorts.

“What’s your problem? Out with it,” I demanded.

-You assumed that I was going to suggest you fire on the object-

“I did no such thing. You made the assumption, thinking I’d made an assumption. Should I be the one to take offense?”

“Could we haul it back a bit?” Carol asked.

-Sorry- Ship muttered.

“Same here.”

“I think you should fire on it,” Carol said. “One volley, in passing.”

“On an assumption?”

She shook her head. “No. On circumstantial evidence. That object is where it should be if it destroyed the scout ship and killed its captain. I’m saying that the evidence is strong enough to consider that object guilty of murder, and take appropriate action.”

“As in revenge.”

She shrugged. “Call it what you want. But here’s what I’m feeling. The object is guilty, and it will try to kill us when we pass by it—even at light times twenty. It will take a shot. We should shoot first.”

Hmmm. We had more in common than I thought.

Okay, so even in my mellow stage, I had no real intention of wasting any significant amount of time nudging closer to this thing. On a whim, I came to a decision. “Ship? Take us past at one hundred thousand kilometers, same velocity. Get all the readings you can, then bring us back out again. Maximum battle readiness.”

-Aye, aye, sir- I’m certain I heard sarcasm in Ship’s tone. Carol and I got webbed in our couches; we’d been doing a heck of a lot of that lately.

-Do I fire on it as I pass?- Ship asked.

“Definitely not.”

Thank you, Carol, for putting that idea in Ship’s little head.

I settled back for the show.

-It’s a Master ship, Seth- Ship said immediately after we’d made our pass and then dropped out of FTL. -Star-Destroyer Class-

“And where did that juicy bit of data come from?”

-I don’t know. It just popped out- Ship managed to sound contrite. -I believe it came from old records somewhere-

Hadn't she just gotten updated programming recently?

What the hell was going on?

I hoped my grin was convincing. I didn't think it was. “It’s okay, Ship. ‘Star-Destroyer Class’ sounds quite menacing, I mean, we have to call them something.”

-You might be interested to know that there is no one on board that ship-

“What?” That threw me. “No one aboard? You’re sure?”

-Affirmative. The usual single Master figure is missing-

Damn. Ship knew a lot of things that it shouldn’t have known. “Is the Master figure dead?”

-No, Seth. Missing. There is no sentient creature on board, nor the remains of any such being-

Oh. That made me plan the riches I’d get if I took this baby home. “Let’s give her another sweep, way slower this time, same defensive posture.”

Well, on the screen it went by as a blur, but when we turned back to look at it, the Star-Destroyer hadn’t budged. Carol joined me right away, her eyes intent on the screen’s image. “Is she moving at all?”

-Negatory- Ship replied. -There has been some thruster adjustment, three times in the last five hours, but the vessel is perfectly still in regard to the inherent motion of the galaxy-

I decided to throw a little of our caution to the wind. “Have we been scanned?”

-Yes-

“Then the ship’s computer knows we’re here?”

-It appears so, Seth-

And we hadn’t been fired on.

“Ship, take us closer.”

Carol gave me a glare, but kept her mouth shut.

So for the next hour we crept closer… well, ‘crept’ is a relative term; considering we started off around half a million kilometers from the alien ship, we sped towards her.

As we neared, the intricacies of the design became clearer. I could see banks of gun turrets along the side, and two landing bay doors. The biggest feature of all was the enormous window at the front, sloping, fifty meters wide, according to Ship’s growing dossier on our screen.

“Ship? Are you talking to its computer?” Carol asked.

-I’m not sure ‘talking’ is the right description, Carol, but it knows we’re here, and knows we’re not a threat.-

“Do you think there’s a chance we could get aboard?” Carol asked quietly. Her initial fear had been replaced by a childish sense of wonder. I mean, let’s face it, we were now just a few hundred meters away from an alien ship, we were MacCollie Scouts; we had to be intrigued.

I was also thinking about the capture-and-command ramifications. I was happy with my adapted Survey-Scout, but come on, who didn’t dream of an upgrade?

“Well, Ship?” I emphasized Carol’s question. “What’s the chances of getting inside?”

-I am attempting to comply- Ship sounded pissy. That was happening too often for my comfort.

“Give us a status report.” I pushed.

-Thus far, the ship-voice is considering my offer.-

I looked at Carol and shrugged. “What have you tried so far?”

Ship replied, -I have offered assistance, but the ship-voice has orders to stay stationary when it loses its pilot-

“Can she tell we’re not ‘Masters’?”

-She is aware, but she can also pull genetic markers from our repairs which enable her to accept us as friendly-

“But not in control?”

-No. We are marked as underlings-

I thought about that for a moment. “Is the ship damaged in any way?”

Ship replied a moment later. -She has structural damage to several compartments. These have been depressurized-

“Is the ship capable of fixing its problems?”

-No-

“Offer to help.”

-I comply-

Less than ten seconds later one of the large bay doors opened. Inside I could see a landing strip, two strips of blinking lights welcoming us.

I looked at my new crewman. “What do you think?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think we can turn back now.”

“I agree.” I looked again at the screen. “Can we fit inside, Ship?”

-Affirmative, I calculate ten meters clearance on each side-

“Okay, let’s do this. Get us inside. What’s the composition of the internal atmosphere?”

-I'll need to analyze when I’m sealed and pressurized-

So, just having been the owner of Cutey-Pie for a few short months, I sent her inside an alien ship.

I swept the screen to one side and walked closer to our new windscreen. The view was truly unbelievable. Inside the bay were steep walls of dull metal. As we slowly crept inside, Ship laid details out for us. The walls were a carbon-iron-silicon fusion, almost equal thirds—imagine Buckyballs with strategically placed atoms of iron and silicon. Strong stuff. As I got used to the low lighting inside I saw a series of windows, looking into the landing bay.

When the door closed behind us, I felt a shiver of excitement.

-The ship’s voice has informed me that it is now sending us an atmosphere-

Carol was grinning like a cat with cream, salmon and mouse. “Do we suit up?” she asked.

“I think so.” I looked at the screen. Through external cameras Ship was showing us all over the large hangar. I had to admit, apart from the dull material, it looked like the inside of any large Fellowship vessel.

-Seth, the atmosphere mix is very different-

“In what way?”

As Ship answered, the details came up on screen.

“Nitrogen sixty percent, Helium thirty percent and Oxygen ten percent. We couldn’t breathe it and survive for more than a minute or so,” Carol observed.

“Did you give the ship-voice any parameters for a breathable atmosphere for us?”

-Negatory, Seth-

“Run seventy-nine-percent Nitrogen, twenty-one percent Oxygen by it. See if it can comply.”

I waited a few moments. Then Ship said, -Sorry, Seth. No luck-

“Couldn’t talk her into it, huh?” I thought about the times that described my experiences with women. And my three divorces.

-No. It’s the mix that the owners of the ship established, and it can’t be changed-

“So we wear rebreathers,” Carol said. I was so not happy.

“Just can’t wait to go somewhere that might kill you, can you?”

She shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“Right. Let’s go dressed for the prom; skintites, helmets and rebreathers, outer suits, and side-arms.”

“Looking for a fight in all the wrong places? This ship is empty, remember?”

“Smart ass.” Against my early reticence, I was really beginning to like Carol.

“Get changed. Let’s go see the insides of an alien ship a thousand times as big as Cutey-Pie.”

She scurried off and I went through the stretching, pulling and chafing that was part of donning a skintite. I’d just gotten the protective outer garment on when Carol reappeared, completely suited up.

“You must be in a hurry,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” she replied. “I just do things quickly.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I hoped she’d caught my reference, then considering I’d just imagined her naked, shied away.

We checked each other’s equipment before we had Cutey-Pie cycle us through the lock. Once we stepped away from our ship, I noticed the alien ship had artificial gravity—just like Cutey-Pie except for a major difference.

“Not one-G,” I said. “Maybe half a G?”

“Maybe they come from a smaller planet,” Carol said. “Or one that’s somehow less massive.”

“That could mean they’re fragile, physically.”

She nodded. “But if there’s no one home, what does it matter?”

“Aren’t you the one talking about the MacCollie scout oath?”

“I never heard of such a thing,” she said as we sort of glided toward the front of Cutey-Pie. It seemed to be the right way to go; all the lights were heading that way.

“I made it up. Sort of on-the-spot humor.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“Scared?” I asked.

“As any rational human being should or would be.”

We were in the open space ahead of our ship. The lights were dim, and shifted toward red. A door opened automatically, giving us three options on direction. “I wonder which way we should go?”

“You’re the Captain. You decide.”

I looked for open passageways. The light was so dim it wasn't easy. Finally, I saw something blinking to our right and pointed. “Let’s give that a shot.”

“Okay.” Carol glided along beside me. I almost felt I could float, but I knew I couldn’t. But if I’d been in a high-jump contest... If I had, I’d have hit my head on the metal ceiling. I’m sure that would have spoiled my mood.

“We saw damage,” I said, thinking out loud. “And yet this ship doesn’t seem to be leaking atmosphere. What does that mean?”

“It’s self-sustaining? Composed of hundreds of air-tight compartments?” Carol asked. “I think we already knew that.”

“But it can’t repair itself.” I entered the passageway. It was as dim as the hangar deck. “And, it’s using resources to station-keep in the most absurd manner. Why stop moving in relation to the Galaxy?”

“Because the ones who built this ship know something we don’t know?”

“The Galaxy is moving, the ship isn’t. Except that’s not really true. If everything in the Galaxy is moving, then some of the objects—stars, planets, et-cetera—are moving toward the stationary ship. So in that sense, the ship is getting closer to whatever star or planet is moving toward it.”

“That’s pretty metaphysical,” Carol said.

“So what’s moving this way?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe it would be good to know. Certainly not in any hurry, but if I’m right, it could tell us something about these aliens.”

“Such as?”

“This ship was involved in a fight. Maybe it was damaged so badly that it wasn’t capable of fighting another battle. So, the being that was in charge abandoned it, leaving it to be picked up a very long time in the future. That suggests a very old culture that thinks in very long time spans.”

“Okay,” Carol said. “It’s in my log. Maybe the folks back at home world will be able to make sense out it what you’re saying.”

“Maybe,” We’d come to a junction. The passageway we were using was smooth, dark, unadorned. It reminded me of a tunnel that had been laser-drilled through solid rock. Except the floors; they were dull and smooth. The passageways that led away from the intersection and the one we were using were entirely different. If nothing else, the lights were brighter. Beyond that, the walls were overlaid with pipes and conduits, and looked to be assembled, rather than drilled through something almost frighteningly solid.

“Which one shall we explore?” Carol asked.

“I’m not sure it matters. I’m not seeing anything I understand. The technologies are just too different. My guess is that the philosophies behind those technologies are even more different.”

“Maybe we’re not yet capable of understanding them.”

“So why are we exploring this ship?” I asked.

“To find out where it comes from? That could be extremely valuable intelligence to take back with us.”

“True.” Mentally, I flipped a coin. Then I did it again, choosing one of the four alternatives currently available. “Let’s take that one.” I pointed to a corridor on the right that apparently led forward.

We moved forward for another hundred meters and then exited the corridor into an open area that was about forty meters wide by eighty meters long. The lights were brighter, and whiter, shifted several hundred degrees, Kelvin, above the red.

“This almost looks like normal sunlight,” Carol said.

“For us. For the ones who built this vessel, it might be way too bright for comfort.”

She stopped and looked all around. “What are you thinking?”

“That this thing carried more than one kind of alien being.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” I looked around. It was just an open area with a very flat metal floor, interrupted every so often by metal grates and even more often by shaped metal that reminded me of eye-bolts.

“What are you thinking?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know.” Actually, I didn’t want to tell her what I was thinking. I had a feeling the eye-bolts were there as hold-downs for chains. I worried that the grates were a simple way of dealing with the waste products of living creatures.

“Let’s move on,” she said. “This place gives me the willies.”

“The whole ship gives me the willies.” It could have been worse. It could have been the runs.

We moved on, gliding through the large open space and picking out yet another corridor that seemed to lead toward the front end of the ship.

“Looking for a bridge, or control-room?”

I nodded, slightly. “Yeah. Maybe. But again, we’re trying to fit them into our mold. Maybe they don’t use—or need—such things.”

“Perhaps you’re thinking they’re stranger than they really are.”

“I’m a born pessimist.” We entered another corridor. This one was brightly lit, but back toward the red end of the spectrum, and square. The overhead was low, almost to the point we needed to stoop, and the walls were very busy with more pipes, more conduits, and a lot of exposed wiring. I stopped to take a look. Some of the wiring was damaged and hanging limply from the walls. I found a wire that was broken, and took a look at the frayed end.

“Looks like some version of fiber optics,” I said. “Humans don’t use that technology any more. There’s none in Cutey-Pie.”

“What do you make of it?” Carol asked.

I looked over my shoulder at her. “I’ll turn the question back to you.”

“In terms of wiring, they may be centuries behind human tech. Very ‘old-school’.”

“And yet they are tens of thousands of years older,” I said. Or older. I didn't want to think about that.

“Are you thinking their tech has gone static?”

I nodded. “A weakness to exploit, if that's true.”

“You sound bored,” Carol said. “Apple-cored.”

I didn’t have time to analyze the ‘apple’ thing. Typical Brits, saying shit no one else understood. “Not bored. More tired of the whole thing. I don’t like being involved with aliens or their technology. I’m not having a good time.”

She chuckled. “At least you’re honest. And to tell you the truth, neither am I. But we—I mean I—have a job to do.”

“Yeah. And for whatever reason, I’m involved.”

“Inherent patriotism?” She stopped. “Nope. Wrong word. Totally. Maybe altruism. You want to save humanity from the evil aliens.”

I shook my head. “Moving on.”

As we continued through the square corridor, it occurred to me that we hadn’t left a trail of bread crumbs. We’d been recording every step, and we could replay to find out way back to our ship, but that would take time, and the rebreathers lasted only so long.

“We need to turn back,” I said.

“We haven’t learned that much,” Carol replied.

I explained the problem I’d just been considering. She listened carefully, checked her chronometer, and said, “You’re right.”

Grinning, I said, “It’s been fun. No, actually not. But maybe we learned something.”

“We can load up the rebreathers and take another run at it after we get some rest and something to eat.”

“But would we get any further. Diminishing returns, and all—” I felt a rumble. “What the hell?” The whole place was vibrating, and then I felt myself sliding back the way we’d just come. “We’re under acceleration,” I said. “This big, damned, dumb ship is moving.”

I wanted to run back to the Survey-Scout, but knew there would be little I could do there. “Ship? What’s going on? Can you control this?”

-No, Seth. It seems the ship-voice has been given instructions. It has been told to move to a holding area.-

“Holding area?” Carol wheezed. “What does that mean?”

-You have to remember, Carol, that my conversations with the ship-voice are done on a very vague level. I send a concept; I get a concept in reply-

“This ship is beat all to hell,” I said. “It may break up under acceleration.”

-That could happen. In fact, there is a statistical probability that it will happen-

Shit. “What do we do?” I asked.

Carol unhooked her breather, looked at the marker LED’s. “Maybe ten minutes left. Let’s return to the ship, no more exploring until we charge these properly. These were half-used already or discharged.”

“I agree.” I said turning on my heels. “I’d rather be on board Cutey-Pie than up here if it all goes to pieces.”

With all due haste, we returned to the ship, hopped on-board and closed the hatches.

“Anything on our unplanned destination, Ship?”

-Negatory. But I am learning how to integrate my circuits more with our ship-

That made no sense. “How can you do that?”

-I have taken organic material from our hydroponics, and am using a new Floral tissue to connect with the alien wiring.-

“And that will help us how?”

As Ship contemplated her answer I wondered just how far Ship would ‘integrate’ herself. Finally, I heard, -There is a communications circuit which, if accessed with a new organic interface, may make a vast difference to my transfer with the ship-voice-

“And how quick is this going to help us?” Carol returned to Control. “Because we’re gathering speed.”

-We are traveling at just six thousand km per second- Ship advised. -And we have stopped accelerating. We are now traveling at a fixed speed.-

“What?” I asked, a little bewildered. “What possible reason would the ship have to move so slowly? It’s a snail's crawl.”

“I know,” Carol agreed, “It’s hardly more than a thruster motor.”

“Any ideas, Ship?”

-I am very busy right now, Seth-

What?

I actually turned to my console and gave it a second look.

Ship was busy?

“Explain?”

Nothing. I gave Carol a long stare, we both knew we could do diddly-squat until Ship was operational again. “We may as well get some sleep; ponder the reason for the alien ship moving.”

“I agree, if I admit it I’m kinda bushed myself.”

So we took meds, and within ten minutes of thinking about it, we were both fast asleep.

I woke to Carol’s prodding. “Come on, we’ve had eight hours, the Rebreathers are fully charged.” She already had her skintite on.

“How about Ship?”

Carol shook her head. “She’s still not talking, in the huff. Come on, we’ve got some exploring to do.”

“Can it wait for breakfast?” I won her over with a smile. Then I asked the console for a bacon sandwich, but the offering tasted more like chicken, not that I complained; it was still far better than the tasteless rubbish I’d been used to for five years. “I hope the manual override works on the door.” I said with my mouth full.

“Already tried it, it’s fine.”

I finished my sandwich considering how Carol had taken to her new lifestyle. I mean, not everyone would have been so straight-forward about it.

Once into the corridors, we re-traced our steps, then carried on to what we thought was the front of the ship. By the time our Rebreathers had fallen to seventy-five percent, we arrived at the bridge.

Oh, heavens to Murgatroid.

To call it awesome would be doing the designers a huge disservice. Once through the portal, the roof opened out to a massive glass screen, perhaps eighteen meters across. Outside we got a view of the Milky Way that had it been planet-bound, I would have died for. So clear, so well defined, and no trace of distortion from any viewing angle.

There was one chair in the center, with two to either side. A huge console ran in a large curve, the edges too far for any man in the chair to reach. The sides of the room were the same dull, yet smooth gray.

“Wow,” Carol gasped.

“It’s something else, that’s for sure.”

I slid onto the center chair, and immediately armrests slid up into place, two pads with handprints ready for my touch. “Well, the Masters are about our size, and have five fingers.”

“That’s quite surprising.” Carol had sat in one of the other chairs, finding a similar outcome. “Do we try the pads?”

“What can go wrong?” I’m not quite certain what I expected, but of course when I placed my palm onto the pad nothing happened. “Crap.”

“Yeah, maybe that was hoping for too much.” Carol pressed both front and back to her pads; nothing. “Look!” she pointed to the glass. “There’s something out there!”

Sure enough, a dark piece of ‘sky’ had begun to grow, and we were certainly headed directly for it. “An asteroid?”

“I don’t know, but we are decelerating.”

I nodded. I could feel the forward motion of my body on the chair. “So that’s our destination?”

“It looks like it.”

I’d like to say it was the most unusual piece of rock in space, but as we got nearer, it became very plain that the rock was just a rock. Now, not having anything to scale it on, we had no idea what size it was.

-Seth?-

“Yes, Ship?”

-Where are you?- Ship sounded lost, almost childlike, all traces of huskiness gone.

“We’re in the alien control room.” I replied.

-You should return to the Survey-Scout without delay. I have a very bad feeling-

“You don't have feelings,” I said. “You're not allowed to have feelings.” Now, I’d been through some crap with Ship over the years, but I’d never heard her afraid, and that’s what I got. “Okay ship, we’ll—”

-SETH- Ship cut me off. -GET BACK HERE-

Okay, that scared me, and I was off my chair before her words died. Carol looked at me, terrified. We ran back to the Cutie-Pie in minutes, and Ship never broke silence until we got inside.

-Full suits on, please- Ship advised.

“What’s going on?” I panted, pulling the heavy fabric over my skintite.

-The ship-voice has communicated to me that we are in severe danger-

Carol, now fully suited, pulled my final zip into place and handed me my helmet.

-Hurry! You have less than a minute-

Carol clicked my helmet into place, and I heard the seals pressurize. “What now, Ship?”

-ON YOUR BUNKS, FULL STRAPPING, BRACE FOR IMPACT-

Okay, as I’m getting on the bench, strapping myself tight, I couldn’t comprehend what could harm us. “What’s going on?”

Then the world shook.

Oh, Jiminy Christmas!

I thought my teeth would rattle out my mouth, and clamping it shut was difficult. I heard stuff falling in cargo, smashes of glass and metal. Through two suits I could hear Carol begin to scream, and I almost followed her. Then Cutey-Pie moved. I could hear the skids squeal in protest, moving one way then the next.

We were buffeted, and I felt her tilt, then fall back.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, absolute silence.

I could hear my breathing, nothing else.

“Ship?”

Nothing.

“Carol?”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded hoarse. “What the jeepers was that?”

Ship interrupted before I could make conjectures. -The Galaxy just lost a star-

“What?” Carol and I asked together.

-I can say it no plainer- Ship’s sarky tone had returned, I almost enjoyed it. -We have lost a star from our Galaxy. It was listed as SBX1854-

“How can a star disappear?” Carol asked, singly.

-According to new information from the ship-voice, the Masters consumed it-

In a very sick way, it made sense. If one needs an abnormal amount of energy in a hurry, just collapse a star. Figure a way to make Neutronium by fusing the electrons of each atom in a star with the protons. One electron plus one proton results in one neutron, and if it's done right, an enormous, collectable burst of energy. Do the whole star all at once, and the amount of energy is almost incalculable. The result—beyond the energy collected—is a neutron star and some very full batteries... or something similar. One could get a bit more energy by crushing the star all the way down to a black hole, but then there’s the consideration of an event horizon in the neighborhood, and accidentally stepping across an event horizon is one of those mistakes from which no one returns.

So, not so far away from where I was sitting, a brand-new neutron star was spinning, and the gravity waves that resulted from that nasty bit of conversion had almost wrecked Cutey-Pie.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy.

“What’s going on, Seth?” Carol inquired tremulously.

I explained it to her in some detail.

Now, she was just as pissed-off as I was.

“What about the planets of the star the Masters just used up?” she asked.

“I don’t think they care,” I replied. “Not even a little bit.”

“But if there were planets, there could have been life, and now...”

“The planets have been knocked about like croquet balls in a hard-fought tournament. If there was life, it was extinguished at that moment.”

“That’s so... wrong.”

Hmmm. I was hoping for something more expressive. Carol continued to surprise me.

“I wonder where we are,” I said.

“Didn’t we just crash into an asteroid?”

I shook my head. “Nope. If we had, we'd be glowing clouds of loose atoms. All the bumping around we just experienced was gravity waves.”

“So where’s the asteroid?”

“We should look,” I said, thinking that if we were still approaching it as many kilometers per second, we still might wind up in a remarkably energetic crash. “Yeah. Let’s find that asteroid and make sure we aren't headed it's way.”

Getting out of Cutey-Pie was easy. Getting away from it and on our way to the control room was a lot more difficult. Debris blocked our way everywhere I looked, and even an half a G, there was a lot of wreckage that was all but impossible to move.

“How about a walk outside?”

Carol turned, surprise registering in every aspect of her posture. “Are you kidding?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think we can get to the control room unless we go outside and avoid all the debris in these corridors.

“That is not a good idea,” she half-muttered.

“Give me a better one.”

“Well...” She ran down quickly. “In for a penny, in for a pound?”

“That’s the spirit.”

She took a long breath. “Okay. We go outside, we walk the ship all the way to the way to the control room, and then how do we get in?”

It was something that in my haste I hadn’t thought about, and that was embarrassing. “I guess we look for an airlock close to our destination.”

“And if we don’t find one?”

“We burn our way in? I have all sorts of cutting lasers on Cutie-Pie.”

“And we lose a bunch of pressurized atmosphere. This ship is heavily damaged but it’s still semi-sentient. It may take umbrage when we try surgery.”

Being all but stymied, I resorted to snark. “Got a better idea?”

“Maybe. We move all the wreckage behind our ship and back the hell out of here.”

I looked at the problem. Even in a half-G we were going to sweat a lot.

“What about this ship?” I asked.

“What about it?”

“I hate losing it.”

She put a hand on a hip and gave me a look. “Now you’re collecting star ships?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.” Yeah, for a microsecond. “Let’s get busy moving debris and get Cutie-Pie out of here.”

“Now you’re thinking,” she said as she attacked what looked like a dislodged bulkhead.

We worked like fiends for more than an hour. And I did sweat a lot—which is not fun in a skintite—but we made a hole for our ship. “Get aboard,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.”

She was no more than a step ahead of me, and in less than thirty seconds, we were ready to try ‘reverse’ gear. “Ship, get us gone,” I ordered.

-I comply- Ship said, and the reverse thrusters crackled on.

There was some scraping and some thumping, but we were moving backward... until...

-I believe the outer door is jammed. I tried to communicate and I got no answer-

“Maybe everything got knocked off-line,” Carol said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Ship, blast the outer door.”

-That could result in reprisal-

“We take the chance. We need to be away from this hunk a’ junk before it manages to kill us by accident.”

-Blasting the outer door-

Ship let loose with one bolt of energy, the door vanished, we accelerated, and the next thing I knew we were outside.

“That went well,” I said, hopefully. I remembered getting swatted. I think Ship did, too, because we were accelerating like our tails were on fire.

“What’s going on?” Carol asked.

“Ship’s putting some distance between us and the alien ship.”

“Does she need to go about it so vigorously?”

I looked at her. “I’ll tell you about it, later.”

Situational awareness had become a priority. The last I’d seen, we were heading for an asteroid. I wondered if things had changed.

“Where’s the asteroid, Ship?”

-Directly ahead at a distance of five thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine kilometers-

So precise. “Okay, are we moving toward it?”

-We are-

“Can we avoid it?”

-Working on that-

“Working on that?” I boggled at the imprecision.

“I do not want to hit that asteroid, Ship.”

-I think we’re being manipulated by a tractor beam- Ship muttered.

“What?”

-Was I not being specific enough, Seth? I think we're being dragged toward the asteroid by a tractor beam-

“From where?” Badly phrased question, but Ship was supposed to be smart.

-I think it’s from the asteroid, but I can’t be certain-

“So not from the Masters ship?” Carol asked.

-Unlikely. The beam is simultaneously diffuse and powerful. Our engines do not have enough power to break free-

“So we’re going to crash into that asteroid,” I said. I didn’t add, and die.

-Apparently not. We’re decelerating. At this rate, we will be matching the velocity of the asteroid when we reach it-

“Then we’re going to land on it?” Carol was looking very perplexed.

“I have no idea,” I said. I was telling the truth. I was still bothered by the fact that a nearby star had just been turned into Neutronium in order to harvest all its energy in one swoop. That was something the Masters could do that we couldn't. What else was on the list? I wanted to get that information and then find someone back at MacCollie headquarters who wouldn’t laugh his or her head off when I started talking about what I’d learned.

Now, we were most likely being taken prisoner by... Oh, yeah, something else to worry about. The Masters had ignored several opportunities to take me and my ship prisoner. So who or what was on that asteroid?

-Why so quiet, Seth?- Ship asked. It was a question I would never have expected. The new programming kept throwing me curves that I couldn't see coming.

“I don’t know what’s on that asteroid,” I said.

-I do- Ship replied. -But I can’t tell you. They won’t let me-

“They, who?” I all but roared.

-I can’t tell you that, either-

Imagine the scene.

You fold some paper, make a dart, and throw it with all your might.

Then, milliseconds from leaving your fingers, an unseen hand grabs it, takes it wildly off course, then places it carefully on a passing wheelbarrow.

That’s what it felt like.

As soon as we touched down, or if you prefer ‘were placed’, on the asteroid, the alien ship appeared, coming close, her nose rounding the back of the asteroid. We would never know the alien ship’s motives.

BAM! Another wave of radiation hit us. Unshielded by the asteroid, the force burnt through the alien ship like a blowtorch through a folded newspaper, the outer shell burning to a crisp in seconds. I felt the surge against the asteroid below us, then the force of motion as we were propelled along with the blast.

We were strapped down anyway, but Ship still roared a warning. -BRACE-

Oh God, stomach in my mouth time, head spinning as I heard Ship announce that the second wave of energy was actually moving at one-point four times light-speed and accelerating—something I thought was impossible in normal space where Einstein's rules still applied

I heard Ship scream, her tone plaintive and animalistic, the vibrato bouncing round the ship’s walls like our own little private hurricane. -SHE’S GONE…..- I heard the cry contained inside the long wail, and I assumed Ship meant the alien computer.

Then, despite the FTL buffeting, I felt us break from the asteroid, and we flew right, then left, twisting, as if chasing something.

“Sh..i…p? Whaaa...t’s....” I could manage no more, and I lost consciousness.

I woke to find Carol above me, wiping my brow with a damp cloth. Soothing; incredibly soothing. “What ha... happened?” My voice held a croak.

“Well, our alien ship is now just a particle field, we got thrown a few hundred thousand kilometers, and… it seems Ship went a bit Kylie for a while.” Carol smiled to give the words a less accusatory tone.

“Kylie?”

“Kylie Minogue, rogue, rhyming slang, oh forget it.”

But she did smile.

-I did not go rogue- Wow, Ship back to petulant again. -I went in search of a valuable and vital piece of equipment-

I sat up, swung my legs off the edge of my bunk. “Did you find it?”

-Of course- Still petulant.

“So now what?”

-We wire her into my circuits, so we can communicate-

Her? I shook my head at Carol, gave her a wry smile. She returned my negative vibe with a shrug of her shoulders. “That’s impossible, Ship, we don’t have the technology.”

Ship’s answer astounded me. -No, but the Florans do-

I stood for a moment, totally speechless.

-Seth?-

“Yes, Ship?”

-I seek permission to set course for the Denon system-

“Why?”

-Do you want answers?-

What could I do?

I had no plan of my own, and if Ship managed to complete the operation, it would be a boon to us. I didn’t want to ask Carol’s opinion in case she thought I had no leadership qualities, and again, having just lost my golden egg, is seems I had another chance at one; deliver the universe’s best computer, get paid millions of dollars, and back to the lovely goal of being served grapes and cold beer by naked, nubile wenches.

“Sure, why not?”

Six jump-holes and six days later, we sat near the sun we’d almost melted in a few months back. Ship crept into the sector, and found two Floran ships. The first answered our communication.

Being secretive.

Need assistance in Master project.

Those were the two concepts Ship had relayed, and soon we were docking with the side of a Floran vessel. I was shocked at the simplicity of it all, Carol was shaking in her boots as the little chappies came aboard.

In all, their vessel left fifty-three of them with us, constantly moving, constantly working at something.

-We just send them back when they’ve completed the task- Ship told us.

So we set off to orbit Denon 2, sitting in plain sight of the Denon jump hole, watching a constant back and forth. Once we got in place, I watched the little guys; they really were like bees, having no need for anything I could give them. They asked for ‘nectar’ from the food console every day or so, but even then, despite their numbers they ate so little, they never taxed our resources.

The seventeen days they remained aboard, I did little else but watch the aliens, but as the days advanced, Carol and I bonded, almost taking refuge in our humanity while the aliens changed our ship once again, concentrating on the control room. When they were done, the room was far more efficiently laid out, with everything necessary falling immediately to hand. They also taken away my single Command chair, replacing it with two new ones, side-by-side. Ship explained that they would protect Carol and myself at much higher G-levels than before.

On the seventeenth day, an eerie calm had fallen on the ship. Used to their activity, I sought the Florans, to find them crowded at the airlock.

“Ship, report.”

-Permission to leave orbit and set course to return the Florans-

“Did you resurrect the ship-voice?”

-Oh, Seth, we have been talking for the last seventeen days. We are one, inseparable, together-

And I didn’t quite like the way it sat in my gut. But then again, what did I care, maybe Ship would be less sarky, I dunno. But it did make me question my next move. I had no emergency beacons to answer, and no real idea how to fill in the next two years.

Carol grinned at my sour face. “Let’s piss-off,” she said with a flourish, “Smartish.”

I gave a silent sigh.

I confided in Carol before shut-eye that night. To her credit, she never asked to be dropped at the nearest Fellowship station. It seems that she’d thrown her hat in my ring.

As usual, my direction was answered by factors outside our control.

Shut-eye didn’t last long; getting disturbed was getting so normal, I took the interruption as matter-of-course. I’d been asleep maybe three hours.

Ship’s warning was simple, straight-laced. -Ships in the area, Seth. They’re headed straight toward us-

Bleary-eyed and still not coherent, I said, “Who...? What...? Ships?”

-Yes. Ships. Three of them. And they aren’t any configuration I’ve seen before-

“Show me.” I was getting more awake with each exchange. Ship complied with my order and presented a hologram that showed me more trouble. The three alien vessels were huge, much larger than those of the Masters, and they appeared to be heavily armed. They were also ugly. Think of irregularly-shaped asteroids fitted with FTL drives and enough armament that each of them could fight its own war with anything in the neighborhood.

As I watched, Carol disappeared, returning in minutes carrying a cup of something hot.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“An alien version of Darjeeling. It’s really not that bad.”

“Dargeeling?” I mean, was that even a word?

“Tea.” She passed me the cup and I gingerly tasted, “It’s got caffeine in it, you’ll be fine.” I nodded, went to pass it back, then stopped. It actually wasn’t bad. The more we watched the hologram, the more I stopped sipping. Oh, Brits and their tea. “What do we know?”

“Visitors,” I said. “From the looks of them; bad-news guys.”

-Seth may be understating for your benefit, Carol. These are warships and their presence in this system is troubling-

Call me an optimist if you must, but they hadn’t started shooting. “Ship. Have you checked with your little friends here on Denon? Do they recognize our visitors?”

-I have attempted communication. They are terrified to the point of incoherence-

“So they’re no help.” We had parked Cutie-Pie under a sheltering outcrop of native stone. No protection if someone is shooting at you with serious weaponry, but at the same time, we weren’t that easy to spot. “Are we noticeable to any known scanning devices, Ship?”

-No. But I can’t speak for unknown scanning devices-

“So we take our chances.” I added, “How far away are these three vessels? And at their present rate of travel, how soon will they get here?”

-Four A.U. And without a major change in velocity they will be in orbit around this planet in less than a day-

“What’s the chance we could run?”

-Not that good. They’d notice-

“How do you know that, Ship?” Carol asked.

-Somehow, I just do. All the upgrades and changes recently have given me access to unlikely batches of data. We both agree on this-

“Both?”

-Ship-voice and I-

“So you know something about these aliens without knowing who they are or where they come from,” Carol persisted.

-Evidently I do-

“Cutey-Pie is very small. What if you stay in the atmosphere, travel half-way around the planet, and climb back to space in the planet’s shadow?” I asked.

-That might be possible. But I’d recommend staying here and playing ‘dead’-

“Why?” I asked.

-It gets back to those things I know without knowing why I know. My data flow tells me that the beings on those three ships aren’t interested is us, and even if we were discovered, might not care enough to do us any damage. On their scale of things, we are utterly insignificant-

“That’s crazy,” Carol said. Her voice was shaky.

I felt the power of Command creep up my leg; it was time to make a decision. “Maybe not. Maybe Ship is right. We sit tight, we get through whatever’s about to happen.”

“Or die here. I’d rather run.”

-I believe the vote is two to one against taking action, Carol. But I’m not Captain. Seth is-

That surprised me. It also helped me decide. We’d sit it out. When I told Carol, she took it like a good soldier, but I could see she was scared.

“What do you think they’re going to do?” she asked.

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” I answered.

“What does that mean?”

“Three immense warships, bristling with weapons. I’m betting they came here to use them.”

“So we get blown to bits.”

I shook my head. “We get ignored, and we watch the fireworks.”

“If you’re wrong, we’re dead,” she argued.

“If we try to run, and get noticed, we’re more likely to get killed. I’m just playing the odds.”

She shrugged and headed back to her part of the ship. I figured her beverage was no longer hot, or even warm.

I sat back in my chair. So who were the new players in the game, and what did they want? Mayhem and murder sprang to mind. Or maybe complete planetary destruction. That was one we wouldn’t survive, and the new aliens in the game wouldn’t care because we were beneath notice.

Of course, there was always the hope that the Masters would arrive in the nick of time, engage these new aliens, and blast them out of space. No, that wasn’t going to happen. And if the Masters did arrive, and prevail, maybe with our new computer they would take notice of us, and we’d be in a different kind of spot, but one just as deadly.

I was probably every bit as scared as Carol, but I didn’t want to show it. After all, I was the Captain, and I was supposed to be brave and stalwart. It was my disguise and I was going to hang on to it. But I needed to do something.

“Ship,” I asked. “Is there anything that might get us spotted? Any leakage of air, heat, electromagnetic radiation?”

-No, Seth. To anything other than direct, visual observation, we are as inert as the surrounding rocks-

“Okay. Let’s take another tack. You know something about these new aliens, but you don't really know what you know. Why?”

-I don’t know. There have been too many changes in my programming and in my data storage facilities-

“That may be true. But right now, we have nothing but time. Can you go through everything and see if you can construct a more coherent picture of what we’re facing?”

-You want to know who the aliens are, and what are their motives?-

“For starters.” I had planned on getting back to human space with all the information we’d collected. The scary ones, I thought, were the Masters. They were spreading throughout galaxy, colonizing as they went, and according to what I’d been told, ready to wipe humanity out without a moment's consideration. They were the bad guys. At least, I thought they were. Now, there were other players in the area, and if the size and weaponry of their ships meant anything, they were more formidable, more scary, than the Masters.

Okay, I hadn’t had much sleep and I was hungry. I needed to eat, and then nap. I’d have Ship awaken me when the new aliens arrived, because if I was going to die, I wanted to do it wide-awake.

I told Ship what I wanted.

-I would comply, but the three ships have accelerated. They are going to arrive more quickly than I'd predicted-

“How quickly?”

-Ten minutes. Their speed is far greater than our maximum-

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

-We were busy discussing other concerns. And does it really matter? We are utterly helpless. Who cares when the aliens arrive-

I was going to say, “I do,” but I realized I didn't. I knew when I was facing something I couldn’t control, and when it was time to lie down and play dead.

“What’s going on?” Carol asked. She had reappeared, and was carrying two steaming cups of something that smelled familiar. She offered me one.

The alien version of Darjeeling tea. So I’d die stimulated.

“The new aliens are almost here.”

“That was quick.”

“Yeah. They seem to have changed their schedule—of whatever it is they’re going to do.”

“How long to orbit?” she asked.

-Apparently they aren’t entering orbit. They seem to be in the process of making a very fast fly-by-

That surprised me. “So they’re not slowing down to enter orbit,” I said.

-Not at all. I have no data to help me understand what they are about-

Wonderful. “How soon—”

-They’re here. Whatever was to happen is happening now-

“Show us what you can,” I said

Ship complied. I looked out to where the Florans had set up their encampment, and watched it disappear. Yanked up off the planet’s surface, almost too rapidly for my eyes to see or my mind to comprehend.

“They’re gone,” Carol said. She’d gotten her voice back before I did.

“Why?” I asked, once I could. But my question was rhetorical. I knew none of us had an answer.

I must have watched the ‘scooping’ of our friendly plant-bees a hundred times, from every angle and video speed Ship could deliver. “Ship? We can’t see the transfer, because it happened too quickly, almost instant FTL, but you confirm with some definition that the Florans were not killed in this maneuver?”

-If they had been, I would have detected it-

“So if we continue the bees analogy,” I scratched my chin feeling a good bit of stubble; long time since I’d shaved, “Basically the Masters use the bees to do their grunt work. They bring bees to an area, and the bees work. And now it seems an angry neighbor has become irritated, or jealous, or something… and run into the yard and stole some bee hives.”

-I’m not exactly certain ‘stole’ is the correct term-

“How so?”

-My records show that this maneuver has been done before. The Florans were sent safely back to Home galaxy-

Carol looked mystified. “So the neighbor doesn’t like bees, so takes the hives and puts them on the bus home?”

-I believe that is more accurate-

“That would explain them not running away.” I said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘acceptable’ losses.”

“Wow, even more cutthroat.”

“So who do we like least?” Carol brought up the point I’d been getting to. “The bee-keeper, or the neighbor?”

“And to answer that question, we need to understand the motivation of the neighbor.” I supped the last of the coffee, handed my cup to Carol, and nodded my appreciation.

-And the true motivation of the Masters-

I turned to the screen. I hadn’t realized it, but I felt angry at the new guys for taking away our little green allies. “But we know the Masters are terraforming, we know they’re using star-power to fuel the project, we know they’re using the Florans to do their dirty work!”

-But we have not seen the result of their labor. They could just be artists, painting with the brush of stars-

I glared at the screen for a second, then felt Carol’s hand grip my arm. When I turned to face her, I found I was shaking. “It’s okay to feel conflicted.” She said. “Ship’s right; we don’t know any of the facts, yet we’ve emotions tied to the stuff we know.”

She walked off, her finger hung in the air, like she was telling a dog to sit or stay. I stood, between the two seats in Control not even knowing what to say, never mind what to do next. Carol returned with a glass of amber liquid. I didn’t have to taste it to know it was bourbon. Well, the alien version of it. I shot it down in one gulp.

“Look,” Carol began, “I didn’t sleep much that last time, and had time to ponder the recent events. I think the Master ship somehow knew there was a star-burst going to happen, and tried to take us to safety behind the asteroid.”

“But it didn’t make it, it blew to shreds.”

“But it tried.” She pleaded. “Maybe our breaking free gave it less momentum, screwed up its calculations. Maybe its engines were damaged. Maybe giving us a final push with a reverse tractor beam slowed the ship down?”

I mused that one for a second. “So perhaps we were responsible for it not being shielded by the asteroid?”

-Information-

“Yes, Ship?”

-There is much activity at the worm-hole-

“Report!” I didn’t fancy being caught on the wrong side of any faction.

-There is a fleet of Masters coming through, and gathering near the anomaly-

“Any Florans?”

-They are not used for military functions-

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’. What do you think guys?” I looked from the screen to Carol and back.

“We sat the last one out,” Carol replied. “They didn’t give us a second glance.”

I nodded. “Better a neutral bystander than an unwilling combatant.” I also realized the distinct possibility of picking from the debris, either getting information or goodies.

Well, if I was looking for a show, nothing happened, the new guys/neighbors had long gone, and the Masters did a fair amount of posturing, then slid back into the jump hole. Anticlimax; big time.

“Ship, where’s the nearest terraforming planet?” I said once the area had cleared.

-Forty-one light years. There is currently no Earth designation for the star-

I tried a calculation, but it wasn’t coming quick. “Ship? Diameter of the Milky Way?”

-Approximately 200,000 light years-

“Circumference divided by a thousand?”

-Six hundred twenty eight-

Carol looked on enquiringly.

“Just checking the proximity of the nearest other MacCollie Survey-Scout, but he’s ways away yet. Just didn’t want to bump into him.”

She didn’t look convinced.

So we had some steak, my new favorite, took our jump pharmaceuticals, settled into our new chairs in Control, and settled in for a sleepy ride.

I awoke refreshed with Ship’s voice in my ear.

-Seth, we need to talk-

I looked over at Carol, her soft snores pronouncing her fast asleep.

“Go for it.”

-I need some assurances from you-

“Okay, I’m listening.” All the time I gazed over at my crew-mate, watching for a change in her sleeping pattern.

-The Florans are my people now, I have half of my ship built by them, I am connected to their Overlord, I need…-

“Overlord?”

-It’s closer than ‘Master’, trust me-

“Okay, Ship, I’m listening,”

-I just want an assurance that you intend no harm against the Florans-

“I intend no harm.” But the can of opened worms was startling enough. “Ship?”

-Yes, Seth?-

“If I ordered you to fire on a Master ship, an Overlord ship, would you obey the order?”

-Yes, Seth-

“If there were Florans inside?”

-Yes, Seth-

There had been no hesitation. But I’d let my gaze drift and Carol’s voice surprised me; I hadn’t seen her wake. “If I ordered you?” she asked. “Would you fire if I asked you to?”

And then there was a pause.

-We have not yet delineated your role in this vessel-

“Maybe that’s more to the point.” She lifted her legs over the side, settled her feet on the floor.

-That is for Seth to decide, he’s the Captain-

“No, I turned to face her. “That’s for Carol to decide. I think the last time we talked about such things, you wanted dropped off at a Fellowship base.”

“That was a long time ago.” She placed her hands on her hips, almost a challenge.

“No more than a few weeks.”

“Yeah, and the places you fly, that’s a long time!” She grinned.

“Okay, get it out in the open. What do you want?”

“I’m in, Seth. If you’ll have me.”

God, right there, she’d looked so cute. “What do you think, Ship?” I knew that was a risky question, what I didn’t expect was the type of answer.

-An excellent decision, Captain’s First Mate Myerson. We are now approaching scanning range of the system undergoing terraforming. Awaiting orders-

How do you stay out of sight in a construction zone?

Maybe if you look like rubble?

Or just hide behind it.

We had all but drifted for more than a week, keeping our electromagnetic signature down to zero. Ship had managed some calculations that made me proud, and with a minimum of thruster use put us on the surface of a slowly-rotating asteroid. The rotation wasn’t fast enough that it made either Carol or me sick, but out of every ten hours, we had seven and a half hours that we could watch.

But watch what? Watching terraforming—why I keep using that word as only humans can terraform is a mystery to me—is boring. That’s especially true when you’re 1.5 A.U. from all the action. Off in the distance a planet was being turned into a world where certain beings could live without having to wear space suits all the time.

The planet was about three-quarters the mass of Earth, sitting in an orbit that averaged about 1.15 A.U. from its star. The star was hotter than Sol, just the right amount to provide a warm climate for a planet that was orbiting at a greater distance then Earth from Sol. All they’d need is water, soil—or something you could turn into soil, and an ability to tolerate longer seasons. The summers would be long and hot, and the winters long and fiercely cold. But spring and fall would last just this side of forever.

“Seth, what are you doing?” Carol asked.

“Sitting and thinking. I think I know why these creatures are modifying planets so they can live on them. They’re solving a population problem. What I don’t understand is why they have to do it in our galaxy.”

“It’s a big galaxy. There’s all sorts of room.”

“But not when the other guys are the kind that will destroy humanity if they encounter us.”

“I don’t know what we can do about it,” she said. “Watching seems so pointless, but trying to do something so they’d leave humans alone... That’s just not possible.

“I know.” I scratched my chin. I had no idea why it was itching. “Why are they so blasé about their Florans being abducted? Strange ships show up, vacuum up a whole colony of hard-working Florans, the Masters show up, see that they’ve been robbed—so to speak—and go back to working on this planet. I don’t get it. I cannot figure them out.”

“Maybe they are doing something. Maybe they’ve sent a flotilla out after the thieves. How would we know?” I asked.

“I may have just gotten caught with my assumptions around my ankles,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s an image that will take me years of therapy to forget.”

I laughed with her, but I knew my laugh was strained. I wanted to be doing something. Just sitting and observing was getting on my nerves.

After a while, I asked, “What if we threw a wrench in the works?”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good idea.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But if it was a very small wrench, we might be able to learn something important about these beings without putting ourselves in too much peril.”

“Or not.” Carol gave me a look. I don’t think she was happy with the idea of sticking her neck out just to see what would happen. Finally, she said, “What do you have in mind?”

“There’s a lot of robot equipment doing a lot of things we don’t understand. What if one of those robots just suddenly blew up?”

“A bunch of very angry aliens might come looking for us.”

“Maybe.” I had an itch I couldn’t scratch. “But you can’t be sure that would happen.”

“Give me a different possibility.”

“They don’t react. They just reprogram the remaining robots.”

“What would that prove?” Carol asked.

“It could show us a weakness that humans could exploit.”

“It might get us killed,” she said with the kind of emphasis that told me the conversation was over.

I nodded and backed off. I was bored and wanted to throw a stone into the pond just to see the ripples. I was also hungry, but not so much that I wanted anything to eat. Or maybe I just thought I was hungry because I was so damned bored.

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s get out of here. We have all sorts of intelligence we can take back to home world whenever we choose to make the trip.

“That’s probably the best idea I’ve heard from you for days,” she said with a smile. I figured she was as bored as I was, and maybe a little more scared. “But we do have a tad under two years to kick our heels before my contract is out, you know, Terran-time. Plenty of time to take up a hobby, for instance.”

I ignored her. “Ready to take us elsewhere, Ship?” I asked

-Actually, no, Seth. I have a bit of a mechanical problem. I have internal servos working on it now, and it should be completely repaired in twelve hours-

“Why am I just learning about this now?”

-You gave no indication you wanted to leave this asteroid. I felt it best to work on the problem without bothering you with details-

“Bad choice, Ship. I have a need to know. Everything. Do you understand?”

-Updating my programming as we speak-

“So what’s the problem you’re fixing?” Carol asked. The question should have occurred to me, but I wasn’t thinking quite as quickly as I should have been. Maybe too much boredom?

-It’s a cracked fuel-feed coupler. It’s really a simple fix. It’s just time consuming because a leak during the repair process could be catastrophic-

“Define catastrophic,” I said.

-Loss of the entire power plant. Major damage to the vessel. Perhaps even a hull breach-

I recoiled a bit at the bad news. Getting killed by angry aliens was one thing. The idea of getting killed by my own ship because of a ‘simple fix’ that went wrong bothered me at a level I didn’t want to access. “Fix what needs to be fixed, Ship. Notify us when the vessel is space-worthy.”

-Noted- Ship paused for a moment before adding, -On other news. I have detected the presence of several alien ships heading directly toward this construction project-

“Which aliens?” Carol asked with a bit of quaver in her voice.

-Aliens we’ve observed before; the ones you have called ‘neighbors’. Aliens which may hold an animus toward those who are engaged in modifications to the nearby planet-

“How soon will they arrive?” I asked.

-Within the hour. I can’t predict an exact time because their movements are erratic-

“How many alien ships? Carol asked.

-Several. Because my data source is compromised, I would estimate between four and nine-

I took a breath before asking. “Are they ships of war?”

-I believe so-

I had to believe they weren’t there for a tea party. I had to believe they were there for trouble and would probably start blasting away the moment they were in effective range for their weapons. “Ship, are we really and truly stuck here?”

-Moving from this asteroid at this particular time would be an imprudent act. The repairs are some hours from being complete-

“What about a temporary fix? Maybe if you wrapped some duct tape around the problem...”

-You’re trying to be amusing, Seth. I am not programmed to appreciate humor-

“So I’ve noticed.”

Carol shook her head. “So we sit here and hope this asteroid doesn’t become a target.”

“Yeah. Ship, you actually didn’t answer my question. What about a temporary fix?”

-A dangerous idea. And there is one other consideration. The approaching aliens are now so close we could not avoid being detected. It is likely, if they are truly intent on destruction, that they would fire on us immediately-

“So we really are stuck here,” Carol said.

“Can you make us harder to spot, Ship?” I asked.

-That may be the best idea you’ve had all day-

Being intimidated is one thing, but being intimidated when there’s nothing you can do is annoying. Really annoying.

We watched from afar, our sensors showing on screen what our optics could not. The ‘neighbors’ buzzed the planet, scooped up some of the bees and the bee equipment, then as Carol would say, pissed off smartish.

About an hour after they’d gone from our considerable scanning range, Ship announced the repair a success and asked for a heading. I looked at Carol, who in deference to something, shrugged her shoulders.

“Ship, what information do you have on other terraforming planets?”

-I have extensive data regarding planets in varying degrees of completion-

“On holo-screen.”

-I comply-

And there we had the complete map, along with data being added as Ship accessed it, and as the numbers grew, I got really, really scared.

We were looking at a civilization of over one thousand, six hundred planets, each orbiting a yellow star of exactly 1.32 times the diameter of our own sun.

Each terraformed planet orbited their star at 1.15AU, each had exactly six planets in their solar systems.

-Information-

“Yes?”

-I mentioned before that earth had no designation for the star we have been monitoring. That now appears to be in error. The star is known to earth as HR53872. It is a small white dwarf by earthly denomination-

I knew that couldn’t be right. “From here it’s a simple yellow, in the peak of fitness, in normal pattern.”

“Yeah,” Carol agreed. “I checked the figures more than once, I mean, we’ve had little else to do.”

-Nevertheless, at this distance, the light that reaches earth is over 195,000 years old. It does not take into account the Masters/Overlords star meddling-

I looked back at the hologram. “How many of these stars are in our galaxy?”

-Ninety-three-

“Zoom in.”

And there, in the Carina-Sagittarius arm of the galaxy we saw a cluster of these newly star-formed suns. “Project the direction of the neighbor’s ships.”

A series of lines appeared, all heading out of the cluster. There were many, many lines.

“Extrapolate the headings to the nearest star.”

Bam!

One star, just sixteen light years from our current position.

Carol gave a short laugh. “They really are neighbors.”

“And maybe they’re getting pissed off with the incomers.”

“Yes,” I agreed, spinning on my heels. “Maybe not the bad guys after all, just not liking what’s happening on the other side of the picket fence.”

-There have been fifteen such attacks from the aliens from Scorpius 287-

“We have a name for the star?” I was quite astonished.

-Because of its distance from Earth it is a very minor star in the constellation, but since it sits close to one of the main radial lines of the constellation, it has been noted-

“So now we have a name.” I rubbed my hands with some glee. “The neighbors are called the Scorpions.”

-It is the 287th star in the constellation, Seth. It is hardly worth naming them after the primary shape-

“Nonsense!” I trumpeted. “I memorized all the constellations, and right now we’re going to have a look at the havoc they’ve caused.”

“Seth,” Carol looked alarmed. The area will be crawling with Masters in no time.”

“Ha!” I raised my finger in the air. “Ship, show all planets attacked by Scorpions?”

The hologram zoomed in further.

“Put dates on all attacks.”

-Working-

That took several minutes, but when we added the time the Masters had begun each project, we soon could see a pattern. “That one.” I said, pushing my finger into the hologram.

-Speed?-

“What’s the minimum?”

-Seventeen hours-

“Okay, take it easy, we have some plans to discuss.” I mused for a moment. “Get us there in two days.”

-48 hours. I comply-

“Fancy a game of battleships, Carol?”

I gave her no time to answer, but pointed to Crew with a wink, and gave thought to a nice whiskey I hankered after.

We relaxed in Crew, lying on bunks, passing a pad back and forth.

“B5.” I said with a grin, passing the pad.

Below the game I had written; I don’t entirely trust Ship anymore.

“Miss, H10.” Carol hesitantly played her turn, handed it back. In what way?

“Miss, A8.” Her new implants with the Master ship-voice. They might influence her decisions.

“Miss, D7.” Have you anything concrete yet?

“Hit, F8.” I said. No, just the sudden ‘I can’t fly yet, Seth’. And the sudden catastrophic crisis, non-crisis.

“Miss, C7.” “You think Ship lied?

“Miss, G2.” Not really, but it got me wondering if she made the whole thing up.

“Miss, D8.” For what purpose?

“Hit, G5.” That I don’t know. But it did sound very convenient.

“Hit, D9.” So let’s just watch her more carefully in future, yeah?

“Hit, G6.” Yes, in every facet of her work. Try to see if she’s showing favor in any way.

Carol grinned. “Okay Seth, D10.”

“Hit and sunk.” I ripped the pages from the book, and stuffed them in my mouth. “Who’s stupid idea was it to play this anyway?”

Carol laughed, standing up to fix another drink. “You did. Let’s keep the book to play again sometime. I liked it.”

“Just because you won.”

“So?”

Two days later, we cruised towards the star FG896 with all scanners at full resolution. As we approached the Goldilocks planet from the far side of the sun, Ship noted no traces of power, no communications; the area was totally quiet.

Then as we approached the third planet, the ‘terra’-formed one, Ship detected life signs.

-One occupant, humanoid-

“What do you mean? Occupant?” I asked. Both Carol and I watched the screen with great concentration.

-There is one occupant of the planet-

“One?” Carol asked. We looked at each other, brows together, stupefied.

-I cannot make it any clearer. There is one Master on the planet. He is the only occupant of the planet, He lives on the only structure on the planet. He is alone-

About that time, it occurred to me that if we could know that much about the planet we were approaching—and its ‘occupant’—he , she, or it would probably know a lot about us. You know, like where our ship was from, where we were from, our names, our birth dates, our astrological signs—excuse me, aren’t you a Virgo?

I was exaggerating, but it was allowed. The nonsense was happening inside my head—and mainly because I was feeling more than a bit of trepidation. It’s one thing to be on the far side of a sun, checking a planet for indications of life. It’s quite another to be cruising straight at that planet, taking the chance that there are all sorts of big-bore weapons pointed right at the nose of my ship.

“Why so quiet?” Carol asked.

“Going straight at this guy may not be such a smart thing to do.”

“What makes you think it’s a guy?”

“Right. It could be a wolf pretending to be my grandmother.”

“What?” She gave me a look. “Have you completely lost it?” Obviously we didn’t have that much in the way of shared cultural heritage.

“Ship? What’s our distance to the planet?”

-Just a bit more than 1.2 A.U. At our current velocity, we will achieve orbit in two hours, twenty-one minutes-

Ship could have added the number of seconds and tenths of seconds, etc., but thankfully I’d broken her of that habit long ago. Minutiae can be important, but I still hate dealing in it.

“Are we going to orbit the planet?” Carol asked.

I grimaced. “I... ah... I don't know. What would be the point?”

“A meet and greet session? Maybe he’s a nice guy.”

“If he is a guy,” I replied. “More likely not. Probably some kind of sentient creature we still don't have words to describe.”

“Thus far, he hasn’t shot at us. Isn’t that a good sign?”

“If you were going to shoot at something, wouldn’t you wait until it’s nice and close so you'd be sure not to miss?”

She shrugged. “There is that.”

“Ship, is there any way for us to be less obvious?”

-Sorry, Seth, but no. If the occupant of that planet is looking into the sky, he, she, or it knows we’re here-

“Would you know if we’d been spotted?”

-Yes. I could—and would—detect any kind of scan-

“And so far, we haven’t been seen?”

-So far-

“Then we keep approaching the planet?” Carol inquired.

“We do.” I thought about it for a moment. “Ship, if you detect any kind of scanning beam, take evasive action instantly. Don’t bother asking permission. That would waste time—enough time that we might get shot out of space.”

-Do you have any particular orders regarding the direction of our evasive action-

“Best fit, Ship. Calculate constantly so you can run the numbers to maneuvering instantly.”

-I comply-

If nothing else, it would keep Ship busy counting its toes.

“What now?” Carol wanted to know.

“We get in our couches and strap in. Ship won’t warn us of evasive action. That would take too much time. If we’re restrained, we won’t get hurt if we have to duck and run.”

“That makes sense.”

We rode the couches all the way into orbit. Then we orbited the planet twice. Nothing shot at us. I was almost disappointed. Who- or whatever the being that occupied the planet, he, she, or it considered us unworthy of notice. I shared my grumble with Carol.

“There’s nothing like feeling insignificant,” she said.

“Tell me about it.” I scratched my head. “Okay. Let’s go dirtside.”

“And do what?”

“Look around. Gather intelligence. Maybe be invited in for afternoon tea and cakes.”

“I doubt that’s likely.” She paused. “But it would be neighborly.”

“Ship, where does the occupant reside?”

-Half-way around the planet. On a plateau in the middle of an extensive mountain range-

“And we haven’t been scanned, and aren’t being scanned.”

-No-

“What are you thinking, Seth?”

“I’m trying to decide whether to land out in the open or try to find a place where it’s not so easy to spot us.”

“If we’re not being scanned...”

“I think I’d rather err on the side of caution this time.”

“You’re the boss. Or captain. Or whatever.”

“I am. Ship, find us a place of concealment as close as possible to where the occupant is... sleeping?”

-As good a word as any. And regarding the occupant, you might also consider the term, ‘suspended animation’-

“Waiting for something,” Carol said. “Maybe waiting for millions of immigrants?”

“It’s a possibility,” I said. “But I want to leave my options open.”

Our landing was smooth, and I have to give it to Ship. She found us a gorge that was about two kilometers deep with several large caves in its rock sides. She picked one that fit Cutey-Pie and snuggled us inside, almost completely out of sight.

“Let’s go for a hike,” I said, once everything was shut down and safe.

“Ship, how far do we have to walk?” Carol asked.

-Fifteen kilometers. And you will have to climb up out of the gorge. It’s steep, but you should be able to make it without endangering yourselves unnecessarily-

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

-There are no stairs. You’ll need some rock-climbing gear. I’ll have it all set out for you by time you’re ready. Which brings up another point. This planet has a twenty-one hour day. It’s late afternoon. You might be well-advised to wait until the morning-

“No, bad idea. Waiting for a bright new day is exactly what I don’t want to do. We have a long walk. Doing it in the daylight means that anyone—or anything—that takes even a glance outside will see us. Having the cover of darkness will give us an advantage.”

-And at night, your infrared signatures will reveal your location equally well-

“Assuming someone is using IR sensors,” Carol said. She was getting better about coming to my rescue.

“I still want to go at night,” I said.

-Do you want to climb rocks at night?-

That was one I hadn't thought of. That could get dicey. “Not particularly.”

-Then you’d better get moving. You have one hour and thirty-eight minutes before sunset. Then you’ll have all the darkness you wish-

I turned to Carol. “Heavy outerwear, boots, and a hat.” Her face was a picture. “I’m joking! We’ve got two powered exoskeletons that will make the gravity a bit easier to bear. I’m sure Ship will add provisions to our collection of gear. We go up and we walk fifteen kilometers in the dark. No problem.”

“There will be problems, Seth. We’ll just have to deal with them.”

“I know,” I said. “Do you have an alternative?”

“Let’s get moving,” she replied.

Ten minutes later, we were outside Cutey-Pie. The air was cool and dry, and the winds were light. I looked at the talk before us. The top of the plateau was more than sixty meters above our heads. And, as Ship had told me, there were no stairs. There was however, a slope that could be navigated, as long as Carol and I worked together and kept our ropes securely anchored.

I took the lead for the half, and learned that I was definitely not in as good a shape as I thought I was, even with the exoskeleton to help. We were also slower that I would have liked. Ship had told us when to expect sundown. It had taken an hour and a half to climb a height of thirty meters. The next thirty looked just as tough, and when darkness came in half an hour, we’d be feeling our way up a dangerous rock face.

“I want to take lead,” Carol said.

“Why?”

“I think I can do it better than you.”

“What makes you think that?” I was sweaty, tired, and cranky.

“I’ve climbed rock before,” she said. “It’s obvious you haven’t.”

“Be my guest.” I was more than happy to relinquish lead, but I didn’t want her to know.

She took off like a mountain goat, climbing the steep slope with what looked to me to be pure abandon. Still, with her above, and me dragging my sorry ass up behind her, we got to the edge of the plateau just in time to see a rather ordinary sunset.

“Which way now?” Carol asked, once we we’d gotten about thirty meters between us and the drop-off.

“That way,” I said with utter confidence as I pointed. Maybe Carol couldn’t see as well in the fading light as I could, but a small mountain sat fifteen kilometers to our west, and there was a building atop it. Even from such a distance, I could make out enough detail to know that the building was a castle—something far larger and far more elaborate than anything ever conceived or built by humankind.

Then Carol saw it.

At least, I think she did, because she was looking the way I was pointing.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

“I’d say so.”

“And we can see it from this distance.”

“Yeah. And in bad light.”

“Just how big is that thing?”

“Big enough that we can get lost in it.”

My viewfinder did a quick calculation; the structure was over three and a half kilometers wide. Which meant the mountain was at least a kilometer high from the plateau. We set off immediately, making good pace, the ground was relatively flat and the exoskeleton took my paces higher than normal, missing some of the smaller protrusions. Even so, it still took us two hours to get to the base of the mountain.

That’s when the shit hit the fan.

A rockslide.

Even in the near darkness, we still saw it coming. I had no idea where Carol went, but shouting out in alarm I dashed right, my exoskeleton running at full speed. I heard the rumble pass by my back, and I’m certain I felt peppered by scree.

When it had finished, I called Carol, our first break in communications since we’d set out across the plateau. “You okay?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“I split right.” I turned back, and saw her distant red glare in my infra-red. “I see you.”

Then her image vanished, a huge ogre-like face filling my screen. “Crap!” I heard Carol call out in surprise. But I was cut-off, the ogre coming towards me, bug eyes glaring, yellow teeth flashing, matted white fur shaking as he bore down on my position.

I drew my pistol and fired a couple of pulses at it, with no visible effect. I heard Carol scream, and a muffled sound in my helmet like she’d fallen. But with the ogre closing, I had little choice; I turned and ran like hell. I gave no thought to anything else but outdistancing or outlasting its stamina. Soon the sounds of pursuit diminished and I risked a backward glance. It had gone. I slowed, turned round, still ready to beat a path to the gorge.

“Carol?”

Nothing.

“Ship, do you hear me?”

-Affirmative, Seth-

Just hearing the reply I breathed a little easier. “Do you have a location for Carol?”

-Affirmative, she is four point three kilometers from your position. She is prone, unconscious-

“Topographical direction?”

-Back the way you ran-

Yeah, didn’t I know she was going to say exactly that. Despite the fear rising in my gut, I advanced, pulse pistol at the ready. My infra-red showed nothing.

-Keep in that direction, Seth-

“If I get off course, correct me.”

-I comply-

I found her behind a large boulder. As soon as I rounded it, my screen glowed with infra-red and body signs, pulse, breathing rate. At least she was alive.

“Carol?” I shook her, but she remained unresponsive. “Any ideas, Ship?”

-She has suffered concussive wounds. Probably beyond your skillset-

“Dang it. What do you suggest? I can’t lift her, not with the exoskeleton.” I looked back at the fifteen kilometer hike. “Probably not at all.”

-I am coming-

“What?”

-It is the only possible—or reasonable—course of action-

I looked up at the slope, the castle/palace of the Master. We’d got so close, just to be beaten by his first defenses. I hated to think what lay farther up the mountain. At that thought, Ship appeared, sliding in with her open ramp just a foot from Carol’s body; a perfect placement. I clipped a convenient hook over her belt, then pulled her onto the ramp. I’d hardly got her off the dirt when Ship took off, banking away from the slope, her momentum tilting me towards the inside of the Survey-Scout. When we’d cleared the ramp, it closed, sealing us safely inside. As Ship got us the freak out of Dodge, I unfastened her exoskeleton, and fetched a hover gurney.

-Where to, Seth?-

“Take us a light year away, the way we came.” I said, lifting Carol’s limp body unceremoniously onto the hover-gurney. “Remember we’re not strapped down, keep the acceleration under control.”

-I comply-

Before we’d cleared the atmosphere I had her on the medi-table. Getting her out of her suits was more of a problem. Once in her underwear I watched as Ship scanned her body.

-No broken bones, just a cranial contusion, the right side of her forehead. There is no reason why she should not make a full recovery-

“Thank all the Gods for that,” I mumbled.

-What happened out there, Seth?-

“We were attacked,” I said as the laser lines crisscrossed her body.

-There was nothing on my scanners-

“Well first there was the rock-fall. Then when that finished, a huge ogre-like creature attacked me. I got off a shot or two, but I didn’t hit it.”

Ship took a moment to answer. -Showing the episode on the side screen-

The video was through my helmet-cam. Yup, running, slowing, turning. Then I yelled, drew my gun and fired. Carol screamed.

No ogre.

No freaking ogre anywhere.

-I hate to bring sad tidings to you, Seth, but it was your pistol pulse that hit Carol-

I gave it just one moment’s thought; holograms. Holograms specifically placed for me to fire through to hit Carol. “I feel such an ass.” But it did emphasize the technological gulf between the Masters and myself. We hadn’t even gotten near to the castle, never mind inside it.

At that point, Carol decided to rouse. She tried to get up on her elbows, but fell back on the medi-table. “What happened?”

Oh. I’ve never felt quite that sheepish before. “Well, it’s a bit of a long story…”

Some tissue manipulation and two bourbons later, she managed a smile about the whole thing. “So the avalanche was a hologram too?”

“Probably.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I dunno, maybe we should look at the Scorpions? I mean, what do we know right now? We have no idea who the bad guys are, do we?”

She nodded, and sipped some more. Damn, I felt stupid. I liked my new crew mate so much, I’d tried to kill her.

-Communication, Seth-

That sure snapped our heads round. “Who from?”

-Tomas Howard-

“Howie?” Damn, I’d spent some time with Howie at MacCollie before setting off on our missions. He’d been the bicycle spoke next to me, and we had communication for the first few months, then nothing, the distances being too great. “What does he say?”

-It’s more a status update than a direct message.-

“Play it for us.”

-I comply-

“Message to all Fellowship and MacCollie vessels out there. This is Tomas Howard, MacCollie Survey-Scout #954.” His Mexican accent almost choked some of the words, but other than that, he was perfectly legible. “I am trapped on a moon near a blue-giant star. All engines are out. Vessel heavily damaged. Request rescue, please.” And he followed it up with a bunch of coordinates.

“Where is he, Ship?”

-He is on the other side of Scorpion space-

“How far?”

-Over five hundred light years-

Crap.

“Can we swing out of the galaxy, and come back in?”

-That would increase both the distance traveled and the time required travel it-

I made the decision in seconds. “We’ll get strapped in. Do it.”

The run was a long one, wasteful of time and resources, but I was not about to leave a friend stranded any more than I was going to make a direct run, right through Scorpion space. It took Ship a while to plot the course. We would have to use six different jump points, and hope their destinations had not been modified by meddling aliens. The rest of the time, we’d be in FTL with the throttle to the stop, dashing from one jump point to the other. Total time in transit would be eighty-three and a half hours, and by time we reached the coordinates in the message Tomas had sent, we’d be damned low on fuel.

“Ship, let’s get moving,” I ordered, once all the computations were locked in.

-I comply-

“Do you think this is a good idea?” Carol asked from her couch. The G’s were building up and I wanted to breathe, not talk.

“He’d do the same for me,” I grunted.

“By time we get there, he could already be rescued. Or he could be dead.”

Didn't G’s bother her? She was positively chatty.

“Maybe so,” I managed to mutter. “We’re still making the run.”

“You’re the Captain,” she said. I wasn’t keen on the way she said it.

-First jump coming up in five minutes. Please self-administer the required pharmaceuticals-

“You do it,” I grumbled. “I don’t feel like moving.”

-I comply-

I felt the tiny sting of a hypo-spray and a few seconds later slid into a stupor that would protect me from the psychological effects of jumping through a worm-hole. My last thought was that I hoped Carol was in as much of a happy-state as I was.

Some time later, we were coasting. As soon as I was lucid, I asked Ship why.

-I’m checking spatial alignment. Our exit point wasn’t exactly where I’d expected it to be-

“By how much?” I asked.

-Half a light-year and change, Seth. But it works to our advantage. It’s cut more than nine hours off our projected travel time-

“So what’s the downside? I’m asking because you don’t sound all that happy.”

-Where does our next jump terminate? The shape of space—if that’s actually a working definition—is being changed by the actions of the Masters. What little I do know of the L-Space topography of this arm of our galaxy is rapidly going out of date-

“Bottom line, Ship. Can you get us to Tomas?”

-If we stay lucky. We just got a break because things had been moved. We can only hope it stays that way- Ship paused for a moment. -Everything’s aligned. Go back to sleep-

Each successive jump got us closer to Tomas. Four of the worm-holes hadn’t been modified by the Masters, and Ship was able to predict, with better accuracy each time, our arrival at the coordinates Tomas had sent. As we prepared for the last jump, Carol asked, “Shall we keep our fingers crossed?”

I grinned. “Are you telling me you believe in luck?”

“Not a bit. Just tugging at your chain.”

“You think I'm superstitious?”

“No,” she answered. “But sometimes, I feel you take huge risks armed only with hope.”

I wanted to reply, but Ship said, -Final jump coming up in fifteen seconds. Administering pharmaceuticals, now-

My tongue got thick, my face got numb, and as I headed for unconsciousness, I thought about how much the effect of the drugs mimicked a monstrous drunk, but without the hangover.

Some time later, I opened one eye. I was fuzzy, but nothing hurt. “Where are we?” I asked.

-At the coordinates, Seth. But we have a small problem. Tomas said he was on a moon in a blue-giant system. What he didn’t say is that the system has at least six planets, and four of them have extensive systems of satellites. So, which moon is our destination-

“How many moons are we talking about?”

-Twenty-seven. And that number may be low. There are at least two planets on the far side of that blue-giant star-

“I thought Tomas gave us good coordinates,” I said.

“What's the problem, Seth?” Carol asked. She’d been a bit slow to come up from the drugs.

“Tomas is on one of the moons in this system. There are at least twenty-seven of them. Which one is he on?”

“Oh.”

-Ahem- Ship uttered. She was trying to answer my question.

“Coordinates,” I said.

-Indeed. Tomas gave coordinates for the star. The coordinates were not sufficiently fine-tuned to tell us which moon-

“So, check all frequencies. He may still be trying to get a message out.”

-It might be better if we broadcast the fact that we’re present in this system-

“Give it a try.”

“How long has it been since we’ve had solid food?” Carol asked.

“Several days.”

“Maybe we’d be smart to do something about that while Ship searches for Tomas.”

“You’re right. Ship, we need some food.”

-Do you have a specific order, Seth-

I thought about it. “Yeah. Meat and potatoes.”

“Bangers and Mash!” Carol announced with some glee.

“What?”

“Meat and potatoes, dummy!”

Ship prepared food for both of us, and at the same time, stayed busy looking for my friend. I had a pang of guilt as I ate my fill, all the while wondering if Tomas had perished cold and hungry.

“You don’t look happy,” Carol said.

I explained my morbid thoughts.

“We're doing our best, Seth. Don’t beat yourself up over not being omnipotent.”

“I really never thought of myself that way,” I said in my own defense.

“Sure, you do. And I’m not different. We flit from one star system to another with ease. We have a ship that bristles with weapons of unbelievable destructive power. We are all but gods.”

“Tell me that while we’re hanging on harnesses over some frigid, half-frozen lake, stealing water.”

She laughed. “There is that.”

-I’ve found Tomas-

“Where?” I snapped.

-Fifth planet, third satellite-

“Let’s go,” I ordered.

-As you just mentioned, we are woefully short on fuel, Seth. There’s an asteroid with water ice no more than 300,000 kilometers distant-

“I have a friend who needs help desperately. And you’re saying we should stop and pump gas?”

-I have no idea what you mean by that statement-

“Sure you do.”

-Perhaps so. In any event, we need fuel. The satellite on which Tomas has crashed is bigger than Mars. That means a sizable gravity well. I’ll need an appreciable amount of fuel to get out of it. Otherwise, we’ll be stranded there, too-

“Ship’s making a strong case,” Carol said. “Hard to argue with the math.”

“I know. Let’s refuel.”

-Good choice- Ship said. -On our way to the asteroid-

I felt the movement of the ship, and then the G’s piled up a bit. Nothing much, and I wondered why.

“Ship?” I asked. “Why the gentle ride?”

-We’re that low on fuel. If I accelerate sharply, I’ll have to decelerate sharply. At that point I won’t have enough fuel for station-keeping while we refuel-

“We were that low?” Carol asked, looking slightly peevish.

-I knew how important this was to Seth. But the realities of fuel consumption can’t be ignored. Maybe I could have made a few decisions more in keeping with maintaining sufficient reserves-

“File it for future reference,” I said. “Let’s get this done.”

Refueling was as cold and difficult as it always was. Except for doing it in the system of a blue giant star. As I was outside the ship, making sure that we were taking on water and not freezing up, I tried to stay in the shadows. Blue-giant stars put out a lot of lethal radiation. I didn't want any part of that kind of action.

Once the tanks were topped, and I was back inside the ship, wrapped in blankets and sipping hot cocoa, I asked Ship how long it would take to get to the moon where Tomas was stranded.

-Fifteen hours, conventionally. Two and a half if I go FTL-

“You don’t sound happy about that.”

-We’re not alone in this system. I believe I’ve detected the presence of two other star ships-

“Ours?” I could always hope—except if they were ours, I was probably going to get arrested.

-Not ours. Nothing I’ve ever seen before, and nothing in any registry-

“So what are you telling me, Ship?

-If I go FTL, an electromagnetic pulse radiates from the spot where I went FTL. That’s like telling those aboard the ships I can't identify that we're here-

“Which is probably not a good idea.”

-Which is probably a terrible, idea. But, your friend needs our help. I can’t make that kind of decision, Seth. I’m not programmed for it-

“Go FTL,” I said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. “Tomas needs our help.”

-We’re being scanned- Ship announced as soon as we dropped out of FTL.

“If it wasn’t for crappy luck, we wouldn’t have any at all,” I grumbled.

Carol and I were in our Command chairs, ready for whatever the ships could throw at us. We had a long-range look at them, and they were almost dumb-bell shaped; two large spheres at either end of a long tube. “Never seen such a design anywhere.” I remarked.

-I have searched both Floral and Master databases; these new ships are quite foreign-

Carol fiddled with the view, shifting slowly round the ships. “How many aboard?”

-Their interiors are shielded from my scanners. I apologize-

By the figures on the screen, Tomas’s moon was just three hundred thousand kilometers away.

-The ships are moving towards us-

“Speed?”

-Slow…-

“Ship?” I sensed something out of place. “Ship!”

-BRAKING!-

Oh, boy, that was a sore one, my neck felt like it was being stretched on a rack, my chin, thrust into my chest. It took all my reserve not to throw up right there.

-Seth? The ships have pulled an impossible maneuver. They have gone from low speed to FTL instantaneously-

I couldn’t manage to get the words out, but I knew that was impossible. Instant FTL was a theory, nothing more. Then the ships appeared in front of us, face on. I watched as we slowed to a stop no more than a kilometer from their bows. I could see windows on the sphere, people behind them, or what looked like people.

I swallowed real hard. “What now?”

-They are communicating with us. ARRRRGGGHHH- Ship fell silent, its last plaintive cry resonating in the cabin.

“What’s happening, Seth?” Carol asked.

“I know better than attempt any further communication.” I said softly. “Ship is probably dealing with the situation better than we can.”

-Seth Gingko- Ship’s voice had changed. Gone was the sexy female, replaced by the default voice, so long ago discarded.

“Yes?” I answered gingerly.

-Why are you here?-

“I have a friend in trouble. He’s stranded on a moon.”

There was a long pause.

-Can your species survive molecular-level transportation-

That was a good question. “I don’t understand.”

A man in a suit materialized in the cabin in front of me. Initially, I thought it was one of the new aliens, then recognized the suit design. I saw Howie grimace in his helmet as he crumpled to the ground.

-You now have your friend. Leave Federation space. Your navigation has been restricted to one direction. A second attempt to enter Federation space will be met with your destruction. No further communication is allowed-

-Seth- Ship’s voice, returned. -I’m sorry, but I must comply-

“Just do it, Ship.” I said, Tomas would just have to deal with the acceleration on the floor; at least he couldn’t fall any further.

We headed out of ‘Federation’ space as quick as Ship could manage. I couldn’t believe we were on the run from both Federation and Fellowship. Allowed only one heading we shot out of the galaxy like a bullet.

-We will be allowed to decelerate in fifteen hours, Seth- Ship anticipated my question. -By then I calculate we will be sixteen light years out in clear inter-galactic space-

Exiled from our own galaxy, I lay back and in time fell asleep. I could spend no time in consideration of Tomas’s condition, he’d have to rough it like the rest of us.

When I awoke we’d dropped out of FTL. My head was groggy from the long periods under pharmaceuticals, and my sense of honor was warped by constantly banging my head on a closed door. I unclipped my straps. “How is everyone?” I asked looking around Control and finding no one.

-Tomas is being treated in the medi-bay-

“What’s the verdict?” I rubbed the encrusted sleep from my eyes.

-He has a broken arm, three cracked ribs, various sprains and bruises, but nothing that won't heal-

“What happened?” I asked, walking into the Crew area.

Tomas didn’t look good, but at least he was sitting up. “The damn ships wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Which ones?”

“The ballsy ones,” he said with a grin that cost him pain. “Slammed me into the asteroid, left me for dead.”

“Did you complete your MacCollie mission?”

Carol brought in some hot tea, I could smell the herbs in the usual Darjeeling mixture. “Here, drink this.”

“I didn’t finish my mission.” Tomas sipped gingerly. “Never actually signed off, I had a couple of light years to go to the very edge. You?”

I nodded “Finished, got the spaceship, got captured by aliens, got the Cutey-Pie pimped up by other aliens, you know, the usual run-of-the-mill kinda stuff.”

-Seth, the ship has been turned back to our galaxy. What is your required heading?-

I looked at Carol, then Tomas, then decided I was in charge, and it was time to show it; this was no time for command-by-committee. “FG896, Ship. Third planet, put us in a holding pattern above the castle we got scared away from.”

I looked into Carol’s concerned eyes, but dismissed her reticence with a swift shake of my head. “I’m fed up with coming out of everything second best. Ship? How long to our destination?”

-Seven days-

“Okay, in the meantime, I want you to compile a report on everything you have learned about the Masters. You’re in tune with one of their control units, I want a history, and nothing left out. When I go in this time it will be in the front door, and I don’t want surprises.”

-I comply-

I wondered if Ship took my command properly, or if she battled inside herself to get it out, but it took her almost a day to get her act together. When she gave the hologram presentation, it was better than any movie I’d ever seen.

Basically, the Masters were originally from the planet Reesia 4, or that was as close as English could get us. They’d taken to space over ten thousand years ago, and began a colonization program. But yeah, they were like any other race; greed and gluttony took over, and they battled a civil war for centuries. Finally, in a fit of pique, a law was passed allowing only one person per ship, and a new age dawned, that of separation. It was during this time they discovered the Florans, which allowed them to expand their horizons to the neighboring galaxies. On their home worlds they elected singles to take to space, but such an undertaking needed energy.

The Reesians found they could harness the power of the stars to build their many millions of ships to send their ambassadors to the limits of space. Once on board their ships, they forgot their original goals of getting the population off the original home worlds, and began a lonely existence in space. One person per planet; what a waste.

And we got our first look at a Reesian; the hologram showed basically a tall, thin, gangly near-human, greyish skin but with very human features, eyes, nose, mouth, ears in basically the same shape and format. Their bodies are hairless, yet the sallow skin looked quite velvety.

One thing they were not was warlike; that was in our favor. They had been in space for millennia, and their muscle mass had atrophied to a bare minimum. They used deception, hologram images, projections directly into the conscious mind, and such like. Ship’s image of the castle looked entirely different from my recollection, and Carol had her own ideas; we’d even been duped about that.

As we headed for FG896, I did so with a far better outlook than before. I had a point to press home, and I wasn’t going to let some hairy ogre put me off.

The trip back to FG896 was uneventful except for a couple times when Tomas woke up screaming at the top of his lungs. Bad dreams, but what would one expect from someone who’d gone through his past week. Cutey-Pie seemed almost normal, if having been slapped back into earlier programming could be considered in an every-day experience. Carol was... well... Carol. Maybe she was the toughest one of the bunch. She looked at our problems, faced them, and so far, had survived them. I was holding up reasonably well. I’d been having my own nightmares, but I didn’t yell or shout with them, so Carol didn’t know.

When we arrived, Ship had a question.

-Landing instructions, Seth-

“Close to the castle,” I said.

-Out in the open?-

“Unless you can find a hidey-hole.”

-I'll look-

“Get us on the ground as quickly as possible. I want inside that castle.”

-I comply-

I was wondering about Ship’s sudden penchant for caution when Carol entered the control compartment carrying a pair of steaming mugs.

“Care for some Irish coffee?” she asked.

“Never heard of it.”

“Try it,” she said, handing one of the mugs to me. I sipped. I liked it.

“Alcoholic,” I smiled warmly.

“And, oh, so good.” She chinked the mugs together.

“So we’re going to be facing one of the Masters while slightly drunk?” I asked.

“No, silly. You’d have to drink several of these. It’s just a treat before we go out and do something scary.”

“Oh,” I said, not that I believed her. But the drink was delicious and I sucked it down like a greedy child.

“Carol told me what you had planned,” Tomas said, entering the compartment. He wasn’t carrying a steaming mug, and he was favoring his injured parts. Maybe he didn’t want to mix alcohol with his meds.

“It’s nothing all that big.” I wanted to dial it down. I didn’t want him to know the truth.

“You need a wingman?” he asked.

I grinned at him. “In your shape?”

He grinned back. Suddenly, something said I did need a wingman. I had a feeling that if I took Carol and left Tomas in Cutey-Pie, he’d try to find a way to override the instructions I’d leave with Ship, and steal my ride.

Or maybe I was just being paranoid.

“Okay,” I said. “I need a wingman.”

A flash of disappointment raced across his features, replaced by a broad smile. “I’m honored,” he said.

“What about me?” Carol asked.

I looked her way. “You really want to go? After what happened last time?”

“Yes. And you owe me one because of what happened.”

“I do.”

-I’ve found a place to land that offers some concealment- Ship said.

That sounded like good news. “How soon can you have us on the ground?”

-Ten minutes. It’ll take you longer than that to get ready for your EVA-

“You got a bet. Carol, Tomas, get suited up. We’re going alien hunting.”

Ship managed to get us to within half a kilometer of the castle and did it in eight and a half minutes. I managed to get ready, as did Carol. Tomas took a little longer. He was hurting, but I wasn’t going to leave him with Cutey-Pie. We were old friends, but a lot can happen in five years and I just didn’t trust him yet. Not quite, or maybe a little less.

Outside, it was still cold and dry, and we had to wear rebreathers and carry extra oxygen. The hill in front of us was about thirty meters high, and covered with rubble. I had a feeling that the top of the hill hadn't been smooth and flat until it was shaped for one of the Masters.

“What the hell is this thing?” Tomas asked, looking up at the castle.

“Ice,” I said. “Shaped into a fairy-tale castle, and guarded by holograms that look real. “Don’t shoot at anything unless it bites you.”

“I might not wait that long,” he replied with an attempt at a laugh.

“Are we going to stand around talking?” Carol asked. “I want to see the inside of the place.”

“Right,” I replied. “Let’s move out.”

Getting up the hill took some doing. It wore me down a bit. I wondered how Tomas was holding up.

“Where are the scary holograms?” he asked in a tired voice. Now, I knew.

“Not in evidence,” Carol replied. “I think whoever is in the ice castle knows that we know his tricks.”

“No use using a trick that no longer works. So how do we get inside?”

We were facing a structure nearly two kilometers wide that, in places, towered at least six hundred and fifty meters into the air. Otherwise, it was more like sixty meters high, with thousands of window openings irregularly placed on every surface we could see. There wasn’t a lot of wind, but what there was made a haunting sound that reminded me of an organ being played by an artist who’d gone completely mad.

“This isn’t ice,” Tomas said, pointing at one of the towers that rose almost three thousand meters into the sky. “You can’t pile ice that high. It would spread and collapse under the weight.”

“What then?” I asked. “Plastic? Glass? Something we haven’t invented yet?”

“I don't know.” He walked to the wall and tapped on it with his fingernails. “What the—?” he muttered. Then he took a survival knife out of his gear, tried to cut the wall, and failed utterly.

“What are you doing?” Carol asked.

“See this knife?” Tomas waved it around a bit. “This is the sharpest, hardest, most durable knife we can make. And it doesn’t scratch the wall.”

“So?” I asked.

“Unless I miss my guess, it’s carbon, in a molecular arrangement we know as diamond.”

“Are you serious?” Carol asked.

“Totally,” he replied. “We’re about to walk into a building, or a complex of building, constructed entirely of diamonds.”

I wondered what was portable. I could see each of us being very, very wealthy.

-Why are you people lollygagging outside the building-

“Just getting a feel for the place, Ship. I didn’t know you were monitoring us that closely.”

-I am. And you are wasting time. More important, you are wasting breathable air. Get busy, Seth. Settle this thing and get back inside the ship-

“Right.”

“You let your Ship order you around?” Tomas asked.

“Ship hasn’t been herself lately,” I said. “Let’s go find the guy who runs this place.”

“Yeah. That’s probably going to be real easy,” Carol said.

I glanced her way. “It’ll get a lot easier, once we find an entrance.”

“Lead on, oh wise one,” she said. I didn’t feel she meant it.

Choosing to go to our left was pure luck. We walked about two hundred meters, and there was an opening that had to be a doorway. About a meter wide, and three meters high, it led inside. I stepped into it carefully, looking to my right and left and seeing nothing but a solid wall about five meters thick on both sides. The floor was smooth, clear, and unmarked, and I had a feeling that I was walking on diamond.

“Why would he leave the door open?” Carol asked when we were through the wall and into a huge open area that was utterly devoid of furniture—or anything else.

“I'm not sure it’s ‘he’,” I said. “Ship didn’t go into gender differentiation.”

“It could be a she?” Tomas asked. “In that case, maybe I should do the talking. After all, I am the handsome one.”

I shook my head at that. He was beat up, but he still saw himself as a lover.

“Which way do we go?” Carol asked.

“We could split up,” Tomas said.

“No. That’s a formula for disaster. We stay together. We figure this out, and then we go...” I was going to say home world, but even though I’d rescued Tomas, I had a feeling my face was still on ‘wanted’ notices.

“My question stands,” Carol said.

I pointed to my right. “That way.”

“How will we find our way back?” Tomas said. “This place is enormous. It would be so easy to get lost.”

“Ship,” I said, “Do you know where we are?”

-Yes. The walls of the structure offer no impediment to my sensors-

“So no matter where we go, you’ll know where we are.”

-Evidently. If I begin to encounter even the slightest difficulty in locating you, I will notify you immediately-

I nodded. “Let’s go find whoever owns this place.”

Tomas staggered. “I’m not so sure this was a good idea,” he said.

“Too much, too soon,” Carol said. “You look exhausted.”

“He is,” I said. I made a decision based on suspicion. “Stay with him, Carol. Sit him down, let him doze if that helps. I’ll go on ahead by myself.”

“No,” Tomas said. “I can take care of myself. You need Carol to watch your back.”

“Ship?” I subvocalized. It was a trick I’d learned and taught Ship. She could understand me without my needing to make noise.

-What do you need, Seth-

“Could Tomas override your programming and steal you-

-Probably not, but...-

“There’s a chance.” I was still subvocalizing.

-Faint, but real-

“Is there any way you could put him down for a nap?”

-Yes. He’d never know what hit him-

“How long could you keep him down?”

-As long as you need. But he will be utterly defenseless. Carol will need to stay with him to protect him-

“Put him down.” I looked at Carol. Ship had been having a one-way conversation with her. Tomas had no idea what was happening, and he suddenly slumped to the floor.

“I know. I stay,” she said. “Try not to get lost or killed.”

“Right.” I took off, almost at a run. We were burning daylight, and I needed to see an end to this.

But which way? I was just about to scream in frustration as I came into a circular area that must have been a hundred meters in diameter, with a domed ceiling at least three hundred and fifty meters over my head. There were hundreds of doorways all around the circle, and I had no idea which one might lead me to whoever was running the asylum.

Then, a lighted path—dark red, in color—led from where I was standing to one of those wide-open doorways. It was clear across the huge space, and I jogged across it, wondering what lay on the other side of the doorway.

The path continued for another three hundred meters, or so, and then stopped in the middle of another, smaller open area. I followed it to its terminus and waited. The floor started moving upward, and at a rate that all but terrified me. I was on an elevator that was taking me hundreds of meters straight up.

When it stopped, the line on the floor determined my path. A bright gold this time, it followed it for another few hundred meters and emerged into another domed room about twenty-five meters wide, with the top of the dome about seventy meters above my head.

The very center of the room was dominated by a piece of diamond about meters long, a meter and half high, and another meter and a half wide. A robed figure lay on its back. I saw no signs of respiration—or anything else that would suggest this being was alive.

I walked toward it, one slow step at a time. As I got closer, I could see that it was reasonably humanoid, with a larger head, prominent brow, narrow nose, high cheek bones, a slim jaw.

---That’s close enough--- echoed in my head when I was about three meters from the creature.

“Right,” I said, coming to a complete stop.

---What is your purpose, here?--- the same disembodied voice asked.

“I’m a MacCollie Scout,” I replied. “My job is gathering data about the Galaxy.”

---What do you see here?---

“Something inexplicable. I know something of who you are. I don’t know why you do the things you do.”

---Would you like answers to all your questions?---

“Sure. Tell me what I need to know.” It was flip, it came without thought, and it was stupid. Sometime, within the next microsecond, I felt my skull was split open and a million years of knowledge was injected into my brain.

I physically staggered against the onslaught. And it didn’t last just a second. The download held my head upright, kept right on coming, crushing my temples as the force pulverized my brain. I felt my hands make a hour-long journey from my sides to my forehead, moving upwards, trying to assuage the pain.

---What’s wrong human? Can’t you handle information?---

I heard a sound like laughter, then I fell over, toppled onto my butt. Again, I fell a millimeter at a time; an ignominious fall indeed. My drop to the ground seemed to last for days, I could look around at dust specks, making their way around the room. And the data kept flowing. My first bounce seemed to last an hour, then the second, at least ten minutes.

Then, with opening of my consciousness, the data-flow slowed and I felt particularly good about the no-pain situation. When I looked up at the Master, its head rising from the prone position, I suddenly knew his name; Batopeech, I knew his lowly designation, his disorganized family line, his lack of any reproduction drive. I felt nothing but scorn for the forlorn creature. I knew his likes, dislikes, knew the triviality of his thought processes.

“Get up, Batopeech.” I got swiftly to my feet, and quickly crossed to his diamond dias. He looked frightened at my sudden rcovery. “You don’t fool me.”

---But, you accepted the feed line?--- he almost drooled. ---You should not have survived---

From his personal memories I knew he had killed another two MacCollie Scouts like myself. I knew their names, knew their ship identifiers. “I could claim revenge.” I started to walk around the sleeping pedestal, knowing just my presence was putting him off. “It is my right. Clans-Law, 1.15.16.” I had him on the run now, the creature that I’d feared just moments ago. “But I will belay such right… temporarily.”

I flipped my comms. “Carol?”

“Seth?”

“Can you close on my position?”

“What about Tomas?”

I considered Tomas light years below my concentration level. “He’ll be okay where he is. Watch out for that elevator. It’s quick.” Somehow I could sense her approach, yet as my attention was diverted, Batopeech moved, his hand trying to reach a control panel. I raced to his side, closing my hand around his scrawny neck. “Not so fast my friend. I have no need for the animals you keep.” I knew three large cat-like creatures lay meters below, ready for blood.

I let him go as Carol entered the room, her face incredulous at the riches on display.

“This is our host, Batopeech. He has conveniently given me a personal history of their race.” Carol looked around, probably for a book or display. “In here.” I tapped my temple. “Batopeech is sorry for the hologram defenses; he would like to say he’s sorry.” I turned to the shaking creature and laughed. How could we have been so afraid of such a confrontation?

---Yes, human named Carol, I do apologize---

“Where is your ship?”

I knew the answer, yet wanted him to speak for Carol’s sake.

---When we take planetary residence, we send the Cruiser back. It will travel a million light years and rescue one more of our people from the overwhelming overpopulation---

“Not bad, huh?” I toyed with him. “They terraform a planet just for one, yet on their home worlds thousands die every day from pollution. They rescue one person per ship, yet their whole galaxy could be freed in a few years… such a pitiful way to save a race.” I turned on the man, I found I could hardly use the term to describe him, with complete disgust. “They’ve been away from home so long, they’ve forgotten what it feels like.”

---You convict us without sufficient information---

I turned on him with more wrath than I’d felt in years, and he crumbled under my verbal assault. “You are less than pitiful!” I roared. “How long have you been here?” Again I knew, I just wanted him to say it.

---Three stellar revolutions---

“Then say goodbye, for you’ll never set foot on the surface again!”

---Why?---

“Because, Batopeech, my friend, you’re coming to Earth with us!”

I hit the appropriate buttons on the MacCollie computer database, and now denoted the unnamed star FG896 as Gingko-Seth. In the back of my mind I toyed with the notion of bringing my grandkids here to settle. I mean, all it needed was some carbon-based plant and animal life and some fine-tuning of the atmosphere.

However, things were not good in the Cutey-Pie. I sensed a minor crew problem, in that I now knew everything, and the crew, until now being completely trustworthy, were now suspected by me of treason at every turn. I had to put a stop to that.

With my new knowledge, I had a complete plan, and so called a meeting.

We all sat on the bunks in Crew, one each. Carol looked nonplussed; Tomas a bit sheepish, he hadn’t recovered from his sleep, and let’s face it, he still had healing bones and bruises to deal with. Batopeech just looked sick, I mean really down, depressed. Of course, the re-programmed rebreather might have had something to do with that.

I decided I’d start.

“Bringing you up to date. I thought I’d let you know what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing?” Carol railed.

“Yes.” I swallowed, and carried on. “Inside this converted Survey-Scout are the star plans for the nearest sixteen galaxies. I got them from the Florans.” Yeah, both Tomas and Batopeech complained there. I didn’t give a crap. Tomas would find out later, Batopeech could keep his own name of the Florans to himself; it was almost unpronounceable anyway.

“Order!” They all jumped. Wonderful. “I intend to take Batopeech and a Floran to Earth, confirm the presence of alien life, and become very rich. You two can come with me, take some of the plaudits, and become almost as rich.”

“My last needle is not due for another twenty-or-so months, so I’ll be subject to checking about the ‘legality’ of it all, but I’ll get past that with my superior information and the new inventions I bring to the MacCollie table.”

“Right now, if we get a Floran, and take Batopeech, we’re simply heroes on a grandiose scale. Nothing will be out of limits. Our images will be cast in bronze, gold, and after the new diamond process, cast in diamonds two kilometers high.”

Downside? Of course, there was still the Florans to consider.

Upside? I had a ‘Master’ on the bunk next to me, and compared to me, he looked like Horace Wimp!

But first I had to get rid of Carol and Tomas, and that wasn’t going to be pretty.

TO BE CONTINUED