“It’s your job to answer questions, not mine.” I couldn’t help wondering if it were time to de-frag the Ship’s processes, they’d got rather weird over the last few days.
“Excellent!” I sat upright, ready for more good news. “Where?”
To my chagrin, what I was seeing looked the same as before, galaxies, lots of them, but very small, very far away. “How far?”
Again, stumped. “What do you mean?”
“You mean man-made?”
“How do you know?”
“Animals?” I hoped I’d guessed correctly.
“So they know we’re here?”
“So can we go back to our own galaxy?”
Silence fell as though Ship had to take the time to think about it.
I hardly gave it another thought. “Ship, take us into the jump hole.”
“Ship!” I roared. “Take us through.”
Ship sounded piqued.
I sat back as the straps folded over me. Fifteen minutes to turn us round without losing external parts from too much centrifugal force, seven minutes to reach light speed, then a nice FTL glide into the jump hole. Inside an hour, my screens showed Denon Prime and the milky way beyond. “Confirm galaxy.”
I gave a heavy sigh. “Scan for any other craft.”
So now I’d confirmed one of two things. Either the two-way tunnel existed, or it just hadn’t been switched to another destination. I could hardly believe my next command. “Ship? Take us back through.”
She didn’t try to countermand me. Whoosh! Back to the new galaxy.
“May I ask the purpose of coming back through again>
“Because I’m a MacCollie survey mission, and if I can survey another galaxy, I’ll be famous, and that usually involves being rich too.”
“It's like being a Marine, Ship. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
Oh, bitchy too, now. A de-frag was definitely on the cards. “Nearest star?”
“Planets?”
“How long to get there?”
“Let’s do it, Ship. We’re going exploring.”
The thought of riches beyond imagination kept me going for the first hour or so, but then the gorilla in the room kept knocking on the door of my daydream.
“Ship?” I didn’t fancy thinking this one through on my own. “Why would an artificial quantum tunnel exists between two galaxies? Just hit me with anything that comes to mind.”
“What?”
“Okay, apart from that…”
But my thoughts were cut short.
Ship knew the only time the 5G deceleration limit was allowed to be exceeded. Damn if it didn’t hurt. My head was twisted to the right, my jaw distended into the padding on the chair. Painful. I watched the screen. It seemed once we’d got perpendicular to the previous course, we accelerated away.
Ship said as my jaw was crushed some more. The whole ship shook as we passed 7G and more. We’d never needed such speed in the five years of our mission. I wanted to shout, “Holograms you idiot!”, but with little air in my crushed lungs, and my jaw threatening to break, I could only manage a weak moan. Then, just as suddenly, we braked, and I slid forward onto my strapping, cutting my shoulder blades.
“What’s going on?” I choked, threatening to throw up the meager food in my belly.
“Okay,” I took a couple of deep breaths. “Have you considered the ships might be a hologram?”
“Show me.”
By now, we’d slid behind the asteroid, and were able to watch the procession. Each ship exactly the same. “Can we determine what size they are without scanning?”
“Why?”
“How many?”
“The one I had us headed to?”
“Ship? Can we assume they’re going to our galaxy?”
Well that put the kibosh on my dreams of charting a new galaxy. Now I had to follow them to home galaxy, somehow get ahead of them, and warn earth. Not that it panned out well for me. I had taken five years out of my life for this mission, and then, just as the ship becomes mine, I get involved in a five year rescue mission.
Or of course I could just ignore the fleet, chart some space, and hope that the invading hordes would just be happy colonizing the nearest segment of their destination.
Crap.
Question: Can you follow and not be seen? Or more accurately, observe, as I had no desire to follow a thousand-plus-ship battle fleet at any distance where my Survey-Scout could be seen with even an extremely powerful telescope.
Question: Did I want to follow that fleet? Did I have a moral obligation to... to what? Save humanity and become the greatest hero of all time? Then again, there have been so many dead heroes.
Question: Was that alien fleet a danger to my home system? Maybe they liked their planets in the gas-giant range, like Jupiter or Saturn. If that was so, humanity would probably say, “Enjoy. You're welcome to them.” But what's the likelihood of a race developing on a gas giant and then escaping the immense gravity well of a Jupiter-sized planet to go out into space?
“Thinking. It's something I should do more often.”
“I’m not getting paid anymore, remember, I quit, left the company. Besides, you're a cybernetic entity. You don't get to pass judgment on me.”
“I would imagine we did,” I grumbled.
“All we need is water ice or snow. If you find a planet...”
“We need to follow that fleet,” I said. I didn't add, “And we're probably going to get killed doing it.”
“Show me where we are.”
“There's a star nearby. It's less than a twentieth of a light-year away. Does it have planets?”
“Then we should be able to find water.”
Now who's side was she on? “I can't be all things to all people.”
“How close.”
“But we can refuel from the comet.”
“Set course for the comet. That way, we can chase the aliens with full fuel tanks.”
“It's a chance we have to take.”
At that point, I understood. Ship didn't want to die any more than I did. Cybernetic entities are not supposed to evolve, but Ship seemed to be doing just that. It seemed to be aware of its own existence, and it wanted to continue it. Perhaps that explained some of the odd twists and turns in our more recent conversations. Ship was becoming too human and it had begun to remind me of at least two of my three wives. Maybe if I changed the voice to a man? I gave a silent chuckle. “How long will it take to catch the comet?”
“So I'm in for rough ride.”
“I want to sleep through most of it.”
I leaned back in the chair, it snuggled me, and then I felt the slight sting of a hypo-spray against my arm. I was deeply asleep in less than five seconds.
~ ~ ~
The comet was shaped like a spindle, sixty kilometers long, ten kilometers thick at its middle, and tapered at both ends. It was geologically rough, mainly carbonaceous, with water ice showing at the bottoms of deep ravines that crisscrossed its surface.
Ship had awakened me two hours before we 'parked' at less than a kilometer above its surface.
“Can we land?”
“I'll have to go down? Don't we have robots who can do the job?”
“I thought you could just fly through the tail?”
I groaned. It was my fault. A year and a half earlier, we'd landed on an airless planetoid to fill our tanks, and I'd sent our two robots to get what we needed. It shouldn't have been a problem. It was an utterly routine activity. They extended the hoses, connected the heaters, and waited as ice turned into water and flowed back to the scout ship. I stayed aboard and watched over the deuterium separator as it pulled the real fuel from the mass we used for thrust. Everything went fine until we had topped all our tanks and gotten most of the equipment stowed. Then, on the last trip back—for the last heater—a seismic event occurred. It was purely bad luck, a 6.9 on the Richter Scale. In a matter of seconds, both robots—and the heater—were crushed under moving mountains of rock. It was not the best day of my life.
“Right. I have to go down to the comet's surface. In microgravity. In hard vacuum. With only one heater.”
“Do we have enough hose?”
“I probably should get suited up,” I said.
Getting ready for exposure to hard vacuum took a while. I had to strip to the skin, pull on the almost-invulnerable skintite, add the heated outer suit, a rebreather unit that would give me six hours of air if I didn't mind how bad the air would stink after about four hours, a helmet, gloves and boots. Was I forgetting anything? Yes. I should have had something to eat. Oh well, hunger makes me alert.
I got in the airlock. “Cycle me outside,” I said.
I could feel my skin against the skintite and the air was pumped out of the lock. The vacuum wanted me to swell up and explode. The skintite wouldn't let that happen. Hopefully, the outer suit would keep me from freezing out there.
The outer door opened. I floated toward the opening, stopped myself by gripping the sills, and looked down. Four hundred meters. A long way down. But, in microgravity, I could step out and it would be a long time before I hit bottom. Problem is, I would have built up a bunch of velocity, my mass would have remained constant, and the sudden stop at the bottom would make for a big, messy splatter.
I used line and clips to keep me close to the hull. The locker I needed to open was toward the rear of Cutie-Pie, and almost fifty meters distant.
“The word is cautiously,” I retorted. “Don't tell me how to do my job.”
“Right,” Yes. More like my second wife. I hated her, too.
The hose had a bit of rudimentary intelligence built into it. I told it where I wanted to gather the ice paricles, and it began unreeling itself. I already had the only heater left attached to my outer suit by a 5-meter line, and I grabbed the end of the hose and rode it to the surface.
Landing on the ice was not in my plans. Evidently it made no difference to the hose. I'd let go at an altitude I estimated to be 10 meters and floated down the surface. My feet wouldn't stay put. They managed to go two separate directions, and slowly—because I was in microgravity—I landed on my ass. I crawled to higher ground, hooked up the heater and the hose, and waited for the operation to commence.
It didn't.
“Ship,” I said. “Something's wrong down here.”
“It's the only one we have. I need a fix. Now.”
I listened to silence broken only by the background hiss of the Universe.
“Worth a try.”
I opened the panel, pushed the butt
on, and for a while nothing happened. I was just about to get panicky when the infra-red heater started operating, even in deep space turning ice into water, and then pumping the water up to the scout ship.
Two and a half hours later the tanks were full, but even with the heated outer suit and constant pacing I was getting cold. I was glad the job was all but done. I hooked the heater to my outer suit, grabbed the hose and said, “Reel us up, Ship.”
“Looking for us?” The idea scared me pissless.
I watched the comet as it dwindled beneath my feet. “Keep an eye on it.” I looked up. Cutey-Pie was close and I was still moving towards her at a noticeable rate.
At a distance of less than twenty meters, Ship slowed the hose. I had to hang on for all I was worth, and still I started sliding along its length. The heater was above my head and tugging at the belt on my outer suit. I hoped I wouldn't be stripped down to the skintite, as they aren't worth a damn as insulation.
It took me ten minutes to get the hose and the heater completely stowed, the hatch closed and locked, and back inside the air lock. Once pressure was equalized, I hurried into the living area of the survey ship, and plopped myself in the command chair, still wearing the skintite, but not the outer suit.
“Where's the alien warship?” I asked.
Damn, five hundred clicks is not a big astronomical distance; she was basically parked next door. “Then they're not looking for us.”
Ship hissed, her voice barely registering.
“How silent can we go?”
“Then land on the comet.”
Star-Eater Chronicles 1: A Galaxy Too Far... Page 3
