Space Madness: Episode XXI

WHILE YOU WERE OUT

Harvey and Polk stood over the Captain’s unconscious body, still curled up in a fetal position on the floor of the bridge.

“Should we wake him up?” Harvey asked, not knowing how to accomplish such a task.

“Nah, he’ll wake up eventually.”

“Shouldn’t we at least take him down to the Med Bay? You know, put him on one of those tables that monitors his vital signs?”

Polk thought about this. The Med Bay was a tiny room with a chair and a computer console for the doctor and a coffin sized tube for the patient to lie in. Polk shuddered at the thought of waking up in there. “I don’t think either of us have the requisite medical training.”

Harvey poked the Captain’s body. No response.

Polk began to pace back and forth. “If we’re going to make it back home, it’s not going to be Captain Paps that gets us there.”

Harvey gave Polk a confused look. “Why not?”

Polk shot an even more confused look back at Harvey. “You’re joking, right?” The earnest, naive face of the navigator suggested he wasn’t. “Captain Paps has never had control of this ship. Quite the opposite I think. Do you want to know why he’s out cold on the floor right now?”

Harvey poked Paps’ body again.

“That fleet out there was sending signals to his brain. The signs were all there, plain as day. The way he was always talking to himself, how he seemed to be looking at someone else whenever he was talking to you…”

“I thought that was just me. I’ve never been much of a conversationalist, you know. I find myself talking and then people either wander off or start talking about something else before I can…”

Polk pressed on, determined not to get sidetracked by Harvey’s lack of conversational skill. “That fleet has been in constant contact with Captain Paps. Ever since we left Orion. He probably didn’t even know it was them. But they show up here, get completely wiped out while they were still connected, and it fried his brain.”

Harvey opened his mouth to speak.

Polk continued. “The ship was on some mission of its own. None of use had any control over any of the systems. Every once in a while it decided to actually let us know what it was up to.”

Harvey raised his finger to indicate that he had an idea.

Polk continued. “No, our best shot is The Worm. She has the access to the computer, she can even give some commands. Paps isn’t the captain now, and he won’t be going forward. How can he be the captain when his own ship won’t follow his orders?”

Harvey was about to voice his disapproval of what Polk was suggesting. He inhaled loudly and prepared to say something forceful.

Polk continued. “Leave him here, or take him to the Med Bay, I don’t care. I’m going down to the engine room. Let me know if anything happens up here.”

Polk walked off the bridge in a hurry. Just after the door shut behind him, Harvey muttered nervously to himself. “But I don’t want to mutiny.”

————————————-

Down in the engine room, The Worm had regained consciousness. She checked to see that all her appendages were still intact. They were. She was lying back in a reclining chair that Polk had slapped together some months before. She felt more comfortable than she ought to, considering the circumstances. Though something felt missing. She was still hooked up to the ship’s computer, tethered to the sphere in the wall. The sphere was somehow less active than it had been in the past.

That was it.

The chatter was gone. The voices, the codes, the instructions, all gone. She tried to contact someone, to tell her what to do. Part of her knew what to do: fire up the engines and get the hell out of here. She could do it. She could take control.

A message came in. She didn’t recognize it. It would take some time to decode. “Uh-oh, that’s not one of ours.”

Polk had just walked in, carrying a cup of water and a tray of food that probably still tasted like Dr. Capitate. It was better than starving, but not much better. “What’s not one of ours?”

“I think… I think we’ve just been contacted by the Remotes. I’m working out what the message says right now.”

Polk placed the tray on a small table beside the reclining chair. He had built that table from the floor panels in his quarters. “There aren’t too many things they would want to tell us. Can you find a way to get the engines under control before you find out?”

The Worm went stiff and stared at the wall. “Processing…”

She relaxed her body and turned her head toward Polk. He could never get used to the way she transitioned from robot to human with such frequency. “Richard, I have control of the engines. The others, they stopped giving me instructions and now the system recognizes me as the ranking officer.”

Polk excitedly leaped into the air. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get moving!”

The engines began to hum. The ship veered starboard as sharp as it could. The internal gravity couldn’t keep up with the acceleration and The Worm’s chair started sliding across the engine room floor, knocking her food tray off the table.

The Worm was reveling in her newfound power over the ship. She smiled for the first time in eons. “We’re off. By my calculations we should be back at Orion in sixteen months.”

Polk raced over to the intercom and mashed his fingers over all the buttons. “Are you reading this, Harvey? We are going home! YEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAH!!”

Harvey’s voice crackled over the channel. “Great news, sir. I felt the turn up here. The Captain’s body rolled all the way over to my station.”

In an instant, The Worm shifted moods. “Um, Richard? I think we’ve got a problem.”

Polk’s eyes bulged out of his sockets in disbelief. He should have known the other shoe would drop at some point. “Oh, no. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare say it. We are THIS close to making it home…”

“We’re being followed.”

———————————–

Paps awoke on the floor of the bridge, underneath Harvey’s console. His head was still throbbing from whatever it was that happened. It felt like a bomb went off inside his skull. At least Hal was nowhere to be seen, which was a plus. He looked around and found Harvey staring at the main viewer. It appeared to be the image of a grey wall, though it might have been simply turned off.

“Harvey, what’s our situation?”

Harvey turned around nervously and scratched the back of his neck. “Well.. the good news is we regained full control of the ship.”

This good news felt like a pair of sledgehammers pounding against his temples. He hated to think what the bad news was going to feel like. “What’s the bad news?”

“Um…well…err…”

“Spit it out, Harvey.”

“It’s not going to do us any good to have control since we’ve been… captured.”

“Captured?”

“Captured, this ship caught us from behind and sort of… swallowed us. You’re looking at the inside of it right now.”

Paps attempted to stand up straight. He failed, and had to lean on Harvey’s console. The console beeped when his hand fell against it, causing sharp pains to shoot down the back of his neck. Paps had never been in so much pain.

“Good, wake me when something terrible happens.” Paps collapsed into Harvey’s chair in order to let his consciousness focus on more important things.

Space Madness: Episode XX

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

The ship scanned the huge dark mass in front of it. This was taking much longer than usual because Captain Paps decided to use a passive scan. Normally, to scan an object one must bounce photons of various wavelengths off it. By doing this, one can quickly determine the distance to the object, its velocity, size, shape, temperature distribution, and material properties. Of course, any intelligent being on this object would notice all the extra photons hitting it, and could deduce all of the same information about the ship doing the scanning. If one wants to approach undetected, one must therefore use a passive scan.

The problem with a passive scan is that it takes an extremely long time to collect enough data to be useful, and there is no guarantee that whoever it is that is not supposed to detect you will not, in fact, detect you anyway.

On the bridge of the ship, nothing was happening. Captain Paps sat in his Space Captain’s Chair, doing nothing. Engineer Richard Polk sat at his station, doing nothing. Paps’ imaginary friend Hal, who originally claimed to be an all powerful being who exists in all of time and space but was now revealed to be a by-product of an alien piece of technology implanted at the base of his skull in order to communicate more efficiently with the ship’s computers, was doing nothing. Even if he was doing something, no one but Paps would notice.

Down in engineering, the ship’s computer specialist The Worm, who had successfully forged a link between her mind and the ship’s computer, but was rarely in control of this link, was doing nothing.

The mental toll that interstellar travel takes isn’t due simply to the fact that nothing ever happens. That would be bearable. It’s the fact that, at any moment, something could happen that requires the crew’s full attention. Everyone on the ship must be constantly alert, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. To be in a constant state of emergency readiness when nothing happens for months, sometimes years at a time is mentally taxing at best, and can potentially drive a person insane.

The ship’s navigator, Harvey, was doing something. He was combing through the data that the scanners were collecting. He had been doing this for weeks now, and had worked out the distance to the mystery object with error bars of less than 10%. He had also determined that the object was hot enough for a star to be inside it. Someone had constructed a shell around a star and was living on the inside surface. No, not a shell, the angular momentum was distributed far too erratically for that. It was a dense cloud of orbiting bodies, possibly with multiple layers, dense enough to completely absorb the light from the star, yet aligned perfectly so that none of the orbiting bodies ever collided with one another.

Preliminary calculations also determined that the mass of material in orbit was far greater than what was contained in an ordinary solar system. Harvey conjectured that these creatures must have brought in multiple systems worth of rock, carbon, water, methane, and whatever else they needed during its construction. This was surely the largest object ever built.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Harvey said this to no one in particular. Paps and Polk both turned toward him.

Polk responded. “It is amazing, and it scares the hell out of me. We won’t stand a chance if they decide to attack.”

Paps interrupted. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If we’re no threat to them, they might let us be on our merry way. Who knows? They might even want to talk, exchange ideas, or help us poor humans out with some fancy tech.”

Polk guffawed. “How’d that work out the last time you encountered these guys? They took your ship before you even knew they were there. It was only through some freaky bit of luck that you escaped. I’m still not sure I believe that actually happened.”

Paps leaned back in his chair and thought about this. “Yeah, it happened. They weren’t too friendly. I’m pretty sure they wanted to put me in a zoo.”

“How long are we planning to stick around here for, anyway?” This was not the first time Polk had asked this, nor would it be the last. He knew that the ship would decide they could leave when it was good and ready.

“If you want to take the helm and get us out of here, be my guest.”

———————————-

The passing weeks turned into months. Every day the crew sat on the bridge, staring at that unmoving black blur in the center of the view screen, and every day nothing continued to happen. A little more data would trickle in, Harvey would get excited and analyze it, refine his estimates of the mystery object’s mass and material makeup, and announce the results to his utterly dejected crewmates. Every day Polk would go down to the engine room to keep The Worm company, and help her find a way to take control of the ship. Every day they failed to find one.

Paps figured that today would be no different. Today would be another day when nothing happened. He tried hard to keep his focus, to maintain the image a commanding officer is supposed to. This was becoming a little harder everyday, however. At some point, he would crack.

There was something different about today, though. For one, Hal was a bit more talkative than usual. Well, more talkative than he had been since they arrived in this system. “You know, Captain? I’m glad you were able to witness the greatest engineering marvel in the universe before it got destroyed.”

Paps looked up at Hal, who was wearing an army uniform from ancient France and pointing at the viewer with a stick.

Hal continued. “Soon, this place, which was constructed from the ashes of dozens of star systems, from the slave labor of the peoples of those same star systems, will be destroyed.”

Paps didn’t care that Harvey was on the bridge. “Destroyed by who? Us? Yeah, right.”

Hal began to march confidently around the room. “Oh, not us. It was our job to find this place. Admittedly, we weren’t expected to succeed. I mean, this was supposed to be a trial run. Most of our Duner friends were skeptical that it was even possible.”

This was a new wrinkle that Paps hadn’t heard before. He wanted to fly out of his chair and start screaming at Hal for not telling him this in the first place, but Harvey was sitting behind him looking nervous. The look of rage on Paps’ face said everything he needed to say.

“Oh, don’t go flying off the handle again. You’ve got a witness on the bridge. Besides, in the state you were in when we first left the planet, I doubt you would have been receptive to the idea.”

Hal marched back to the viewer and slapped the dark blob with his stick. It didn’t make a sound. “I’ve got some good news for you. News that will this long journey of yours seem worth while. You know that blip Harvey kept seeing behind him? Well, it was more than a blip. It was our fleet catching up to you. Your computer genius down in the engine room somehow contacted them and they are ready to strike. They are receiving tactical data and forming battle plans and soon you will see them descending on this system from all angles.”

Paps cocked his eyebrow. Hal continued. “And what to you get out of this, my dear Captain? You get to be free, you get to keep your ship, to go home, retire. You will also be the greatest hero the Duners have ever known. The man who led them to the den of evil, and helped them to destroy it.”

Paps mulled this over. He scratched himself thoughtfully. “What if the Duners lose?”

“Impossible. They have been building this fleet for generations. They have weapons that could wipe out a planet with a single shot. Every angle will be covered. You are about to witness complete destruction.”

“Captain, the shell is shifting!” Harvey was pointing at the screen. It was difficult for Paps to tell if the look on his face was excitement or terror.

“What do you got, Harvey?”

“Some objects appear to be moving away from it. A lot of objects.”

The black sphere in the center of the main viewer appeared to be growing. On closer inspection, it was simply shedding an outer layer. Shafts of starlight intermittently broke through the structure. As the shed layer moved closer, it began to resolve itself into millions of individual dots. This was presumably the defense perimeter of the Remotes.

Hal was still marching back and forth in front of Paps. “Oh, it looks like they’re gonna put up a fight.”

The comm system started crackling. “Paps!” It was Polk. “The Worm is starting to go crazy down here. It looked like some kind of seizure. She kept screaming ‘they’re here’ and now she’s yelling out a bunch of numbers at random. What the hell is going on up there?”

Paps slammed his fist on the comm button. “I think we’re about to find out if our mission is a success.”

Harvey began flailing at his station. “We’ve got multiple ships behind us!”

Several large craft whizzed onto the screen, racing toward the giant black sphere. The sphere was also expanding toward them.

Paps didn’t know what to do. He punched the comm button again. “Polk, can you get us out of here?”

“No can do, Captain. The Worm is in full computer-talk mode right now. You can turn the scanners back on, though.”

Paps motioned to Harvey to do so. A tactical display appeared on the main viewer. It was a bunch of dots moving toward each other. “Come on! That’s all we can see?”

Hal was triumphantly pointing at the screen. “I can taste victory! It’s so sweet!”

Explosions started going off in front of them. Bright white flashes dotted the screen. The intensity and frequency of the explosions increased rapidly until the Paps and Harvey had to shield their eyes.

Hal’s started to look uneasy. The back of Paps’ head started to throb. Harvey started to get sick.

Hal fell to the floor, screaming. “No! They can’t win! It’s impossible!”

The pain in Paps’ skull became too much to bear. He fell to the floor screaming. Polk’s voice crackled over the comm again. “The Worm is freaking out down here! What’s going on?!” Harvey was curled up in a ball on the floor.

Suddenly, the flashes stopped. The viewer faded to black. The dots on the screen receded, once again sealing the shafts of sunlight from view.

Paps lay unconscious on the floor. Harvey worked up the courage to walk over and see if he was still alive. He checked his pulse with his least shaky hand. Polk punched the comm button on the captain’s chair. “Richard, are you down there?”

A few seconds passed. “Yeah, The Worm’s out cold. I don’t know what happened to her.”

Harvey looked at the pattern of debris on the viewer’s tactical display. All of it was moving away from the star system. “I think our guys lost.”

Space Madness: Episode XIX

RECYCLING

It is difficult to overstate the importance of recycling while traveling in deep space. Resources are extremely limited, so any organic material that can be re-used, is re-used. This includes the water, the food, the packaging the food comes in, the garbage, the waste products of all the inhabitants of the ship (including hair and sloughed off skin), and most grimly of all: the dead.

All organic material is pulped and processed in order to be used as raw materials to feed the specially bred algae in the ship’s hydroponic bay. Some of the algae produces oxygen, and some is harvested to provide food for the crew. An unpleasant side effect of this process is that each bit of organic material gives the food a unique characteristic taste, and the crew eating this food are all painfully aware when they are ingesting the remains of a fallen comrade.

The same process happens planet side as well, but few people ever notice because it happens on a much larger time scale.

“Don’t give up now, Captain. Your mission is almost complete.”

Paps sat alone in his quarters, away from the prying eyes of his crew. Only he was never alone. There was always Hal. Paps had come to the conclusion that Hal’s purpose was to force him to finish this mission, whatever this mission was. He provided motivation when it was required, misdirection and outright lies when that suited his purpose, and never enough information to figure out what was really going on. “My mission, huh? I don’t suppose you’re going to finally tell me what that is? Why the Duners wired you into my brain? Why they couldn’t have done all this themselves?”

Hal placed his hand on Paps’ shoulder in an attempt to reassure him. Once again, it had the opposite effect, as nothing was actually resting on Paps’ shoulder. “You’ll find out soon enough. Though I must say, you have far exceeded your expectations.”

Paps no longer had the energy to argue with Hal. He was a broken man. A puppet controlled by aliens with their own agenda. Nothing he ever did or said ever changed that. Why did it only take his engineer a few days to see this, when Paps couldn’t in the eternity he had spent here? Hal. It was always Hal making sure that he didn’t look in that particular blind spot.

“Your computer specialist is working out, as well. She took to the merging process like she was destined for it.”

“Yeah, only took one of the crew out during that process. You calling that a win, too?”

Hal smirked. “Well, it’s not like she killed a useful member of your crew. You have no need for someone asking how you are feeling all the time.”

Paps hated himself for agreeing with Hal here. It’s never a good thing to lose a crew member, but if one has to go, always go with the one whose skills will be missed the least.

The intercom beeped, followed by the sound of Harvey’s unnervingly excited voice. “Captain, we’re slowing down! I think we’re almost to our destination! The invisible star system!”

Paps slowly rose from his chair and made his way to the bridge.

——————————-

Polk sat on the floor of the engine room, trying to keep The Worm company. Her personality had partially returned since the download on her scanner had completed, but she was still physically attached to the sphere in the wall. Every once in a while she would lapse into computer-speak and start uttering monotone lines of instructions, but it was good to see her able to converse as a human being once again.

“Richard, we’re almost there. I have to notify the others.”

“I’m sure they’ll figure it out. I can tell just sitting here that the braking thrusters have switched on and we’re beginning to slow.”

“Not them… never mind.”

Polk was also convinced that The Worm was their only hope of getting back to civilization. She didn’t exactly have control over the computer, but she did have access. She could, if she chose to, initiate a change in course. She had to want that, however, and it wasn’t clear at the moment where her wants ended and the ship’s began.

“Worm, what are we going to do when we arrive? If this is the home system of the Remotes, are we going to contact them? Are we going to attack them? I can’t imagine we’ll have much of a chance if that’s the case.”

“Don’t worry, Richard. We’re just reconaissance. We get to watch.”

Polk didn’t like the sound of that. “Watch what?”

“The clash of two ancient civilizations. Enemies for millions of years, fighting a war that may never be won.”

“You make it sound like millions of years of warfare is somehow noble.”

The Worm sighed. “Not noble. Tragic. Those that rebuilt this ship feel they have been wronged by the Remotes, but the passage of time has distorted those wrongs into great evils. I don’t think they remember what they are so mad about.”

Each word from The Worm’s mouth depressed Polk more and more. “I’m not a fan of tragedies. Can you maybe, I don’t know, coax the ship into heading back home before the fighting breaks out?”

“I don’t have that kind of access. Besides, it’s obvious that our new masters hold grudges for a very long time. Zeno has given me the distinct impression that if we sabotage the mission we’ve been tasked with, they’ll declare war on humanity.”

Polk’s heart rate was beginning to speed up. “Well, then. After the battle, promise me you’ll help us get back home.”

“Assuming we survive, I promise.”

—————————–

Paps dragged himself onto the bridge. “What have you got, Harvey?”

“We’re slowing down. In a few minutes the stars will be within our visible range and we can get a good look at our mystery system.”

Hal whispered into Paps’ ear. “Let’s not draw undue attention to ourselves, eh Captain?”

Paps took a moment to contemplate Hal’s advice. Based on his first encounter with the Remotes, the ship would probably be detected regardless of the precautions he took. On the other hand, it would definitely be detected if he bounced a bunch of signals off them. “Passive scan only, Harvey. I don’t want to annoy them.”

Paps was also worried that radiation from the engines and other systems could be seen, as well. “Also, if the ship will let you, reduce power levels to minimum. We’ll coast in. Hopefully we’ll be indistinguishable from an asteroid.”

“Yes, sir.”

The lights on the bridge dimmed. The shutters on the main viewer opened to reveal a bright star field. The center of the star field was missing. It appeared to be covered by a black disk, the edges of which could only be seen where it partially blocked a star.

At one time Paps was good at making inspirational speeches. That was one quality that made him an effective commander. He had the ability to rally his troops, to make minor causes seem righteous, to turn certain death into a fighting chance.

His experience had slowly taken this quality from him. Speech by speech, his once powerful words degenerated intostatements brief statements of inevitable defeat, culminating in his shortest, most depressing speech yet: “I wish I could say it’s been nice knowing you all.”

Space Madness: Episode XVIII

THE BLIP

Dr. Capitate didn’t know what to do with The Worm. Every time she came down for a chat the progress bar was further along and The Worm was further removed from reality. During their last chat, The Worm rambled incoherently about the union of humans and computers, the birth of a new species, and the beauty of a perfectly executed self diagnostic program. Dr. Capitate had to act soon, or The Worm would be lost forever.

The Worm rocked back and forth, never taking her eyes off the metal sphere in the hole in the wall of the engine room.

“Destination…instructions…positrons…oxygen…tea…”

Dr. Capitate revised her estimate of when she needed to act. It was yesterday, perhaps even a week ago. She looked down at the hand scanner which now seemed fused to The Worm’s hand. 87 per cent.

——————————-

Richard Polk was getting punchy. No amount of reading, meditation, or motivational therapy could have adequately prepared him for the sheer boredom of deep space travel. Every little thing annoyed him a little more every day. The way Harvey breathed irregularly through his nose while scanning and finding nothing. The way Captain Paps couldn’t maintain eye contact when being spoken to. The way the captain would lock himself in his quarters and shout at himself. The way Dr. Capitate would scribble in her notebook, as if those notes would somehow save the psyches of the crew.

Polk clawed at the armrest of the chair at his station.

Polk decided he would mix things up today. He got up from his station on the bridge, swaggered over to the Space Water Dispenser, and poured himself a cup of tea. He took a sip, slurping the tea loud enough for everyone else on the bridge to hear. “This is some mighty fine tea today, Captain Paps. What flavor is this?”

“Boiled water,” Paps muttered without bothering to move a muscle. He was intently focused on the bottom right corner of the main viewer.

“Well, I think someone put a little extra Oh! In the H2O today!” Polk was being intentionally annoying. He wouldn’t be satisfied until everyone was bothered by him as much as he was by them.

Harvey upped the ante by loudly opening a packet of Space Chips. The crinkling sound the bag made while Harvey attempted to open it reverberated inside Polk’s skull. Once open, Harvey grabbed a single chip and bit into it while grunting with satisfaction. He chewed with his mouth open, smacking his lips and sending a cloud of debris around the entire bridge.

Polk countered by clearing his throat and slurping his tea with increased volume. He pulled the cup slowly from his lips and let out an exaggerated sigh. He placed the teacup on the control panel at his station and put a lid on it to keep it safe from the debris of Harvey’s masticated munchies. Polk then started cracking his knuckles, one by one. He considered taking off his boots in order to crack his toes, but decided that should be a last resort.

“Captain!” Something distracted Harvey from his high decibel meal. “There’s a blip on my scanner!”

Paps turned his chair around toward Harvey’s station, though clearly he did not want to. “Are you sure it’s not your food?”

Harvey wiped the scanner off with his sleeve. “No, sir, it’s definitely a blip.”

Paps stood up laboriously. He grimaced and put his hand on his lower back as he slowly made his way over to have a look at Harvey’s screen. “Where is it?”

“It’s just at the edge of scanning range. Keeps popping on and off the screen.”

Paps took a look. Polk leaned back in his chair and started whistling tunelessly. “I don’t see anything.”

Harvey’s eyes darted back and forth across the display. He began chewing on his fingernails. “Keep looking. It should come back into range again.”

Paps rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re sure about this, are you? When we double check the logs, something will actually…”

Harvey bolted to a standing position and pointed at the screen. His chair careened all the way to the entrance of the bridge. “There it is again, Captain!”

Paps was non-plussed. Amongst all the bizarre happenings that his journey had put him through, this appeared to be a minor one. It was just a blip on a scanner, a scanner he had determined only let him see what it wanted him to see. “What do you think it is, Harvey?”

Harvey was shaking with excitement. “It has to be a ship of some sort. It’s matching our speed, and hovering just on the edge of our scanning range. It stands out like a sore thumb when it shows up, since everything else behind us has been red shifted well past our ability to detect it.”

Paps thought about this. It made sense. The Duners could have been shadowing him since the beginning. Or the Remotes could have been following him since he left the red giant. But why show up on the scanners now? “Run a more intensive scan. Full spectrum sweep. I want to know what that thing is.”

Polk turned his head toward the Captain and Harvey and laughed out loud. It was a joyless laugh, the laugh of a man resigned to his fate. “You don’t honestly believe that will make one bit of difference, do you Captain?”

Paps raised his head in order to glare menacingly at his ship’s engineer.

“You, more than anyone else, should know just how little control we have over the events on this ship. It has taken us hostage, and will do whatever it wants with us before it kills us all or leaves us for dead. Stop pretending that you aren’t a pawn in some alien scheme.”

Paps didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to give in. He didn’t want to admit that he had lost control. That he never had any control in the first place. “I’m the captain of this ship dammit! I have been fighting every ridiculous action that it has put me through since the moment I woke up without my first crew.”

“And how has that battle of wills worked out for you so far, eh, Paps? Have you been able to get her to do one thing you wanted? To prevent her from doing one thing she wanted?”

Paps flew across the room, ripped Polk out of his chair and threw him to the ground. He slammed his knee onto Polk’s chest and lifted his head up by the collar of his uniform. “If you’re giving up, then I don’t have any use for you. The only reason to keep you around is for fresh meat in the event we run out of food.”

Polk laughed again, this time his chest rattled and he coughed up some blood. “You never had any use for me. Did you think I would find anything out that you didn’t already know? Did you think I would be able to rig up some kind of manual control system for the engines?”

Paps let go of Polk’s collar and let his head slam against the floor. Polk continued to laugh and wheeze and cough. Paps leaned back and softened his tone. “I hoped you would be up to the task. I guess I was wrong.”

Polk wasn’t finished yet. “And what of our poor hacker? Did you think she would be up to the task of getting control of the ship’s computer, rather than the other way around? Is her condition the reason you scream at yourself when you think no one is listening?”

Paps was on the verge of tears. He hadn’t been down to the engine room to see her even once since their initial conversation. His mouth opened, but he couldn’t find any words.

“Whatever that blip is, it doesn’t matter. We won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”

Paps began to compose himself. He stood up so he could once again project an air of authority. “Are you finished, Engineer Polk.”

“Just one more thing, Captain. I want to thank you. Thank you for dragging us all into your own personal hell. At least Harvey’s enjoying himself.”

——————————–

This was the moment of truth. Time to break the cables that were draining the humanity from The Worm.

“Contact…receiving…processing…”

Dr. Capitate pulled a laser scalpel from her bag. The metal sphere in the wall rotated slightly, jostling the wires joining itself to The Worm’s hand scanner.

“Air filter on line…optimize…reset…”

She lightly grabbed The Worm’s arm and carefully positioned the scalpel. The wall panels began to rattle. For the first time in weeks, The Worm stopped staring at the sphere. Her gaze shifted to her arm.

“Defense mode 217…engage…”

In a single, fluid motion, The Worm grabbed the scalpel with her free hand, dialed its power level to maximum, and sliced off Dr. Capitate’s head. Her torso fell forward into The Worm’s lap, while her head bounced and rolled at her feet.

“Threat neutralized…oxygen levels nominal…conversion complete.”

Space Madness: Episode XVII

THE PROGRESS BAR

“Tell me, Harvey. How are you holding up on this journey?”

Harvey’s eyes moved around the room, as if it burned them to look at any one thing for too long. “I’m great, Doctor. I never dreamed I would actually get to see my hiding star. When Zeno just took off after seeing my evidence, I … I’ve never felt more alive. I thought at first that we would arrive in a matter of minutes, but reason prevailed and I realized we have quite some time before we arrive. Time is flying, though. I can barely sleep I’m so excited. How long have we been out here?”

“About three months.”

“Yes, three months. And already several years have passed for those back home. I really should compute how long it’s been for them. It would be a simple matter. We can gauge our speed from the blue shift of the starlight in front of us. I’ve never done that before, it should be fascinating.”

“You don’t miss anyone back home? Your wife? Your friends?”

“Oh, I abandoned them long before we left Orion. My wife was pretty angry with me for spending so much time at that observatory. I’m glad she can move on and not worry about me.”

“I see.” Dr. Capitate scribbled something in her notebook. A classic case of obsession. At least he won’t be distracted while at his post. This trip will have his full attention.

——————————-

Polk walked on to the bridge and found the captain napping in his chair. “Sir. Captain. Hello?”

Paps shot up to a standing position, facing away from Polk. “No! You can’t control me!” He was dripping sweat. He shook the cobwebs loose from his head and slowly turned around. “Polk?” He asked, slightly embarrassed.

“Nightmare, sir?”

“Something like that. What do you want?”

Polk handed a tablet to Paps. “The latest report on the engines, sir. I still don’t know how they work, but I can make them work for you if Zeno here decides to release the controls.”

Paps took the tablet and tossed it lightly on his chair. “Good. I’m sure we’ll get at least limited control back when we arrive at our destination. How’s The Worm doing?”

Polk sat down at his station. Not to do any work, but just to sit down. “She’s still staring at that thing in the wall. Still staring at that progress bar, waiting to finish downloading whatever it is she’s downloading. You know it’s up to 23 per cent now?”

Paps started pacing around the bridge. “She have any theories?”

“Oh, she’s got tons of them. But she’s going crazy down there. She won’t leave. She won’t take her eyes of that sphere. I have to bring food down to her every day because she can’t bear to step away long enough to feed herself. The Doc brought a bedpan down there, for crying out loud. We have to get her out of that room.”

Paps stopped pacing in front of Polk’s chair. “She’s not going anywhere until that download is complete. You hear me, Mr. Polk?”

Over the last few months, Polk had come to the realization that he was the sanest person on this ship. This was deeply unsettling, as he was accustomed to being the crazy one. But here was the captain, insisting that his hand picked hacker stare at a progress bar that won’t be complete for months. “What if… what if I take some shifts monitoring the download? She could get out of there for a while. She could clean herself up, get some sleep, it would be good for her.”

Paps had a look in his eyes that scared the hell out of Polk. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“Why not?!”

“Because she’s not safe anywhere else.”

Polk opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He suddenly longed for the days when he cleaned up Orion’s sewage. That, at least, was a job that made sense.

Paps went back to his chair in the center of the bridge. “I can’t explain how, or why, but this ship will kill her if she leaves that engine room. She needs to convince the computer that she can be trusted on this mission.”

“And what is this mission, exactly?”

“I thought that was obvious. We’re going to the homeworld of the Remotes. I can’t say what we’ll do once we get there, but presumably it involves all of us.”

Polk hoped this wasn’t true. He had heard Paps’ stories about his voyage back. He had heard how the aliens that fixed up this ship hated the Remotes. How the ship somehow hated them as well.

“Oh, goody. I don’t suppose all of us are going to live through this mission, are we?”

“I don’t know.”

It was Polk’s turn to get up and start pacing. “When I was a kid, I used to love all those stories about interstellar ships that never made it to their destinations. What might have happened to them. My favorite was the one where aliens would capture the ships, and stick all the passengers into a zoo. That was how they studied us, by observing our behavior in captivity. Alien families would walk by the cages and feed the passengers crumbs left over from the ship’s food stores, remarking at how primitive these humans are.”

Paps nodded gravely.

“When I got older, of course, I stopped believing such nonsense. But you, Captain, you have managed to bring all those childish fears back. Your cryptic remarks about how this ship wants to kill one of us, but she’s somehow safe in the engine room, those are not helping.”

Paps kept silent.

“I don’t see the point in holding back, sir. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Tell me what is really going on with this ship.”

Paps leaned forward in his chair and buried his face in his hands. “Be patient, Mr. Polk. You’ll know before we get there.”

——————————

“Everyone laughed at me when I said I found an invisible star. But I think I’ll get the last laugh. This has been my life’s work, and my life will finally be worth something.”

Dr. Capitate stopped scribbling in her notebook. She was ready to go back to her quarters to have a good cry.

Space Madness: Episode XVI

THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART

“Tell me, Richard. How have you been coping with life on the ship?”

Richard looked at the ceiling and sighed. Another useless psych evaluation with Dr. Capitate was the last thing he needed. He wanted to work. He wanted to tear apart the floor of his quarters to find out what alien technology was hiding just under the surface. He wanted to not think about his feelings.

“How am I coping? Let’s see, our ship has a mind of its own and is taking us to an invisible star that may or may not actually be there. Nobody can figure out how even the most basic mechanisms work here. Our captain has mood swings like I’ve never seen before. Oh, and if we ever make it back to Orion, hundreds of years will have passed and everybody we know will all be long dead. All things considered, I could use a drink.”

Richard was always one of Dr. Capitate’s most difficult patients. He was clearly very smart, and just as clearly didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. He walled off any sadness or depression he may have felt with humor. Dr. Capitate never liked humor. “What do you think about the captain?”

Polk lowered his head and grinned at Dr. Capitate. “Oh, I see. You’ve got a new crazy fish on the line. Captain Paps. You know, way back when, I used to be your pet project. But the captain, he’s something else isn’t he. A man who lost his first crew on some uncharted alien planet, and fears the same grisly ending may come to us. A man who’s brain may have been altered by alien hands. A man who has lost all control of his surroundings and desperately wants to get it back. I can see why you’re so interested in him. I have to admit, I’m a little jealous.”

Dr. Capitate scribbled in her notebook. “He is our commanding officer. It’s troubling to see the crew talk about him like he’s some sort of mad man.”

Polk stopped smiling. “In a few weeks, I think every single one of us will be as crazy as him.”

A chill ran down Dr. Capitate’s spine. In all of the sessions she’d had with Polk back on Orion, he had never been so serious.

–—————————-

The Worm had found something interesting in the engine room. She hadn’t made progress accessing the computer’s subsystems from any of the access terminals on the bridge, so she decided to take a more direct approach. For two weeks she mapped out the data connections on the ship, looking for hubs of electrical or optical or neural activity. Her data revealed a few places where activity was a tick higher than normal. The first place she found was buried inside a wall in the engine room. She managed to pry open the paneling on the wall, revealing another panel. She pried open this panel and found a metal sphere inside connected to tube shaped conduits that presumably led all over the ship.

She needed access to that sphere. She used her hand device to scan for any ports or cracks or loose wires that could be used as an interface with her computer. As if anticipating her request, the sphere rotated and revealed two spikes that could be clipped onto.

The Worm leaped backward in surprise. For all she knew, those spikes could fire lasers at her and incinerate her. “Get a grip,” she whispered to herself.

In an impressive bit of post-hoc reasoning, she convinced herself that any automated defenses would have got to her when she opened the first panel. This ship was far too smart to allow physical access to anything it didn’t want her to see.

She scanned the metal spikes. Low voltage electrical output. “It’s inviting me in.”

The Worm grabbed a couple of cables with self soldering tips on the end from her tool kit. She plugged the other end of the cables into her hand scanner.

She wiped the sweat from her brow. The computer system had seemed to be toying with her for the last two weeks. She got the impression that it was sizing her up, testing her, that she needed to earn its trust. She was long past wondering whether it was intelligent, she knew that for a fact. Now she was intensely curious about what it wanted with her. Curious and ridiculously scared.

The download onto her scanner was a bit slow. This was to be expected, as the ship’s computer, designed by aliens, wasn’t exactly compatible with her portable device. A progress bar appeared on her little screen. One per cent.

The Worm sighed and sat down, resting her head against the wall opposite the mess of her pried open panel. She could feel the faint hum of the engines reverberating in her skull. “This is going to take a while.”

She looked back down at the progress bar. One per cent. When she raised her head back up the figure of Captain Paps loomed over her. “How’s your work progressing, The?”

There was a tinge of hesitation in his voice, as if he was fighting with himself just to remain calm. “So we’re on a first name basis now, huh, Paps?”

Paps laughed nervously. “I guess so.” His eyes darted away from her and settled on the sphere embedded in the wall. “What have you found here?”

There was no point in lying to the captain. There was also no point in telling him everything. “Some kind of data node. I’m hoping to access some of the subsystems from here.” If it will let me, she didn’t say. “It’s pretty slow going. I’ve got a bit of a dodgy connection here, so I might be a while.”

Paps nodded and looked around some more. “Good… good. Carry on.”

Before Paps could turn around and leave for somewhere private to go scream at Hal, The Worm stopped him. “So who’s your imaginary friend, Paps?”

For a moment Paps looked like he was about to start breaking things. He quickly resumed his stoic demeanor. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re quite good at pretending he’s not there when others are in the room. I don’t think our head doctor has figured it out. But I’ve seen you looking at empty chairs like there’s someone sitting there mocking you. I’ve heard you having animated conversations with thin air. You see someone. And what’s more, you’re scared of him.”

Paps crouched down to The Worm’s eye level and started breathing heavily through his nose. She couldn’t be sure if he was going to tear her limb from limb or start weeping. “Are you calling your captain crazy?”

The Worm considered just how far to push this. “No. I think what you are seeing is this ship communicating to you through that device in your skull.”

Paps grabbed her by the shoulders and shook. “How do you know about that?!”

The Worm continued, not showing a hint of fear. “Paps, you hired the best hacker in the galaxy. I perused your medical records. Besides, I’m just following orders. You wanted me to crack the ship’s computer, and I think that your friend is the key.”

Paps let go and slumped against the wall next to her. “He wants me to kill you, you know.”

The Worm did not wet herself after that statement. She continued to project confidence. “Well, since you haven’t killed me, and the ship hasn’t killed me, I’d say you have control over the situation.” She was speculating wildly at this point. “I’d say that you are starting to take command, real command of this ship with your mind.”

Paps stood up and straightened his shirt. “I hope you’re right.” He then walked confidently out of the engine room, confidently bumping his shoulder against the edge of the doorway on the way.

The Worm exhaled for a good three count. She looked back down at the progress bar on her hand scanner. One per cent.

————————-

“Richard, we’re talking about you right now, not the captain. I am asking you not to do anything… foolish.”

Polk laughed. “Trust me, I’m not the one you have to worry about. The way I see it, there are only two ways this little adventure can end. Either we get to Harvey’s invisible star and there’s nothing there, or there is something there and it will kill us all. Either way, none of my actions here will make the slightest bit of difference.”

Space Madness: Episode XV

SCIENCE IS TEDIOUS

Richard Polk, the engineer, was sitting alone in his quarters, lost in thought. He was supposed to be in the engine room performing the utterly hopeless task of determining how they worked.

He decided to start with something simpler, like figuring out how the gravity worked on this ship. Hanging from the ceiling were several Space Paper Cups attached to strings. The ventilation in the room was turned off, to prevent air currents from blowing them around. Of course the stagnant air caused to breathe heavily, defeating the purpose of shutting off the ventilation in the first place, and the Space Paper Cups on strings steadfastly refused to stay still long enough for him to make a proper measurement.

On the floor were four ramps, inclined at slightly different angles. He had spent the better part of the last four hours rolling steel balls down these ramps and timing them. He also rolled the steel balls across the floor and charted their paths, mapping out any irregularities and rough patches he could find on the Faux Space Redwood.

Spread out on his desk were papers filled with measurement data and calculations, complete with scribbles in the margins about where the gravitational source might be, and possible systematic errors in his methodology. He planned to go through the data with a fine tooth comb and make impressive looking graphs out of it.

The door to his quarters slid open. Wendy The Worm looked as if she had something important to say, but was completely distracted by all the cups on strings, inclined planes, steel balls and papers strewn haphazardly about the place.

She opened her mouth to speak. Before she could say anything she realized she could barely breathe the air in the room and began coughing uncontrollably. She staggered back into the hallway to catch her breath.

Engineer Polk wandered out after her to see if she was alright. She looked up and hissed at him. “What the hell are you doing in there? Aren’t you supposed to be in the engine room?”

Polk giggled. “Well, aren’t we little miss follow instructions to the letter? That must be the behavioral engineering talking. Oh, the wonders of the modern prison system, turning rebellious teenagers into upstanding citizens.”

The Worm stared at him as if trying to burn a hole through him with her eyes.

“If you must know, I’m testing the gravity on the ship. It’s an easier system to figure out than the engines.”

The Worm walked back over to the open doorway and eyed the chaos in the room with contempt. “You never heard of a hand scanner?” She unclipped a small device from her belt, pressed a couple of buttons, and placed in on the floor just outside Polk’s quarters. She didn’t want to enter that room until the stench of primitive science left.

After a couple of seconds the scanner beeped and she picked it back up. “There you go, point nine two g’s. Deviation from the vertical of point six degrees.”

Polk threw his hands up in the air. “Wow, that is genius. Why didn’t I think of that? I mean, an electronic device to measure the gravity in the room? Brilliant! I would have never worked that out.”

The Worm resumed her steely gaze.

Polk put his hands into his pockets and pulled out his own hand scanner. “Of course that’s the first thing I did. But here’s the thing. That scanner is lying to you.”

The Worm blinked. “What?”

“Oh yes. Mine said the same thing. But something in my gut was suspicious, and I always trust my gut. Especially near lunchtime. So I decided to figure it out the old fashioned way. No gadgets with any kind of wireless network connections. I would have preferred to have a bubble level, but I couldn’t find one on the ship, so I hung some strings from the ceiling, rolled some balls down some ramps and timed them, worked out the results and got different results than the scanner.”

The worm sighed. “Have you considered that these old timey experiments just simply aren’t that accurate?”

Polk laughed. “This isn’t my first ‘old timey’ experiment. I know what I’m doing.”

“Ok, I’ll bite. What were your results?”

“Point nine two g’s. Zero deviation from the vertical.”

It was now The Worm’s turn to get sarcastic. “Off by half a degree. That couldn’t possibly be measurement error when you’re doing everything by hand.”

“Go ahead and poo-poo my results. I worked on The Lobby for several years. I can feel the slope of the floor of every room I walk into, and I’m telling you, there is none here.”

The Worm chewed on this for a moment. She paced around the hallway to see if she could determine which way was uphill. She couldn’t. But she had never been in artificial gravity before, so that didn’t mean much. She switched her tone from sarcastic to patronizing. “So why would the scanner lie to us? What sort of deep dark secret can this ship be hiding that it creates a fictional deviation angle?”

Polk shrugged. “I don’t know. But Zeno’s systems have gone to a lot of trouble to hack into the scanners so they’ll give off false readings, which raises another question. What else is this ship hiding from us?”

The Worm finally began to worry. She hated secrets. They always hid some method of holding power over others. When she was younger she was willing to risk her life exposing them.

Polk continued. “I’ve got another doozy for you. We’re not docked anymore, haven’t been for hours. The ship’s not spinning, so what’s generating all the gravity in here?”

“Stop it!” The Worm was seething at this point. She knew that this so called mystery was a minor one and was not worth her time. If there was something bigger going on, she would find it by cracking the computer system. “Don’t tell anyone about this, especially not the captain. He’s got some sort of weird connection with this ship, and I can tell he’s hiding something from us. Don’t tell the shrink, either. I don’t trust her.”

“You obviously don’t trust anybody.”

“No, I don’t. But now I’m trusting you. Don’t start feeling special or anything, but you’re the only person here without a hidden agenda.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.”

“Shut up! Look, I’ve been trying to access the main computer. There’s a lot of access to surface systems that looks pretty normal for an old ship. But access to subsystems is completely blocked. Not blocked in any way I can cheat my way through, but blocked by something I’ve never seen before.”

Polk tried to wrap his head around this. He couldn’t. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The worm took a deep breath. “There’s a second computer system behind the first one. Definitely alien, possibly intelligent, possibly even conscious. It doesn’t react to queries and commands the way a normal system does. It’s like…” She searched her brain for a description. “… it looks at what you want, considers it, and ultimately tells you no. Or, sometimes it just creates an unrelated problem, one that you need to solve immediately, just to get you to stop asking.”

Polk scratched his head. “So?”

“So, I don’t know. I have to do some more digging to find out more. But for right now, this stays between you and me.”

Polk scratched his head some more. “Alright, in the meantime, what do we tell the captain?”

“You’re supposed to be figuring out the engines, right? Have you made any progress on that?”

Polk stopped scratching his head and started rubbing the back of his neck. “I have no idea what the basic operating principles are, much less anything specific. The best I’ve got is what the computer showed me about acceleration curves, some figures on maneuverability, and some power usage statistics. But that’s all stuff the captain can get by pushing a button. Besides, I wouldn’t be surprised if the computer was lying about those numbers, as well.”

“Put it in a report and give it to him. That way he knows you’re keeping busy.”

“Oh, I already did that. It’s on the desk ready to put Captain Paps to sleep whenever he decides to read it. I’m an expert at making it look like I’m working really hard.”

The Worm didn’t laugh. “Where is the captain, anyway?”

“He’s on the bridge with Harvey. They were trying to figure out optimum locations for the defense platforms using the Nav computer, last time I checked. Neither one of them seemed very interested in the task, though.”

The worm narrowed her eyes at Polk. “What do you mean, last time you checked?”

“Oh, I put a spy cam on the bridge to alert me when someone was coming. Wanna see what they’re up to now? I’m sure it’s really boring.”

The Worm wasn’t sure if the air in Polk’s quarters was safe to breathe yet. “You ventilate your room yet?”

“Should smell like a pine forest in springtime after a rain by now. C’mon, let’s spy.”

Polk cleared some papers off his desk and placed a device the size of a poker chip on it. He waved his hand over it in a way that made The Worm question his intelligence. The device made a clicking noise and began to project a black and white image on the wall.

“Sorry for the low resolution. This ship has so much wireless chatter I couldn’t find a decent piece of unused bandwidth.”

The projection showed Captain Paps and Harvey hunched over a holographic display. Harvey was very excited about something. “My original project was to create an interactive three dimensional map of our galaxy, or at least our local corner of it.”

Paps rubbed his eyes and attempted to sound interested. “So what are we looking at here?”

Harvey continued enthusiastically. “This is a map based on images taken from Earth. See, there we are.”

He pointed at a star on the map that looked like all the rest to Paps.

“I see.” He didn’t.

Harvey switched the display to another map which looked identical. “This map was made from a combination of images taken from Earth and images from Proxima Centauri. As you can see, it’s virtually identical.”

Polk could not contain his amusement. “Man, that Harvey is a laugh a minute. He should start his own one man show.”

The Worm didn’t dignify Polk with a response. “Look at the Captain. He keeps turning his head back and forth. It’s like there’s someone else in the room with him.”

Polk turned his attention away from Harvey’s gesticulations. “Oh, come on. He’s probably just fighting to stay awake. It’s like when you start to doze off in a meeting and you jerk your head upward to fight it off, causing everyone in the room to realize you were falling asleep, and the boss to call you into his office for a good talking to, where you can start the process all over again.”

The Worm was unfazed by Polk’s useless observation. “No, he’s not falling asleep. He looks more… annoyed.”

Harvey had been talking uninterrupted during this entire exchange. “Now this map, which took me ten years on and off to put together, combines data from Earth, Proxima Centauri, and Orion. It took me so long because of this one tiny discrepancy…” Harvey pressed a button and the display zoomed in toward a small cluster of stars. “…here. This star, which I’ve named HG-001, is not where it should be.”

Paps now looked both annoyed and bored. A red circle appeared around a nondescript star. Harvey continued. “When I compared the position with the one calculated from just the Earth and Centauri data, I found a discrepancy of 50 million kilometers.”

Paps jerked his head to an upright position. “Harvey, you more than anyone should know that’s hardly any distance at all. It’s not even the size of a planetary orbit. You can’t possibly be that precise.”

Harvey scoffed. “My map took so long to make because my calculations were done to the best precision in history. My error bars were 10 million kilometers. There’s virtually no chance I got this wrong.”

Paps was curious in a how much longer is this going to take sort of way. “Ok, so how do you account for the discrepancy then?”

“Well, it could only be a massive object between us and the star, bending the light so it appears in different places from different vantage points. The thing is, it would have been undetectable if we didn’t have data from three different systems.”

“A black hole?”

“That’s what I thought at first. But then I ran the numbers. I worked out the most likely position. I worked out the mass and even the density of the object. Not enough for a black hole. It took me years to accept what this was. It was too crazy, too impossible. But it was the only thing I could come up with that fit the data.” Harvey’s hands were waving wildly about at this point. It would not be inappropriate for a thunderstorm to break out on the bridge.

“What was it?”

Harvey leaned in toward Paps, as if he were revealing the darkest secrets of the universe. His whispers were barely audible on Polk’s display. “Somebody has hidden an entire solar system.”

The bridge suddenly burst into a whirlwind of activity. Lights blinking, alarms ringing and buzzing, screens flashing red warning signs. Paps spun around in his chair and started shouting, “oh, no you don’t! You’re not taking me to another hell-hole where I can taken hostage all over again!” He ran toward the nearest console and started frantically pressing buttons, cursing the ship the entire time.

The engines started to ramp up. Polk and The Worm looked at each other incredulously, completely unsure of what to do. “We should probably get up there,” they both said, and bolted out of Polk’s quarters, papers covered in calculations and other doodles flying around in their wake.

Harvey sat at his station and stared wide eyed at the course setting. “We’re going there? We’re going there!”

Orion and its lobby started receding on the main viewscreen. Chatter exploded over every channel on the comm. Paps slammed his fist on the console and a voice came over the sound system. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Pappas?” It was General Salazar. “You haven’t been cleared to launch! Get your ass back here!”

Paps continued running around and pressing buttons. “Believe me, I’m trying, General. This ship has a mind of its own, though, and has a nasty habit of taking me places I don’t like.”

The General screamed incoherently over the speakers, generating a painful screech of feedback. Paps flipped the channel off and shot an angry look at an empty chair by the weapons station.

Polk and The Worm ran onto the bridge, both breathing heavily. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”

Paps stopped what he was doing and looked at his new crew, tears streaming down his face. He started laughing in a way that made everyone’s skin crawl. “We’re going to Harvey’s invisible star system, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He fell to the ground and buried his face in his hands.

Polk and Worm ran to their respective stations. The systems were locked. The Worm got the distinct feeling that her terminal was mocking her.

Everyone on the bridge settled into a state of resigned terror. The room stank of the sweat of panic and fear. The ship was making its way out of the Orion System, dragging it’s new crew kicking and screaming.

Dr. Capitate strolled onto the bridge, confidently carrying her clipboard and completely unaware of the events of the last few minutes.

“Is everyone ready for their psych evals?”