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Ellis Bjørnestad and his jaguar friend Jack kill some time aboard the Walküre before their salvage op takes an unexpected turn with the discovery of a mysterious starship...

What's all this? You got plot in my smut! You got smut in my plot! Together, it's the continuing adventures of Ellis and Jack, the latter settling into her, uh, 'duties.' A sequel to "Objects in Motion" and "To that fine, fine music." Comment as needed; it validates my sad existence :(

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

"The Valiant" by Rob Baird

---

Quick: draw a star map from memory. Remember, absorption lines count! An "A+" means you reach your destination. An "A" means you die undiscovered in the cold blackness of space.

Jack began our conversation with "so, where are we?" and I gave her the kind of dry, brow-arched glare you give someone who asks a question like that. "What does that mean?"

"Means the universe is awful damn big," I shrugged. We weren't jumping into particularly known space, either. I kicked the wall to nudge myself towards the navigation console, and powered on all the Walküre's sensors.

I was fiddling with them when the jaguar's body collided with mine. She used her shoulder to steady herself, grabbing on like she owned the damn thing, and then rested her muzzle on me so she could see what I was doing. "Well, last time we did this you knew exactly where we'd wound up, didn't you?"

"Last time we did this, we were only jumping twelve parsecs. Nichi ain't stupid; he bought Shikoku Station 'cause it's so close to everything else that matters. See, now, the further out you go, the lower your resolution is. We're anglin' for a hundred and twenty parsecs. Might have to jump a couple more times to get where we really want to be."

"And until then?"

"Until then, we wait." The nice thing about Jack, besides how nice and warm she felt pushed up against my side, was that she didn't know anything about deep space. Otherwise she might've asked why I was jumping a hundred and twenty parsecs on a nav computer rated for no more than a hundred.

"Wait and...?" she asked, letting the question trail off lazily. I turned to her, raising my eyebrow again as her tail curled teasingly around my leg.

Jaguar or no, I wasn't quite ready to go again, so I shrugged. "Maintenance. Play some board games. Need to do a circuit of the ship, make sure none of the pieces've come off."

Untangling her muscular arm and thick tail from about me, I left the navigation computer behind and drifted into the main part of the cabin. The Walküre, like most older spaceships, is mostly taken up in machinery and fuel.

Now, one of the dirty secrets of being a space-dwelling type is that you don't have much control over your death. Busted air recirculator fills your cabin with carbon dioxide? Reactor forgets what temperature it's supposed to run at and cooks everything like a friggin' microwave oven? Micrometeor punches a hole through your pressure hull? Or a fuel tank?

You can't do a damned thing about that, really. But there are useful preventative measures. Don't rename your ship, even if you can't speak a word of German and have no idea what a Walküre is. Don't let the uncompensated mass of your cargo end in the number 3 (or worse, 13). Carry a bit of dirt from your home planet (or a rivet from your home station) in your pocket. Don't step into the ship with your left foot first.

And always watch the little diagnostic computers. Green is a good color. Orange is not. Flashing red is really, really bad (worse than the number 3, even). I was perfectly content with just checking them wordlessly, but my jaguar companion insisted on an in-depth explanation of every compartment.

"So, you know..." she asked -- we were looking into the humming machinery space for the water purification system. "Uh. What happens if this breaks?"

I tapped the plastic-bulbed lamp above a computer panel that was displaying information in machine-readable gobbledygook. "This turns red."

"What does that mean, though?"

It means that it's red, lady. The fuck do you want? Don't you know that the whole point is to let us pretend that we have some control over our fuckin' destinies? Sheesh. "Well, you'd come back over and see what the error code was, and go about fixing it."

"You can do that? Fix it, I mean?"

I shrugged. "Nah."

"But at least you'll know why you're going to die?"

"Yup." Bracing myself, I shoved her further down the corridor, towards the next panel. Jack was fun to push -- a lot more fun than Claudio had been. As she twisted, her long hair followed her in a fluid arc, and the folds of her skirt billowed in languid aimlessness.

A circuit that should've taken me five minutes instead took the better part of two hours, while Jack explored the intricacies of the fiddly bits that kept Walküre more or less functioning. On the other hand, she volunteered to help scrub the filtration system, and so we finished that in record time.

I tossed her dinner in a little foil packet. She was expecting it to have a ballistic arc, and had to lunge for it at the last minute -- her movements fluid and graceful as she snatched it from the air. When I passed a bottle of water in the same way, she caught it effortlessly.

Some people go in for really high quality food. Me, I'm a simple dog; the foil packets contained roughly twelve hours worth of rations. Mostly sugars, plus assorted vitamins and minerals -- a big helping of calcium, lest we wither away into fragile wisps. It was palatable, barely; I splurged in stations, when I had the gravity to really enjoy it.

"Tasty," Jack said, though she was making a face.

"Welcome to space. You were expecting a three-course meal?"

Her blue eyes fixed me as she suckled on the foil packet, tail lashing. "I was expecting something more than... icing. Don't you get tired of this?"

"Yup. Gotta force yourself to do it. Force yourself to drink up, too."

"The water?" She slid the straw from the bottle and closed her lips about it thoughtfully, draining about half of it to wash the taste of the meal from her muzzle. I found another bottle and sent it drifting her way. "This too?"

"Can't have too much," I shrugged. "Your body's busy destroying itself every minute you're in zero-g. Wind up pissin' out half your damned skeleton. You don't drink enough, well... kidney stones can be pretty unpleasant when you're five weeks away from any help."

This was reason enough for her to finish all of the first bottle in one long pull. She looked so cute, long whiskers quivering as she sucked on the straw, that I found myself willing to indulge her naïveté. Particularly when, after the conversation had lapsed for a few minutes, she tilted her head and arched her brow. "So, is this why you taste so good?"

Maybe. I was willing to take credit, anyway; I flashed her a grin, and the jaguar giggled softly -- then blinked, and seemed to find herself tumbling into a yawn.

I have never quite gotten used to the food, or the movement, but I'm rather partial to sleeping in zero-g, and after I'd guided Jack through the practicalities of our evening routine ("Wait, I'm sitting on a vacuum?", asked with wide blue eyes) we retired to the sleeping chamber of the ship. This was distinguished, chiefly, by a lack of switches that errant, wandering paws could accidentally brush against.

My sleeping bag was secured with magnetic clasps directly to the wall, which also helped to prevent such movements. I used to sleep in the open, but your paws tend to drift up when you sleep without the aid of gravity. One time waking from uneasy dreams to the sound of an alarm and clawed fingers that seemed to be angling right for my throat was one time too many.

There were two bags; Claudio's was identical, and fixed to the opposite side of the chamber. I undid the magnets that ran down the side of mine, and slipped inside. Jack glanced between me and the far wall, and then scratched behind one of her rounded ears. "You sleep by yourself?"

"You don't?"

"Not if I can help it..."

"Bad dreams?"

Jack rolled her eyes. "You know, for being a big, bad space-wolf you can be awfully naïve."

Because the sleeping bags were closed with magnets, it proved to be relatively easy to join them together, and in this fashion I found the feline pressed snugly up against my side. Her blunt muzzle nosed my neck gently. Well. What the hell was I supposed to do? I leaned down and nuzzled her ear once before calling for the lights.

The room sank into space-black shade; the reflections of status lights and the computer terminals in the cockpit formed glittering constellations, but otherwise the world was still. Jack seemed to be as tired as I was: a few minutes in the sleeping bag, and her breathing was already slow, and deep. I closed my eyes, and dreamed of Tartarus.

Gravity. Water. The energy of the club. Feeling the beat, and the undulations of the feline's lithe, muscular body. Warm -- close... rhythmic... I opened my eyes in darkness, on the liminal (yeah, I know that word) fringe between sleep and wakefulness, to feel faster, shallow breathing ruffling my fur hotly.

Jack was straddling me, grinding her hips carefully against my own and using the sleeping bag for leverage. I mumbled into the cabin, and discovered the sound meeting up against the rumbling purr of an excited big cat. "Morning," she whispered. "You didn't set an alarm, did you?"

"This'll work..." I admitted. It was a nice wakeup call. A sizable bulge already pressed up against my underwear, and I could feel a damp heat every time our hips met. "Bit eager?"

"Heard somewhere you need to exercise a lot in space," she teased, and bit my neck just a little more possessively than I'd really expected. Very sharp fangs on that kittycat. "Right? Keep in shape?"

"Not quite what they meant, I think."

Jack had, I discovered, stripped out of her bra. There was nothing to disturb my paws as I caressed her back, feeling the fur spreading out beneath my fingers. Her rear was still shielded in thin silk -- thin enough that she felt every bit of it when I groped her rump. "Bad dog..."

So I did it again, and this time I slid my fingers under the fabric, where velvet fur met my claws, growling as I squeezed her: "Don't call me that. I might hafta --"

Teeth dug into my throat, and the pressure deepened as her hips pressed with an urgent firmness into mine, pinning my now achingly stiff cock against the fur of her belly, separated only by the cotton of my briefs. Her muzzle moved up a few inches, and a dangerous purr filled my ear. "Shut up, Ellis," Jack whispered, nipping me again. "I'm in charge this time."

Picture that. A captain, on my own ship no less! The nerve. Practically a mutiny... but those teeth were awfully persuasive. So were her claws, no less sharp, skillfully guiding my underwear over my throbbing shaft and pushing them down my legs. I felt her knickers disappear, too, the sheer fabric gliding smoothly over the fingers that still groped her darkly spotted rear.

It's hard to move too fast in zero-g, and after the frustration of the first few tries Jack learned the value of patience. She spread her knees wider, using their grip to hold me in place. Her hot gasp filled my ear when she finally found what she was looking for -- wet, silken heat parting around the tip of my cock as I slid into her, and she pulled herself down to take me smoothly, that gasp exploding into a giddy, moaned slur: "oh, fuck yes, Ellis..."

I tried to help her out, gripping her waist in my paws, but the jaguar was having none of my steadying. Her legs held me in a strong grip as her hips bucked, arching her back to the straining limits of the sleeping bag's fabric, then dropping down again to take me deep, my smooth cock gliding effortlessly into the slick, wet, textured embrace of the jaguar's sex.

In the lightless chamber she was nothing but a silhouette -- her ears flicking further and further back as she began to mewl and whimper, the kittenish gasps breaking her predatory purring into something more plaintive and needy. Her cunny squeezed in unsteady, fluttering pulses around me as the jaguar tensed... quivering...

God, she was tight -- warm, and wet, shuddering with every new gasp and cry of pleasure as the jaguar girl took me all the way inside her, her folds gripping every inch of my thickening shaft. Her hips had lost all their rhythm, slamming down firmly against mine, grinding -- then she started to stiffen, her muzzle open in the darkness, fangs glinting in the dim light of the cockpit monitors, only her tail moving, lashing violently...

"Ellis!" she gasped my name in rapture just as I felt the first ripples starting around my cock. Her hips shook, and warmth gushed into the fur of my crotch as she ground against me, the strained humping of her strong hips meeting resistance as I bucked with her in the moment of her release. Her pleasured gasping became a rattling purr, growing shakier and shakier until she was simply mewing weakly into my neck.

Rocking as smoothly as I could beneath her, I stroked the jaguar's sides comfortingly. It was another minute or so before my thrusts registered in her thoughts -- each one fetching a soft moan from my spotted lover.

All the fangs were gone from her words as she nosed me, her voice muffled and muzzy. "Did you go yet, puppy?" I shook my head, and she craned her muzzle to find one of my tall ears again, nibbling the rim encouragingly. I grunted in response, starting to thrust faster, and she gasped anew with it. "Oh, that's it... that's a good boy..."

I'm not ordinarily one to be demeaned so... but with my knot swelling with every thrust, and the jaguar so hot and willing around me... well. Gotta be flexible. She regained her composure, bucking with me as I pistoned inside her -- I had to grab hold of her hips to steady her now, pushing deep, trying to tie with her.

By the second or third thrust she'd picked up my intent, and now when I hilted in her she pushed her hips to meet mine instead, squeezing down around the swollen base of my cock. I groaned, and her arms enveloped me snugly. The purring was back. "Tie with me, Ellis..." she murmured into my ear. "I want you to knot me so badly..."

Encouraging the inevitable at least makes it feel like you have some choice in the matter. But I was all instinct, then -- groaning out with lust as I forced my knot past her lips, locking myself deep within her. Now my bucks were sharp and constrained, urgent; her paws grasped my sides, spurring me on as my desire swelled beyond my control --

She mewled in counterpoint to my snarled groan when I thrust deeply and the first spurt of canine seed splashed hotly into her. At first I could feel only the pleasure of my release as I pumped her with my warm, sticky cum -- then pressure, the jaguar's strong legs gripping me, her arms tightening. Sharp points of pain at my sides as her claws broke the skin. The sound of her mewling becoming breathy. "God -- Ellis -- yes, that's it, fill your little kitten..."

She didn't let go until the jerking spasms of my shaft had dwindled to weak twitches, only the heavy bulk of my knot trapping the flood of semen I'd filled her with. I hugged her desperately, and she squirmed a little until our bodies were flush with one another. "Ah... Jack... fuckin' hell..."

"All woke up now, puppy?"

"I'm nobody's puppy," I growled, but there wasn't much strength behind it.

Jack giggled. "Well, you're well trained, at least. You come when you're called."

"'M the captain of this bloody ship," I protested, though I couldn't help shuddering when a sharp claw trailed around my ear.

"Maybe we can come up with a compromise." I grunted, and she snickered teasingly. "How about you're both? 'Captain,' like, aye-aye, captain, helm hard to starboard. But 'puppy,' like oh, god, puppy, fuck me harder. Does that work?"

Another grunt. "Maybe."

"You probably would anyway." She stretched languidly; our activities had popped a few of the magnets loose, and the sleeping bag was off-kilter, swaying in the chamber. "Are all canines so... copious?"

"I guess," I shrugged. I hadn't actually ever had to deal with the ramifications in zero-g; ordinarily, when I was only using my paws, a recyclable rag did the trick. "You're not, ah... that's not going to be a problem, right?"

"You're asking if you can knock me up?" I shrugged again. "Mama didn't raise her kittens stupid, Ellis, even if you were another jaguar. Which you're not, and -- do you really believe in crossbreeds like that?"

"Stranger things have happened..."

She shook her head, snorting. "Tanba was right, you salvagers really are gullible. Remind me to tell you about chromosomes sometime..."

Cleanup was not as big of a problem as I'd thought, aided by the absence of gravity and a portable wetvac. I helped Jack with a spongebath, and she repaid the favor -- and then, while I was still damp, glanced over my shoulder. "Green light is flashing for you."

It was coming from the spectrometer, and when I saw the results I grinned. "Jackpot."

"You found it?"

I double-checked the figures against the map I'd stored when I first found the mysterious signal. "Sort of. I've found where we are, and from that... hey hey, Ellis," I grinned. "Not too fuckin' bad. We're off by about forty thousand AU."

"Is that... a lot?"

"Less than a light year," I shrugged, and then dialed the new numbers into the navigation computer. The jumpdrive responded smoothly to the throttle, a lyrical bass humming from the stern of the ship -- soothing. Like your mom singing you to sleep. "Might as well strap in, right?"

Instead the jaguar lingered next to me, watching everything I did while I typed the final commands into the navigation computer. The green jump light flickered, then turned on full brightness. Eschewing the drama of voice commands, I pressed the firing button gently with my thumb.

The world drew snug for a moment, like it was holding its breath; static flickered across my fur, my lungs tightened... then it all released, and it was time to start the process again. This time it didn't take so long before the spectrometer told us it had hit paydirt. A big contact, lots of metal and what it referred to as "artificials" -- signs of constructed materials.

Three hours later, the rotating LIDAR array had finished drawing a picture of the mysterious object, ten thousand kilometers away and drifting two more every minute -- not bad, really, considering the dead reckoning I'd used for the jump.

I told the computer to bring us in closer, and then Jack and I huddled next to the computer screen, scrutinizing the image. A long, graceful starship with sleek lines. It was shark-shaped, with an elegant, flattened nose tapering back to engine nacelles that slipped with artistic precision from the curve of her stem. Completely fucked up, really. "Huh."

"Huh?"

"It's... weird."

"Weird how?" Jack asked.

Her girlish enthusiasm, which worked damned well when I was rutting her, was becoming a bit much now: I was baffled by what the LIDAR claimed to be showing, and I wanted to focus entirely on that confusion. "Just weird," I said curtly. I was trying the shape from different angles, sending it to my image recognition database and coming up with a blank each time.

"C'mon," she pleaded, nudging my side. "Throw me a bone here."

The LIDAR could only paint the half of the ship that was exposed to us, but even that was enough to know the thing was all wrong. It looked like the kind of ship a science fiction author would come up with if he had no idea what he was doing -- beautiful, and very out of place. "Spots, go be quiet somewhere."

"Sleeping by yourself tonight, huh?"

I rolled my eyes at the jaguar girl, and then sighed. "I don't know what this thing is. It ain't in my databanks."

"I thought you said it was the Princess --"

I cut her off with a growl. "The Princess Maria Sachsenberg was a Columbia-class colony ship." Everyone knows what those look like -- but my spotted companion seemed puzzled, so I explained. "Four kilometers long. Two contra-rotating cylinders for the habitation section, with the jump motivator and the sublight fusion drive cluster well behind them. You see any cylinders here?"

Her eyes widened. "So it's an alien ship?"

"No such thing," I muttered. "Just a weird, anomalous... I don't know. It must've been a prototype or something, but I don't get anything about the design." I found the Walküre somewhat appealing, in a ratty sort of way, but like all spaceships she was boxy and functional and uncomfortable, bristling with all the gear needed to keep Yours Truly alive and happily, ah, celebrating with their willing feline companions.

The LIDAR swept over it again and again as we neared, building a picture with increasingly fine resolution. The ship had a smooth hull, unbroken by lines for thruster pods or communications antennas or anything like that. I imagined it to be shiny -- though in the emptiness of space it was, of course, just a black mass blotting out the stars.

Normally, steering in for a salvage op is one of my favorite parts of the job. You get to be a real pilot for once, carefully tweaking the translation and rotation of your ship to nuzzle it right up against your target. Now, with the mysterious two-kilometer leviathan dwarfing my thoughts, I found it rather trepidatious.

Jack didn't help, lurching and twisting with every jolt of the reaction control system, and the big thrusters that could move my ship with six degrees of freedom. Finally I told her to strap in before I strapped her in, and she settled down with a huff.

The shipboard computer's collision alarm system piped up. "Danger. Object... two hundred meters. Danger. Object... one hundred meters. Danger --" I silenced the alarm; my paws on the controls were unsteady enough.

Normally I like to cut it close, under ten meters -- but even if I wanted to show off for Jack, I didn't know what to expect from the huge starship before me, and it didn't seem worth the risk. I settled for forty, and then went aft to get suited up.

In the old days, they used to make suits super bulky. I'd splurged on mine; it was one of the new Buckley-Maxwell types, with the tactile interface that was supposed to transmit feelings right from the glove sensors to your fingertips.

"Can I come?"

I clipped the helmet fasteners, and heard the hiss of air as it pressurized successfully. Speaking through the microphone, I shook my head. "You only came on 'cause you said you could stay shipside," I reminded her, and she rolled her eyes. "Gotta keep legal..."

And, of course, we wouldn't want to give anyone a claim to the salvage title.

... And, what the hell, maybe I was a bit concerned for her safety.

I was one part nervous to every four parts excited. That my salvage turned out to not be the colony ship was a bit interesting, but hints like that turned out to be wrong all the time. On the other hand, an unidentifiable ship... well, that had lots of potential. But whose was it? And were they going to come back any time soon?

It must've been a prototype, some military project that hadn't panned out and had been scuttled. I just had to hope my salvage software would be able to make sense of the ship's computer, or we weren't likely to be going anywhere.

The floodlights on my helmet spilled a circle of pale light on the hull of the ship before me, reflecting a shimmering blue-grey that looked almost alive in its smoothness. But when I turned, the light fell on what was unmistakably a hatchway -- one that was appropriately sized, to boot. And, I saw with a sigh of relief, the keypad next to the hatch was entirely conventional.

The keys were a little small, but the symbols looked familiar, and the head-up display in my helmet translated them readily on the fly. Letters. Numbers. The word "OPEN." On a whim I pushed it, and the hatchway melted away, revealing the airlock chamber behind it. Pale white light illuminated the interior. "Okay, Jack. It's still got power. I'm going to make my way inside and we can see what's going on..."

I floated through the open hatch. Then it snapped closed behind me, and I tumbled to the deck, hard, letting out a sharp yelp of pain. "Ellis? Are you okay?" my headset carried the jaguar's nervous question.

When I tried to lever myself upright, I found that something seemed to be pushing me right back down to the floor. It took a second or two before I remembered that this was the way the world was supposed to work. "Yeah, I'm fine. How fast is the ship spinning right now?" If it was rotating, as now seemed likely, there was the possibility that it would spin into the Walküre, with less-than-happy consequences.

"It's not."

This is where you sit up and think to yourself: what am I getting myself into? I needed to know where the illusion of gravity had appeared from. I got to my feet and peered out the airlock window. No, the jaguar was right: the stars were motionless. But when I tried a careful step, there was definitely weight to my body -- about one gee, if I judged correctly.

Curiouser and curiouser.

But the configuration of the starship was not terribly mysterious. Words floated in my visor as my computer translated them on the fly: "DOCKING OPS STATION A." I was increasingly confident that we had stumbled across a recent ship, with fantastic technology: artificial gravity, at least, and god knew what else. I quickly scanned the few buttons I could find, chose one that looked promising, and flipped the switch: the computer screen came to life obligingly.

Attached to my right forearm was a small puck-shaped computer, which its manufacturers referred to as some boring model number and we in the business called Robin Hood, after the old myth about the bandit who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Robin Hood would work its way into a computer system and do its best to open up access and download all the data it could.

In this case, the computer was still booting. "UNS Valiant," it said, lines of text flickering past -- then a rendering of the ship done cleverly in the letters of the monospace font the system apparently used. I found I could read many of them without the help of my augments. Finally the boot sequence stopped, displaying only a flashing cursor: "please enter your username (leave blank for admin) and password."

There was a keypad, to the right side of the screen. It had keys for all ten Arabic numerals, and the letters A through F. More letters were assigned to each number key, and I found that when I held a button down the letters cycled on the screen.

Robin Hood was still chugging along, but it hadn't gotten me in yet, so finding the right login credentials became a guessing game. I pecked out "admin" and "password," and the screen flashed before telling me the login had failed. "Admin" and "valiant" failed as well. Fortunately the computer was a trusting sort, and it let me go through a dozen combinations without protest.

But I was getting nowhere. "Hmm," I mused aloud. Well, I didn't know who had built the ship, but spacers are all pretty well alike. What's the point of needless work? It was a pain having to use the keypad to enter letters; I left the username blank, and, on a whim, typed in "12345."

"Error. Your username or password is incorrect," the computer said, for the thirteenth time. "Password is case-sensitive." Then it added: "And must be at least 6 characters."

Well, then. 123456?

"Hello [root_user]! Welcome to MSEOS 95. Please select an option from the below." Yup. Yup, that was spacers for you. The screen now displayed a list of options: SHIP, MANIFEST, COMMS, ADMIN, and so on. I selected SHIP, which brought up more choices -- LOG seemed to have the most potential. Ship's logs were a goldmine of information.

I was hoping it would say something useful, like, "the UNS Valiant is a fantastically advanced starship designed by people who don't want it anymore, so we're leaving it here for anyone interested. Do you want to see a detailed user manual, written in plain English? (y/n)"

Instead I got this:

[1] 03/16/4522 PASS U/1/0X1F EUR [2] 02/05/4522 PASS S/0/0X00 SON [3] 11/30/4521 PASS U/2/0XAC+ EUR [4] 06/06/4521 PASS U/5/0X03 EUR [5] 05/29/4521 FAIL U/3/0XD1 CEN [6] ERR. DAVIDS_ERROR_5 [ID_NOT_SANE_OR_CHKSUM_FAIL] [7] 02/26/4521 PASS S/0/0X01 SON [8] NEXT [9] PREV [0] BACK

The first numbers looked like dates, but 4521 was four millennia in the future. The rest was meaningless, and when I pressed 1 to see more about the most recent entry it was just a litany of maintenance tasks that had either been performed or suggested or dreamed about or god only knew.

"Everything okay in there, Ellis?"

"Yeah, yeah. Calm down, spots..." I worked my way back to the main menu and tapped to have a look at the manifest. More dense text -- I skimmed it, tapping quickly through page after page. Anyway my visor would be recording everything; I could play it back later. "What about over there? Everything's good?"

"Yeah. I think so."

Jack was not exactly proving to be the most useful crewman, I had to admit. But she was... uh. Dedicated? Yeah. That would work. Dedicated. I still had half a mind to drop her off when we stopped to refuel at Lohengrin Station, but the sneaking suspicion presented itself that she was going to plead her way out of that.

Somewhere nested in the maze of computer menus I found an option called SIDEKICK, and I stared at with a furrowed brow. "Turn Sidekick on," it asked. Was that an assistant? They had artificial gravity, after all, which I had always thought of as mythological -- might this be an artificial intelligence? I chose the option for "yes."

PLEASE SELECT SIDEKICK MODE OF OPERATION:

[1] ASSIST/WARNING ONLY [2] TRACK/MAN RELEASE [3] MAXIMUM SAFETY

Well, "maximum safety" sounded good, right? I wasn't about to put myself at the whims of some computer I'd never met before. It prompted me for a password, and once again "123456" worked just fine. "Sidekick initializing," the screen flashed, and then, a minute later brought up a new menu altogether:

INITIALIZATION COMPLETE. CHOOSE ADS PROFILE:

[1] UNIDENTIFIED [2] ALL [3] UN DATABASE [DEFAULT] [4] CUSTOM TAG A [5] CUSTOM TAG B [CURRENT]

That made some sense. They would've had their assistant configured in some special way. But I was new to it, so I chose "all." When it prompted me for "range" and "systems," though, I left it at its defaults. The final option, "resolution," offered only "complete" and "disable only." It recommended the first, and I was not ready to argue.

Now I found myself all the way back at the main menu. The only change was a little "SDKCK" flashing in the upper left of the screen. No AI, no new lights. No new options in any of the menus. I decided it was time to go through them one by one.

"Hey, uh... hey, Ellis? I've got a light on here. Your computer says, uh, 'new radiation.' It's flashing."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Am I getting superpowers?"

It's not like sources of radiation are fantastically uncommon. "What does it say next to it? Should be a few numbers -- what's the first one?"

"Um... 8.4... gee aitch zed."

I wasn't paying all that much attention, and rattled off a stock response. "Gamma rays, then, probably -- wait, hold on. 8.4 gee? As in gigahertz? Not ee?"

"Uh, yeah. 8.4 guzz, Ellis." Not having taken my cue, she pronounced this as though it was a word.

"That can't be right. 8.4 GHz is microwave. That's... what... comms?" My mind was racing. Were they trying to communicate? What would happen if I didn't reply? "Tap the little line for the signal and tell me if there's something in the... CMS field."

"It says, uh... 'insufficient data,' then 'low beamwidth.' Then on the next line it just says 'pulse 400' -- but then sometimes the 400 changes to a 720."

The fuck? What kind of a way was that to communicate?"I don't get it... X-band with a 400 Hz PRF? That's not comms; that's not even a distress call. It's more like a strobe... or a..." I froze. Or a targeting radar. I tried to keep my voice calm. "Hey, Jack? I'm almost done here, so... why don't you, ah, why don't you spin up the jumpdrive? Pull the PTO lever to 'stardrive' and then when the green light comes on you just slowly push the throttle forward. Easy as pie."

"Oh! Sure."

I tapped buttons until I found myself back at the Sidekick page, and pushed the one marked "STATUS". Sure enough, what it showed made "complete resolution" versus "disable only" a lot more clear. It was, rather pointedly, not a friendly AI companion:

TARGETING SCANNER LINK... OK MISSILE BATTERY POWER... OK POINT DEFENSE LASER POWER... OK MAIN TARGETING COMPUTER... OK MISSILE LOADING CYCLE... IN PROGRESS [3:13] [1] BACK

The number after "in progress" kept decreasing. I stabbed at more buttons. Pages flickered past, until I found what I was looking for: "Shutdown." I pushed its associated number, and nothing happened. I tried again; again nothing. One final time, and I held the button in. The screen darkened:

SIDEKICK AUTOMATED DEFENSE SYSTEM [ADS] MINIMUM CYCLE TIME NOT YET REACHED. COMMENCE SHUTDOWN?

[1] YES [2] NO [0] HELP

I pushed 'yes' three or four times, just to make sure it would get the message. It did, I think -- but apparently patience is a virtue, because the next screen told me that "SHUTDOWN WILL COMMENCE IN 5:00," and then began counting back. The math-literate will notice that this was longer than it would take for the missiles to be loaded, leaving a charming window for Yours Truly to learn what happens when you play around with strange operating systems.

Some more explorations took me to the screen for the missiles themselves. I think. The header read: "IDS 530A BLOCK E 'HABU' STAT PAGE" and below that "CURRENT STATE: LOADING." 2:15. 2:14. 2:13. Two more pages of submenus brought me to "[5] CANCEL LOAD OPERATION," a choice evidently so meaningless it needed to be hidden away like a precious gem. Breathing a sigh of relief, I pressed the appropriate number.

:( ERROR 103. INTERNAL ERROR: Operation not permitted. Called by a group with execution privilege that does not match or exceed operation privilege in restrictions.h (expected 6, given 6). Thread terminated (103_CANNOT_DO_WITH_PRIVILEGE) [1] TRY AGAIN [2] ABORT

It was the little frowning face that really did it for me, like "yup, sorry I'm about to be killing you." When I tried again, the screen locked up completely, showing only the ominous countdown.1:45.

I grabbed the Robin Hood module and sprinted for the exit. As soon as I pressed the button to activate it, gravity stopped abruptly, and I had to grab for the handhold -- waiting as the door's iris opened with an aching, torturous slowness. Faster, you son of a bitch. I turned to look back at the screen, and that's when the little brass plaque next to the hatch caught my eye:

UNS Valiant Sonora Stardrive Assembly Yards, Terra. June 11th, 4520 AD "To sail beyond the sunset..."

No time to ponder the T-word there. As soon as I could squeeze through the airlock I did so, firing the suit thrusters at full speed. Safely back inside, I tore off the helmet and the suit, flinging myself naked through the corridors and into the cockpit.

"Uh -- you forget something?" Jack asked.

I slammed into the navigation computer, sending a painful jolt up my arm. "Are we spun up?"

"Eighty percent. Eighty-two. Eighty-three... Is everything alright, Ellis? What happened to your suit?"

I'd heard rumors that even the Hephaestan shock troops won't jump in suits -- horror stories abounded about the way the life support behaved at FTL speeds. "Can't wear it. We need to jump." The navigation computer was dutifully plodding its way through the calculations that would take us back to safety. "And we've got no bloody URNT."

"What?"

"Unambiguous Resolution of Navigation Target," I explained, giving the navigation computer a kick to drive home the urgency of the situation. "They say, uh... fuck, what is it? 'If you don't have it, U RNT gettin' home.' Bastards. Come on, damn you!" I kicked the computer again.

"Ninety percent." Ninety percent was the cutoff point: in a pinch, the jumpdrive could be engaged then, though it stressed the system badly. But no sooner had Jack said it than an alarm began to sound, throbbing and dangerous. "What's that?"

"Never heard it before. Maybe the proximity warner."

"Alert. Missile launch," a computerized voice clarified.

"Or that." The green light for the jump drive lit up, and I no longer felt we had the time for leisurely contemplation. I had to hope we were pointed in the right direction, and that my old instructor had been lying when she told me missing a single variable meant the difference between winding up in this galaxy or the next one over. "Computer -- engage!"

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that. Did you mean --"

I lunged for the control and slammed it home with my fist. My lungs seized up -- enough so that I couldn't scream when the missile exploded, and we heard the rattle of shrapnel hitting the hull. Then -- dead silence. The alarms had stopped.

"Made some friends back there, Ellis? What happened?"

I rolled onto my back and discovered Jack sitting cross-legged in mid-air, watching me, still oblivious to the danger we'd narrowly escaped. "User error. You know, computers are designed so bloody terribly. The first thing I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna change my system password..." Then I thought better of it. "Actually. The first thing I'm gonna do is whiskey."

"Then passwords?"

I powered up the navigation computer again, so that it could start to crunch our position. "Yeah, then passwords." But before that, there was the small matter of reassuring myself that the nearby explosion hadn't done any lasting damage to Walküre.

We were still alive, which was a good start -- but I mean, hey, you never know. Explosions in space aren't all that frightening. There's no blastwave, for one, and it's not like a piddling little missile can put out more thermal radiation than those big fuckin' stars all habitable planets seem to have. The shrapnel was likely to be the only problematic thing, and unlike some of the newer freighters Walküre's skin ain't exactly paper-thin.

Jack invited herself along for the tour, and we glided down the corridor. I was a little disappointed not to have the magic of artificial gravity beneath my feet: then again, we can't all be from the Sonora Stardrive Assembly Yards. I had adjusted already, anyway -- and now, station by station, we checked that everything was in order. Green, green, green, green, green --

Red.