A Billion Souls

"Okay, give me two percent." Mmabs called out, pushing carefully away from the complex screen of film-thin metal sheets that comprised the entirety of the wall before him. A dim blue luminescence glimmered deep within the dense complex of vanes and flickered steadily as the glow blossomed to the surface like water. Still floating away, weightless in the confines of the engineering cavity, he watched the energy shimmer and ripple a few millimeters above the realigned metal vanes.

"Readings are stable up here." A low feminine churr offered within his left ear with the direct clarity of a close whisper despite the speaker being a hundred meters distant.

Using circular sweeps of his short tail Mmabs rotated himself about and grasped one of the thick struts running through the center of the chamber to bring his compact, broad-shouldered body to a stop. "Looks stable here, too." He canted his head up to scan the chamber above, or below, or aft depending on one's perspective. "But I couldn't find the drifter, so I'll end up down here again before too long." He grunted irritably as the watery ripples of energy stabilized to a steady shimmer. Turning his hand he gave a nudge to push him toward the hatch at the distant end of the chamber. The thin metal fins were incredibly delicate and required careful, and constant, tuning to keep the energies that was guided through them flowing efficiently. One small piece of debris - a drifter - bouncing around in the chamber wrought havoc quickly and it irritated him that he had not found it during the ten hours he had just spent repairing the numerous tiny dents it had caused.

The badger found it insane that some small object no larger than the smallest of his claws could so disrupt the efficient flow of energies required to keep their field shroud up. Without that field shroud they would, and were, forced out to slow to sub-light speed in the void between stars to repair the problem. He could only imagine how many ships had suffered similar damage but lacked the expertise, parts, or tools to affect repairs and were stuck light years from anywhere.

It would be an unpleasantly slow way to die.

Reaching the hatch he paused to check himself studiously to make sure that he had all of the tiny, delicate tools he had been using, and the spare parts he had not. No need to loose another drifter, other than his own shed fur - which would be vaporized the moment the energies were brought beyond ten percent - to cause further havoc. Satisfying himself that he was leaving with everything he had brought in, Mmabs cycled through the hatch.

The short corridor beyond offered no more sense of gravity than the chamber he had just left though there was a definite design sense of up versus down. Unfortunately, however, their ship was old and in dire need of retirement.

That also made it very inexpensive to purchase.

And a nightmare to maintain.

Two months into their survey, far beyond the edge of known mapped space, the gravity plating controller had simply burned itself to a crisp. Mmabs had plenty of spare parts to fix damaged pieces, but he could not replace an entire unit, so he and Shabri were left without gravity. But the environmental and inertial systems were still humming along without a hitch and, other than having to retune the wave guides every time that drifter broke loose in the number three, their engines were going strong.

So Shabri had decided to forge on in weightlessness.

For Mmabs it was an inconvenient annoyance at most so he went along with the wishes of his captain, employer, and sole-ship mate. She was comfortably ensconced into her command lounge at the other end of the ship. "Still holding pretty stable. I'm bringing the harmonics back online."

Ordinarily Mmabs would have felt the low frequency rumble of the plasma confinement systems through the soles of his feet but, floating weightless in the corridor, he had no sense whatsoever that anything was changing. With the inertial compensators, the most critical component of any vessel, in working order he could not even feel acceleration. "How's the flow?"

"Smooth as glass."

Nodding satisfactorily Mmabs pushed himself away from the wall to drift down the corridor into the main engineering space. He tapped his way delicately over to the tool bin and put his equipment away, humming a broken melody in his gravelly, growling voice. For a badger Mmabs was not young, but he was not old. He was hardly the best looking specimen of his species either. His youth, spent crawling around the guts of countless ships and stations, had been dangerous, rough, and often violent. It had left him with countless scars, a tail four inches shorter than normal, and both ears rather notched. His bifurcated brown and black striping was crazed with pale white slashes left by numerous cuts earned in labor or violence.

Shabri didn't care what he looked like, or even that he was a badger - known for their stubbornness and temper - beyond their similar dietary needs. She had been solely concerned in his engineering skills, which were commendable but hardly worthy of finding a berth on a proper liner, and his ability to work alone. Her previous engineer had simply up and walked out after another year long survey and salvage expedition returned barely enough profit to repair the wear and tear on the beaten old antique she liked to call her ship.

At the time Mmabs was simply happy to get off station so had jumped at the first opportunity that presented itself. The fact that he would go from being trapped on a border colony station doing scutwork to being trapped on a ship held together by prayer and duct tape light-decades beyond the limits of mapped space doing more scutwork meant little.

At least it would be his own scutwork he was doing - do it or die - with only one supervisor to satisfy. It was a sure sight better than the incessant internecine warring between various down-sider criminal factions. Now, five years later, the rickety old boat had become as much a home as anyplace he had ever been for more than six months.

"Hai, badger, can you go check the port sensor array?" Shabri's growl asked after some minutes, interrupting his tuneless humming.

"Yeah, sure." He secured the tool bin, "Something wrong?"

"Nah." He could sense her shrug just through the sound of her churring voice deep in his ear. "Just want to do a checkup to make sure what I'm getting isn't some ghost because it's pointing at our energy wake or something."

"You wound me, stripes." he replied in mock offence. As if he would be so careless in his maintenance that an entire sensor array got so poorly misaligned. Mmabs snorted a chuckle and shook his flat, spade-shaped head atop the thick neck and broad shoulders given his species as he pushed off firmly. From the tool bin he had a direct flight into the corridor which ran the entire length of the ship's spine from the command deck at the bow to the engineering bay at the stern between the four bulky drive nacelles. "What's this ghost look like?"

"Shamiir radiation."

Drifting along Mmabs only need to make small corrections by moving his arms or tail to adjust rotation or taps on the walls with his claws to keep him from 'landing' on any of the four surfaces like an atmospheric craft skidding ungainly to a landing with no gear. He had to wrack his brain for that one and came up blank, "Shamiir?"

"Yeah. Ionized radiation trail from a Shamiir-class star drive, and it's not faint." She reported in his ear as he brought himself to a halt just aft of the bridge hatch and maneuvered himself into the sensor collar. "Even so, if we hadn't dropped out for repairs within a light month we would've missed it." The room within was mostly electronics and a single exterior airlock. An EVA suit hovered immobile in the airlock ready to be worn if he needed to make repairs externally.

Mmabs' ear twitched as he wracked his brain. "Sham drive? Those things haven't been used in... how long?" He drifted over to a diagnostics console to check the array alignments. As an engineer he knew a great deal about the mechanics and theoretic systems used to propel space ships, among the many other systems that made those ships livable, so could place a time era of particular technologies roughly in his head.

"Fourteen hundred years, give or take a century?"

Mmabs's heavy brows beetled as he scowled, more focused on what his Captain was telling him than the information screen confirming that the arrays were pointed where they were supposed to be. "Ion trails don't last that long."

"A few decades, at most. This one, though, is only a couple of decades, no more than five. At least if your sensors are turned in." In the empty space between stars even the most nebulous of traces tended to linger for a surprisingly long time.

Mmabs tapped a button to send the diagnostic system's feed to her bridge monitors. "Trued to within three percent, which is the best I can do with the primary tortional rotator motor failing." He pushed off back toward the hatch. "You're saying there's someone out there puttering around with a sublight ion drive?" He perked up at that thought; first contact surveys had the potential to rake in frightening amounts of credits.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out." Shabri's voice suddenly doubled in both ears when he floated from the corridor into the bridge. The strange harmony quickly faded as the receiver chip detected an external source of the same audio it was producing and suspended its own function. The huge main display, dominating much of the forward bulkhead, showed nothing more fascinating than a star field made somewhat hazy by nebular dust. Superimposed across the haze was a computer artifact showing the vapor trail of a dirty ion drive. From behind the command lounge Shabri's lush, long, black and silver ringed tail twitched lazily in zero-G. He could not see anything beyond that until he drifted closer. "The computer is telling me that's a genuine Shamiir drive, not some nascent race making its first extra-stellar trip."

Even better, Mmabs thought as he drifted along what would normally be the ceiling of the bridge to bring himself to a stop above the command lounge. Shabri's dark eyes glanced up at him from the black-furred mask on her tapered angular muzzle. Recovering a millennia-old piece of tech, especially if it was still functional, could be worth their ship three or four times over - when it was new. "Shams were last used where... Molgue?"

"Annachere." She looked down, reaching out a hand to tap one corner of the smaller display mounted to one side of the lounge with a claw. An info-graphic sidebar windowed up on the main panel giving a brief history of the Shamiir ion drive. The calamity of Annachere, where two vast armadas had clashed and annihilated each other almost entirely, saw the last known use of sublight ion drives, shortly after the invention of field drives like the one their own ship used.

"Any secondary radiation?" Mmabs braced himself on the complex struts and wiring of the ceiling with one hand and his short tail hooked through a tangle of cabling. Shabri's jumper, worn mostly to keep shed fur from drifting loose about the ship, was half fastened giving him a rather remarkable view as he looked down. Not that modesty was important; after five years they had become completely comfortable around each other regardless of their state of dress, or lack thereof. They wore light garments simply to keep their pelts from overtaxing the environmental systems beyond their cabins.

"Transitory. I am picking up some ceramo-metallic ions, though, which would indicate oxidation of the drive housings."

"Oxidation?" Mmabs scoffed with a humorous snort, "In space?"

Shabri tilted her head back to look up at him, her whiskers twitching, "If these are original_drives, slow-boating around for more than a thousand years, you'd expect some atomic spalling from the manifolds." Her whiskers drew back along her angular snout and her ears pricked, "And Mmab, if these _are Shamiir drives -" She trailed off with a sharp-toothed grin.

"Payday." He grinned back, ears twitching. "Where's the trail lead, stripes?"

Her slender procyonid fingers danced on the arm of the lounge and their little scow listed around, "That way." She nodded toward a distant pinprick among the thousands dotting the main panel. After a few seconds of careful stellar navigational calculations, all handled automatically by the ship's computer, the main panel froze. At super-luminal speeds there was nothing beyond the ship to see or sense. "Shouldn't be far, a few light-years, judging from the -"

The main view hazed to a foggy black and then snapped back into focus, silencing the captain as the distant pinprick became a discernible star. She said nothing for a few moments while the sensors did their complex, unfathomable things to make everything within half a light year understandable. Anything moving, however, would take longer for the computer to pinpoint, and would have to be much closer.

"XN-7-v8A01.03 - recognized median yellow, 5.2bn standard. Eclectic plus 11.3, seven and twelve." She read off the navigational system's brief statistics of the system, recorded by a mapping station over ten thousand light years distant. It was slightly above the galactic plane with seven confirmed and twelve unconfirmed planetary objects. At least it would be a virgin survey so they would make some credits when they returned to their neck of the woods and downloaded their survey data to the stellar cartographical Core. Not that they paid much. Science and exploration companies would pay better, but on a more individual basis depending on what they found. "Nebular membrane's been breached, ion trail continues into the system."

The computer projected a foggy veil over the star ahead of them, encapsulating it in a roughly flattened toroid a couple of light years in radius from the parent star where its outward winds and gravity defined a very nebulous demarcation between the nebular gasses and inner system. That roughly delineated the star's entire local influence. Directly ahead of them a ragged trail in the computer generated fog pointed toward the inner system.

Shabri followed the trail without hesitation, the display freezing, recompiling, and freezing again as their drives pulsed them forward a few light days, slowing them to sublight and collapsing the drive field so that the sensors could take a snapshot before jumping forward again. "Eight jovian, five high density probably rocky, one metalloid." Shabri nibbled the claw of her thumb while the ship's navigation hopped them around the system in a polar circuit. "Metalloid body is way out there... six AUs!" She exclaimed with a coughing churr, stabbing her view panel with a claw, "Aggregate ring along its orbit indicates likely remains of a planet." Mmabs said nothing as he hovered above her. This was her bailiwick; he had never studied bridge operations beyond basic navigation. He could get the ship somewhere if the captain was out of action, but that was about all he could do. Scanmapping was beyond him. "And there she is!"

Generated for their view solely by the computer overlay, the tiny moving entity that was the source of the Shamiir radiation was an intense blip of white light moving past one of the inner gas giants. Mmabs scowled at the velocity to energy output figures because they were skewed surprisingly high. "Gods, look at those energy readings! Fourteen hundred years and still running that hard. I'd have to dig to find out how much mass those old ships were, but I can't imagine they were that high." He waved a finger at the energy graph.

"She's pushing something heavy, that's for sure." The screen froze again and when it reformed there was no need for the computer to show them the object of their search; it was only a few hundred kilometers distant. Mmabs blinked, his jaw hanging open, and Shabri chuffed in surprise. "So she is, damn."

The three kilometer long mass of the ancient spacer was partially buried in a twelve kilometer long, seven kilometer thick chunk of rock. Its ion engines were an intense white glow pushing the huge boulder through space. The ions pouring from them were left in such a highly energized state that the drives left a glowing trail behind the beast that stretched thousands of kilometers. "What the f-" Mmabs breathed.

"Stars... Mmab! That is an Annachere derelict!" Shabri crowed and slapped the arms of her lounge, "History said that no ships survived, but that's one of the Fists!"

"Fists?" As with captaining, Mmabs had never studied much beyond the workings of the ships he repaired.

"Planet buster! In the final battle against the Adzandi the last fleet of the Empire took their most damaged ships, leashed them to planetoids, and used them against the last remaining Adzandi world-ship during the battle of Annachere!" She explained without taking her eyes of the huge artificial comet struggling through space ahead of them. Just beyond it a gas giant loomed a few degrees off of its course. "But everything was supposed to have been annihilated when the Adzandi ship's singularity containment failed took out everything in the entire system - every ship, escape pod, observation drone. Everything."

It was a rather more complex fate, the failure of a singularity core, collapsing the vessel and local space for a few milliseconds before the unstable artificial black hole released all of its contained energy, and mass, in a titanic explosion. Having just consumed a ship almost as large as a planet the explosion of the last Adzandi world-ship had decimated much of the Annachere star system and destabilized its sun. After almost fifteen hundred years the angry green blot of the Annachere's unstable star was all that remained to mark the spot where two empires met in their death throes.

And that was the reason that true singularity cores were highly illegal.

"'Cept that." Mmabs flicked his fingers toward the main screen.

"Yeah, except that. I would've had to have missed the entire system to have survived, and ended up out here, or missed by such a huge margin that the singularity's collapse didn't pull it in." Shabri was staring at the incongruous amalgam of stone and technology ponderously plowing through space before them. "Mmab, if we could tackle that thing... cut the rock loose and use its reactor to extend our shroud..."

"Sha, just show me the money." Mmabs chortled raggedly, licking his whiskers. Even without the boulder the ship alone, as a historic artifact, was worth a planet in its own right. "Let's get down there and see what we can do." He was already running the process through his head; figuring out how to harness what remained of the monster's reactor output to their own drive cores, disable the old ion drives and sever the insanely huge rock.

All with their limited tools, small ship, in a short enough span of time that they would have the supplies to get back to known space.

Twisting about he shoved himself toward the hatch. Rather than navigating their ship closer Shabri unfastened her restraints and floated after him. They both made their way into the sensor bay and to the airlock in which Mmab's EVA suit hovered. While he stripped out of his lightweight coveralls she cycled the inner seal to pressurize the airlock; the suit was kept in vacuum because it was pretty old and constant oxygen exposure was hard on it. Squeezing into the airlock with the suit was a pretty cramped affair but neither evinced any discomfort despite the fact that he was now naked.

After so many years in a cramped ship they had become accustomed to one another. It had taken two years for the inevitable to happen and, while neither had been aware or actively seeking, the intimacy had simply - occurred.

And recurred. But, like a standard ration from the dispensary, it was nothing beyond something friends shared. Mmabs did not even know how it had first come about; there had never been any romance between them; captain and engineer living ostensibly in opposite ends of the ship. Employer and employee with a shared goal.

Badger and raccoon, not even the same species.

But beyond the borders, outside of the stations and between stars, no one cared if partners were of differing species even if social and cultural convention frowned upon it.

Thus it was that Shabri helped him into the lower half of the suit, floating around behind the badger to grasp his tail. Leaning close she held the short, muscular appendage until both had stopped shifting around in the confined space before using both delicate, nimble hands to affix the thruster control collar around the root of his tail. She did not even smile or quip when she pushed his tail up and eased the throttle sensor into his anus.

Mmabs had undergone the procedure so many times he didn't even flinch, momentarily occupied by the head unit sensors while she slipped his short tail into the tail sleeve and began working the rest of the suit upward. Just below his groin and at the apex of his biceps pressure cuffs cinched down securely. With his gloves on Mmabs was unable to help any further, leaving his captain the task of connecting the rest of the suit's systems and getting the helmet on.

She double and triple checked all of the seals, stepping out of the airlock and depressurizing it to check them again. "All good?" Again her voice was limited to his left ear.

The suit's system display holograph glimmered across the inside of his visor. "All green, cap." He gave her a thumbs up. Her gray and black face disappeared from the airlock window and, through it, he watched her drift back out through the opposite hatch. A few moments later her voice came to his ear again.

"We're seven meters from the hull, three hundred from the nearest strutwork attaching this thing to the rock." Mmabs turned slowly to face the outer airlock door and, with a touch of his tongue to the sculpted plate pressed against the roof of his muzzle, deactivated the thrusters while activating the diagnostics mode. Moving his tail up, down, and to either side he tested the thrusters, then clenched the muscles of his anus to test the acceleration control. He moved his ears slowly; the left controlled the suit's sensors while the right controlled the external lighting. Everything seemed to be in proper working order. "Cycling the outer airlock door, now." Another touch to the tactile surface of the muzzle plate discontinued the diagnostic routine and re-activated the suspended systems.

On cue the hull shivered against the soles of his deck-boots and the outer airlock door rolled to one side, sticking half way open for a second before completing the maneuver. Yet one more thing he would have to fix. Eventually. Beyond the airlock the hull of the ship, seven meters below theirs, was illuminated by the bright lights mounted around the hatch. The ancient, blackened metal was pitted and crazed with thin stress cracks from centuries under constant load. "Exiting the airlock. You find any method of entry?"

"Plenty of battle damage half a klick to your left, but too much jutting metal to park near." Shabri said, her voice quiet knowing that, in the suit, every noise would be amplified. "I think there are some hatches nearby, thirty meters forward left."

"Any atmosphere?" With a clench and motion of his tail he drifted forward, the quiet hiss of the reaction mass thrusters filling the suit, and slowly descended toward the dark hull. "Any life signs?" His own sensors indicated that the local atmospheric pressure was nil, with minute gravitational and magnetic readings to be expected from so much mass. There were only two biologic forms identifiable within the suit's two kilometer range but it filtered them out as known contacts.

Shabri snorted in his left ear, "Neither. Hardly surprising after fourteen centuries."

As soon as his deck boots came into contact with the hull a new sound, dull and growling, filled his ears; the sound of the huge ion drives vibrating the hull as they pushed that massive weight through the void between stars. "A lot of drive noise down here." Mmabs turned to look back at Shabri's vessel, his home for the last half decade.

Wide and squat the thing looked more like one of the arthropods he used to see in the bilge levels of a few stations he worked. The main body was a flattened ovoid flat on the belly and slightly domed along its length like a stereotypical teardrop sliced in half down its axis. Toward the tapered aft four short, thick engine pods thrust outward on thick pylons and, tucked close to the belly, four massive landing legs that doubled as cargo stays. The airlock he had just emerged from was centered beneath the ship's prow facing forward.

Turning back around the badger carefully bounded forward a few steps, the tail controlled thrusters keeping him from bouncing toward the subtle gravitational pull of the huge rock a few hundred meters away. He stopped at a large, purposeful cavity in the hull and peered into it. The hollow was not battle damage insofar as an impact caused it, but in retrospect it was caused by some crippling damage to the vessel when it had been crewed as a ship of war and not a rock pusher. Mmabs found himself standing on the lip of an expended escape capsule port. To his left fore and right rear a total of twelve such ports gaped black under the glare of the airlock lights.

Carefully settling himself down into the cavity he turned on his suit lights to illuminate the shadowed declivity. The small lights swept about, controlled by the turn and swivel of his ears, before alighting on an access panel to one side of the large circular lock. Extruding a prying tool from the adaptive nano-utility bracer above one wrist he popped the panel cover off. Luckily there was nothing more complex within than a manual airlock lever that could only be used after the escape pod was ejected. Letting the prying tool melt back into the extruder Mmabs grasped the leaver and pulled.

Nothing happened, which was hardly surprising. It took a few seconds of careful manipulation before the badger figured out which way he needed to turn the handle to crank the airlock door open. Unlike the airlock on his own ship, despite its age, the escape hatch lock opened with deceptive ease. Beyond the hatch was a corridor bereft of light, air, or life. His helmet lights swept ancient walls painted Empire blue with indecipherable writing. "You seeing this, Sha?"

"Perfectly. I'm recording, too."

"Good. Internal mapping system activated. I'm going to see if I can find the bridge or some other sort of command center."

"Be careful in there. We don't know what sort of anti-boarding systems those old Empire tubs used, or if anything is still active."

The vacuum silenced the ponderous footfalls of his suit as Mmabs made his way down the corridor, "You got any sort of energy readings?"

"Only the drive system and reactor, which is about a kilometer toward the aft, seem to be operational." He voice had a light growl of caution to it. "That said, it is throwing off a lot of rather unpleasant radiation. Be careful in case something is blinding my sensors."

Mmabs stopped at an intersection and found an old ship diagram on one wall. Lines and letters indicated, to a crew who could read them, where he was but to Mmabs it was so much gibberish. It took him a couple of minutes to match the markers on the ceiling of each corridor to the map to figure out where he was. "Bridge will be... gods, anywhere." He groused with a growl, the lights skewing upward as his ears backed in frustration. He regained control of the natural reaction and set his suit thrusters for minimal power and, pushing lightly from the floor, sent himself floating down the corridor that seemed to lead forward. "Do we have any schematics in our archive? Anything that matches up with what I've mapped so far?"

"None. I can't even identify what kind of ship this was. It could be a freight scow for all I know."

His chuff was a loud echo in his helmet that momentarily fogged the faceplate. "You and me both."

For half an hour he floated through the bowels of the dark vessel pausing to read the schematics whenever he encountered them. "Anything in our linguistics files?" He finally thought to ask. The ancient Empire had spanned over a thousand stars and lasted almost two millennia before internal corruption among its elite, and the arrival of the trans-galactic Adzandi in their worldships, brought it crashing down in a couple of short, brutal centuries. Much of their modern language still traced back to the Empire's 'galactic common'. Unfortunately there had been sufficient change during the chaos of the remnants to render it unreadable to his modern understanding.

"Let me run a comparison, give me a few minutes."

While he waited Mmabs made his way through another hatchway and came up short with a gasp.

Stretching before him beyond the range of even his bright suit lights was some manner of bay. He found himself on platform from which lead a multitude of broad cat-walks suspended from the ceiling forty meters above. At regular intervals secondary platforms jutted out into the cavernous void, their far limits bereft of safety railings. "I think I've figured it out, Sha. We've got some sort of transport or carrier. I think I just found an ancillary ship bay."

"Seriously?" Shabri's surprise trilled loudly in his ears. "Is there anything in it? Please tell me there is."

Mmabs shook his head, wishing he could rub his ears but for the suit. "You'll be the first I tell."

Stepping over to the edge of a loading ledge he peered down, his lights sketching the shadowy outlines of utility gimbals and hoses stowed at the end of massive arms. Stepping from the edge of the ledge he slowly drifted downward, cautiously navigating around the nearest utility arm. Some distance away he could see stars through the gaping bay access.

Nearer the floor he discovered a few small and medium vessels in various states of disassembly and disarray. "Found some derelicts they were parting out, it looks like. They've been partially gutted for whatever reason. Looks like anything that could fly was ... wait a minute." He paused when he found a smaller vessel, sleek and predatory hiding in the shadows, still connected to its utility lines. "I think I found an intact ship. Looks like a combat craft; a fighter, perhaps."

"Can you get in it?"

"Yeah, give me a bit." Circling until he located a hatch near the bow of the craft he tried to find some sort of manual override for the door. That proved to be another plate similar to the one in the escape pod bay. Even the armature within worked the same, opening the hatchway outward and upward while a smaller section descended to the floor. Cautiously maneuvering through the hatch, which was clearly not designed for an EVA suit, he eased into the small vessel. Within was a minimal bridge, easily the size of their own despite the ship being half as large. "I doubt I can bring its reactor online after this much time, but if I can decouple it we might be able to slide it through the launch bay doors. They're on the port hull just forward of where I entered."

There were three lounges in the cramped bridge and Mmabs made his way over to the central one to find that it was configured much as Shabri's own. Even the button layout seemed the same. Reaching down he depressed one.

Much to his surprise the arm of the chair lit up with a wan illumination and the commander's screen affixed to the opposite arm flickered to life. "We've got power here!" Pushing back from the seat he moved behind it and crouched down to examine the maintenance panels. "I'm going to try to link my suit system to the computer. The interface seems to be identical to the one on your ship."

"That's no surprise." Shabri's incredulous chuff laughed in his ear, "This tub is almost eight hundred years old, out of the Plenum Centris shipyards." One of the more stable Empire remnants, the central Plenum systems had weathered the reconstruction better than others, and maintained much of the old Empire's culture for centuries before a civil war three hundred years past had left the core worlds little more than charred ruins.

With a sharp-toothed smile Mmabs extended his arm and extruded an interface connector. The nanites crawled into the chair's maintenance port and fabricated the necessary connections until a quiet tone in his suit indicated that a successful interface had been established. "Accessing, for what it's worth. Can you set aside a secure dataspace with the linguistics database on your end? Let's see if we can make sense of this old computer."

After several minutes the holographics of his suit HUD shimmered, a subtle blue flicker washing across his eyes as his suit matched his focus and began overlaying understandable letters upon the indecipherable scrawl inside the chair's access panel. "Seems to be working, though some of the words are still foreign. The letters line up, at least. I'm going to see if this thing has a ship schematic." Using his eyes to navigate the HUD he delved into a chaotic morass of file structure, much of which might as well have been written in some downsider's pidgin language. Still, he found what he was looking for with only a minimum of fumbling. "Ahh, yes, here we go. I've got a schematic of the M'blis Paladinat, the command carrier pushing this rock. But the sloop I'm on is operating on a backup power cell that's pretty badly depleted. Its reactor seems to have been scrammed, which is probably why it got left behind."

"You're on a closed data space, I can't see what you're accessing. But now that you know where you're going, get out of there and find the carrier's bridge." Mmabs frowned with a droop of his whiskers at the edginess in the raccoon's tone. "Now, Mmab."

Withdrawing the connection he pushed back and stood, "What's up, Sha?"

"Bad news."

"Well, shit, woman! Don't keep me in the dark!" He backed out of the bridge and out through the access hatch.

"While you've been busy down there I've been planning, trying to figure out how we're going to get that hulk off of its rock. I decided to plot out its course and see where it's going. I think this thing's on a collision course with a planet!"

"What?!" Mmabs staggered and was sent floating up from the deck, his slow spiral automatically corrected by his suit's thrusters until he was floating a few meters away from the derelict sloop.

"I'm going to back off a little ways, get out of the shadow of this rock, so I can get a proper navigational fix. The computer just plotted this thing's course toward one of the inner planets and I'm really hoping it's wrong."

"What the fuck?"

"Just - find the bridge. I'll tell you when I know more."

"How soon?" Mmab's had to be careful not to let his anal muscles tense as he made his way back around to where the ship was connected to its support gantry. Luckily it was only connected by a trio of heavy hoses and cables and not secured by any sort of clamp.

"Twelve hours, give or take. I'm hoping give."

"Gods damn the stars!" Mmabs cursed furiously, then hissed as his ears backed and his suit lights spun madly again. It took him several seconds to get them focused back on the hose he was attempting to disconnect. "Fifteen centuries slogging through the void at sublight and we find this mother fucking thing twelve hours before it annihilates a planet? Stars blight our fucking luck!"

Shabri did not offer any response while Mmabs wrestled the connections loose and scouted a path toward the huge void of the launch bay access. There had once been insanely massive doors there to keep the cold void of space at bay but they had at some point been removed entirely. Confident that he could get the sloop out with their tractor array he ramped up the thrust coefficient of his suit and jetted toward the door through which he had entered. He navigated around the huge gantry pillars and catwalks with subtle twitches of his tail, his ass clenched down tight on the throttle control.

Following the holographic map projected onto the visor of his suit he sped, as hastily as was safe in the confines of the ship's inner corridors, toward the command deck. Only securely dogged hatches slowed him down while he cranked them open.

"Yeah." Her churr interrupted his thoughts half an hour later as he was cranking open the bridge hatchway. "I scooted around a bit to get a proper triangulation, but at its current course and thrust, this thing is going to plow into the second planet in a little over twelve hours." She sounded morose through the tiny receiver chip in Mmab's ear. He could imagine her drooped whiskers and tucked tail. "We're coming around the innermost gas giant now, I can already detect a navigational adjustment from that thing's drives. It's steering into a gravitational boost that'll push it up to point three C in a couple of hours."

"Wait, adjustment? The nav system is still functional?" Mmabs growled in surprise as he slowly cranked the huge hatch open. "Why the hell is it going after that particular rock?" He pushed through the gap and found himself floating onto a cavernous darkness populated with empty lounges all facing a common wall. It was the ship's bridge, equally as huge as that of an orbital habitat housing tens of thousands, far too big for his lights to illuminate even partially. Where the sloop had three posts on its bridge the M'blis Paladinat had dozens stretching beyond the range of his lights. "Does it even remotely resemble a fucking planetoid with moon-sized drive cores?"

"No idea, we're in the jovian shadow right now so I can't get a scan on it unless I leave you here."

Mmab growled, his whiskers twitching in irritation. "Do it, Sha. I'll work it from my end here."

"Okay, you be careful. I want you well out of that thing long before it says howdy to something bigger than it is."

"You and me both."

"See what you can pull out of it while I'm gone. Or, better yet, dig into its nav system and steer it away."

Floating through the bridge, rotating with small twitches of his tail against the thrust collar secured around it, Mmabs surveyed the dark expanse of the bridge with his suit lights. At the uppermost tier where the fewest lounges were wide spaced he found a single panel that was illuminated. Its back had been hastily wrenched open, maintenance panels cast aside forgotten to the deck, and wires spilled forth in a tangle. It was clear that someone long-forgotten-to-time had manually rewired it to keep the ship going without anyone to pilot it. With a moue of disgust Mmabs moved to the one lounge that was positioned in the center of the top tier on a short platform thrust out over those below. Tapping the arm console he was mollified when it immediately lit up brightly.

So, too, did much of the bridge in a wash of glimmering lights. Consoles near and far sparkled to life, filling the bridge with a twilight glow. The wall that all of those lounges faced flickered, proving itself to be not a wall but a single unbroken display that stretched from one side of the bridge to the other, floor to ceiling. Mmabs had never seen a display half so large and gaped at it in surprised awe. Unfortunately that was all it did; flicker. After waiting a few moments in breathless expectation only to be rewarded without even a power-on self-test status he shrugged. Hunkering down behind the lounge he popped the access panels loose and sought the maintenance port.

"It's just a normal planet." Shabri reported while he was delving into the mind boggling complexity of the ship's data space. "And this thing's been trying to hammer it for decades. It's left an ion trail around the system at least twice or more. Apparently it's lost a lot of its maneuverability so has had to use planetary gravity wells for crude, high vector navigational maneuvers."

"Great." Mmabs muttered from the depths of his digging into the ship's data space. "I can't redirect this thing any better; it has no maneuvering thrusters at all." He groused, interrupting her. "And that was if I could get into the nav system at all, but oh, no... some yahoo jerked the wiring out and jury rigged it. I can see the systems, but I can't affect them at all from inside the systems." The main screen resolved nothing, not even diagnostic gibberish, just occasional flickers like a slumbering giant dreaming.

"Probably to get around the collision avoidance systems. I doubt the designers wanted their ships to go plowing willy-nilly into other ships, much less whole planets."

"I might be able to from main engineering, though."

"Aft engineering section is a mangled wreck, Mmab, you'll shred your suit trying to get at it that way. And it's probably flooded with rads from the reactor. After this long its shielding is pretty much gone."

"So much for the elegant solution." Mmabs hissed, "Fuck it. We jettison the computer core, haul that sloop out of the launch bay, grab up both, then let this thing suicide."

"You can't, M." Shabri muttered sadly.

"What?"

"If you eject the core the drives will probably shut down. We can't correct its course without this thing's thrust."

Mmabs disconnected his utility extruder from the arm of his suit and left it connected to the back of the commander's lounge. "I already said I can't get into its navigation... how else do you think we can adjust which way this thing's going?"

"With our own drive." Shabri said confidently.

"Stripes, we couldn't extend our shroud over the derelict alone without accessing its reactor, and even if we could we can't shroud the rock. There's no way we're going to cart this thing away from its mindless hell-bent suicide course."

"All we have to do is steer it, a little."

"What?"

"I can use its thrust if we can steer it, throw its course off enough to miss."

"No, Stripes." Mmabs shook his head at the raccoon's insane plan. "Salvage what we can and just... let this thing on its merry suicidal way. We get a pretty light show as our haul-of-a-lifetime smashes itself to atoms against a planet; a show no one has seen in fifteen hundred years and one that has never - not once - been recorded within a light-month." He made a few small adjustments to the tool while he spoke, still poking at the mountains of data with a twig as if willing them to get up and move. "I doubt I could have fixed this thing if I had a week's time anyway. We get what we can and get the hell out." He fiddled with the utility tool for a few seconds before the silence in his left ear plucked his hackles up. "What's the problem?"

"That planet's populated, Mmab." Shabri said quietly.

The suits environmental system was a soft hiss in his ears as he tried to process what Shabri just told him. "Say again?"

"It's populated. I picked up some low level EM when I got away from the interference of the outer jovians." Shabri sent a schematic of the inner system to his HUD showing the second planet's night side. Spots of light glimmered in the darkness clearly indicating cities. "Pre-space, it looks like. They haven't even got satellite communications yet."

Mmab's teeth ground with surprising volume within the confines of his helmet. "You scanned the planet?"

Shabri's voice was quiet, no doubt she could hear his teeth gnashing. Her bio-monitor was probably showing his stress levels spiking, "I did. Early era industrial pollutants and complex network of improved roadways between population centers. Probably a billion or so inhabitants."

Mmabs's lips thinned against predatory teeth as he sighed and shook his head. "Bully them, looks like this is not their lucky day." Leaning on the arm of the command chair he pried up the panel of switches and dials to access the internal wiring. With his second extruder he began tying into the system. "Stand by, I'm going to eject the core -"

"God damnit, badger, no!" Shabri snapped in frustration. "They don't have a chance if we take our pickings and leave this thing on a collision course!"

"No one knows they exist, woman!" Mmabs protested, the low growl of his frustration vibrating within his breast. "No one will after this thing's through with them. Just another sorry fate for another sorry planet of primitives."

"We know, Mmab. We can't just do this."

Growling, grinding his teeth in frustration, Mmabs glared at the huge viewscreen that dominated the bridge. The ship had been looking for the telltale EM signature of an Adzandi worldship and, somehow, had decided that the pitiful nascent transmissions of a backwater world matched what it was hunting. Now untold exotons of rock and ceramo-metallics was hurtling at the defenseless world that, likely, had no idea of its impending doom. "We can." He slapped the arm of the lounge, "We're broke, Sha! Broke, and scuttling around on a ship that might fall apart on us at any moment!" He snarled, "If we limp back to known space with nothing more than measly survey data will there be enough left in the bank to even refuel for another foray?"

"Maybe. I don't know." The raccoon sighed in his ear. "But we can't consign a billion souls to doom just to pad our expenses." He could imagine the raccoon shaking her angular head slowly, "And ... we're going to be recording this, either way. You think some data miner won't notice that we just let this thing vaporize a planet of pre-contact sophonts without at least trying to do something about it? We'd get banned to an agricultural planet as farm slaves! Or worse."

"Worse." Hissing, Mmabs delved once more into the ship's convoluted dataspace, looking for some way to correct the erroneous readings the ship had focused on. Unfortunately many of its sensors had been removed during its repurposing, or damaged, likely by the death of the last worldship and time. It was down to a few navigational sensors and wide field EM arrays that could only listen, and not well at that. "I can't open this monster's eyes, Sha. We can't stop what's going to happen." He tried to bore into the sensor data cluster only to be halted by command level encryption he had no hope of boring through given a few decades to try. There was plenty of unencrypted data, but he could find no way to use those input streams to fool the sensor cluster.

"We can." She assured him again, "We've got enough thrust with our field drives to turn this slug, just a little. Maybe enough."

"How much?"

"Less than two degrees. Probably less than one."

Mmabs' nose twitched at the stench of his own frustration overcoming the suit's filters and clutched the gutted arm of the command lounge so solidly his claws ached. The suit's material was more than stout enough to keep his mere mortal claws from piercing it. "That won't be enough."

"It's a small world in a big void, at this thing's speed a couple of degrees will be too much for it to correct from with the mass of that rock on its nose."

"Can we get that sloop out, at least?"

In his mind's eye he could see her gray muzzle frown and the black of her mask squint around closed eyes, "We don't have time, we have to start pushing as soon as you get out of there."

She was right. Mmabs knew it, and that knowledge left his heart cold and his gut knotted. Billions, if not trillions, of credits throbbed under his deck boots just waiting to be claimed, and he could not recover any of it. Not even a single solitary derelict sloop. Turning about he stomped to the back of the command tier toward the doors of a lift tube. He stood staring at the ship's commission plate on the wall for several seconds. "Okay, Sha. I'm coming out," he radioed, even as he began to extrude a new tool from his bracer.

Getting out of the doomed carrier was far easier than getting in; there was a clearly marked rank of escape pod hatches to the left and right of each bridge tier and he used one of those to egress the bridge. Shabri hovered their ship a hundred meters away and he jetted over to it leaving a planet's worth of fortune behind. While he made his way into the airlock she drew off to reposition their ship, tiny at a hundred fifty meters compared to the combined fourteen kilometers, at the very tip of the pitted rocky asteroid that had long, long ago been repurposed into a badly guided missile.

One that was still armed and looking for a target.

Peeling himself out of the reeking suit Mmabs left it floating in the airlock as he drifted to the bridge. He only hoped he would not have to use it again until the cold vacuum of the depressurized airlock could crystalize the stench of his own musk and fur oils enough for the automatic systems to clean. So much for buying a newer model, he thought sadly, or a newer ship. Providing, of course, they even survived the dangerous, foolhardy stunt Shabri was about to put them through. He found her once again strapped into her lounge, one hand deftly playing at the nav console and another extending their gantry arms toward the rock.

"How far can you extend the fields?" She asked without looking up, likely smelling him with her sensitive pryconid nose as easily as hearing him with her similarly sensitive ears. Her ringed tail swept weightlessly back and forth behind the lounge. Mmabs' own, shorter and less lushly furred, was motionless behind him. Those who trained extensively with EVA suits often tended to lose the reflexive ability to wag their tails because of the control collar. Thoughtless tail-wagging in a suit could get one killed in a hurry so keeping his tail still had long ago become a subconscious habit.

"How do you want me to extend it?" He mumbled, taking a sip from her canteen which he captured floating beside her lounge. "No way I can shroud this whole thing, or even a small bit of it."

"No, we need to employ transverse thrust. We'll have to extend the drive field perpendicular to the ship's vector and steer it, not manhandle it with our shroud."

"Ah. I can extend it perhaps a kilometer along our longitudinal axis, will that do?"

"It'll have to."

Drifting over to the sub-command lounge, which he seldom used because most of his time was spent in the aft engineering space, Mmabs slid his tail through the hole and settled down upon it. He strapped himself in snugly; there was no telling if their inertial compensators could handle the stresses they were about to impart on their rickety antiquity of a ship to move an antique even older. He brought up his engineering panel and made a few quick system scans. Their data store was a third full and filling up fast but he didn't need much computational power. Shunting erroneous data aside he brought up the deep level drive field parameters and reactor status. "Extending axially to aft, thirty percent impulse thrust." While at sublight speeds the field pushed against the background gravitational influence of space to move them; the more gravity there was in a given volume of space the faster they could go, up to seventy percent light speed. Despite its mass the boulder beneath them hardly registered a blip gravitationally.

"Adjusting." Their ears backed and Mmabs' hackles lifted at the low shrill groan that filled the ship as the heavily reinforced gantry mounts began to strain against the rock. "Bring us up slowly, extend the field ventrally a little. Let's see if we can capture enough of that rock not to wrench off our legs." The low wail became a shuddering rumble that soon faded to a pouting moan as Mmabs extended the field outward into the rock beneath them, grabbing it with a fist of ephemeral energies.

"Thirty two percent."

For the better part of four hours Mmabs pored over his screen, skin oils seeping uncomfortably under his short, coarse fur. Their shared musk filled the bridge, mostly his own as he was still unclothed so there was no fabric to trap his stress stink but enough of her own to reveal that she was feeling the strain as much as he. "She's compensating." Shabri hissed, as if she was trying to push that monstrous load with her bare hands. "The old boat's engines have adjusted their thrust vector."

"Those ion drives are huge, but they're slow, stripes. They don't put out much raw thrust, we should be able to overwhelm their long response time."

"No." The raccoon seated a few feet away did not look up, but Mmabs could hear the devious smile in her voice. "I want her to compensate."

"Okay, you're the pilot."

"Three hours to achieve counterthrust and correct." She shot a dark-eyed glance over at him and smiled, sharp white teeth gleaming beneath her long whiskers. Mmabs was struck, just then, at just how pretty her homely, round raccoon face was. She wouldn't win any beauty contests, nor even place honorable mention, but she looked past his scars and ragged exterior to find enough inside him to like. Enough to keep him aboard. Enough, now and then, to share her bed with him. He offered a wan, crooked smile and waited for her to explain. "You ready for some scary shit?"

What kind of explanation was that? Mmabs tail tucked against the back of his lounge and his smile became a frown. "Uh... ?"

"Increase to one twenty."

"Stripes, that's going to put our reactor damn close to critical!" He chuffed in surprise, glancing down at the amber glow of the reactor's thermal state. It was edging toward orange at only ninety percent peak output.

"I need a short burst, that's all."

With a gulp Mmabs slid the tip of his claw across the load indicator, pushing past the stops and quelling the warnings before they filled the bridge with klaxons. "How short?"

"Two minutes."

He watched, chewing his whiskers, as the amber climbed swiftly through orange and was beginning to fade toward red as the two minute mark neared. "Drop back down to seventy, extend the shroud one-eighty and hold."

"The opposite direction?!" He swept the reactor load quickly back to a safer zone and collapsed the aft axial extension of the field only to extend it a kilometer beyond their bow. A red shimmer tinted the starfield beyond the main view as the shroud extended beyond the automatic compensation of the forward sensors.

Shabri only nodded and, for a few moments, said nothing as they simply waited for whatever little bit of something she was looking for intently in her own console. After ten tense, silent minutes her teeth gleamed in a rictus smile. "Now, please." She warbled, a sure sign that she was either distressed, or euphoric. She did not look in any way near bliss. Mmabs clenched his teeth and tapped the thruster controls. He felt a ripple of nausea clutch at his guts as he was pushed to one side of his lounge. Loose objects scattered across the bridge and the reactor temperature quickly climbed once more toward red. The tortured sounds booming through the hull made Mmabs cringe and his teeth were clenched so tight they hurt. "One hundred percent thrust, now, please!"

"Stripes..." But he did as she asked, wincing as warning telltales scattered across his system board. None of them were external hull, but he knew he had a lot of repairs ahead of him in the next days, if they survived. The computer bitched at the data load approaching its theoretical limits but that was hardly as noteworthy as the drive trim warnings. "We can't hold this much longer."

She waved a placating hand toward him without looking up from her display. "Drop it back to fifty. We just pissed this motherfucker off big time." Shabri giggled nervously and slapped the arm of her lounge. "I forced her to overcompensate and now she's on a bad bobble trying to correct for that snap rotation."

"What?"

"I used its own drives to accentuate our rotational vector..." She smiled victoriously at him, whiskers and ears lifted in glee, "I forced her to compensate for a low grade rotational impulse. Once the drives had achieved parity thrust, you increased ours. The Fist responded by doubling its thrust output and then I had you reverse and pour it on." She twitched her brows at him and giggled madly, "We can apply thrust instantly. It can't, not with its main drives. Since it doesn't have any maneuvering thrusters it has to compensate for our rotational effect with the big drives and takes three hours to match us if we're applying steady thrust."

"And what we just did only served to amplify her turn," Mmabs concluded, finally understanding what Shabri had been doing. "You used her own engines against her, very nice."

She tittered and rubbed her muzzle vigorously for a few seconds with both hands, "Yeah, just tossed the old cow into a little slide."

"What did that get us?"

"About a half degree course alteration but a seven degree yaw." With a lift of her whiskers she smiled across at him, "Maintain thirty percent for three hours, and then we'll rotate her one more time. Hopefully if we spin her enough her own thrust will push it out of its collision course."

"Will it be enough?"

"I sure as hell hope so."

"Enough time for me to go back aboard and haul out that sloop?" He half-joked.

Shabri trilled a laugh and shook her head, "I need you here, you growly old shit, to keep us in one piece."

And he did keep them in one piece, though the red blinkers on his panel kept him worried. At least they were cooling and environmental rather than drive or inertial - they could be repaired relatively easily from within the ship. Three hours later, as Shabri had expected, the monstrous propelled rock matched their rotational thrust and began to compensate for it.

And, as before, they reversed the vector of their thrust and amplified the boulder's own correction for another three hours. By then the planet had gone from glimmer, to discernible object that was not a star, to identifiable planet on their view. Three smaller gleams nearby were its moons. Two were hardly worthy of the term, only a few tens of kilometers in diameter whereas the third was large enough to be a small planet in its own right.

"There's the balance, she's turning against our thrust again." Shabri stretched, her tail lashing and dancing behind her lounge as she yawned hugely. They had not slept at all despite the long hours between corrections. Most of it had been spent in companionable silence. "Start the last burn at fifty percent and then increase to one hundred over the next..." She glanced at the chrono on her lounge panel, "hour. That'll leave us fifteen minutes from impact when we cut away."

Shutting down the forward extension of their drive shroud Mmabs extended it rearward and ramped the power back up. "Should be sufficient already."

"Should be, yeah, but better safe than sorry. After our last rotation she'll be sliding sideways with her thrust angle away from the planet, more or less."

Mmabs rubbed his palms together before cracking his knuckles and stretching his back. "Then what?"

"Then what? What do you mean?"

"Stripes, what if this monster tub misses its target?"

Shabri's short, raspy laugh filled the small bridge, "Then, old dirt dog... we get back aboard, get everything we can carry, jet and salvage the core, figure out how to shut down the engines, and let her just... drift on out of this system." She leaned over and gave him a wink, "With our beacon on her, of course."

"And my sloop?"

Shabri's laugh was a sharp bark this time. "If this thing misses the planet I'll help you push that sloop out of the bay myself."

A little over three hours later Shabri finally withdrew the ship's landing gear slash cargo clamps and slipped free of the rock. The drive buzzed a little when she skipped a few hundred thousand kilometers to unload a raft of small survey pods. "Damn number three's out of true, again." Mmabs grumbled at his status board. "Floater's dinged her up pretty good." Once more the humming vibration, just within the upper range of their hearing, danced through the ship from the drive nacelle he had spent hours repairing not even a day before. "All of these short-hops aren't easy on it, either."

Shabri dropped back to sublight again to rotate as she disgorged another dozen pods, "That should be the last of 'em. We'll be able to get a high resolution scan of the planet, and the Fist hurtling by." She held up both arms while the ship's shroud slipped them neatly into an orbit above the planet's northern hemisphere. "Ahh," She paused and frowned, glancing up from her display to the distant mote of the approaching rock and then back down. "Ahhh, well."

Mmabs scowled, one brow raised, "Well? Well what?"

"So much for salvage." With a single flick of a claw tipped gray furred finger she sent whatever it was that had her concerned to the main viewscreen. Mmabs glanced up and let out a grumbling chuff.

"Fuck."

A white line extended from the brilliant gem of light at the end of its cometary tail describing its current course. Under its current velocity and thrust, barring some considerable gravitational adjustment, the rock and its derelict would not survive its latest brush with the planet.

"Rockets." Shabri observed a few minutes after they had taken up orbit. Small icons on the main view highlighted dozens of them climbing toward space from the planet below. Despite lacking any artificial satellites the natives seem to have discovered enough rocketry to send some small portion of themselves into space in the hopes of surviving the coming apocalypse.

They watched as the world smashing guided missile of rock and millennia-old starship swept past the planet within a scant few thousand kilometers; hardly a noteworthy distance on a planetary scale. The guided rock had rotated until the ship that drove it was pointed almost directly at the planet below, the glow of the engines increasing to such degree that the main viewscreen's automatic limiters kicked in to dampen it.

Neither of them said anything as they watched the ancient ship, their fortune, and its deadly payload sweep past the planet in a slide that traversed a few hundred thousand kilometers while it ponderously tried to correct the course that Shabri had fouled. The ion drives were still struggling to turn the ponderous mass when, a few short minutes later, the whole assembly slammed into the surface of the planet's largest moon. The viewscreen dampened down the resultant flash of blinding iridescence as a few hundred million tons of rock and ceramo-metallics were reduced to almost pure energy by the sheer kinetic forces involved in that titanic collision.

"Boom." Shabri sighed softly.

Mmabs looked over at his captain and quirked his low brow curiously but said nothing. She looked across at him, her profile lit starkly with light and shadow even under the screen's damping. One eye flashed emerald while the other was as black as the space between stars. "I know there's no sound in space, but in the case of something like that," she waved a hand toward the screen, "there really should be. Had it hit, it would've incinerated everything on the planet as deep as a kilometer or more. Nothing, not even the hardiest micro-organisms, would have survived even if the planet did not crack wide open on impact." She leaned back in her lounge and looked to the screen again, her whiskers drooping and ears packed. "That at least deserves a Boom."

With a soft, growling chuckle, the badger began to extricate himself from his lounge. After hours in the stifling environment of the EVA suit and the better part of a day strapped in his lounge his fur felt positively foul. And he reeked of stress musk and lack of rest. "So much for my sloop."

"Phegh, don't remind me." Shabri muttered sadly as she unstrapped herself. She leaned back, pushing herself slightly from the lounge to float above it, and stretched her shapely arms over her head with a groan of released tension. "At least we got a good show. A salvage haul big enough to last us several lifetimes; reduced to atoms before our eyes."

"Boom," Mmabs echoed jokingly as he drifted above his captain, one hand held up to catch a bundle of dangling wires. Leaning down he pressed a small kiss on her forehead, pushing her back down a few inches. "There'll be other hauls, stripes. Another star, another day."

Shabri looked back up at him and rested a hand upon his brawny shoulder to arrest her downward drift. With a smile curling her lips and lifting her whiskers she tapped the bridge of her angular raccoon muzzle under his chin. "Yeah, I suppose you're right."

"And, besides, you recorded it." He waved toward the moon beneath its growing haze of fiery red debris. On the viewscreen a hellish red wound had spread across a good quarter of the moon's surface and a cloud of fiery debris was swiftly pluming into space around it. Cracks were still propagating rapidly outward across the surface of the moon beyond the immediate impact zone. "You recorded everything."

"Yeah. That data should pay this trip, and for a few repairs." She admitted, resting her brow against his upper chest while they drifted weightless above her quiescent lounge.

Mmabs caught the hip of her lightweight coveralls to hold her close while retaining his grip on the cables and turned them both so that they could look at the wounded moon. "So, a profitable run anyway. Perhaps we can leverage an observation license for the planet and contract out the first contact rights." He shrugged and pushed himself along the ceiling of the bridge toward the hatch, "But... anyway, while we're waiting to see if that moon blows apart I'm going to hit the tank. I am all over a mess."

"Yeah, good -" Shabri was distracted a moment as he drifted over her head by the trill of her lounge's status console. Looking down she twisted about to tap the screen, momentarily inverted head down above the chair. "What the hell..." She groused when she noticed that the computer was angrily warning that the data store was reaching the theoretical limits of its copious storage capacity. Survey ships amassed prodigious amounts of information during their journeys and had commensurately huge data stores that could, under normal circumstances, be quite difficult to fill. Her survey probes could not have overloaded the data store so swiftly, or even come remotely close even had they been left on record for weeks.

And yet, hers was almost over its capacity.

"Oh, you sneaky devil," she growled, the edges of her muzzle slowly curling up in a bewildered grin.

Mmabs caught himself at the hatch and looked back, "What?"

Shabri turned herself to leer at him with a huge gleam of teeth, her ears up and tail bushed at the realization at what he had done "You sneaky, cagey old son of a bitch." She flicked the data limit warning and cackled a laugh. "Snatching a taste of victory from the deadly jaws of defeat, you grizzled old badger you!"

Mmabs's own muzzle drew back in a bright toothed smile, "Yeah, I love you too, stripes." He surprised himself by saying. In five years that particular four letter word had never passed his lips. Why now, he wondered, and then promptly shoved aside. If he said it, he meant it. "Care to give me a hand?"

"Oh, yes." Shabri shoved herself away from her lounge and floated toward the badger. Her badger she finally realized, not just her engineer but hers entire. "Lucky they designed the tank for more than one occupant." Whatever had they been thinking, those designers, when they added multiple respirators to the submersion tank they used for bathing? She stopped herself against his chest, fingers buried in his fur. "Then we get this bug turned around, find us the nearest major transit hub, and unload this data."

He slid one arm around his raccoon captain's waist and pulled her close, the other hanging onto the hatchway and keeping them from drifting away. "And then?"

She slid her slim muzzle along his much broader one, nuzzling at his cheek fur, and whispered in his ear. "Profit."

What price, a billion souls?

_____

Epilogue

Night had fallen over the silence of a city, a world, upon the last dusk of its existence. For the most part the populace stood out from their caverns to gaze up at the sparkling stars of the night sky and Ra's Spear, a growing gem of brilliance just above the northeastern horizon. To Praetor Lus it seemed that the brilliant white streak of the spear's shaft was even a bloodied read. He leaned back on his thick tail and crossed his arms over the tawny fur of his breast.

He wore a simple wrap, eschewing the badges and honors of his station. There were no guards surrounding him; they had all been sent away to attend the Spear's fall with their families. Lus' own was with him; two of his surviving wives, their children, their parents and his own. They stood upon the grassy prominence that dominated the center of the palace terrace and the slender blades felt cool beneath the pads of his paws and underside of his tail.

Twice before in their people's history the Spear had been cast from the heavens, and twice it had missed, though ever closer. The spear would find its mark on the third cast, Lus had been assured -- as had everyone of Gela, their doomed world.

Velys General Multach stood only arm's reach away, having no family with which to spend his final moments. No armies remained for him to command, and so he stood out on the grass with his once mortal enemy and gazed skyward as well. "Makes all that we fought for, over, seem - truly petty and pointless." The old soldier muttered, more to himself than anyone else, with the stars gleaming in his dark eyes.

Lus turned his head slightly, the tall scallop of his ear catching the quiet words. "As much I said when I took office so many years ago, 'Tach. The war was futile, and would wreck our world."

Bobbing his long muzzle Multach huffed a short, rueful laugh through his nose, "Better, then, that the gods smite us, all and one, with but a single sweeping gesture and start afresh as they did with the first Great Fire."

Impetuously Lus reached out and rested a hand upon the old soldier's shoulder. "It was good that we came to find peace, 'Tach, before the end. It was good to know you without armies between us."

Curling one corner of his lips, Multach nodded. "And you, Lus. Gentle may your ways be, but you were ever a sword's keen edge -"

"Praetor Lus, Praetor Lus!" A haggard voice called from the edge of the field. Lus and the others looked toward the unwelcome loud intrusion. A middle-aged bespectacled male bounded toward them with great strides of powerful legs, claw tipped toes gouging the immaculately tended lawn. Despite the fact that the green would be atoms come the dawn, Lus felt a twinge of regret at the damage.

"Braegar, what is this that brings you your home and yelling all through mine?" Lus snapped sharply as he caught the scientist's arm with a firm grip and pushed him back onto his heels. "Anchor your tail, man, and catch your wind before you collapse." On the horizon a scintillating star rose upon a white plume. Others had already ascended, or would be in the last minutes, bearing bits and pieces of their people's history to the heavens where the gods might one day happen upon them in their travels between stars.

Painful it was to be spurned into seeking some measure of escape from the pull of their homeworld only by the Gods' Spear bearing down upon them. Further painful that the only things which could be borne into the heavens were archives and histories; life would remain behind to end when the Spear found its mark.

"Praetor, the gods... the gods..." The old man bowed forward, grasping Lus' forearms, his thick legs and long tail quivering from the exertion of running from his observatory to the palace rota. "Your stargazer, look!" He jabbed a finger toward the ornate telescope a short distance away. Lus' third son had trained it upon the white slash moving across the heavens, the view reflected on the polished plate beneath the telescope.

"What am I looking at, Braegar?" Upon the witness plate the Spear was a dim misshapen blot at the tip of a scintillating white tail. A reddish smear crossed the tip of the Spear sending a long plume to one side which was lost against the white trail. Lus' son was careful to keep the oculus trained upon the Spear but Lus could discern little.

"The red, my Praetor, the red touch of La!" Braegar held a shaking arm out and coughed while still trying to catch his breath, the tip of his claw pointing to the red smear upon the blurry tip of the spear. La was sister of Ra, King of Gods whose chosen weapon, the spear, was even now bearing down upon them. La's auspice was Justice and Forgiveness and her color - red.

"I fail to understand." Lus could not tear his gaze away from the rippling red blotch while it jumped under his son's careful adjustments of the telescope. Try as he might the young man could not grant any clearer focus.

"I have been watching, all the day, sire." Braegar wheezed, "The red touch, you see, it has moved! And each time it moved the Spear wavered! It wavered! La seeks to stay her brother's anger from us!"

"Likely a cometary outgassing, Lus." Multach muttered quietly near Lus' side so as to not disturb the scientist's frantic explanations. "The Gods are -"

"Watching, and acting!" Braegar's gaze was steely despite the heaving of his chest, "It has been said that La would stay her brother's wrath in a time of our most dire need." His arm waved curtly toward the heavens. "If that is not our most dire hour, I know not what might ever be!"

"Now is not the time for arguing, my friends." Lus waved his hands placatingly, "Braegar, please, what is the import of La's touch?"

"The spear will again miss, my boy!" Braegar lost all decorum for a moment, standing to the full height of his long legs and extending his arms heavenward as if to grasp the distant glimmer of light. "La has pushed it aside, and saved us!"

Multach snorted a breathy, rueful laugh "A brief respite, at best. As before, it will simply make another pass through the outer planets and return again."

Braegar bobbed his head. "A brief respite is a respite still. It will give is time, it will give us years to learn, to expand our knowledge of rocketry and reach further into the heavens. Perhaps enough time for us to learn how to stop Ra's Spear entirely!"

"You seek to usurp the gods?" Multach raised an eyebrow curiously. While he had never been particularly given to the dogma of the Temples he had never expected to hear the devout scientist speak so blasphemously. The barb was more an instinctual reaction than a true insult, with no malice behind it. In these end times he found there was no malice left within him.

None the less, Braegar slowly sank back down and turned suddenly tired eyes to the old general. "They seek to destroy us. If we cannot appease them... better, perhaps, we find a way to destroy them first?"

"Ah, hai, Braegar!" Lus' third son cried out and a disquieted murmur rippled outward from the base of the telescope. Everyone's gaze jerked back to the witness plate where the misshapen tip of the Spear was bereft of the red smear of light that had been there only moments before. The tip had become foreshortened from their perspective, almost occluded by the blinding brilliance of the Spear's shaft. "You had to speak ill of La's aid, and now she has withdrawn it!"

Braegar ears were backed as he peered at the witness for a few moments rubbing his jaw while his tail twitched and lashed. While he looked down as if to divine the will of the Gods in the plate everyone else was looking up.

Toward the distant northern horizon the short white streak of the Spear's shaft had become a discernible slash in the night sky tipped by the brilliant coruscation of the Spear tip itself. Initially it simply seemed to hover there, steadily growing brighter but, after many long minutes, they began to discern a slight lateral motion.

A hush fell across the terrace and even Braegar eventually looked up from the telescope's projected image to stare heavenward and take in the sight with his own eyes. Simmyr, the largest of their three moons, was a quarter waxing and its wan light was soon overwhelmed by the swift growing glow of the approaching Spear. Lus muttered a litany to the twenty gods of Light to spare his world. His tall, scalloped ear picked up the quiet whisper of others in their own heartfelt prayers.

All across his empire of Aven Tel he imagined that the prayers were a general chorus lifted toward the heavens in a million voices, millions more in the kingdoms which surrounded his on the continent, a billion upon their entire world as the countdown clocks in thousands of cities rapidly counted down the last minutes and seconds of existence. A billion prayers, lifted with pleading hearts and yearning hands raised skyward as if to shield their world from its fate.

And, surprisingly, it worked!

Almost blinding in its coruscating brilliance, the Spear flashed across the sky, plunging from the far northeast of the heavens and sweeping toward the southwest. Lus imagined he could hear the roar of its passing despite his ears flattened back in growing horror. He raised his hands to shield his eyes from the searing white brilliance, the shadows of his fingers gliding swiftly across his thick muzzle.

Hazarding a glance he peeked between them to see the white streak of the Spear's nebulous shaft across the night sky leading to the brilliance of the tip, now hanging just below the southern arm of Simmyr. As he watched, the gap between moon and Spear narrowed.

"It missed!" Hashyn, his youngest son, yelped in his breaking adolescent voice, joined seconds later by a rapidly spreading choir of elated exultations.

"It missed us," Braegar noted quietly, still watching the dwindling mote as the gap between light and moon narrowed further. In a short time it was no more. For many long seconds the white dot of light was interposed before the moon and then, quite abruptly, winked out only to return in an explosion of light and red fire.

Lus' jaw hung slack as the ruddy red glow of Simmyr's new light lent a hellish glow to the night time world from horizon to horizon. A towering tree of flame was growing from the lower quadrant of the moon's dark side, its branches beginning to define a halo around the moon. In the expanding cloud of gasses he saw a face, a woman's face, an enigmatic yet beatific smile drawn across her hellish red features. It was a face formed of the shimmering blood of Simmyr's wound. He blinked and the face was once again nothing more than a mottling of the growing plume.

"La preserve us," the old general muttered in awe beside him. He felt the weight of the man's powerful hand upon his shoulder as he swayed in place, rocked by the enormity of what had just occurred. "We have been given a new birth, my old foe."

"Father?" Lus' gaze shifted to his old enemy and recently discovered friend, to his third son who still stood beside the telescope. That telescope was no longer pointed at the moon. They needed no viewing device to witness that. Instead it was pointed almost directly north. "See what the witness shows us, father." His son leaned back on his thick tail and pointed to the polished plate.

Centered upon it, glimmering in the ruddy glow of Symmir's fiery wound, a small insect hung in space. It was long and squat, legs tucked neatly to its belly while its wing plates were half-raised toward its posterior. A shimmer of red rippled serenely about the arthropod's nebulous wings.

"What is that?" The insect, if it truly was an insect, was not something on the telescope's lens or perched on the witness plate; it was beyond their world, in the realm of the gods themselves. "Why does Gluus watch? Did he expect to gloat at our extinction?"

His son shook his head slowly, "Father, when La's touch fled after Braegar's blasphemous words I managed to follow it... and there it stopped. Gluus aided La, father. It was _Gluus_who acted as Her hand, who steered Ra's wrath away from us."

"They are Gods, my son. We Adzandi are not given to know their whims for we are their children and, like children, bid to watch and learn but not question." He briefly lifted his gaze back to the moon and its tide of slowly spreading chaos. "If the God of Death aids us, I am pleased in it, and will ponder my confusion another day." He smiled and reached out to embrace his son while his wives and family looked on. "Now that we have days before us to ponder, and rejoice in our deliverance."

Th'End