The Journal of Alan Ledford

by Roger Ostrander

Let me introduce myself.

Captain Alan Ledford, freelance starship pilot extraordinaire. You'll never find a pilot more daring and adventurous than I! You can pay me less, too, because as a good guy I always work for what's right and good!

Now that we've placated the people who expect such qualities from their pilots, let me actually introduce myself.

Captain Alan Ledford, freelance starship pilot ordinare. People say I'm 'daring' and 'adventurous' but really it's more along the lines of 'want to get paid' and 'willing to go into hostile areas because that's where the money is.' The last bit about being a good guy is, as much as I like to project an embittered-mercenary-captain image, mostly true. I stay on the right side of the law. I take on the 'good' jobs like mail delivery and moving food supplies to backwater colony planets. I don't pirate.

Let me elaborate on that point. When people hear the phrase 'freelance starship pilot', they think 'pirate'. This is because that's what the movies call pirates. In these movies, there are always two pirates - one, the one we call the 'freelance pilot', the bad-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold that we know will always do the right thing, and the other, the truly evil pirate who we see at the beginning of the movie hijacking a shipment of puppies and then setting fire to the ship. Never do you see the actual freelance pilots, the ones who are doing boring things like resupplying trade convoys or haggling for a slightly better deal on bulk quantities of poorly-manufactured rice. That's what an actual freelance pilot does.

Now, you're probably asking yourself, "If this guy's so boring, why am I rifling through his memoirs?" Well for one thing, if you're reading this then I'm dead. Or possibly I've been captured by one of the many factions who hates me specifically or my species in general and you're the person they've assigned to find evidence against me. There stands a chance that you're a prankster practicing his slicing skills and you've managed to break into the computer I'm keeping the notes on and go through them. If that's the case, I commend you, because I stole the security technology from back when I was military years ago and I've been improving it ever since. So no, I will not hold the hackery against you.

Back to the point about being boring. Just because I'm on the level and an upstanding citizen hardly means that... well, it hardly means that I'm on the level or an upstanding citizen. Laws vary wildly from place to place and there's no way to be able to follow them all at once. I inadvertently smuggled forbidden goods into a sector once; after I learned that they were prohibited - certain religious artifacts, in this case - I made it a point to continue smuggling them. They were harmless, they brought good money, and they tweaked the nose of the various authorities who didn't want them around. All good reasons in my book.

There are also pirates. The real sort of pirates, the puppy-looting sort. When you're around for a while you know where they'll strike (borders, areas with underfunded patrols) and where they won't (central planets, heavily escorted convoys, anywhere they stand the remotest chance of being caught). Regardless, I've been in a few firefights. My ship was once a factory-original Merchant Cruiser. MCs, as a rule, do not generally carry weaponry. This is not to say that they're forbidden to, but it is frowned upon and of course there are the sectors which outlaw the practice entirely. My ship is packed to the gills with weaponry. Standard and non-standard lasers, launchers for missiles of all sorts - including a number of nukes and nastier items, the typical package of EM warfare gear, and a few little toys I'd either whipped up myself or kludged together based on half-remembered military technology. The first few times I encountered pirates, they took me for an unarmed cruiser. To get into certain sectors, after all, I had to project an aura of helplessness. It was, fortunately for me and unfortunately for them, a completely false aura. Strangely enough, I had little trouble with pirates after the first year or so of my freelance career. Word gets around.

Enough with the small talk. Let's get started.

Tennel Station, Day 0.

Like I mentioned before, one of the jobs I typically undertake is that of courier. The Tennel Postal Service is currently one of my best customers. They've got a border dispute going on over a planet they claim to have colonized. An adjacent empire is claiming it as theirs. Neither side has actually landed people on said planet, much less even considered that the atmosphere of the planet is poisonous to both their species, but it isn't my place to take sides in this affair. It's my place to go into the war zone, collect letters, and bring them home.

I am, thankfully, nearly done with this task. As dangerous as flying into a war zone sounds, Tennel has had so many border disputes with this particular empire that there's been a protocol for the whole event ironed out long ago, and everyone abides by it. Courier ships such as mine are allowed to pass through, collect mail from the central depot, and fly out without being bothered. Similarly, the mail we collect and deliver is personal mail. Delivery of intelligence, battle plans, and the like while under the flag of a courier is strictly forbidden and neither side would even think of it. Although I personally thought of the idea numerous times, I was rebuffed angrily whenever I brought up the topic and decided to just stick with the steady flow of money.

I've checked. Strictly speaking, it's against my contract to go snooping through the mail. However it's a long-standing facet of Tennellian society that the courier in any situation is entitled to read what he is delivering. The idea, I suppose, being that said courier can take pride in his work, knowing that real people and real families are depending on it. Instead, said courier gets bored. The letters that soldiers send back from the zone are nearly uniform in nature - unable to discuss battle plans with their families, they end up all asking the same questions. How is Timmy? How is Suzie? How is Scruffles, my lovable pet dog? How is the girl/guy/genderless creature I left back home but am eagerly awaiting upon my return?

Letters back to the war zone are the answers to these questions, and they too are all the same: Fine, fine, has fleas, has left you or is eagerly awaiting your return as well.

If I ever get caught, I can explain that I was simply indulging in Tennellian culture, and that reading their mail really does give me that extra motivation I need to go out there and get the job done. It's far nicer sounding than the truth, which is that I have very little better to do on these trips.

I've finally been cleared for boarding the station. Finally, my payday is soon!

--

"Soon" is a relative term. Once I'm cleared to be on the station, my job is to park the ship in a bay somewhere and then go away for a few hours. During this time, my ship will be searched for contraband and my cargo will be examined to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with.

Obviously, those charged with doing the preceding are not very good at their job. Like many stations, Tennel has outsourced the job of inspections to some corporation of theirs rather than relying on their military to do the job. Wanting to save as much money as possible, they went with the least expensive bid. Thus, amateur smugglers and mail-tamperers fall through the cracks. It's a sad system, but it's working for me.

Regardless of their ability to actually do the job they've been hired to do, they have an astounding ability to appear as though they're doing it, and doing it well. My ship is likely to be in inspection for the rest of the day. I'm recording this via a rental panel that I have, in a method of dubious legality, networked into my ship's computer. I'd like to take the opportunity to answer two questions you may be having. First, while I may be a smuggler and mail-tamperer and network-slicer and worst of all dis-respecter of the letter of the law, I still maintain that I am not that bad a guy. Secondly, yes, as this station orbits the world of Tennel and is one of its primary trading hubs, it is enormous and there is a great deal for me to do which would be preferential to recording notes through a clumsy rented panel. However, Tennellians communicate through flashes of light that not only can I not interpret or replicate or understand, but am also incapable of seeing most of the wavelengths of. The station population is overwhelmingly Tennellian as well. As you may imagine, my translator is on board the ship while underpaid technicians poke at it to ensure that it's not a bomb and that I haven't stashed whatever substances serve as drugs to their species somewhere inside it. Thus, note-taking while sitting in the waiting room is about the only recourse left to me. That, and I need something so I can keep my head down while the Tennellians talk to each other. The light gets dizzying after a while.

"Captain? You trader-captain?" the gratingly robotic voice of an extremely poorly maintained translator box sounds next to me. I look over and, sure enough, one of the natives is standing there clutching his box and staring into it, awaiting his answer.

I know what you're thinking now. You can read me just fine with your translator, after all, why is his translator doing such a horrible job? First of all, it's been through two translations, from his language to mine and from mine to yours. Secondly, while it's your job and mine to be able to understand anything we see and hear and therefore we make allowances in our budgets for top-of-the-line translation packages, most folks don't feel like spending that much money.

As for my suitor, I nodded to him in the vague hopes that he'd have a sophisticated enough box to understand what it meant. Judging by his lack of reply, he did not. I then shrugged, which for my species is the universal signal for "My translation box is stuck on board my ship due to underzealous inspectors wanting it to appear that they're overzealous and as a result I stand absolutely no chance of being able to communicate meaningfully with you"

That, he understood - even the poorest of rigs is geared up for that sort of signal. "Find me later. I employer number 9-1-4-1-7-1-1-2." and with that cryptic announcement, he slid off.

Employer number. That made a lot more sense. Every station's got millions of recruiters for companies local, global, and universal. Some have temporary jobs they want to give out, but most want full-time pilots who will fall in line and do exactly as they are told. As you may imagine, I'm not exactly their type. Still, I'd follow up once I got my box back, if for no other reason than to see what sort of outfit wouldn't spring for their recruiters to have modern functional translators. A company that doesn't care about its public image. My kind of place.

"Captain Ledford, we of the Tennel Inspection Service thank you for your patience in these times of crisis." the pleasant female voice piping over the loudspeakers is the same one I've heard on every station I'd ever been to. Whoever provided the voiceprint for the simulation must be a very, very rich woman. "We are pleased to inform you that our experts have discovered no contraband or tampering, and are pleased to have done business with you."

The public announcement of results was another custom of this particular empire. The idea being to reinforce the good or ill will that a pilot had engendered. It'd be embarrassing if anyone spoke my language or cared, but they don't so it just serves to let me know that I can go back to my ship, grab my translator, and have a conversation with a client.

--

"Captain Ledford, I am the Tennel representative for Borderlands Construction Corporation." Now that my translator was pulling its weight, the conversation was going quite a bit more smoothly. "We are seeking someone with combat experience to escort an important convoy of materials into a war zone."

That got my attention. I could tell from his tone - more accurately, my translator could tell by the hue of the flashes of light - that the war zone he had in mind was not exactly the sort of organized place the postal service had been sending me. Hell, the fact that they wanted combat experience and that their contract was in the Borderlands told me that much. Still, the mail delivery was little better than a milk-run and while I kept "combat experience" on my resume it'd been quite a while since I'd had to do anything. I'd gotten a bit rusty. I could use a workout. I was essentially rationalizing the fact that I was going to take the job the moment my translator hinted that it might be dangerous, and I knew it was rationalization, but hey, that's what I do when there's no good reason for me to take a dangerous job.

Still, I asked about the details.

"The star system of Poln is home to a small race that has recently discovered a method of faster than light travel. Their system is close to Anor, whose people are in a similar situation." My host wasn't blinking at all, so clearly this was a recorded briefing. I wondered how many had heard it before. "The two systems have had poor relations for quite some time now, and the people of Poln wish to increase the defensibility of their system. They are building a replacement for their Outward Station and have contracted with us to bring supplies. As the construction of this station is of utmost importance to the authorities of the system, they expect that their rivals will attempt to disrupt the shipment. You will be the leader of a squadron of three ships, also freelancers like yourself. Your contract will call for the protection of the shipment until it reaches the construction site on the edge of Polnian controlled space, and then you will be responsible for the delivery of the other freelancers to Poln."

It sounded like a mission rife for fun, but it doesn't do to appear over-enthusiastic. I asked, casually, what the mission was paying.

He answered.

I accepted immediately.

Lane 971, Day 1

I briefly met with the pilots of the tugs that would be dragging the multiple millions of tons of raw materials and equipment. Not a Tenellian among them, thankfully, as my head already ached from the conversation earlier that day. Half of them I couldn't even identify the species of, though a little time at the computer would remedy that. One thing I could tell, however, was that they were all native to the Borderlands.

The Borderlands - at least, these particular borderlands, there are about 1200 different areas by that name - were an area on the edge of the Anashi Conglomerate, a loose grouping of star systems and species that's about as organized as the name implies. They're the border between the conglomerate and the vast Unsettled Areas. In actuality, the aforementioned areas call themselves the Torkund Collective and refer to the Conglomerate as unsettled. There's a long and tedious story behind why the two refuse to acknowledge each other, and while I won't bother putting it all here I will likely get bored enough during the trip to read the whole thing.

Yes, bored. I signed on for this venture in the hopes that I'd get to see a little bit of excitement out here. Instead, it turns out that there's no offensives planned against either the station or the people building it, my employers knew this fact all along, and it was in fact their policy to have an experienced combat pilot along for insurance purposes and to teach the new kids a thing or two.

Yeah, new kids. While the tug captains were all old hands at their job, the other three escorts were not. The company was looking for someone experienced because nobody else given the job of protecting the cargo was.

In other words, I was flying with rookies.

Now, there are certain advantages to flying alongside newbies. For one thing, anything I say to them becomes gospel. This isn't because I'm famous, or even because they know who I am, but just because of the fact that I'm old and have been doing this a while, and must therefore have some sort of idea what's going on. This means that, any time I talk to them, they are impressed. The topic doesn't matter - I shared my stories about the postal service deliveries with them, and they were gaping in awe of my prowess. I didn't exaggerate, either. I told them what I'd written down here. And I'm not exaggerating here, as it happens, because why would I bother keeping a journal if I'm not going to keep an accurate one?

There are certain disadvantages to flying with rookies as well, I've discovered. For one, they never have anything interesting to say. If I'm lucky, this means that they'll realize this fact and keep quiet. If I'm not, they will think that I want to hear every event in their life, perhaps as a way of re-living my earlier days. I don't need them for that, that's part of the reason I'm keeping the journal. The journal's quieter and shuts up when I want it to, too.

Other disadvantages include the fact that they've got questions. These questions are either going to be extremely basic - ones they should already know the answers to before they even step into a cockpit - or so bizarre as to make no sense whatsoever. As an example of the first, one pilot asked me earlier for the best mixture of air for a combat situation. Forgetting the fact that his atmosphere and biology are entirely different from mine and therefore I'd have no idea, there's also the little tidbit that his on-board computer has this information. An example of the second would be the poor misguided pilot who asked me if the dirt tasted different on different worlds. At first I took it for a translator mistake, but no, that's actually what he asked.

The point is, as soon as the novelty of being able to have people pay attention to my stories wears off - from experience, this will not take long - I'm going to start getting really annoyed at my charges.

The communicator is blinking while I'm entering this. I'm informed that it's the dirt-tasting pilot, the one I've named Moe. My translator is top-of-the-line, but all translators have a soft spot when it comes to names. They either translate to some sort of gibberish phrase which is hardly useful as a name or they give up completely. Mine is the former, but I've hacked it around enough so that it lets me give names to individuals and then sticks by them. My three cohorts are Larry, the obvious-answer asking one, Curly, the quiet one who's bugged me the least of the three and therefore in my opinion has the greatest potential, and Moe, the dirt-eater.

"Captain Ledford," Moe asked, "What if - what if one of us turned out to be an Anor spy!? Wouldn't that be cool? The rest of us would have to hunt him down!"

No, we wouldn't. I didn't care if one of the pilots were a spy from the other side. I was reasonably sure that this was not the case, as none of them were even familiar with either Poln or Anor and, like me, couldn't care less about whatever dispute they had. Even if one had been a spy, however, my job was to escort the cargo and protect it, and since the job of the spy in this situation would just be to gather information, I likely wouldn't care.

I only said a little bit of that, and I coached it in kinder terms, but Moe got the hint and stopped bugging me. The communicator light remained off for an entirety of thirty seconds before I got a call from Larry.

"Captain Ledford, sir," Larry was trying to look very professional and it was all I could do to stifle laughter. "I've been looking at our course along lane 971 here, and I've found it brings us very close to the Yotian Anomaly. Do you want me to figure out an alternate course?"

Larry was obviously very proud at having found a flaw in my course, but there were two problems with his reasoning. The first being that it wasn't my course at all, but rather the Borderlands Construction Corporation's course that they'd handed down from on high. The second problem was that he had succumbed to the public's view of the Anomaly, which was that it was a horrible scar in space from which nobody returned alive. This was only half true - it was indeed a horrible scar in space, but they wouldn't be able to place a lane anywhere near it if it had even a tenth of the horrible power it's reputed to have. I gently broke the news to Larry and he not-so-gently terminated the communication.

Ah yes, here comes the second part of Fun With Rookies, wherein they decide that you're just an old man who rambles too much and is out to quash their fun. At least it's quieter.

Yotian Anomaly, Day 3

The chatter over the open communicator lines was getting to be annoying. Larry and Moe were swapping their favorite ghost stories about this particular part of space. You know, the ones where a ship vanishes into it but on dark long trips like this one, a faint sensor echo can be found....

For fun at one point I faked a sensor echo on Moe's readout, and he nearly had a heart attack or the equivalent for his species. Moe and Larry summarily ignored me after that, which was even better than what I was aiming for.

The tug captains were also talking to each other, but their conversation was very loudly about anything that was not the anomaly. They'd made the trip by it a few times, and they like many a pilot regarded it with a bit of superstitious reverence. Best not to mention it, the thought went, lest you call its attention to yourself.

The only people not talking were myself and Curly. Curly no doubt thought that if his squad leader weren't talking, there was a darn good reason for it and he should follow in that example. Like I said, the kid's got potential. Reminds me of myself when I was that age. Of course, in this particular reasoning, he was wrong.

I just wasn't saying anything because the anomaly creeped me the hell out.

I'll describe it for those of you who haven't seen it personally or caught one of the many movies in which it is featured: Imagine a large, irregular scar in the fabric of space. There's blackness inside and often a dark, swirling violet. Stars can't usually be seen through it but occasionally they are visible - and when visible, they do not resemble the stars that one should be seeing through it. Early after the incident that created it, it was thought that the anomaly was actually a stable wormhole. This was later found to not be the case by the brave exploratory crews who neglected to re-enter normal space at any point. Anything that enters the anomaly either stays wherever it leads or vanishes from existence.

Because chances are good that, to you, this anomaly is just one among many and you likely don't particularly want to look this up and lose your place, (and, if your job is to extract information from this text for evidence against me, your job) I'll explain how Yotia came about.

War, as you've probably noticed already, takes a number of different forms out here. The war between Tennel and its neighbor has a number of rules designed to limit how it spills over to the civilian population, while systems like Poln and Anor just beat the stuffing out of each other. The two species involved in the conflict over the Yotia system - one of them, I'm not proud to admit, was mine - had rules leaning closer to the Tennellian philosophy. One species had developed a superweapon that could wipe out entire planets - not just render them uninhabitable, because the universe is full of weapons like that, but actually physically destroy the planet. Naturally, while use of such a weapon on an inhabited planet was banned by any number of accords which went beyond this particular conflict, merely the threat of such a thing was enough to end the war right there. So the species decided to demonstrate it on Yotia IV, the uninhabited neighbor to the contested (and populated) Yotia III.

As you can guess by the fact that the entire system has been replaced with a gateway to nothingness, the weapon did not work as intended. Rather, it worked, but entirely too well. It consumed the planet it was placed upon and then proceeded to grow unchecked. While an evacuation of the third planet was undertaken, it had a population of some twelve billion, and it was impossible to get everyone out in time. Fully half the people on the planet died. Naturally, the species with the weapon was condemned roundly by everyone, and lost the war by default. Furthermore, they were forced off of their own planet, which the relocated Yotians would now call home. Punishment for war crimes are like that; the entire species is held at fault for their commission. The rationale being that, if everyone gets punished for such a thing, there will be no encouragement for it from the public, and anyone who attempts to do so in secret will be swiftly found out.

The anomaly is still growing, as it happens. Lane 971 has been moved a number of times to a more safe distance and will eventually be entirely useless as a travel lane at all. The gravity that the system used to have appears to be gone, thus supporting the 'gateway to nothingness' theory, but the anomaly causes easily twice the problems that gravity would. For one, it has a nasty effect on navigational sensors, and tends to lead ships that think they're traveling along the lane directly into it instead. I don't have that problem, of course. As soon as we got remotely close to this place, I pointed the ship in one direction, set it heading that way, and shuttered every sensor I have on this ship.

I don't need to see this place again.

Outward Station Construction Site, Day 9

The newbies had gone from a state of awe to a state of disrespect and back twice during the duration of the trip. While I realize that the children are indeed the future and we need them or else there will be no more sentient life, I despair utterly at their annoyance. It's safe to say that I'm not exactly a family man. I don't know what to do with kids. The fact that, by the various standards of their species, my squad-mates were in fact adults has no effect on this particular feeling. I measure maturity by experience, for the most part, and nearly everyone in the flight business long-term does so as well. This works mainly because immature pilots tend not to advance in this career after a while, either because nobody will work with them or they say the wrong thing to the wrong people and cease to advance in a more permanent fashion.

"New Outward Station" is being built as I type this up. It's going to be, judging from the incomplete shell, the typical sort of enormous station that species new to interstellar travel build. This is to make up for the fact that they really don't know what they're doing when it comes to stations. More experienced species build their stations as small as possible, to cut down on maintenance coasts and to annoy freelance pilots who stop by there and have to duck to be able to navigate the halls.

Also, I'd like to take a moment of your time and yet more space in storage to complain about naming systems. While the actual name of this station probably sounds inspiring to the species that named it, and likely has all sorts of subtleties, my translator reduces it to "New Outward Station."

I would make a conservative estimate that there are around several trillion stations that share that name. I could ask the computer if I wanted to find out for sure, but it likely wouldn't know and would have to go ask the Library, this far out from civilization it would take forever and cost a ton, and I just don't care enough. The point is, nearly nobody names things originally. If the translator gives me a name for a station that ends up being "Small night-blooming flower native to the planet this station orbits found only in the high reaches of the southern hemisphere during the correct season", it's not a name I'm going to keep using but it at least shows that they gave naming it some thought. Those stations that aren't named "Outward Station" "Border Station" "Station for the Inspection of Others" and such are nearly always named after the planet they orbit, and if the species is native to that planet, that name is always "Dirt". So there are even more Dirt Stations than there are Outward Stations.

I'm not entirely blameless in this, of course. I named my ship after a planet, too, so I am, of course, flying around in a starship named Dirt. Still, my ship's name is inspiring to me, and has all sorts of subtleties!

In other news, the first part of my contract is now officially complete. The construction security team for the station has taken over responsibility for the tugs, and now the only thing I need to do is get the newbies over to Poln so they can go about doing that mercenary thing that they would not likely do very well. Oh, I know, the contract didn't say a thing about mercenaries. For all I know the people of Poln want them to congratulate them on a job well done. That, of course, is entirely unlikely. It's the middle of a war for them, and they got some newbie pilots on contract to do some dirty work. Luckily, my contract just has me getting them there. Otherwise, I don't even have to get involved. Oh, I'm sure I could command a high price if I felt like flying a few sorties, but the problem with mercenary work is that you're likely to get yourself killed. Besides, the real money is in smuggling.

Poln, Day 12

Since I started this journal of mine, I've made an attempt to keep it updated on a semi-regular basis. I can do this because I'm the captain - and, as it happens, only crew mate of - the ship containing said journal. Furthermore, I'm not usually away from the ship for long periods of time. It's my primary mode of transportation, on-world and off, and even when I'm on a station or dirtside wandering around there's always a way to get to the ship's storage and make a recording. So it's pretty easy for me to stay up to date.

Except, of course, when you're under contract to deliver mercenaries to the middle of a war zone, and said war zone is very very active whereas it was explained to you that said war zone would not, in fact, be a war zone at all. In that case, it's your job to land your ship halfway around the planet so you don't get shot down by anti-spacecraft missiles and then try to sneak your charges behind enemy lines, all the while being sought after as a fugitive.

The Anor, it seemed, had decided not to put their productivity into re-building stations that their arch-nemeses had destroyed long ago. Instead, they'd refined their FTL engines. Now, it appeared, instead of needing a direct unobstructed passage to where they wanted to go, they could just appear there instantly.

Earlier I'd mentioned that the two species had discovered a form of faster than light travel. I say "a" form because there are about twelve hundred ways to get around the whole 'speed of light is absolute' restriction. The Poln were satisfied with the one they had, while the Anor, I suppose, felt like branching out. The result was that Poln was under heavy attack when I arrived.

It bears mentioning at this point that I'd previously assumed relations between the two planets were just now souring. The briefing had said that they'd developed their methods of travel and then started fighting. This, apparently, was not the case. Relations between Poln and Anor had been bad ever since one (it was not clear who) had sent a probe to the other that the other had percieved as a threat and destroyed. They'd been sending sub-light-speed weaponry and, on rare occasions, personnel in hibernation against each other for nearly a century now. Had they not discovered FTL travel nearly simultaneously, one would have swiftly overtaken the other the moment they could. In other words, it was an old old war and I had stepped right into the middle of it.

My first clue that something was wrong was the blockade. That and the incoming fire from Anor patrol ships. My squadmates exited the lane before I did, so there was time for me to wonder at the sudden silence on the comm before all hell broke loose. The Anor had word of my contract - not specifically me, as many such contracts to supply troops to Poln had been signed and many subsequent delivery attempts stopped - and so had patrol ships near the lane exits to politely request that such contracts be carefully reconsidered. It was, of course, much faster and easier to communicate this through low-yield blaster fire than it would be to engage the translators and actually speak to people.

All three of my squadmates, of course, panicked immediately. I couldn't blame them, of course, as they had been rather unreasonably assuming that mercenary work would somehow not involve being shot at and here they were already being given warning shots by the patrols they were supposed to evade.

Initial salvo over, a recorded warning informed me that I was escorting mercenaries into a war zone in violation of the "We don't want extra soldiers fighting ours" policy and that if I were to turn my charges over to the patrol ships immediately, they could guarantee a certain amount of leniency when it came time to sentence me for said violation. This was followed by recordings of prisoners who had done as the Anor had asked and were being treated fairly and well. My computer was helpful enough to point out that these recordings had been falsified. Wonderful.

I got on the comm to my squadmates and ordered them to stand down. The reply to this was a resounding stream of translated curse words from Larry and Moe - nothing translates more amusingly than curse words - and a complete systems shutdown by Curly. The other two seeing their friend obey my order had apparently decided that being outnumbered 10,002 to two, they should likely also stand down.

"Keep your inertial cancelers on" I reminded them. This was also replied to with a stream of increasingly creatively translated slurs against my species, but was likewise obeyed. The inertial cancelers would keep the ships from drifting and thus make them easier to board. As for myself, I turned to the navigation computer.

"We thank you, mercenary squad, for obeying our order. Stay in place as we board your-"

We went hyper.

I'd like to take yet another moment of your time - after all, it's your job, where else are you going to go? - and say a word about the faster than light drives that my particular ship has. Your typical merchant cruiser, after all, has the Lane Drive that allows it to travel along the preconstructed FTL lanes that are typical in this part of the universe. When I said 'drives', however, I meant to use the plural sense. I've got the Lane Drive, I've got the Sleeper Drive, and I've got Hyperdrive. The first I already mentioned, the second one you don't have to sleep through but usually end up doing so because you're using it to go somewhere far away and not Laned, and the last is popular where there are no Lanes, and usually very very illegal in the areas that have them. The reason, of course, is that it doesn't have to travel along predescribed routes or even to known destinations. The Anor had discovered a very primitive version of this drive that let them appear where they wanted to. Mine had thousands more years of engineering behind it, in addition to the little tweaks I'd added. I'm no hyperspace expert, of course, but I know how to get more out of machines.

More, in this case, meant that not only I but also my squadmates were transported by the hyperdrive. Our destination was a few billion miles away on the planet surface. Sleeper drive would have taken but a few minutes to get there, but we'd have been shot to bits by the Anor patrol before we even engaged it. The Anor wouldn't even be able to trace my drive, nor would they suspect that I'd use it to bring the four of us to a spot about ten meters over the planet surface as their drive wasn't fine-tuned enough to allow such a thing and, as far as they were concerned, we had a drive just like theirs.

In other words, I'd just escaped using a better version of their own trick, and they had no idea how.

--

The Anor were furious. In the time between our interception by the patrol and the computer's completion of the proper sequence of commands to send the hyperdrive, I'd tuned the comm to listen in on their ship to ship traffic. It was pretty routine in the few minutes we'd spent out there. Even our interception didn't generate a whole lot of excitement; apparently a number of contracts had been trickling in for some time now. This relative quiet on the comm was shattered utterly when we vanished. I shook off the typical disorientation of a jump and spent a few moments listening to the sudden surge of traffic. The translator was quite capable of keeping up with everything that was being said up there, but I of course couldn't listen to it all at once. I just had the swearing translated.

The other three had no clue what was going on. I suppose they thought that this had been done by their would-be captors, and they were awaiting a proper fate. I tuned the comm to a channel I was reasonably certain neither the Poln nor Anor had the ability to detect and got ahold of my squadmates. This time I also recieved a stream of swear words, but they were of the positive variety. Along the lines of "That was a present-tense verb indicating vulgar reproductive act great escape!" and "Those Anor must be really past-tense verb indicating urination!"

I walked them through procedure for landing ships quietly in a war zone, which was very new for all of them as to date they'd only had to dock at friendly stations. I then introduced them to stealthing technology which, considering the technology level of those trying to find us, mainly consisted of turning the ships off. I downloaded all the maps I could fit onto one of the portable panels - considering how I didn't especially want to broadcast my position any more than I could help it, I'd have had to not contact the computer.

In short, that's the reason I haven't updated lately. That, and the orbital bombardment.

When I saw the plumes of fire and smoke following small specks of light in the sky, I knew instantly what they were. The Anor, either as part of a continued offensive against the planet or because they'd grown tired of their blockade, had just dropped about ten thousand sub-nuclear weapons from orbit. I hadn't been worried when I took the job, and I had only been mildly worried when we were approached by the blockade, but now I was very worried indeed. Had I known at the time that the weapons being dropped were not sub-nuclear but in fact full fusion bombs of the 'planet buster' variety, I would have relaxed somewhat, as at least then the end would be swift.

An orbital bombardment is usually a message to those defending a planet. That message tends to be along the lines of "We can drop anything we want anywhere on your planet, and there's nothing you can do about it." Because the attackers tend to want to take over the planet, they usually drop said bombardment in the middle of a wilderness somewhere. A wilderness like the one I'd landed the ships in.

I had not yet at the time fully grasped the animosity between the Poln and the Anor. The bombardment was not a demonstration, it was an actual attack designed to cause as much damage to the population of the planet as possible. Thus, rather than blowing us to kingdom come, the nukes headed toward nearby cities.

"Nearby" being a relative term. I could barely make out a blue haze on the horizon that the ship's sensors indicated was a city-sized shielding unit. The viewscreen went dark momentarily to blot out the fireball of light that, had I been looking at it with my bare eyes, would likely have burned them from their sockets.

Truthfully, I was more than a little thankful that the viewscreen had blanked itself out. I wouldn't have to look at the outdoors and know I'd be going there soon. I, like most pilots, have a touch of agoraphobia; large open spaces are not our friends. This seems counterintuitive, given that we work in the largest, most open space that exists, but it makes sense when you consider that for the most part we're comparatively tightly enclosed by our ships and, on occasion, stations.

More than anything else, I wanted to fire up the ship's engines and fly to one of those cities, drop off my squadmates, collect my money, and get the hell out of this system before it killed me. There were many subtle flaws in this plan, however. If the Anor didn't detect my ship flying around and destroy it from above, the Poln would assume that it was an attacking ship and attempt to destroy it from below. The best bet was to take the cadets and walk to the nearest city which, judging from the amount of time between the blast of light and the ear-rupturing cacaphony that followed, was quite some distance away.

Fortunately, a few things had gone in our favor. For one, the city was still there - or at least, the shield maintaining it was holding. Another excellent turn of luck was the the atmosphere was breathable by every one of us, with the caveat that I personally would have to take a breath from a de-toxifying canister every ten minutes or various poisons in the atmosphere would build up in my body and kill me painfully. I have many such canisters, as my particular blend of atmosphere is fairly rare. Gravity was somewhat higher than me and Larry were used to, and somewhat lower than Curly was used to, but since the options were to quickly become used to it or die, we would become used to it.

I sent one last message to the other members of the squad telling them to download anything they'd want onto a panel and then shut their ships down. We had a walk to make.

--

Each of our ships had various emergency supplies. Larry and his buddies had to bring their own food, as none of us could stomach either the native food or the supplies that the others had brought with them. Camping equipment, the portable panels, and the large number of maps were all supplied by me, however. The rookies had brought very little with them, apparently having presumed that nothing bad would happen in their mercenary career until they actually got started fighting.

Or, the more cynical side of me insisted, they knew that they weren't coming back.

That probably wasn't the case, especially not for Larry or Moe. Larry was constantly talking to me about how reproductive actingly cool our escape was, and Moe was asking me questions about the various life-forms he saw around him. We'd landed in a temperate zone, and it was my hope that the thick canopy would shield us from at least visual spotting by the Anor ships, but the downside to this was that Moe practically demanded everything be identified. The only information about local life-forms I'd downloaded to the panel was which ones were safe to eat, so I had no clue. Still, it's boring walking constantly toward some city that never seems to get any closer, so I happily made up names and stories for each and every of the plants we passed. I pointed out the Luminous Restel, whose glowing phosphorescence at night lures bugs to it, whereupon they are eaten by the zznorm - my name for the tiny insectivore creatures which tend to burrow under the Restel. The zznorm then proceed to fertilize the plant via its natural waste products, and the great cycle of life continues. This was, of course, entirely made up. Xenobiology is about as far as you can get from my area of expertise. I knew tech stuff, I knew piloting, and I don't have a whole lot of spare time given the first two. It's hard to attend courses to learn how to pick up an additional hobby when my cargo has to be several light years from here very soon, after all.

At least this time, my 'cargo' could walk on its own. If I'd had to choose between dragging crates to the city or risking detection by firing up a cart, I'd have had a very serious dilemma on my hand.

Curly was being even more taciturn than usual. He didn't look very well either, but as I'm still to this day not very familiar with his species there wasn't any real basis for this judgement. He might always look slightly yellow.

I discovered later that night that Curly was, in fact, not very well at all. Unfamiliar though I am with their species, I'm guessing that they are ordinarily able to walk without suddenly losing all balance. Curly seemed to be an exception. We slept in shifts that night, and when he got up for his, he made enough noise tripping over himself and the rest of the camp that it rapidly became clear that someone was going to have to do an extra shift or nobody would sleep from that point onward. I volunteered - the day/night cycle of this planet was a little shorter than I was used to, so I was not entirely tired yet. I also tried to have a little conversation with Curly, but all I managed to get out of him was a murmured apology for the racket, and that only via his translator. I just figured he was unnerved in some way by either the blockade escape earlier or our current situation. It wasn't nearly as dire as it seemed, and I would have explained that to him had he been willing to listen, but all he wanted to do was get back to his tent.

Poln, Continent of SouthMirror, Day 13

It turns out I was right about Curly being affected by the blockade, but not quite in the way that I'd envisioned. When Larry woke me up at the beginning of what I'd declared to be 'morning', I proceeded to wake up Moe and Curly. Moe was already up and examining a clod of soil very closely. I hadn't yet seen him actually attempt to taste it, but there was definitely some part of me that had a sick fasination with wanting to see it when it happened. Curly, on the other hand, took quite some time to rouse. He was incoherent until he got his translator, which is somewhat of an oddity as mine is usually good enough to translate for someone who doesn't have theirs.

"I need to rest." he declared. "I haven't slept yet."

This was patently false. His entire species snores, so we had ample evidence that he had, indeed, slept that night. It took a bit of time to convince him that this was the case, but eventually he grudgingly agreed to help pack up and come with us.

It was late afternoon when he fell again. At first, I thought nothing of it. The path we were following through the jungle-like area we had landed ourselves in was growing slowly more impassable, and I had on more than one occasion caught myself about to fall. I never actually did, though, and that's something I should have thought about. Instead, I helped him up, examined him for injuries, and set us all on our way again. It happened again near nightfall, and I blamed lack of light. I didn't want to call camp too early - our supplies were relatively plentiful but I didn't feel that we should take chances - so again I had us keep going. The third time he fell, we all stopped and made camp. Curly didn't get back up; Larry and myself carried him to his tent where he could continue his sleep in peace.

"He's got the Twist pretty bad." Larry said quietly, looking back at the tent we'd just deposited his friend in. Then, finally, it all made sense.

The Twisting Disease. Despite the thousands of years that hyperspace technology has been around in one form or another, there are aspects of it that are still unknown. For instance, there is a brief instant of time during which the passengers in such a transport do not exist at all. Nobody knows what happens in that time, but what we do know is that some species take being temporarily nonexistent better than others. It never affected me at all, for instance. Others - Moe, for instance, had briefly alluded to this - experienced nausea or disorientation for a short while afterwards. Some species temporarily blacked out. In most cases, the effects were indeed temporary and minor, but not in all. Some species were especially susceptible to the disorienting effects of Hyperspace. For them, it does permanent damage to the chemical balance in their brain (or, I suppose, whatever the equivalent for them). Symptoms typically include disorientation, missing periods of time in memory, inability to reason, and eventually coma. Those species susceptible did not recover from the Twisting disease; their condition often worsened until they died.

Curly had a suddenly very finite amount of time left to live.

Poln, Continent of SouthMirror, Day 14

I couldn't be sure, of course, that he was going to die. Even species susceptible to the Twist vary widely in their reactions. Some vary to the point that one person is unaffected while another dies instantly. For species which have yet to discover any other method of faster than light travel, this is often a very tough decision. Luckily, mine didn't have to cope with it. Unluckily, I did have to cope with Curly.

He didn't wake up in the morning. I knew nothing of his physiology and hadn't thought to download anything on the matter from the ship when I'd had the chance, so there was no way for me to know how well he was faring. He was still breathing, though. In the first aid supplies, however, there was an expandable stretcher - one of the few such devices to be nearly universal across species. Larry and Moe agreed to carry their friend instantly, and didn't argue the point for a moment. They'd been quiet all day. Not even their near-escape from the blockade had rattled them as much as they were affected now. Blockades, at least, they'd had some training on how to run. This, though, this was something new and deadly and while they knew it couldn't get to them (after all, if they were susceptible they'd be in much the same state) it did make them suddenly aware of their mortality. So very few words were said, but many an afraid glance was passed between the two stretcher bearers, and many an unhappy glance was passed to me when they assumed I was not looking.

They blamed me for this, it was clear. They were right to, of course, as it was entirely my fault; while I'd planned to do some reading on each of their species along the way, I'd instead decided it would be much more entertaining to re-tune the sleeper drive on-board. The computer would have had all sorts of information on whether or not it was a good idea to bring them through hyperspace. Nothing would have changed, though; based on my impression of the Anor they were not in the least sympathetic to the Poln or their cause, and would probably treat any prisoners they caught, mercenary or native, very poorly. Assuming that they survived at all. Thus, I still would have took us all into hyperspace, Curly would likely die, the rest would blame me and I'd blame myself. In other words, nothing would have changed and I'd be feeling even guiltier. Not, really, that this line of thought was easing my mind at all.

Miraculously, Curly did wake up near about the halfway point of the day. He was wearing his translator but still wasn't making much sense. He referred to me as his father and seemed to think that Larry and Moe were his sisters. He proceeded to tell them about his journey to Poln, only events seemed to always end with them crash-landing on the surface. After this recitation, he would be quiet for a few minutes and then respond to any of us speaking with the same story. The upside of this was that it was easier to get him to eat and drink. Aside from the dementia, he seemed well. Of course, dementia itself is almost always a bad sign. Very few species experienced it as a healthy part of their life. Given that Curly had been the most dependable of my three charges and hadn't seemed to change until he'd been affected by the Twist, I was guessing that this was not the case for him.

There was a loud crack of thunder in the sky - at least, I thought it was thunder until I looked up to see that there were no clouds anywhere. Instead, I spotted about a half dozen aircraft flying toward the city we were making our destination. My panel made a noise of alarm and I looked down to see that, sure enough, its rudimentary sensor equipment had identified the airships: Anor.

They hadn't spotted us, of course, or else they would have destroyed us before we'd even heard the sonic boom that followed after their travel. There was little else to do but continue the move toward our nearest city and hope that it was still there when we arrived.

Curly had started his story again, only this time instead of us meeting our maker via crashing into the planet, an earthquake formed a fissure which swallowed us up. I didn't like where his thoughts were going.

Poln, Continent of SouthMirror, Day 15

Curly did not sleep at all that night. He remained perfectly quiet unless disturbed, whereupon he would begin his story over again. He did not speak loud enough to disturb those of us who were sleeping at the time, so whoever had the watch would tend to get Curly started so that he could hear the pilot's speech and thus know that he hadn't suddenly passed away. By the time I awoke in the morning, the ending of the tale had changed yet again; we died of starvation, traveling a dusty featureless plain from which there was no escape or even direction. According to Larry this was just the latest in a series of changes - overnight the ending had gone from the quake to a flood, and then from a flood to some sort of rotting plague. I personally was glad I'd missed the more detailed version of that ending, as I was rather hungry upon waking and didn't particularly want the appetite ruined.

Planes had passed overhead once again during the night while it was my shift. I assumed they had been the only ones, as the sonic boom almost certainly would have wakened me. Again they had showed no interest in our small group. Given that the first wave had not returned, I was hopeful that our city had survived the onslaught. We really had no choice, though. After a short and silent breakfast, we all continued along the path. Curly had fallen into unconsciousness again. I'd have much rather heard increasingly bad endings than have him become one.

One hour before sunset, the jungle abruptly ended. There was a stark line that divided it and the plain of short, cropped grass that made up the whole of the terrain from that point on. The dirt path turned into a paved road which lead directly into the city no more than a half mile ahead. The throbbing blue of its shield had not diminished at all in the past few days, and the panel confirmed my suspicion; the shielding of the city had not been damaged in the least.

Just outside of the blue of the shield, a mass of anti-aircraft equipment was pointed upward. A number of missile launchers - three quarters of which were obviously capable of reaching orbit - kept them company. None of the rockets appeared to have been fired yet, mysteriously. Even more surprisingly, there was little sign of troops or artillery - the city seemed woefully unprepared for a ground assault. All the more reason to do this very carefully. I punched a few buttons on the panel and explained to the remainder of my squad that I'd used a low-power narrowcast transmission toward the city to alert whoever was there to our presence. Given that none of us looked to be even remotely Poln nor Anor, chances were good that we'd be taken for what we were: mercenaries. I had a blaster, however, the technology of which was likely far enough in advance of theirs to negate any defenses they might have, and I also had a jungle's worth of cover behind me, so it could be said that I did have a plan in case the first idea didn't work out even if it were a rather rudimentary one.

A hatch opened up in one of the buildings near the city, and some sort of vehicle sped out of it. It was going faster than I'd have given it credit for, though a moment later I realized it didn't have wheels and was instead coasting about a foot off the ground. I motioned Moe and Curly to take cover and hide Larry somewhere. This was mainly because I knew I'd react faster to take cover than either of the others, and so it should be me taking point.

"Identify yourself!" the hovercraft demanded, still speeding toward us.

The translator indicated that there was not another translating unit on the other side of this conversation, and thus it was having to do all the work and could not guarantee that the translation quality would be as good as I was accustomed to. Hopefully this didn't mean it would get us into a fire-fight by mistranslating an innocent comment. To be fair, however, that'd only happened twice before. I replied something along the lines that I was under contract to deliver some personnel and we needed medical assistance.

The hovercraft continued speeding toward us, showing no sign of even slowing down. Moments before I was about to dive out of the way, it stopped abruptly. When I say 'abruptly', I mean that one moment it was headed full speed toward us, and the next it had stopped completely. There was no discernible deceleration. The sort of technology which would allow that was typically only usable in space, which made me wonder if I had severely underestimated the inventiveness of the Poln. Should they survive their current war, there might be quite a bit of money to be made in shipping their technology elsewhere.

"Command reports you to be the first contract to have appeared." The tall figure of a native Polnian stepped out of the hovercraft and looked through me to the woods. "Where are your charges?"

I motioned them forward and indicated Curly, then gave the being which would hopefully be our new host a quick run-down of events since we had entered the system. He didn't seem to quite understand the concept of the Twist, but he got the parts about going to a hospital. He motioned us inside the hovercraft and we sped back toward the city. At no point was there a sensation of acceleration, or even movement. I was going to make a fortune off of these people.

Poln, City of DayShade, Day 20

These people were going to be my financial ruin.

First of all, the technology I was so keen on trafficking in was a bust. It turned out that all their neat tricks were gravitic. They'd mastered control over gravity - many species do at some point - and if their progress continued along these lines they'd discover in about a hundred years why species tend to not go any farther. Planetary-bound redirection of gravity tended to have destabilizing effects on said planet's orbit. Less fortunate civilizations have had their planets spin off into their suns or out beyond the bounds of their solar system. I could warn the Poln to these problems, but there's really no point. Gravitic defenses are all that's keeping them from being overwhelmed by the Anor, and that was unlikely to be a permanent situation - especially once they figured out how to use such technology offensively. The Poln did not want their planet doomed to the fiery guts of a star, but they held their enemy's planet in about the same regard as their enemy did theirs. It would be an interesting war and I personally was glad that, very soon, I was going to be nowhere near it.

The second reason why this is costing me is that the contract did specify that I had to bring all three pilots to the planet in good condition. Curly wasn't dead - thankfully - but by the time he had finished the heavy regimen of therapy and micro-reconstructive surgery on his brain that would be required for him to be able to function again, years would have passed. I was only getting paid for the other two.

I could have made up this cash - and then some - by letting the Polnian research crew have my hyperdrive. They were the first people to greet me upon my arrival in the city, before even the ambulance for Curly. Our driver had radioed back his best guess at what we had said - my translator felt like it was nearly overheating with effort - and apparently the story of the Anor drive had spread. They seemed to think we had stolen one of their enemy's rigs. Had that actually been the case I wouldn't have minded parting with it, but my rig was centuries more advanced. I figured the war was bloody enough as it was without me giving them more weaponry. Besides. non-interference laws are entirely too strict (and nearly universal) on the matter of selling advanced technology to comparatively primitive cultures. A pilot who violates them tends to make a number of enemies both in law enforcement and - more worrying - in the underground criminal syndicates whose toes I would be stepping on. Besides, it's my policy to only smuggle harmless things.

I spent the next few days informing the research crew what parts of my ship they could take with them for profit (none of it), checking up on Curly, and haggling over my contract with the Borderlands Construction rep. In other words, it was a rather bitter parting. Larry and Moe still blamed me, of course, and now that they were out of immediate danger and therefore no longer really needed my help in order to survive, they had decided that they weren't speaking to me anymore. At the beginning of the journey this would of course not have bothered me in the least, but right now it was just reminding me at the damage I'd done. There's usually a subtle feeling of accomplishment at the end of any contract - even milk runs like the postal service tend to leave me with a 'good job' feeling. This one was just leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth and a pressing need to go somewhere else and put all of this behind me.

My ship was returned to me on this last day; it turns out that flying it to the city would have been a perfectly safe undertaking so long as I'd been broadcasting who I was and hadn't flown above a few miles or so. Apparently the Poln had managed a gravitic planetary shield which was in place at some non-specific altitude. Anything passing through it would be violently hurled to the ground. Even if I'd managed to run the blockade, it seemed, I would have had to use the hyperdrive. This information did nothing for me now, of course, and in no way lessoned the crushing responsibility I felt and would feel for a good long week or so before I forgot. Before uploading the part of this record I'd been keeping on the panel I gave one last goodbye to Larry and Moe, even though I knew they wouldn't return it, and I left an account on Curly's ship computer of my side of the story so at least he'd know what I'd been trying to do (i.e. not get him killed)

--

Writing from the ship now. I'm in orbit, the Anor ships are converging on me with vengeance on their minds, and I'm sick of this place and never want to come back.

I'm hitting the Random button.

<!--

Here's the point at which Ledford's various paranoias start to become justified. Though we aren't watching him just yet, we were on his trail. As neither the Poln nor Anor had formally petitioned us to help mediate their dispute, there was no action we could take besides our usual discouraging of mercenaries jumping to one cause or the other. We hadn't even had to take this measure, as the Anor blockade was very effective in this. Until, of course, the captain had somehow succeeded where all others failed. As you know, the trail grew cold here, but it was the first real lead we'd had for a while. The various postal services were too low profile for him to appear on the radar, though if we'd known we'd likely have tried anyway.

The Random button goes a long way toward explaining why the trail continued to go cold.

-->

Ah, the Random button. This particular invention is mine alone; I don't think I've heard of another ship with one. A few other pilots I've talked to have simulated the experience in software, but it's nowhere near the lengths I've gone through with this button.

I hacked up the random button in software at first, too. Like many a pilot, I eventually come to a point where I'm leaving one contract without picking up another one. Traveling with an empty cargo bay, with nothing to escort, and with no prospects is disheartening, so I need something to entertain me while I'm en route to a trade hub. For that matter, I need to pick a trade hub. While going to the nearest one sounds like a reasonable idea, you tend to get stuck in a rut that way. After all, it was likely that one which sent you out on the job that ended with nothing else for you to do in the first place. So, for the first iteration, I created a program for the navigational computer that would choose a random hub from the list of hubs in my maps and then take me there.

That didn't work well at all, as I'd hit the button, see where the navigational computer was heading us, decide I didn't like it, and hit the button again until I got someplace I liked. This defeated the purpose as, being impatient, I tended to pick nearby hubs and this again got me stuck in a rut. The second iteration was designed to hide the destination from me, but it was the work of five minutes to slice into the program and figure out where we were headed. The third iteration I implemented completely in hardware. I re-wired the navigational computer so that it'd never tell me where I was going when Random mode was engaged. This, it turns out, was the work of about ten minutes to undo and decipher our destination.

The fourth iteration remains today. In one of these hubs, I took out the navigational computer entirely and swapped it with some nonessential system, thus making the nav computer completely inaccessible from within the ship. I dismantled the computer and re-built it, using tools that were only available within the hub. There was no way it was telling me my destination.

Only once did I completely stop the ship en route, power it entirely down, suit up, go outside, construct in the vacuum of space the tools which I would need, dismantle the navigational computer and then force it to tell me where it was headed. It took longer to do that than it would have taken for me to simply wait until I got there.

It's good enough.

Ulix Crossroads, Day 141

I'm entitling this little section here "The Cautionary Tale of Alan Ledford, or 'Why You Should Always Keep Your Nav Maps Up To Date'"

I haven't actually been awake for the hundred-plus days that this journey took. The navigational computer, seeing that the trip would take longer than I had supplies for, had put me into deep-sleep. It did this without warning, and of course as I've mentioned before it's more than a little work to refit the navigation computer, so I'd have to live with it until I got to my destination. Fortunately, that took very little subjective time.

My random button chooses from a list of common and popular trade hubs; places where I'd have to specifically not be looking for work, and even then be extremely persistent about it, if I didn't want a job. Of course, the whole reason I hit the button is to find a job, so they serve well in this capacity. As you can guess from the title of this section, however, it's important to keep this list up to date.

Now, if you're not a trader, you're likely in utter shock at this admission. Why wouldn't I keep my list up to date? Isn't such a list the lifeblood of any freelancer's career? The answer, quite simply, is "no". Newbies update their maps at every single opportunity, either buying them whole each time or acquiring them through one of the subscription services that are so popular. Experienced hands at this know that, fundamentally, nothing ever changes. A location is a trade route because said location is important, and regardless of empires warring, stations changing hands, riots on distant planets, etc, this is going to stay the same. Maps are expensive if you're buying them constantly and the subscription services are little better. If you're a traveler on a budget as I so often find myself being, it's easy to push them down the priority list. After all, it's rare that a true sector-changing event like the extinction of an entire empire takes place, and it's even rarer that nothing arises to fill the vacuum.

In other words, places like my current location are flukes.

Ulix Crossroads is, locationwise, extremely far away from damn near anything. It's on the edge of the galaxy but used to be, while their people still existed to staff it, one of the more popular crossroads. I'd visited it quite often, back in the day. Beyond it were the Galaxy-gates, which would - if you were patient and willing to undergo the dark-sleep - eventually take you to a completely different galaxy. Despite the risks, many people made fortunes ferrying colonists and goods there.

About thirty years ago, the entire Ulix empire vanished. The planets, the stations, even the ships for the most part remained, but every living Ulix disappeared utterly. Everyone who was there at the time - for as a bustling crossroads it had representatives from many species - could not describe the event in any more detail than for one moment the people had been there, and the next they had not. It was as though a giant cosmic switch had been turned off.

Survivors of the incident report that they then felt an overwhelmingly powerful need to leave the empire. Whether this feeling was imposed from some outside force as many believe or simply self-preservation in action is a topic that's argued loudly among historians, and until recently I couldn't care less on the matter. Suddenly, however, this particular bit of history seemed very relevant indeed.

Nobody had returned to re-start the empire for the same reason that people had left. Most people, upon traveling one of the many Lanes (still operational, strangely enough) that lead there, feel at some point a need to turn around and avoid the empire. Again, there is no explanation for this, but everyone eventually does. Those who have ventured closest to the borders report a vague blurring of their sensor returns right before they pass out. When they awaken, of course, they are heading away from the empire and, imposed feeling or not, do not want to return.

In short, the deserted remains of the Ulix empire were surrounded by one enormous anomaly. The largest one on record, in fact, and somehow I had flown through it with no ill effects whatsoever.

I did, of course, want to leave. The feeling didn't feel imposed; if there was some intelligence or machine out there whose task it was to ensure that people didn't enter the area, it's effect was either very very subtle - and according to reports there was nothing whatsoever subtle about the effect - or it had stopped working some time ago and nobody had tested it yet.

I docked with the crossroads and went on-board. Though I was suited up for the trip it turned out that not just the docking computers had remained online. Life support, lighting, gravity, even the job panels remained in perfect working order. The Ulix had long had a justified reputation for building things to last - many regard them to be one of the older species of the universe, though at some point nearly every species makes that claim about themselves - and it showed in this station.

Everyone had left in more or less a hurry. The station was packed with supplies - aged but usable - with which I could survive my return trip to civilization. It was also packed with artifacts of an extinct civilization. With these I could assuage my anguish over traveling with an empty cargo bay. It would also make up for the money I lost on the last contract. I'd also be preserving their culture, which is the excuse I'll give any patrol ships should I be stopped. I distinctly hope that won't happen, though, as they're likely to ask a lot of questions about how I got said artifacts, and I don't know the answers. I'd been in the deep-sleep when I passed through the border that usually turns everyone back, but that'd been tried before and didn't work except for this time, apparently, when it did. If the border's still intact when I get there I'm going to have a lot more questions with no answers myself, like whether or not I'll be able to get out the same way I got in.

First things first: I'm leaving this station.

<!--

With this evidence, it is the unanimous opinion of my section and myself that Captain Ledford was unaware of his complicity in the destruction of the Ulix people at the time of its occurrence. This in no way of course negates his responsibility, but should be taken into account. This evidence is corroborated by Dr. Fallon's testimony, as well as that of others. Our decision on this charge has therefore been entered into record: Guilty, with reservations.

-->

Lane Ledford, Day 177

I'm making up that lane name. It used to be known as Lane 920, but since nobody's been in this place for 30 years and the actual Lane 920 now officially curves around the empire to go to the Galaxy-gates, I've taken it upon myself to creatively label the various lanes within this space. I have more creative names for them, but I'd like to one day have them made official, so I'm going to have to go with my more conservative creations. It's a pity, as I rather liked "Lane Change" and "Lane Ends".

One month has passed, and I'm only somewhat closer to the border. The Empire was huge, and the vast nothingness where the empire was is likewise enormous. The supplies from the station helped, but I'd rather erroneously assumed I'd come across derelict ships to pilfer from and, instead of loading up on additional things to keep me alive, had rather decided to bring back priceless cultural artifacts that would not make me any money whatsoever if I starved to death.

There should be plenty of derelict ships - when the Ulix vanished, all their stuff stayed behind. The goods they were selling, their stations, everything remained while they themselves ceased to exist. I thought their ships would be around, too. I'd been scanning broadly and loudly - not only would I probably find something but if anything was out there chances are good it would find me as well. I figured I had a decent amount of firepower if something went wrong, and company (and supplies!) would be well-received. Instead, only vacuum.

The truly disturbing part of the situation was that I consulted the computer to find out what Ulix ships look like. All other species having taken their ships with them upon their departure, it was likely that was all I was going to find. The computer, however, had no idea. It wasn't just that it didn't have the details such as average shield strength, different types of ship, or even how much one would cost to purchase, it was that it had nothing about the ship at all. The search returned no results. This meant that not only did the computer not know of an Ulix ship, it had never heard of anyone or anything that did. After a long time of searching, the only thing I could find were details of the stations, but even they didn't have records or even mention of ships other than the ones from other species which would visit. That, combined with my sensor sweeps, was growing into the eerie paranoia within me that the Ulix somehow never possessed ships. It was ridiculous, of course, as they'd need ships to build the stations in the first place and then ferry traffic and workers from them to their various planets and back. Every species had its own sort of spaceship, while some eventually adopted another's there was always a point in their history where they had their own, and even adopted designs tended to resemble the original.

My supplies are low, my destination is still far away, and I'm getting a creeping case of agoraphobia. I think it's time to let the nav computer have its way and put myself into the deep-sleep.

Here's to pleasant dreams!

Near the Messenger from the Past, Day 212

I'd programmed the computer to wake me in case it detects a ship. This was less in the hopes of actually finding one than it was to spite the thought that none existed at all. The back of my mind wouldn't shut up about it, and I dreamt in the deep-sleep that I was adrift forever. Deep-sleep dreams go on for a long time, too, so it was especially annoying.

I felt a certain amount of satisfaction and relief, as you may well imagine, when I was woken to discover an Ulix vessel.

I didn't know that's what it was at first, naturally. After being slowly awakened I had to sit there for a number of minutes to let my body adjust. I was impatient, too - all I knew was that it was important, and I was eager to find out exactly what the importance was. Plus I'm always restless after a deep-sleep.

The ship initially couldn't tell what the object was. It'd been detected at quite a distance away, after all, and I'd decided to be cautious and dial back on the random loud sensor sweeps. If it had noticed me, there had been no sign, but I didn't want to tempt fate. As a result, it took a while to figure out what was in front of me. The first bit of news was that it was a ship. The second was that it was like no ship in the database, but there were markings on it. The third was that the markings had finally been translated, and the ship was Ulix. It was named "Messenger from the Past", and it was derelict. It hadn't detected my sensor sweeps because it appeared to be entirely powered down.

Naturally, I couldn't pass up such an opportunity. I made sure the computer recorded all information about the it - I was likely to get quite a commission for bringing in information about a real Ulix ship - and began to set my ship up for docking. Even derelict ships usually have a small bit of juice to power the docking rigs, the justification being that there might be people to rescue. I didn't think that to be the case, what with this being the first Ulix ship sighted ever. Its sheer size would practically ensure that if it had been built recently, it would have been seen. It would take more time than I had left in me to explore the entire thing, but it seemed likely that I'd be able to find supplies fairly easily, as something that big was likely invested with a number of large cargo bays.

Regardless of any danger, though, I was going in. This was too good to pass up.

Messenger from the Past, Day 222

Ah, the joys of keeping my record on a panel. I can't describe how wonderful it is to try to press the right keys only to be met with poor feedback and typing errors. Back on the ship, I have voice recognition and a proper word-entry system. Here I have to make do.

I have other things to complain about, but as I have to do so using this panel, it felt appropriate for me to complain about it first.

I arrived on the colony ship over a week ago - I'd been somewhat mistaken in thinking that it'd be full of useful cargo. Instead, it was full of people. The strangest thing about it, though, was that the people it was carrying weren't Ulix. Tens of millions of creatures in the dark-sleep of some strange species the computer couldn't identify. They did look vaguely Ulixian, some more than others, but none of them were what I was used to.

As a result of there being far more people than I expected - thankfully they were all asleep, so I wouldn't have to explain to them what I was doing on their ship - it took me a bit longer to find the cargo hold. It was, predictably enough, full of food and other supplies that colonists would need. It took me nearly a full day to drag one pallet full of food to my ship, and I didn't want to make the same mistake twice so chances were good I'd need more. It took forever to transport it, though. Being lazy, I figured out how to activate the cargo bay's forklifts and put instructions in them to bring the items to my ship. It'd take less time and be no work on my part. I'd always been told that the best slicers are the laziest, and I did my best to live up to that motto.

Of course, something happened between now and then, otherwise I'd be writing this up from the comfort of my own ship.

The first thing that happened was that I was tired of being suited up the entire time. Life support was off - in fact, power was off to everything but the dark-sleep chambers - so I found my way to what was either the bridge, one bridge among many, or possibly just a computer terminal. With the translator's help, I could operate it. The first thing I did was bring everything back online. I briefly considered hijacking the entire ship for my own and flying it out of Ulix space, but to be perfectly honest I was a bit creeped out by all the sleeping people.

You've probably heard the stories. In deep-sleep, you dream. Your dreams are unusually vivid and long-lasting, usually pleasant but not always. There's no lasting harm in them, however. In the dark-sleep, you do not dream. There's no brain activity whatsoever, in fact. The dark-sleep chambers have very sophisticated equipment beyond even my understanding (due to lack of interest, mostly, and also that if I understood how they worked I'd feel compelled to stop avoiding using them) just to figure out whether the patient inside is dead or just sleeping.

Sometimes, however, people in the dark-sleep do dream. The brain activity goes way up and stays there; beyond that of any waking person. It's theorized that the lucidity and impact of dark-sleep dreams are orders of magnitude more intense than those of ordinary dreams or even waking life. Nobody knows this for sure, of course, because people who've dreamt and were subsequently revived from the dark-sleep have usually been so utterly twitchingly psychotic that their families have them put down if the authorities haven't already seen to it.

If I can help it, I'll never go into the dark-sleep. Deep-sleep's fine if you only want to stay out for a bit, but if you're going to be out for more than a month or so, you've got to go deeper. I know it cuts off a lot of the universe to me to not make that step, but personally, I'd like to retain my sanity. It's all I've got, flimsy though it seems to be much of the time.

So far as I can tell, however, this is not a dream. It's an annoyance. A potentially fatal annoyance, true, but just annoying so far.

On my third day here, I was doing a bit of wandering. I said before that it would take more than a lifetime to explore the ship, and my cursory milling-about had done nothing to dispel this idea. The place was huge. Still, I figured I should get to know the area. I headed down toward the center of the ship – or at least as close as my panel reckoned the center was – for no better reason than to see what was there. The strangest feeling came over me; it was as though I'd been there before. Not deja vu, at least not precisely that. I didn't feel like I'd wandered around a derelict ship until I'd found a hallway that looked pretty much like any other sometime in the past and I was now doing it again, instead, I got the feeling that I should recognize this particular hallway somehow.

I did recognize the hallway. Again, not in the deja vu sort of way. I remembered specifically the last time I'd seen it, over 30 years ago. I did a lot of contract work with the Ulix back then; they were good customers, had entertaining jobs for me to do, and were very trustworthy. At least, I'd thought them trustworthy. They'd always dealt fairly with me; in the decade or so we'd worked together, they came to rely on my input more than that of anyone else. I wasn't freelance back then, I was military, so that might have given me a bit more repute. Still, I wasn't Ulix. While the late lamented species wasn't exactly xenophobic – after all, they ran an entire empire based on trade – they did have a bit of a reputation for not trusting outsiders.

But I'd seen this ship. At the time, it hadn't been a ship; at least, if it was, I hadn't known it. I'd been on one of their planets and they'd taken me down below into a research base. I didn't understand anything I saw happening there, but I didn't really expect to. It wasn't until later that I came to understand that the experiments they were carrying out were beyond the understanding of most sentient beings. It was far too late, then.

I'd only been shown a portion of the ship, and the entire time I was within it, I thought I'd been in the base. At some point we must have gone from the base to the ship, but I didn't notice a transition. I don't even recall walking through hallways that looked like the ones I'd been through more recently. The hallway I currently faced, however, stuck in my mind not because of anything special about it, though there were signs that this was indeed the place I'd been before, but rather what lied beyond.

The Resonator.

I had to see it again, of course. The first time I'd been exposed to it, it'd been an overwhelming experience. I'd had a guide then, and he'd prevented me from getting too close at the time. Later I had all the time in the world to examine it, or rather the data that had been compiled on it, but I'd seen it only that once. If it was still there, I'd see it again. I had nothing else to do on this ship, and suddenly realizing that I'd actually been aboard once before had infused me with a sense of purpose. At least, that's what I told myself was the reason for my newfound energy.

I walked down the hallway; it had initially seemed like all the others, but the lights were in a slightly different configuration, and the markings were somewhat off. To the Ulix eye, apparently, this was enough to set it apart. If I hadn't been there before and become so struck by what I'd seen then I wouldn't have given it a second glance.

A door like any other was at the end, but of course I knew better. Opening it, I rushed inside to see if the treasure I remembered was still there.

It was.

The Resonator. Mysterious relic from millions of years in the past, said to be a left over artifact from one of the Predecessor species. Nobody knew its function except for the Ulix and me. The former are gone and even the latter doesn't have a very clear idea of what it's supposed to be doing.

The Resonator was a sphere the size of my fist, placed on a pedestal in the center of the room. Dozens of slim wires seemed to lead from it, travel along the floor, and disappear into the walls, but I knew they were for show; the Resonator didn't work by electronic command, those wires were there to monitor it. They had the same purpose I'd been given so long ago; figure out what it was doing.

Except in my case, I'd actually done it. Or so I'd thought at the time.

But you're not here to hear an old man gripe about his past failures, are you? No, you're wondering what happened to the rest of the week, between when I saw the only object of technology in the universe that I'd been unable to figure out and now, where I'm sitting in a cramped ductway fiercely typing out these words and hoping they won't be my last. The answer to that is simple; I tried to take the Resonator.

Granted, when I left Ulix Crossroads, I'd thought I'd make quite a bit of cash trafficing the many valuable artifacts of their dead civilization, and when I got here I was determined not to do that and instead get food. Why the change in thinking? Because I had no intention of selling the device. It was mine, and it had been ever since the first moment I saw it.

<!--

Whatever Ledford's motives in interacting with the device the way he has, it's quite clear that it does not belong to him in any sense. The Ulix were notoriously protective of their secrets and the fact that they had a non-native in the presence of such a device speaks volumes of their trust for him. Or, I suspect, their desperation.

Regardless, interviews with the very few others allowed contact with the device – Dr. Fallon and his team among them – indicates that the Ulix never in any way transferred ownership to the Captain. Further investigation of the way the Resonator is thought to function – including Ledford's notes while he was part of Project Archetype and his referrences to it here – seem to lead to the conclusion that while Ledford had no claim over it, it seemed to have quite a large claim over him.

-->

I'll readily admit that I wasn't exactly thinking straight at the time. Had I been thinking about the proper way to go about this, I'd be back on the bridge or engineering or whatever that section was I was in earlier to disable whatever systems might be in place to protect it. But it'd been decades since I laid my eyes on that thing, and I wanted it back. You'll likely think I'm a bit obsessed with it, and that's entirely true. I won't even argue the point but to say that, if you saw it, you'd be obsessed too. You've probably gathered that I'm a bit of a technology nut; tuning my Sleeper drive is my idea of a fun afternoon, after all. I'm good at it; good enough that the Ulix called me in to figure their precious Resonator out. Ever since then, it's been an unsolved problem spinning through my mind. I can't let it go, inspiration will strike me in the middle of the night and I'll think of some other way I could have tapped its secrets, some new method of making the other one perfect.

Yes, we tried to make another one. It didn't work. I've no intention of going into more detail.

All these thoughts went through my head, they were a constant babble under the main thought, which was a far more simple “Holy Shit”. Once I'd made up my mind to have it again, nothing could have stopped me.

Nothing, of course, except for the half dozen security robots which activated the moment I touched the sphere.

The Ulix were naturally paranoid about their secrets, and this was the biggest one of them all. Apparently they didn't want anyone digging through their stuff while they were away. The only reason I survived that is because I spotted the robots, inactive, out of the corner of my eye in the split instant before I touched the prize. I then dropped to the floor as blaster fire nearly deafened me. Better deaf than dead, though; I bolted out of the room while the smoke was still clearing and the bots wouldn't be able to see clearly. Really, it was the only choice I had. I didn't recognize the bots; I'd never ran into them before, but they certainly seemed to behave like other robots: Deadly, remorseless, and precise. Not to mention these were the personal security robots of a paranoid and xenophobic race tasked with protecting the millions of lives aboard and, oh yes, making quick work out of anyone who might try to steal what could possibly be the greatest treasure in the entire universe. Running like hell was my only chance. I had been hoping that those security bots were the only ones on the ship, but I hadn't been hoping very hard because, when you've got a ship this big, chances are good you want a bit more security than just 6 bots.

My pessimism once again proved correct; I turned down the hallway to see a door slide open and a robot emerge. Before I could even draw my blaster, it had turned toward me and shot its own.

I'm alive because this ship is very, very old. The equipment is likewise old. It must have gotten by in the past through meticulous upkeep, but with its caretakers long since turned to less corporeal pursuits quite a bit had run down. Since my first few encounters, I'd seen more broken robots than ones who were likely to try to kill me; it made sense that the ones more likely to stand the test of time be stationed closer to the thing they were protecting. Not that disabled robots don't try their little best to end my life, bless their hearts, but it's hard to shoot well when your joints are malfunctioning and making your legs move in random directions. Along these lines, it's important to note that blasters in particular do not age well; the one which should have been my death blew up in the robot's hand and destroyed it.

After that, I made my way back toward my ship, thinking to get out while the getting was good. Yes, I'm obsessed by the Resonator, and it was my full plan to come back with powered armor, EMP weapons a-plenty, and maybe a squad of mercenaries for good measure, but for now survival was the highest priority.

That's the other thing about robots. Most species think of them as dumb, because they tend to be built that way. Sentient life in general does not like machines smarter than it. However, there are many cases in which you need to build smarter bots. For instance, guard duty is one area where drones shine – so to speak. They've got better sight and aim than a person without the nasty risk of putting a sentient being's life on the line.

Yes, yes, fully half of known species recognize robots of aforementioned sophistication to be sentient in their own right. So my statement may not be exactly correct, but in my opinion guard duty just isn't as hazardous if you can be restored from backup.

These robots, being the last hope of a long-dead species, were insanely intelligent. By the time I got to the cargo bay, they were already there. If I hadn't had the presence of mind to be sneaky about getting there, I'd have been blaster fodder at that point. Even then I'm surprised I made it. I had the chance to see how many there were guarding my ship – a half dozen encircling it and about four more in pairs on patrol around the docking area – before I had to duck back into the ventway or be spotted.

These vents have been my salvation; the ship has somewhat larger than usual vents for air; I suppose whatever species it is it's carrying has a higher need for air pressure or maybe it's more efficient that way, I didn't design it so I have no clue. The point is that if I try and am not particularly concerned about comfort, I can fit in them. The robots can't; they're quite a bit larger than I am. They don't seem to be expecting anyone to be in them either; their charges in the dark-sleep tubes were around their size, so my guess is that they're programmed to either protect against an invasion in which case the invaders would likely not use the vents, or stay on the lookout for rogue sleepers.

I couldn't get back to my ship. I still had this panel, as I'd been using it to interface with everything, so at least I had some primitive sensors which could tell me if the robots were headed my way, but I had little choice other than to retreat.

I tried moving my way over to the bridge/engineering/computer terminal that I'd used to activate the ship's systems (including, to my current dismay, security) but it, too, was heavily guarded. The robots here looked slightly more decrepid than their autonomous friends in the bay, but there were more of them. I couldn't take my chances just yet. Instead, I retreated to a crawlspace to get all of this down and hopefully wrack my mind for a plan.

And that, to use an idiom which likely won't translate at all, was how I spent my summer vacation.

Messenger From the Past, Day 223

This isn't exactly a plan, per se, but it's a lot better than just sitting here.

I've spent most of today and some of yesterday with as many broken robots and blasters as I can. As you might imagine, this is an activity with a high chance of getting myself killed, as not all robots who appear to be disabled actually are, and not all blasters which seem salvageable are stable enough not to explode in reaction to such unexpected stimuli as being looked at. Still, I've managed a lot of parts.

The science of personal shielding is a long and boring one, and if I weren't having to type this out on my increasingly annoying pad I'd go into more detail just to give you more work to do. As it is, I'll say that I'm making hacked-up FAST units out of spare blaster parts and remind you, when you ask me how the hell that makes any sense whatsoever, that all blasters really do is project small force fields very quickly.

Okay, fine, I'll assume you haven't been through military field training (as unlikely as that is) and mention that FAST units are personal force fields. But that's all the explaining I'm going to do right now. I'm on a bit of a compressed schedule at the moment; I've got a number of these things to build and test, after all. They're both hacked together and made from old salvaged parts. I'm not sure they'll work at all or, if they do, whether they'll take a full blaster bolt worth of fire. They're fairly useless to me if they don't, as even a tenth of a blaster from the bots will be enough to put me in my place for a rather permanent time, but even if that's the case, I'll just hack ten of them together. There's no end of spare parts; the ship's even more decrepit than I thought. The deep-sleep chambers, the docking bay, and the central chamber were apparently the only parts really designed to stand the test of time – the further I've gone exploring, the more run-down I find the place to be. Every bridge-like area is guarded, however, and the decrepitude of the robots guarding them is made up for by their sheer numbers. I've yet to encounter any vengeful robotic search parties, though, so at least they weren't making a coordinated effort to find me.

My mind went back to the deep-sleep chambers. Now there's an idea... if I could thaw out one of the passengers, chances were good – in my mind at least – that they'd be able to call the rest of the ship off. I'd merely claim that I'd docked because I needed supplies. This was true, though I felt it would be prudent to leave out the parts where I tried to steal their most precious cultural artifact. Still, it was a better plan than going into the cargo bay guns blazing.

--

No, it wasn't a better plan.

My translator could make only rudimentary sense of the readouts and controls for the deep-sleep chambers, which should have been my first indication of things to go wrong. I stubbornly refused to let that enter my mind, though. Instead, I picked out a likely candidate from one of the chambers and woke him up. I'd been looking for bridge crew or engineering people, but none of the readouts indicated anyone of the sort, so eventually I just chose one of the people nearest a repaired sector.

The waking process from deep-sleep is slow. I began it and had time to get a few working FAST units assembled before my patient was awake. I discreetly attached and activated them. I wasn't optimistic enough to completely trust my new friend.

The waker blinked a few times, regarding me blankly as his brain activity was slowly brought up to normal. At least, I thought it was a blank look; it's nearly impossible to tell what looks mean on faces that aren't those of your native species. When finally the process was complete, he stepped forward from the now empty chamber and looked around the bay. He then turned to me.

“Qnttzfln oorn nnnnnn ym yn yu qlnrn” he said.

My translator was silent.

This did not mean, however, that it didn't provide feedback. A tiny green light on the side beamed happily into existence. That's exactly what it was supposed to be; that particular light is known universe-wide as “The Happy Little Green Light”. The manufacturers of the translators, you see, had long since had a policy of handsomely rewarding anyone who got that button to light up, and so far nearly nobody had.

It meant, quite simply, “You've discovered a new language!”

It wasn't quite the happy occasion right now, however, as it meant I couldn't talk to the being I'd rather rudely awakened and my chances of staying alive were dwindling rapidly. If I ever got back to civilized space, I'd earn myself a small fortune for turning over my translator box, but in order to realize that increasingly far off payday, I was going to have to first not be vaporized.

Oorn, as I'd mentally dubbed my new alien friend, was not seeming likely to help in that matter. Despite the fact that I showed absolutely no ability to understand him, he continued to talk to me. The translator was not being helpful at all when it pointed out that there were harmonics to his voice that I was incapable of hearing. Oorn was getting increasingly agitated, or so I guessed from the rising volume of his voice. Louder and faster speech was hardly ever a good sign.

I'd been keeping relatively quiet despite my silent hope that the robots were not actively looking for me. Apparently this had been the right thing to do, as a loud clanking and a quieter alarm from my panel told me that a pair were on their way to investigate the noise my partner was making. I decided to cut my losses and get out of there, but the instant I tried to leave Oorn reached out and grabbed my arm.

His grip was like iron; he was easily bigger than the security robots and while he was incapable of being as strong, he was more then enough to stop me from going anywhere. The FAST units at my hip started heating up as they attempted to figure out a way to dispel or redirect the energy but they were likely to simply burn themselves out first.

The robots entered the room and, without hesitation, turned toward us, drew their blasters in unison, and shot.

The ancient hacked-up personal shielding units I'd created with my blaster as a soldering iron and a few months of long-forgotten military training received decades ago, surprisingly enough, took the blast and dissipated it entirely before shorting out and burning my hip. Oorn, as he did not possess such a unit, was vaporized. So much for my theory that a native could reason with them.

I drew my blaster, shaking with the knowledge that only one of the dodgy personal shields was now working, and it was beginning to burn into my side as well. It likely wouldn't absorb an entire hit, and I'd be maimed and/or killed. Still, I had time enough to get a shot off before that happened.

I destroyed the robot on the right. Then, as I was apparently not yet dead, I destroyed the other robot.

Neither of them had fired a volley beyond the first. I'd have stopped to consider this – and steal their blasters – had not reinforcements been almost certainly on the way. Instead, I got the hell out of there. I did, however, have a new plan.

Lane Ledford, Day 227

Remember that plan that I'd scrapped earlier? The one that involved me going into the cargo bay guns blazing? That was the new plan.

It didn't happen exactly like that, of course. What actually happened was, I stepped into the cargo bay and was hit by about a dozen blaster bolts at once. The belt-full of FAST units I'd put into my belt all burnt up. I then, one by one, vaporized the robot guards.

I was surprised that it hadn't hit me before, really. All of the robots I'd dispatched took exactly one shot to kill, provided, of course, that one shot actually hit them somewhere. Why would that be the case? Because they had no shielding, of course.

When I'd activated all the ship's systems, I hadn't noticed it missing. When I was fighting or scavenging from robots, I was a bit distracted to see the big picture. It wasn't until the robots made no reaction to my own shields that I realized they didn't possess any themselves. Against all probability, the Ulix who constructed the robots appeared to not possess shielding technology.

The robots didn't even understand it. They all fired upon me simultaneously and then assumed me destroyed. That's the other reason people tend to think that robots are dumb. When a situation comes up that they've never seen before and can't explain, they just sit there. In this case, they sat there and waited for me to blow them up. For all I knew, they would have let me walk right into my ship, but I didn't want to take the chance of them recognizing that me moving was a sign I wasn't dead and deciding to shoot at me again. If they were going to take anything as a sign of my continued existence, it was going to be me blasting them to bits.

I didn't waste any time; for all I knew they'd called in reinforcements. I got in my ship, blasted through the doors of the docking bay with the weaponry – it would have probably been easier to ask my computer to slice into theirs and open them automatically, but that would not have given me the visceral relief of blasting my way out – and got the hell away from the Messenger from the Past.

That was a few days ago. According to my sadly outdated maps, the empire could go on for another few months. Or less. Or, if they were as off as I suspected, more. As the maps had been made before the advent of the exodus of the Ulix, there was really no way to know. I'd just have to wait for the Border to show itself and then hope that I could find some way through again. I did it before by sleeping, it seemed, so that's how I intended to do it again.

Worst case scenario, I figured, if I was trapped in Ulix space forever, at least there were plenty of supplies.

Lane 920, Day 244

That was strange.

Now, if you're not a freelance pilot such as myself, you might not recognize the significance of such a statement. You've read through what I've put here so far, and while a great deal of it may be out of your area of expertise, it doesn't seem especially strange. Weirdest thing to happen thus far has been the disappearance of the Ulix, and that didn't even happen on my watch.

Let me just say, I've seen far stranger things than what I've put here. This journal's only covered the last two-thirds of this year, remember. Nothing much has happened, really. To me the strangest thing so far was me getting into Ulix space at all, not the state in which I found it. Before this year... well, let me just say I've seen anomalies that make Yotia look like an amusement park ride. Entire planets made lifeless. And of course we can't forget witnessing the Resonator in its fully powered glory.

So when I say “That was strange”, you'd better believe that what just happened to me was really really strange.

I hit the border yesterday. It wasn't marked on my maps – after all, they were too old to even know about the fall of the empire – so I didn't really expect it. It hadn't even been a month since my encounter with the last bizarre ship of a dead species, and I'd honestly thought it'd take me longer to get out of this forsaken place. If, of course, escape was indeed possible. Obviously it is, because I'm out now, but at the time I wasn't quite so sure I was going to make it.

I felt the strange compulsion coming over me about an hour before I hit it. It was like the prospectors who'd tried to enter Ulix space had described, only the compulsion wasn't telling me to turn back, it was telling me to go forward. I suppose this made sense, but it raised the uneasy question in my mind. If indeed the border was still up and functioning like it appeared to be, how had I passed through it in the first place?

That was a long hour. The intense need to leave the area built further and further in my mind, despite the fact that leaving was exactly what I was doing. Apparently the border's effect was a constant one, and didn't adjust itself to the fact that its subject might just be willing to listen to reason. I got up out of my seat and paced the cabin. My ship's a fairly large ship, but almost all of that is dedicated to cargo space. The more livable area is quite small and cramped. Normally this lends it a comfortable atmosphere, but at the moment I wanted out. I realized most of this feeling was the artificial noise of the border drilling itself into my head, but that didn't make it feel any less real. I distinctly hoped that I wasn't going to jettison myself out of the airlock in a vain attempt to escape it. This didn't seem too terribly likely to me, but the way things had been going lately it might be more possible than I cared to think about. I paced to escape both that actual thought and the artificial ones that wouldn't shut the hell up.

Finally, the visual of the stars outside seemed to blur. I sat back down in my seat and held on tightly, hoping that I wouldn't awake to find myself still inside Ulix space with a burning desire to get out. The thought of me endlessly repeating the cycle of being compelled to leave while not being allowed to replaced the airlock image in my list of bad thoughts. Thankfully, just then, the blurring of the stars intensified, and I passed out.

It wasn't a dreamless sleep, either.

I was back on the Messenger from the Past, standing in the dark-sleep chamber where I'd woken up Oorn. Only instead of my large gibberish-speaking homicidal friend, Senior was there.

Back when I'd worked closely with the Ulix – apparently on this very ship without realizing it – there were two of their people whose job it was to keep tabs on us. We'd taken to calling them Junior and Senior. Junior was the friendly outgoing one who would typically give us tours and go out with us after a long day's work. Senior was the serious one that he reported to, the one who would ask for better results if we were slacking. The boss, in other words. Strange that he should be the one in my dream; I liked Junior much better. Then again, either one was an improvement over Oorn.

Senior began one long monologue, and I'm reproducing it here as best I can. Most the quotes I include in this work are paraphrases of the actual thing; my species doesn't have a photographic memory like some, so I make do. In this case, I'm going to try to stay as close to the actual words as possible:

“Things are coming to a head, Ledford.” He spoke to me fluently in my language. Why would he need a translator in a dream, after all? “You and yours were spared so you could continue your work, but instead you've spent the time hiding while our people die slowly.

“We brought you back to us in a more direct manner this time. The consensus was that you'd be unable to resist working with the relic and therefore continue where you left off. We underestimated you even in that respect. Instead of confining yourself to the data – as you were strictly instructed to do! - you attempted to steal the artifact itself!”

Senior was angry. There was no way I could read an Ulix expression without the translator, of course, but I could tell anyway.

“And still more of us die! Innocents, now, are dying because of your inaction, your fear. You're being allowed out for one and only one reason: To find the others. To continue the work you made such a horrible mess of decades ago, and this time to do it right! Get the rest of your group together, and when you're ready to come back to this place, press your Random button. We'll do the rest.”

I remember wondering how he knew about the button, as I hadn't put it in until long after his kind had left for greener pastures. I was dreaming, so he answered me.

“Nothing's random for you anymore, Ledford. It hasn't been since we saved you the first time. Finish your job. So help me, you'll dream in the dark-sleep before this is over.”

That's when I woke up.

The first thing I did was jot that last part down. I wanted to make sure I got all of it for entry here later. The entire conversation had this creepy vibe in it, particularly the last bit of it. In case it didn't translate, the idiom “to dream in the dark-sleep before the end” means, generally, that things are going to get much much worse before they get better, if they're even going to be getting better at all. It's a figure of speech but I couldn't shake the the unnerving feeling that it was meant literally in this case. Now, I'm not one of those wackos who believes that dreams are portents of the future or anything, but my species has a habit of thinking even when we're asleep, and our dreams tend to reflect that. Some part of my mind wanted me to find the rest of the old crew and get back to work, and I wanted to know why.

The second thing I did was to figure out where I was. The entire time I extended my sensor net out I was muttering under my breath 'please not Ulix space' over and over again, and it appeared to have worked. I was on Lane 920. The real 920, this time; navigational buoys informed me that the Ulix Anomaly was ahead and that the lane would be taking a small (unfathomably large, really, but small on a universal scale) detour before nearing the Galaxy-gates. All sorts of information filtered back into my sensors; I'd had their sensitivity cranked up so high while on Lane Ledford that at first they were completely overwhelmed. News feeds, job postings, comm traffic, the essentials of civilization were once again being broadcast throughout space, and I was once again a part of it.

I did a few things before jotting all this down. One was to set a course. I didn't hit the Random button – the dream had left me with a bit of a foreboding about it, so instead I consulted my maps for a location I knew was actually still there and started heading that way. I also made a note to update the maps. I didn't want anymore accidents like that last little excursion. Things like that took a lot of my time for very little profit.

I glanced at the glowing green light on my translator. Well, maybe there would be some profit involved.

Another thing I did was to set up an automated backup service. I know that this journal of mine hasn't been going on for very long, comparatively, but it's an activity that's kept me sane. Writing in it's given me a chance to ignore the rookies, take my mind off of Curly's condition, and rediscover a calm state after psychotic robots attempt to gun me down. I didn't want to lose it to a freak power failure in the computer's storage systems. So I invested in one of the common services it is to do long-term data storage and uploaded this entire work to them. Minus, of course, this bit that I'm entering here. The ship'll automatically take care of keeping the backups from here on out, so I won't even have to worry about it. I paid for it using the interest on my contract money; one of the nice things about hibernating through a long period of time was that your money tended to build up after a while. It's one of the few things that makes galaxy-hopping profitable; it takes long enough that the compound interest on your seed money ended up paying for the whole trip. My contract wasn't worth that much money, so I just paid off the service with it and started looking for a new job.

<!--

Had the Captain known that we'd already begun tracking him, he'd have doubtless had second thoughts about subscribing to such a service. Every time his ship performed a backup, it would reveal its location. As we were watching transactions in his name closely, we would be able to find out where each upload had originated from. This is how we discovered him after he emerged from his vacation in Ulix space. This expenditure in tracking justified itself numerous times over the course of our pursuit.

-->

Lane 191, Day 226

My holo broke down today. I don't use it often; the comm channels are usually enough. When dealing with irate newbie squadmates, for instance, turning on the holo and having it sync up with theirs takes entirely too much time. Especially when all you really want to say is “Shut up, would you?”

The holo's real area of expertise is in negotiations. By 'negotiations', I of course mean 'haggling'. When trying to get a quick contract remotely or arguing over the price of cargo, the holo is the best way to go about doing it. That way they can see you the way you are, and you can see them. Of course, one of the reasons I'm considered to be rather talented at such negotiations is that I have, on more than one occasion, tore up my holo and re-built it with certain modifications. I tend to appear, on the holos of others, about a foot taller than I actually am. Or shorter, should their particular culture find that to be more impressive. Because my culture finds it entertaining to look down on people – or at least, I do – they likewise appear to be a foot shorter than me. It's enormous the psychological advantage this conveys.

Given the rather large amount of work I've performed on the unit that almost certainly is far out of the scope of its warranty, it's not exactly surprising that it broke down, but it certainly could have chosen a better time. I'd been talking to my first real person since Poln. Of course, when I say 'person' I mean 'sentient being', as there's not exactly a whole lot of spacefarers who are my own species. Still, she looked vaguely similar and we were having a nice conversation when the unit futzed out. Not, of course, before making me appear to become a giant orange monster of some sort. Before I could hack the unit back into submission, she was gone.

It was just as well; en route my translator finally got back to me with details about her species – turns out that our reproductive organs are quite incompatible.

Hey, it's been a while, okay? These questions naturally occur when you've been adrift for several months.

Aside from my ulterior motives, I'd been using the conversation as a way to get caught up from what I've missed. I could have done the same thing using the various newsfeeds whose purpose it was to do exactly that, but like I said, I had ulterior motives. I didn't learn very much; minor things mostly. Certain cargoes were more or less valuable on certain planets due to certain events, such and such an ambassador to somewhere was sidetracked to some other place, and – much to my shock and surprise – Poln and Anor were at war again!

The conversation with the other pilot was nice, really, but what I was actually looking forward to was people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those xenophobes who think all other species are scum; I'm quite certain, in fact, that my species is just as scummy as the rest of them. It's just that, after a while without seeing any of your own people, you do start to miss them. For me, it'd been three years.

I'd decided it had been too long. I was going home.

Earth-In-Exile, Day 230

If the above name reads the same as that of your home world, it's because your translator is being overzealous. I wrote the name of my home world, but in the interests of it not appearing as 'Dirt' when you read it, your translator has likely changed it to be the same as your home world. There is rationale behind this, namely that you'll identify better with the entity writing to you if it sounds like you're from the same place, nevermind the fact that you're a bipedal mass of meat and water and it's an amorphous collection of silicon. So if you hear me talk about Earth, realize it's my homeworld, not necessarily yours.

It's in exile anyway, and yours probably isn't, so that should make it easier.

If you've leapt to the conclusion that it was my species that blew up the Yotia system and was therefore doomed to be forever without a homeworld, congratulations! So yes, I, by virtue of being a member of said species, must be one of sentient life's greatest monsters. Let's all kill and maim me, as my kind should not be allowed to walk among civilized beings!

Now that we've got the obligatory species-bashing out of the way, I'll continue.

Earth-in-Exile isn't a planet, of course. It's a fleet of colony ships, all interconnected. There were a whole lot of us when the whole Yotia incident occurred, though our numbers have dwindled somewhat since then. Enough people, though, that we couldn't all fit on one colony ship. When we were first exiled, before we actually left our home, a great deal of work was done refitting the ships to handle live people. Very very few species have generational colony ships that people are meant to live on anymore, most relegate their travelers to dark-sleep, so our new habitat required the reinvention of several key technologies. For the most part, my people are content to stay on the ships – I think some of the instinct to explore was burnt out of us after the exile. Why explore, after all, when we're already adrift in space without a home?

Some of us, myself included, take that as a good reason to explore. We're used to being planetless; space itself is more our home now. It's not as though we're going to stop being adrift anytime soon so even in the worst of cases nothing's going to change. We've got a greater number of freelance pilots, proportionally, than we did in the past, but space is a big place and there aren't that many of us left, so I hardly ever run into anyone I know. Until, like we all do, I come back home.

For those of us who venture out, we do it with somewhat of a feeling of responsibility for the rest of the colony. I know it sounds very much unlike me, but I'm planning to use a great deal of the money my happy green translator light's going to award me to improve living conditions back here. Most of the kids growing up in exile are techies like me; you have to be if you want to keep the place running. They don't need my expertise, though, they need my funding.

Even if I wanted to retire and stay behind to maintain the place, I wouldn't fit in. At least not with this upcoming generation. For a lot of the kids, the colony ships are all the home they've ever known. Old farts like me, though, we remember what it was like to have a planet all our own.

We miss it.

Pining for the past, though, is unlikely to resurrect it, so I'm going to put this particular line of thought from my mind and concentrate, instead, on summing up my current visit home.

This part of the journal is being entered from my house. The design of the colony ship I call home was essentially a refit of the sleeper ships, so the word 'house' is a misnomer. It's more like crew quarters, except roomier than those on board my ship. A few of the other ships were of the huge cylindrical variety; ones which actually had real houses in them, real land and trees and atmosphere that wasn't pumped through recyclers. It was an enormous waste of space, but then again there was no shortage of that where we were. I could have bought myself a house on one of those if I'd kept enough money, but every time I visit here I leave poorer. Not just financially, either. Seeing what's happened to my species... it takes something from me.

Checking in was a simple affair; with the general population slowly shrinking, there was more than enough room aboard the ships, and so my old place hadn't been reassigned to anyone. It was just as I'd left it, in fact, except quite a bit dustier. I busied myself with cleaning up because I felt I had to. What I really wanted to do was walk around, see what had changed. It'd been a few years since my last visit and for me that wasn't that long a time. Most pilots who leave from this place come back once a decade, if that often. Still, for all that we never saw each other, we were a close-knit bunch. I'd queried the colony computer about which pilots were in port now, and I knew each and every one of them. I also knew where I could meet them, and I didn't need the computer to tell me that: The bar.

“The Sleeper”, to be specific. It wasn't on the ship I was currently staying in, but since the ships had long ago been rendered immobile and interconnected, it would be a rather trivial matter for me to get from one to the other. I left as soon as I could rationalize doing so.

The neighborhood seemed the same, but all neighborhoods looked like this one aboard my homeship. The people looked the same, mainly. The above-thirty group tended to recognize me, and I'd get respectful nods or waves or looks full of daggers depending on who'd spotted me. The kids didn't know me at all and so regarded me with the dull disinterest of teenagers prepared to, if necessary, completely ignore anything I said. Unlike the adults they were used to, though, I wasn't planning to say a word to them.

There was a quick transport shuttle – the mass transit sort of shuttle, not the interplanetary sort – which rocketed me and a few others along the tube which connected the homeship to the host of The Sleeper. I did my best not to say anything on the ride, but I got more than a few looks. People in my neighborhood knew me specifically, but even to people who weren't acquainted with me I was easily recognizable. I was a pilot, after all, and we were a rare and dying breed. Thankfully nobody tried to start up conversation. It'd either be people begging for stories of the outside, all of which would depress them, or it'd be recrimination for leaving the habitat at all, instead of staying behind to help. I was in the mood for neither.

It only took a few minutes to reach the new ship. I got my bearings together and walked a route that, despite not having tread upon it in years, I remembered perfectly. Contrary to the fact that alcohol tends to erase brain cells, it seems to work surprisingly well for imprinting things upon them as well. Specifically, things like how to get more alcohol.

“Ledford!” the jubilant and more than a little intoxicated cry came up as soon as I entered the bar.

I couldn't resist giving them a smart-ass “As you were” before I sat down. They all recognized me, though I only knew a couple by sight. I'd dealt with all of them, of course. This would be an excellent opportunity for me to put names and faces together, and then drink until they'd become decoupled again.

Two things to note here: I'm not one of those pilots who's always drunk, those who live on some drug or another to get through the days. I do, however, drink on important occasions. Secondly, this was an important occasion. I ordered an Exile special, which was a drink native to the planet we used to have. It was made from a fermentation process on a plant which had resisted all efforts at transplantation. There was a finite amount of the stuff left, and though the Yotians continued to export it, we naturally considered that to be of lesser quality than the real thing. Therefore the real thing was considerably expensive.

“When the hell did you get so rich?” one of the less inebriated captains asked me. He meant it to sound as though he were joking, but I could tell he somewhat irate at me. Probably thought I didn't come by home often enough. I had a mother, guys, okay? I don't need a surrogate.

By way of response, I held up the translator box. The happy green light beamed out toward them, and there was a respectful pause in the conversation while the rest of the bar took in the spectacle. Shortly thereafter, the entire place was in an uproar, demanding the story.

I told them, of course. You might be able to tell at this point that I like telling a story or two. Must be my age; our species grows loquacious in our later years. Still, they hung on every word. I told it pretty much like I told it here, only I didn't mention the Ulix. For one thing, that would have invited a lot of questions that I didn't want asked and weren't comfortable with the answers with. Similarly, I didn't mention the Resonator or my bizarre dreams. Instead, I concocted a story about being Lost In Space, which is one of the many unreasonable fears of a ship pilot. There are a number of sentient species in the universe, and each and every one of them got to that state by being able to survive. Given the opportunity, they've expanded their reach pretty far from their own planet. That being said, however, there are places that nobody's been. Space is big, after all. It's possible that with the help of a little navigator computer malfunction a captain like myself could end up out of range of any navigational aides and be forced to somehow find his way back. This is extremely unlikely though; if even one percent of nav computers were sucepitble to that sort of malfunction, billions of starships would go missing. Nevertheless, in the story the Ulix became some fallen civilization that had never met up with the rest of the universe (but still had Lanes, I had to get Lane Ledford in there somehow) and my harrowing escape was caused by me grave robbing. Close enough to the truth, I figured.

People entered the bar during my story, but nobody left. The more recent additions could be heard whispering to friends in the back in an attempt to catch up on the story. The first drink I ordered was the only one I had to pay for. I left that night feeling rather tipsy and with that good feeling only telling an entertaining story at a bar can give you. I was so tipsy, in fact, that I almost went to bed without checking my room for messages. Almost. Had I done so, I'd be writing this entry tomorrow instead of trying to type it in right now. If there's anything worse than kludging entries up on a panel, it's trying to do so while intoxicated. Still, I needed the time to think and writing the day's events up has a way of clearing my mind.

Katie Simmond was on board, it turns out. My lone message upon my return from the bar – at least, the only message I cared about – was from her. She'd gotten in the day after my arrival, and after I'd done my query to find out who was here, or else I'd have likely sent something her way first. I'd been at the bar while her message was sent. It was simple and short: “Nice to see you again.”

In this context, she meant that it would be nice to see me again. That we'd go meet somewhere went without saying; she wasn't asking to see me so much as saying she looked forward to it. If I'd left her a message, it'd have likely been those exact words. Yes, you, genius that you are, have already figured out what I'm going to mention here, which is that we've been quite involved over the course of the years.

There's a few spaceborne marriages, in fact most pilots tend to marry other pilots, but in those cases the two tend to stay together afterward. I mean this in the sense that they sell off one or both of the ships and go into the freelance business as partners. It's sweet, and there's no way in hell something like that could ever work between myself and Katie. The two of us are entirely insane in too many different ways; my Random button being a perfect example. She wouldn't even have one; her entire trade route has to have been planned out far in advance, her next job was decided four contracts ago. Randomness doesn't exist for her.

There's no animosity between us, though. No sense of what could have been; we tried it, found out it didn't work, and went on our way. Still, it was nice to see her again. If things were different... hell, “If things were different” was practically our mantra. We couldn't have a conversation, it seemed, where the damn phrase wouldn't appear at one point or another. There's just a warmth. The same kind of feeling I get from coming home. It always seems that she manages to appear back in exile at the same time I do, within a few days. Granted, there's times where I haven't seen her and there's times where I run into her on every contract, still part of feeling like I was home when I was here was having her around.

If it seems like I think about her a lot, it's because I was. I stayed up writing this partially because I needed to get it down before the drink, the sleep, and the hangover I was due for tomorrow dulled my memory, but more because I wanted to get down my feelings in writing.

Now that my fingers ache from typing and my head's starting to follow suit, I think I'm going to head into bed and get as much sleep as I can, thus having the hangover's effects experienced mainly while I'm not awake to feel them. Wish me luck.

Earth-In-Exile, Day 231

I'd missed Katie more than I knew, it turns out. As soon as I woke up and made myself presentable, I went to the holo and dialed her up. She was there, awake, and already presentable; she'd either been expecting my call or she was nearly always dressed presentably just in case. Either scenario seemed likely. A lunch meeting was arranged rather quickly, words along the lines of “Why yes, it is nice to see you, I thought it might be” were exchanged, and vague reminiscing produced. The specific reminiscing would keep until later. In between the end of my call and the beginning of lunch, I kept busy by patching my panel through the house's computer into my ship's computer and then using it to look for contracts. I could have done it directly from the house panel, but my ship's got no end of my preferences saved on it, and I hate having to re-enter all of that everywhere I go. I'd also made a half dozen programs designed to filter and prod through job listings and make tentative agreements on my behalf, and the computer in the house, though nice, really didn't have that sort of processing power. The programs are surprisingly overcomplicated due to me being bored en route to places and re-writing them to do additional things far beyond the scope of typical software.

Finally, it was time to head over to the food ship – as the host of The Sleeper and a large number of other eating and drinking establishments were known. I'm uploading this and then I'll be on my way.

--

I'm writing the conversation as best I remember it.

“Alan, if things were different, I'd be taking you home tonight” is how she greeted me. Lately we'd been half-seriously trying to get the dreaded phrase out in the open before its weight could drag down what was usually, up until that point, a good conversation. It typically had mixed results, but today I was already in a good mood and blatant innuendo is always a way to get me to smile so that was the result she got. My reply was to say that I'd toast this particular idea. If things were different indeed....

Instead of going into that line of conversation, which would likely drag things down as it had in the past, I asked her to catch me up on current events, by which I meant things she'd been up to.

Gun-running, it turns out. She doesn't share my view on smuggling; being more of a free-enterprise minded person, she takes the position that anyone who can afford her services should be able to get transport for anything they want. Running weapons isn't what she's specifically doing, necessarily, that's just what I call it. She doesn't ask questions as to the nature of her cargo. She can get away with it because she knows that if she can't detect the contraband on her ship, nobody else can. Being the curious type, she always tries. Plus, she's a damn good pilot. If trouble reared its head like it does for all of us at some point, she'd get out all right. Hell, she has. I suspect that, despite her organized nature, she secretly likes the thrill when things go wrong. Any comments on my part along these lines just garner me annoyed looks, though, so I tend to avoid them.

The supplying of weapons to rebels and establishment alike (“It wouldn't be fair to play favorites,” she rationalizes) aside, she'd actually begun a series of steady contracts. One that could, apparently, mean that a full-time job was in the works. A bit more prodding on my part revealed that her new employer was none other than the Earth-In-Exile peacekeepers force itself. They had quite an extensive bounty hunting contract system set up, and she'd always been one for bounties.

Hell, that's how we met. There'd been a bounty on my capture after I botched a delivery contract; I'd been forced to jettison the cargo I was supposed to deliver when my ship was damaged, and my employers assumed I'd stolen it. I was fortunate in that all they wanted was their money back, but I hadn't known that at the time and thus I had ran. Katie tracked me down and then prepared herself to use all the guile and cunning she had to get on my ship and capture me.

That turned out to be unnecessary, as seeing a pilot from the homeworld (and a female one at that) had been more than enough for me to invite her over. When I did, she proceeded to stun me into unconsciousness, throw me in her brig, and deliver me to the slightly miffed employers that I owed the money to. As I didn't have their money, they impounded my ship until I worked it off. After that, I found Katie and returned the favor. Unfortunately there were no bounties out for her capture, so I settled for actually eating dinner with her, as she'd promised me that right before she knocked me out and I intended to collect.

I'd been on bounty lists a few times since then, but she hasn't captured me since the first time. Whether it's out of courtesy for an ex-lover or the more simple fact that she might not have gotten to the contract before someone else did (I suspect the latter, something told me that given the chance she'd rather enjoy locking me up) she'd never knocked me out again.

I jokingly asked if I was going to get captured by her once more, and she changed the subject. I made a mental note to ensure that all my contracts were completed absolutely correctly.

“So, I heard about your little Ulix adventure” she mentioned at one point.

I nodded before it occurred to me that I hadn't told anyone the true nature of my visit to the lost empire. How did she know that I'd been to Ulix space?

“Oh come on, Alan, I know you better than that. The story is that you ended up in uncharted space, but you've never once gotten lost in your entire life. Yet, there's this expanse of empty space practically on our doorstep and you expect me to not suspect you just came from there?”

She had a point. If I'd known the story was going to get back to her, of course, I likely would have gone through pains to further obfuscate it. In retrospect, though, it probably wouldn't have mattered. She had a habit of knowing when I was lying. Fortunately, she didn't follow up in that particular line; I don't know how much I would have been able to keep from her. I suppose eventually I'd tell her the whole thing, but only after I'd let it settle in my mind a bit. The entire voyage still made me uneasy, the Border in particular.

Mainly, what we did was swap stories. I told her about Poln and Anor and, most entertaining to us, the rookies. She told me about a recon patrol she'd run that'd gone badly, and some bounty hunts that “weren't nearly as entertaining as some I could recall”. I slipped in a few references to the Ulix ship when she asked about the happy little green light she'd hear about, and while I never specifically said it was an Ulix ship, it wasn't hard for her to figure out. She seemed to enjoy the story. I conspicuously avoided mentioning my favorite artifact that I obsessed over to no end. That omission, at least, seemed to work, as she had no idea it even existed.

We ate lunch and, after hours of telling stories, a walk around the area, and eating dinner, we said our goodbyes and headed back to our respective rooms. Instead of inviting me to hers, as she would if things were different, she instead left me with a cryptic remark along the lines of “Check the contracts.” Among freelancers, it's a typical farewell to say “See you next contract”, but that's obviously not what she was trying to say. Katie liked to leave me wondering, you could definitely say that about her.

When I returned to my house, my ship had found several contracts that fit my specifications. I felt briefly tempted to follow in Katie's footsteps and give bounty hunting a try, but it usually involved far too much actual physical fighting for someone my age. I ignored the fact that Katie was slightly older than me and doing fine.

My options this time around were: Delivery, delivery, deployment of scientific equipment, escort some rookies around, and passenger transport. This last was marked by my sophisticated screening programs as being the best candidate. I looked at the description briefing: The Exile Peacekeeping Force – that's our army, or what remains of it after the demilitarization – wanted new recruits transported from Earth-In-Exile to New Yotia (i.e. our old homeworld) in order to begin training. That was also part of the decision that left us homeless and adrift; anyone joining the peacekeeping forces had to spend a stint on New Yotia among the people that their species had caused such strife to. It seemed from a distance like a sound policy, but more and more it seemed to me that the tribunal were just tacking on punishments. It was popular to bash us, as you can well imagine. Hell, you've probably done it yourself. How many exiles does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, we just blow the whole neighborhood to hell and start over!

I wasn't sure why my computer had picked that particular job as being more desirable to one of the easy deliveries. I had no desire to see my home planet knowing that I would never have it again (and, as former military, I was forbidden from ever touching its surface) and my programs to find me a paying job had that fact built in. It didn't make much sense as a choice until I looked at the passenger roster. Turns out there was only one person on the list: Katie Simmond.

Guess she decided to take that job after all.

Lane 711, Day 232

Peacekeepers. It just didn't make any damn sense.

Unlike the usually ironic name that some species gave their wartime armies, the Exile Peacekeepers were exactly that. They had a strict non-interference mandate given to them by the tribunal which exiled us. Peacekeeper ships weren't allowed to carry real weaponry, just EM bolts which could disable a ship but not kill anyone. They were called upon to mediate border disputes, create a safe area around chaotic war zones, deliver humanitarian aid, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that I couldn't see Katie doing at all.

I'd mentioned this to her, and she reminded me she'd signed up for the bounty hunting. While it wasn't officially sanctioned by the tribunal, there was a long list of rebels, terrorists and war criminals out there, and the Peacekeepers usually found themselves responsible for getting them back. That explained, the fact that Katie would choose to fight with only non-lethal weapons made a whole lot more sense. It was a challenge.

She casually mentioned some of the names she'd brought in. I recognized a known pirate leader, which impressed me. Leaders of piratical groups tend to operate in an organized crime sort of way. Those in charge rarely make public appearances, so it was quite a coup for the peacekeepers in general and Katie in particular.

Other names she dropped included a few war criminals from the Yotia conflict. The exiles naturally had an interest in hunting them down, as they hoped it would help redeem them in the eyes of the galactic community. Katie had found some of the higher-up folks who'd been missing for a while. Higher-ups in the military at the time had almost uniformly ran; only those who were honest had turned themselves in immediately. Ironically enough, with public sentiment as outraged as it was, those were the criminals whose sentence was toughest. Luckily for me during the time of the incident I was a low-paid technician working with a team on a crappy Resonator knock-off that refused to work in ways the physical universe dictated it ought to. Considering how that turned out, of course, it wasn't that great, but it was certainly better than being branded a war criminal.

When Katie had appeared on board my ship, she couldn't seem to repress a wide, knowing grin. She'd obviously taken the job before she'd even taken me to lunch, and was at this very moment reveling in her continued ability to pull one over on me. Upon reflection, she'd seemed to have a lesser version of this sly smile during lunch, but I'd put it down to her being mysterious. Even when she's not keeping any secrets she looks like that, so it's somewhat hard to tell when she's not telling everything.

I'm not used to having someone on my ship. Providing transport to people is notably harder than doing the same for cargo. For one, they expect you to talk to them. Katie and I had spent most of the day before talking, and yet I was still going to feel acutely embarrassed if I failed to come up with something to converse about. Thankfully, the two of us can be comfortable in silence. I hardly ever take personnel missions like this one because I don't know the people I'd be transporting, and I don't especially want to. It's not that I'm unapproachable, it's just that someone who needs someone else to pilot them somewhere is not going to have a whole lot in common with someone who pilots for a living.

That did raise a good question, though. I turned to Katie as soon as the thought had crystallized in my mind: Why did she need me to drive her around? Last I knew she had a perfectly good ship.

“I do have a perfectly good ship. I just like yours better. It's quaint, undeveloped; it has this whole primitive feel to it.”

Very funny. I'd like to know the real reason, though.

“They won't let me take my ship with me. When I signed up with them, I lost the right to fly my ship until I'm not with them anymore. My ship's got weaponry, after all, the real stuff. Even if I offered to retrofit their weapons onto it – and Alan, I was so desperate that I did make that offer – they can't be sure I haven't hidden extra bits of explosives around the ship.”

That's because she had, in all likelihood, done exactly that.

“So I keep a few secondary cannons around in case of trouble? Does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to bring my ship, who I've known longer than I've known even you Alan, with me?”

Apparently so.

She scowled and it occurred to me only then, stereotypical dense male of my species as I am, that she was honestly angry about this subject. Had I'd been giving it any rational thought, I'd have realized it far earlier. If someone wanted to take my ship away, after all, they'd do it only after I'd drained the battery out of every last blaster I owned in an effort to stop them. I'm only slightly exaggerating. Katie was just as attached to her ship as I was to mine, perhaps more so. I wondered what it was that could make her willing to give it up.

“It's the work, Alan. You know me, I've freelanced as long as you have. But I don't have the heart for it. I do it because I love to fly and I love the feeling of accomplishment, but there's no greater goal. The bounty work I'm doing, it's important. We're finding some genuine bad people. I just wanted to work for a reason, you know?”

I knew. I didn't feel the same way, of course, for me the freedom of being able to go anywhere I wanted was what kept me in the business. I had everything I wanted as a pilot-for-sale. I'd done the military thing, and while as a researcher I was allowed a certain degree of freedom, even the smallest restrictions started to chafe me after a while. With the tribunal's order for the exile army to disband, I took the opportunity and never looked back. It was this difference between us, more than anything else, which was insurmountable.

Something I didn't know was why she'd gotten into the business to begin with. Initially, I was too busy getting captured to ask, and then I was too busy with courtship and other activities (I will spare you the details of how our species goes about these activities, as it is no doubt disgusting to your species) to bring the subject up. Since our split, the topic had never arisen; I may be dense, but even I can tell when something is a sore subject. Well, after a while I can tell.

“You want to know why I got into this whole thing, then, don't you? Doesn't make much sense, after all. If I not-so-secretly crave order, why wasn't I military? Why did I go freelance?”

She was, on the other hand, pretty damn good at reading me.

She smiled briefly at this admission, but it was a cursory expression. She was either still upset by my mentioning her ship or she was preparing to be upset by this new topic which, no doubt, I would be blamed for bringing up.

“We've got a while until we get home, so I guess I now's as good a time as any.”

It wasn't home.

She sighed. “I know that. I can't help saying it, though. I'd chide you for depressing me but I'm already in that mood.

“I wasn't in the military because I was a protester. I opposed the war.”

Given what I knew about her proclivities toward violence, this did not seem entirely likely. Given those same proclivities, however, I wasn't hurrying to point this out.

“I wasn't exactly a pacifist.” she offered by way of explanation. “I definitely wasn't one of those peaceful protesters, picketing government buildings or starting letter-writing campaigns. You know me, I could never settle for something as inactive as that. Instead, I took a ship – the very same ship as the one that's sitting in storage at Exile – and I did everything I could to disrupt the war effort.”

I stared. She really hadn't been a pacifist; she'd been a terrorist!

“I was not a terrorist! Nobody ever got hurt, after all. Hell, I stopped people from dying. And I didn't play favorites; I did what I could to stop either side from getting where they needed to go. If they couldn't get there, I figured, they couldn't fight. I used the typical dirty tricks; my favorite tactic was to launch probes that looked like ships in need of rescue. If I wasn't feeling that subtle, I'd just broadcast enough static to jam every system of every ship anywhere near the area. That made it a little easier to track me down, though, so I didn't do it often. Never got caught.”

I found it surprising that her new employers apparently didn't mind this history. That is, if they knew about it.

“Oh, they know about it, they don't care. Hell, half of the peacekeepers' tricks date back to stuff we did to disrupt things. They figured I was experienced in exactly what they needed done. Plus I was 'fighting against an unjust war' and all that.”

She was using a phrase that the tribunal had; they'd praised the protesters by saying exactly that. I, on the other hand, had been 'following illegal orders' and 'dooming an entire star system'. Here I thought I'd just been a techie. While neither I nor the rest of the low-level flunkies were punished beyond the rest of the species, we still had some pretty harsh words said about us, then and now.

“I seemed like the perfect recruit for the Peacekeepers when they started up, I suppose. But after what happened at Yotia.... I could have stopped it. We knew, all of the protesters knew there was going to be a weapon demonstration. It was supposed to end the war, though. A weapon to be used on an uninhabited planet, nobody getting killed, yet an impressive enough display to stop all the fighting right there. A number of us wanted to stop it from happening; divert the team delivering the weapon or something along those lines. I wouldn't let them. I wasn't exactly a leader among them, I don't think we even had a leadership, but they knew me and all the things I did, and if I said that this would end the war, then it was going to end the war. I didn't know then how well it would do at exactly that.

“I didn't see any point in joining the peacekeepers when they came around. I didn't see much of any point in anything, really. Despite everything I had tried to do to stop the war, an entire star system was gone. Six billion people, and I made the call. So I drifted for a while. After some time, it became habit. I like freelancing, Alan, I do, but now I've found something I can believe in again. I have to do this. It's like I'd been running away from anything real my whole life after Yotia, and I'm just now getting back to it.”

There was a silence after this. I didn't know what to make of it. She couldn't possibly blame herself for the lives lost – even if she had been successful at stopping the weapon, which was very unlikely given its heavy escort, the army would have just created another one. Knowing her like I did, though, I knew she did blame herself. Every single one of those lives lost was her fault, in her mind. Nevermind the facts.

I awkwardly moved forward to hug her, and she smiled and nearly seemed to laugh before motioning me away.

“Thanks for the thought, but I came to terms with this a long time ago. I've known I was drifting for years. I'd been looking for this opportunity for a while; with contacts like ours, I figured that freelancing was a good way to find it. Guess I was right.”

My incompetent attempt at reassurance appeared to have its desired effect, though, as she seemed to have cheered up. She stood out of the chair she'd taken and stretched. “So now you know my sad story. Freelancing was really quite uneventful, the perfect way to just let your mind go. Until, of course, I met a certain Captain. He's the one who got me thinking about all this, you know.” With that, she went to the door. Turning and winking at me, she added:

“Good night.”

Lane 714, Day 234

The intervening days have been quiet. Fortunately, it's the good sort of quiet, the comfortable sort that you fall into with someone who you know nearly as well as you know yourself. Yesterday she'd taken a self-guided tour of the ship. I'd offered to show her around myself – though I usually preferred to spend time in the pilot's seat, the ship is actually fairly competent at flying on its own – but she'd turned me down with that mysterious look of hers. It wasn't until later that night I'd found out that what she'd actually been doing was trying to find all the hiding spots. Every ship has one, at least every ship with a freelance owner does. They're the spots you put things that the local authorities have, for whatever reason, deemed illegal and yet you have decided to carry anyway. Usually shielded against both regular detection and bumbling inspection teams. On occasion, they're used to secret actual people from place to place, which is where I suppose Katie's interest in them came from. Though, unless she suspected me of smuggling people – and that was most definitely against my 'harmless items only' policy – it didn't really explain why she was going through my ship in particular. For a while I was content to just let her explain when she was ready to, but it rapidly became apparent that the knowing smirk on her face meant she intended to say nothing until I brought it up. So I asked.

“I just wanted to see how many of them I could find. Gotta keep in shape, after all.”

Curious myself as to the security of my hiding spots, I asked how many she found. All but one, it turned out, and that one was only accessible from the outside of the ship, so it wasn't exactly convenient. I made a mental note to design new spots.

I also mentally thanked my luck that I hadn't been in the midst of an operation which would have me making use of them. Katie likely wouldn't have interfered, but then again with her new job she might now be unable to overlook the small stuff. Thank goodness she hadn't found this journal; I've already confessed to mail-tampering. She'd put me away for life!

“You're being melodramatic.”

She's watching me enter this right now, as it happens. She's known I kept a journal since yesterday, when she caught me trying to surreptitiously key in this entry. I received no end of teasing on this topic, notably the insistence that I start each entry with “Dear Diary”. Understandably, I'm not terribly amused at this.

“Spoil sport. Fine, it's obvious you don't want a beautiful and available woman in your quarters anymore. I'll just be at the pilot's seat.”

We're alone now, you and I. It's difficult to keep this journal with her around. We keep secrets from each other; I've never met anyone who didn't. There's things in this journal that I haven't told her. Things I'm not proud of, like getting Curly the twist back on Poln. Things like what actually happened in Ulix space. So anything I type in has to be mentally sanitized with witnesses in the area. Thankfully, there's no real access points to the journal. Central storage on the ship isn't accessible from the inside except via my panels here in my quarters and in the pilot's seat.

The pilot seat that Kate's sitting in, right now.

Hi, Kate.

## Hi yourself. ##

How's the view from the pilot's seat?

## Fantastic. Though this journal's providing even more entertaining reading. Those sensors are awful exciting, but I think you've got them beat. ##

You know, the entire time I've been writing this, I've been doing it under the assumption that some spy or prosecutor was going to be using it against me. I never figured you'd be the one to do so.

## Come now, I just plugged in to what you were writing right now. I wouldn't go through the whole thing unless you okay it. I've got my secrets too, you know. You wouldn't snoop in my diary, would you?##

No comment.

## So can I read yours? ##

I sighed. What the hell did I just write that for? I'm sighing, right now, at you, Katie. Sure, fine, read it if you want.

## Nah, that'd be rude. I'll do it some other time. It's getting kinda dry now that you know I'm looking over your shoulder again. ##

I love that woman.

## Suck-up. ##

--

Just like that, she's gone.

Not permanently, of course. Our brief conversation before her departure indicated she'd probably be on Exile a fair amount of time, so we stood a chance of running into each other. While it's nice to have the ship to myself again and be able to feel free in what I say and do, there is a part of me that misses her.

## Miss you too. ##

I suspect she may have left me a little gift. Specifically, in the programming of the journal. She's always giving me farewells that way.

Her actual farewell was nothing so elaborate. I entered orbit around New Yotia and docked with the station. I was allowed to escort her to the airlock, but of course could go no farther. She gave me a hug and wished me well, saying she was sure we'd meet again.

And just like that, she's gone.

Afterward, I orbited the planet for a while, just looking at it. It'd been a while since I'd been here; I'd had a few contracts that brought me to this area, but those were few and far between. Few were willing to trust one of my species with anything to do with this place. Every time I came, I spent as much time looking down at the place as I could. Exile was a good place, and a part of my heart belongs there, but this planet will always be home.

Eventually the Yotia orbital defense ships buzzed me and gave me a warning which amounted to “stop looking so suspicious. In fact, get the hell out of here.” They did this every time I stopped by, and every time I did as they asked. They already suspected me of trying to finish the work my people started, no reason to give them extra ammunition.

I set course along Lane 530, as that would take me toward Anjarti space. As it happened, I had an Anjarti I wanted to talk to: Salient Steve. As is the case with many of the names I've put down here, that's not his actual one. His name translated to about a paragraph's worth of description, and I can't remember it properly (which would be a grave insult) so, like I do in these cases, I gave him a nickname. He didn't mind because he didn't know; the translator did all the work.

Salient Steve earned his name by being the most visible of our research team, back in the day. Next to Dr. Fallon, he was the highest-ranking non-Ulix involved with the project. He was management, essentially, as the good doctor was too busy doing research with me and Jenny the Amazing Research Squid (sadly, aside from the 'Jenny' part, that was not a nickname; it's how her name actually translated) to deal with the Ulix and military higher-ups who wanted to see a return on their investment.

Of all the people I'd worked with in that project, he was the only one that I had a clue as to the whereabouts of. I suppose I could have hired a private detective, only that's also one of the jobs I tend to freelance at, and it would of course bug me to have to get someone else to do it. So Salient Steve was my best lead. Last I knew, he was on Anjart itself, which narrowed down the search to about twenty billion creatures which were visually indistinguishable from each other to the untrained eye. I'd spent a lot of time with Steve, granted, but not among his own kind. I never learned how to tell him apart. With luck I wouldn't have to. I'd just have to make a posting on the Anjart Mercantile Station job boards.

Lane 530, Day 236

It's a good thing I checked the job boards beforehand. I was only a few hours from the station – close enough to get to its public computers – and I figured I'd spend the time looking for additional contracts. Exile had paid but Katie hadn't tipped, after all, so I was starting to run low on funds. Speaking of which, I made a note to myself to, upon my arrival on station, find a branch of the company that sold my translator to me. I had a linguistic bounty to collect.

Meanwhile, my programs had flagged this job for me as being highest priority:

“Pilot desired for personnel transport from station to borderlands. Lane 404 travel a must. Only pilots whose goals resonate with these should apply.”

You can guess which word was the key in that particular ad. The reason I knew where I could find Steve, unlike the others, was that he continued to post jobs to the board on this station. Anytime I, or anyone else on the team I suppose, wanted to find him, all we had to do was stop by the station and check for messages with 'resonate' as a keyword. This message was strange, though. It seemed to indicate that he'd left for the borderlands, but the Lane 404 caveat was what kept throwing me for a loop. There was no lane 404, at least none in this area of space. Some other scientists on the other side of the galaxy might have named their lane that, but locally 404 was widely known as “The Lost Lane”. Somewhat of a – to use an idiom I hope will translate - “Bermuda Triangle”. Any Lane that wasn't numbered was dubbed 404, and for good reason; they tended to be unstable. When a Lane failed, anything on it suffered a rather non-pretty fate. Why Steve had mentioned such a route was beyond me. Unless....

He couldn't be serious. In his other life, before management at our project and countless projects before, Salient Steve had been an engineer. Specifically, a Lane engineer.

My fingers flew across the keys on my various control panels. I wanted to access the navigational feed from the station; the sort of thing that warned about sunspots interfering with older drives or which Lanes weren't congested. It only took a few moments. My gut instinct had proven true: Lane 685 was experiencing unexpected instability due to a malfunctioning emitter. Steve had, if the rest of my suspicions were true, redirected it for his own purposes. A Lane with only one emitter would be shoddy at best and could hold very little traffic, but someone with enough knowledge of the topic could make it work.

I began to very subtly scan for Lanes. I had to be very careful – Lanes were typically marked by buoys, and it was rare that one would need to actively attempt to discover them. If anyone caught me doing so, they'd wonder why. I wouldn't get in trouble, but it was obvious to me that Steve was going through a lot of effort to stay hidden from everyone but the rest of his old gang, and if that was the case he almost certainly would be in trouble if he was caught.

My sensors showed a very faint echo near 685. I queried the station nav computers as to whether it was a safe lane to travel at all; they informed me that the AMS had many redundant emitters for the safety and convenience of its travelers, and while the ride along 685 would likely be slightly bumpier than usual, it would be no more dangerous.

Excellent. I did everything in my power to make it look as though I was going down lane 685, when in fact I was heading for the small sensor echo just off of it. Hopefully this had actually been set up by Steve, otherwise chances were good that the new lane would vanish and take me with it. Still, the message didn't make sense unless he had meant for one of us to find him.

I turned on the Lane drive, and hoped.

Lane 404, Day 237

I'd forgotten a lot about my comrades in the thirty years since last I'd seen them. Dr. Fallon, for instance, had a way of completely diving into the research and ignoring the outside world. His wife, on more than one occasion, had been forced to go into the lab and drag him away from his work to get him to eat. Jenny talked all the time – her species had no internal monologue; they spoke everything they thought. It was strange the first few times one of us ticked her off, as she would insult us but then seem surprised when we were offended. We got used to it. Sann, the hardware tech, the one in charge of making sure what me and the doc and the squid thought up was implemented correctly, he was the quiet one. While Jenny and Fallon would get into discussions all the time over the true nature of the Resonator, Sann and I would be in the other room silently hacking together our unlicensed knock-off.

Salient Steve, as I had forgotten up until this point, was a sanctimonious bastard, and we all hated him.

I was reminded of this fact as my travel down 404 came to an abrupt and angry stop. I thought that the Lane itself had given out on me, but of course that was stupid; if it had done so I wouldn't be around to wonder about it. A quick query on my computer revealed that the lane had become too unstable for further travel, and the Lane drive had been disengaged for my safety. I was about to start hacking the computer to ignore my personal safety and carry on when I got the transmission.

“Unidentified craft, you are traveling in a restricted zone without permission. Identify yourself immediately or your carrier lane will be dropped.”

My translator produced this voice in a tone of annoyance that I'd recognize anywhere. I sent back a reply along the lines of me being wounded, deeply, that someone who resonated so well with Steve and his goals should be so ill-treated.

“Ledford? Dear God man, what possessed you of all people to find me? Ugh, I was hoping it would be someone else. Even our amazing squid would have been better. What the hell do you want?”

I was getting the old crew back together, of course. I didn't mention the part where I'd much rather have left Steve out of it, but as he was the only one I could get ahold of, he was going to have to do.

“Wow, Ledford, you're even stupider than I remember. Haven't you been paying attention to the newsnets lately? Hell, I suspected I'd have to do it. That's why I was leaving the messages for everyone, so they'd know what was happening. I think we all knew Archetype was going to catch up with us someday. Figures I'd be the only one among you who would care. We're in this much trouble already, and you want to go about starting it all up again?”

I couldn't explain it to Steve – he wasn't the sort who would understand the need to solve a technological problem like that. He was more of a bottom line sort of person, and in this case the bottom line was not calling attention to himself. I focused on another part of his diatribe, though: There was trouble?

“Yes, as you'd know if you'd been keeping up at all. Dr. Fallon turned himself in to the tribunal. Apparently it happened several months ago but word of it's just leaked out now. You know, any second now there's going to be wanted posters up and broadcasts about Archetype and this whole damn section of space is going to be gunning for us. I hijacked that Lane so I could get word out to at least one of you about what had happened. You go find the rest and let them know. I suspect Fallon's told them everything, but he and Jenny were mainly research. It's you and Sann they'll be after; you're the ones who actually built the thing. You especially since you're familiar with both the theory and practice of making that particular bit of cracked-up machinery.”

It didn't make sense to focus just on me and Sann, though. Why us?

“Because, you idiot, as soon as they have you they'll want you to make another one. And we all know where that'll lead. Now I've done my part and said what I dragged you out here to say. Get the hell off of my lane so I can shut it down and vanish properly, okay?”

I responded by cutting the communication short and turning the Lane drive back on. To no great surprise, the stability of the Lane appeared to increase the farther back it reached. Heading forward to where Steve was acting as an anchor were increasing areas of spottiness. It was clear which direction he wanted me to go in. I headed back.

Anjarti Mercantile Station, Day 237

Build another one? Was Steve insane? The first had been an almost irredeemable failure, why would anyone in their right mind want to create another one?

Of course, I had come to him with almost exactly that proposal in mind, so I suppose I wasn't one to talk. Still, my purpose was to create the Resonator as it was meant to be, not the hacked up bastardized version we ended up with. It was that version that the tribunal, lunatics that they were, would want. It seemed somewhat ironic to me that the very people that had condemned mine for war crimes wanted something with which to commit one of their own.

Yeah, our failed experiment failed that badly. I confess to nothing, however, so if you were expecting to get some incriminating evidence out of this journal, you're going to have to keep looking.

Steve did have a point about the insanity of starting up Archetype again. The dream had brought it to the forefront of my mind, but the desire to tinker with and improve upon what we had done had been there for decades. Like I said, it's like a puzzle I just can't put down. I tended to forget that it was a very dangerous puzzle, though. The Ulix had trusted us with it, and boy had they misplaced that bit of trust.

Still, I had another reason to find the others now. That Dr. Fallon had turned himself in didn't come as an especially great surprise to me, I actually thought it would have happened much sooner. He was a man of conscience, and when he saw what his work had done, it broke his heart. The important part now was to find the others. Fallon, great guy that he was, was likely to try to take all the blame for the project, but chances were good that the tribunal would eventually ferret out the rest of us and condemn us to some prison planet – and that only if we were lucky. Salient Steve had recommended I find Sann first, but I had no idea where the recitent engineer would be keeping himself. I had a vague idea, however, where Jenn might be. At least, I knew where to start.

First, though, I had a bounty to collect. Traveling with an empty cargo hold would be a lot easier if I had a bit of money to fall back on.

--

“Mister Ledford, quite frankly we're amazed.”

I was in one of the more comfortable chairs I'd had the chance to enjoy in some time. The offices of Zahann Industries were climate controlled specifically to the client's needs. Naturally this required someone with a tolerance for said client's atmosphere, and in this case it turns out they actually had someone from Exile on hand.

“Never in my lifetime, nor the lifetime of any species currently employed by Zahann, have we actually seen someone come in with this light on their translator.”

Said translator was still in the hands of Zahann engineers, who had likely finished making sure I hadn't taken it apart to somehow force the light to come on and were now just wasting time. It wasn't needed because I understood the particular dialect this fellow was speaking. I had to put up with his horrible accent, though.

“What's even more amazing is that records indicate you were in Ulix space at the time?”

This was said with an air of suspicion. Clearly I couldn't have been in Ulix space, so some tampering had to have been done. I had actually cracked the case of the translator box on occasion, but only to add the various naming features and other little quirks that I eventually add to all my machinery. They'd likely see this and assume I'd messed with its locator somehow to say that I was somewhere I wasn't. The controller which dictated whether or not a new language had been found, however, I hadn't touched. Besides, I knew it would have recorded everything that Oorn had said, so I wasn't particularly worried. I made up some story about not wanting to reveal my true whereabouts at the time of the encounter, as it would raise a lot of questions I didn't want asked. It was mostly true, after all.

“Ah, well, someone in your trade,” this said rather disdainfully “obviously has a great many undertakings he would prefer not be made public. You may rely on us to be discreet.”

Sure I could. A company whose big seller was a device which lets people communicate with other people and thus increase the amount of chatter in the universe was suddenly going to shut up on my behalf.

“Mister Ledford, let me assure you, translation is not our only business. We make a wide variety of products, many of which I am sure you have made use of yourself, even if you were not aware of it. We are very familiar with more... subtle technology.”

I didn't reply to that – either he was offering to sell me black-market items, in which case I had plenty and didn't especially need more, or he was trying to bait me in an effort to get me arrested.

A buzz sounded at his desk. Annoyed, he pressed his fingertip to the intercom key. A message, conducted via his skin, was relayed to an earpiece he appeared to wear at all times. His face lost quite a bit of its skepticism.

“Well, Mister Ledford.”

Dammit, I'm a Captain.

“Captain Ledford, of course. I'm happy to inform you that our engineers and linguists agree your unit is mostly intact and the sound samples are genuine. You've done us quite a service. Provide your banking information of choice, and we will be happy to credit you your bounty.”

My translator?

“It will be returned to you once our engineers have copied the sound samples over. In the meanwhile, we are providing you with our top of the line, free of charge.”

At this, an orderly of some sort emerged in the room, carrying the newest box on the market. I didn't know much about it, as it had only been released as of two days ago. What I did know what that it was way out of my price range. They could keep the old one, this one would be more entertaining to slice.

“Thank you for your kind donation, Captain Ledford. We hope to do business with you again.”

<!--

We have, at our disposal, more detailed records than even Zahann. They date back farther than anyone on this team's species, and in this case the language Ledford discovered was not, in fact, a new language. We compared it to the one farthest back in the archives, the first language entered by those who had constructed these records, and found it a perfect match.

What Ledford had discovered was the native Ulix tongue.

-->