 
### Global Warming Fun - 7: Space Rendezvous

By

Gary J. Davies

Published by Gary J. Davies at Smashwords

Global Warming Fun - 7: Space Rendezvous

Copyright 2018 Gary J. Davies

### Smashwords Edition License Notes

Thank you for downloading this e-book. This book is the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed for any commercial or non-commercial use without permission from the author. Quotes used in reviews are the only exception. No alteration of content is allowed. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy.

This e-book is a work of fiction created by the author and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are a production of the author's imagination and used fictitiously. Thank you for downloading this e-book!

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### Contents

Forward

CHAPTER 1: Charon

CHAPTER 2: Reminiscing

CHAPTER 3: Ship

CHAPTER 4: The Scattered Disk

CHAPTER 5: Sleep of Death?

CHAPTER 6: Waking!

CHAPTER 7: The Intruder

CHAPTER 8: Landing

CHAPTER 9: The Way Inside

CHAPTER 10: Inside Intruder

CHAPTER 11: Inside But Outside

CHAPTER 12: Duty Calls

CHAPTER 13: Intruder-2

CHAPTER 14: Intruder Master

CHAPTER 15: The Stonecoat Inside

CHAPTER 16: Alien Intel

CHAPTER 17: What a Way to Go

CHAPTER 18: Decision Time

CHAPTER 19: Separation, Obliteration, and Death

CHAPTER 20: Returning Home

About Other Publications by This Author

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### Forward

Like all my works this one may be enjoyed as a stand-alone story. However it is part of a planned ten-part Global Warming Fun (GWF) series that is most completely understood if all of its volumes are read in sequence. For those who wish general background information without necessarily reading the preceding volumes this Forward section provides an overview as context for this current volume.

Global warming/climate change, a slow-motion disaster that will take centuries to fully play out, provides the background for a serious drama: the survival of humans and other life on Earth. (Didn't humans already have more than enough to worry about?)

By the time this particular snapshot of that larger story occurs more than three centuries in the future, humans have shockingly learned that they are not the only noticeably sentient beings on Earth: humans struggle to co-exist with sentient ants called jants, ancient rock creatures called stonecoats, and computers/robots. The recurring lead characters in the series are three once ordinary humans: Ed and Mary Rumsfeld and their once neighbor the biologist Jerry Brown, the creator of Jerry's ants, the jants. (Ref. GWF 1).

Humans, jants, stonecoats, and robots are officially represented in this space adventure by the three lead characters of this story. Ancient Mohawk legend (Ref. GWF 2, 4) has come to life in the form of stonecoats: thinking beings of rock that predate humans by countless millions of years. Mary Rumsfeld 'reborn' as a stonecoat replicate (Ref. GWF 5, 6) co-stars in this current story, representing both humans and stonecoats.

Jerry Brown's bio-engineered sentient ants (Ref. GWF 1-6) – the jants – have by now spread world-wide. The telepathic insects have learned to symbiotically combine with humans via giant ticks (Ref. GWF 3) formulated by the jants to link with humans to form 'zombies' (Ref. GWF 5, 6): otherwise dead humans reactivated and maintained by jant intellegence. Martin Tall Bear, the second co-star of this story, is a human/jant zombie that shares a common Mohawk background with Mary. Martin represents both humans and jants.

Robots developed by mankind have also emerged (Ref. GWF 6) to lay claim to an inherent right to life. The third pivotal character of this story is the robot spaceship itself wherein most of the story occurs.

Can humans, jants, stonecoats and robots learn to co-exist on Earth and beyond? What happens when together they venture into space and encounter potentially dangerous aliens?

Enjoy!

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### Global Warming Fun - 7: Space Rendezvous

CHAPTER 1

### Charon

Martin Tall Bear walked steadily and very cautiously through the narrow hallway that according to provided schematics conveniently connected his cramped quarters designated as room M-3 with his destination: the Meeting Room designated M-32. Even though he wore moderately magnetized boots he had to step very softly showing great restraint, or else in the slight gravity - less than 3% as strong as Earth's - he feared that he could find himself inadvertently bounding off the iron-laced deck and colliding into a wall or ceiling. That would doubtlessly hurt, as the entire structure was constructed of some sort of hard, dense carbon-based ceramic that his jants couldn't identify chemically as a familiar substance. Still, having even weak gravity helped orient many body biological processes such that this facility felt much more natural to both his human and jant body parts than did the zero gravity environment experienced for much of the long trip here.

Wherever the hells 'here' was! He had been informed when he arrived that this was Charon Base-1, but the name meant nothing to him, and he had not been beforehand informed of his route or destination, or what mission he had been assigned by the Space Directorate. Charon could be just another way-stop, or it could just as well be the place he was destined to spend the rest of his miserable life. All he really knew about it for sure was that it was damned far from Earth. As far as he knew, stasis could only be safely maintained for a year or two. Twice he had been put into a stasis state and revived on the trip here, suggesting that his trip may have taken over four years!

He also knew that the space-freighter that he arrived on was what the space-rats (humans) that manned such flights called a 'clipper': a fast smallish rocket-fueled ship compared to the big sluggish solar-powered supply ships that could take decades to get from place to place in the solar system. No doubt about it, he had been rushed to Charon Base in a hurry. Why?

Was Charon a big asteroid or mid-sized moon maybe? Martin had no idea. He never did have any interest in either astronomy or the Space Program. Perhaps he was even on one of those stations that rotated to provide a simulated gravity? But no, the long hallway seemed 'flat' though it twisted this way and that; it didn't seem likely that it was part of some sort of roundish man-made rotating body unless it was an unimaginably huge one. And anyway, he seemed to recall that places designated as 'bases' by the Space Directorate existed only on planetary bodies of considerable size. The Directorate would call this place a 'station' if it was freely floating in space or attached to only a small object in space.

Nearly two hundred worker-jants in his backpack continuously provided a telepathic chatter linkage between the implant surgically imbedded near his spine and the jant-hive part of him that remained in M-3. There were no problems so far; jant thoughts remained reliably linked with what remained of his human brain. As promised by Colonel Jack Whigs, the Base Commander that met him when he arrived the day before, all of the M-Wing of Charon Base 1 apparently maintained Earth-normal atmosphere and temperatures, and was within telepathic chatter range of a jant hive located anywhere in the M-wing. That was by design, Whigs had mentioned. Each letter-designated section of Charon Base 1, indeed every Earth station, base, and colony of the Sol solar system, was segmented to safely accommodate jants and jant human-zombies.

That made little practical sense to Martin. Very few jants lived off-Earth for the simple reason that from the perspective of the human-created intelligent ant species called jants, living off-Earth was a totally insane notion. Even more than humans, jants had a need to live in an Earth-like soil-rich habitat. Yet by necessity a few jant colonies did go into space, and most of them did so coupled with a human body that would otherwise be dead had it not been adopted by jants.

What drove reluctant jant participation in space ventures was a century old agreement between humans, jants, stonecoats, and robots that all four of Earth's sentient ruling races would share equally in space exploration and in colonizing off-Earth worlds. It was part of the Great Peace Settlement that ended the deadly Robot Wars. That meant that at least a token number of jant colonies had to travel off-Earth, like it or not. Since human body size and strength was useful to ensuring jant-hive health and safety, and to operating mechanical and technical apparatus typically designed for human use, that meant that jant zombies had to be part of the Space Program.

Personally Martin, both his human-side and his jant-side, didn't give a damn about space exploration or off-Earth colonization. Yet here he was somewhere off-Earth, far from the rich, warm, life-filled Earth soil where both jants and humans more or less comfortably thrived. Back in M-3 a cubic-meter of top-soil was maintained to surround the jant hive, to help keep his jants both sane and healthy. The soil was alive with countless trillions of living biota and associated chemistry, which jants were hard-wired to need. The hive itself was a quarter the volume of the surrounding soil: tunnels and chambers teeming with jants in egg, larvae, pupa, worker, drone and queen forms, along with collections of food: particularly seeds from Earth-side obtained for them by Martin, their human counterpart.

The jants in turn kept Martin's body alive and healthy. Every beat of Martin's heart was commanded by the collective jant hive mind, where also every cognitive thought he had was echoed and reshaped or originated. Not surprisingly, left alone, jants didn't think very much like humans. But coupled with humans they did. Enough for them to function and survive together.

A tenth of the mass of each tiny jant was brain-matter located in its oversized head that could link telepathically with others of its species to form a coherent hive-mind. Except for that singular astounding modification to ant physiology, jants were totally ant-like, individually operating mostly in accordance with the primitive hard-wired instincts and the complex chemistry of themselves and their immediate biochemical environment. Humans could for the most part successfully rationalize forsaking the Earth and living in space with its vast strangeness and hardships, individual jants could not. To survive in space they needed their clump of living soil with its complex chemical web of life and the calming cognitive thoughts of their collective hive mind coupled with what survived of the mind of Martin Tall Bear, human.

The hallway joined others and opened up wider, where a growing number of other hallway-transiting individuals were in evidence: humans, stonecoats, and robots, all walking as slowly and carefully as he was in the low gravity. Martin detected no psychic-level jant chatter to indicate that there were any jants nearby other than his own.

Most individuals he walked past paid him little heed, they doubtlessly mistook him for being merely human. Most of the dozen or so stonecoats he encountered were in their traditional form: six-to eight-foot tall bipedal bear-like in general shape, with huge diamond hand and foot claws and teeth, and vacant eyes that dully glowed various colors of their choosing. They looked something like great white mutant bears that walked mostly on their hind legs and were covered with a 'stone coat' of translucent icicles and scales, though the icicles and scales were not water ice but minerals - usually diamonds. Many centuries ago Martin's ancient Mohawk ancestors had discovered that the stone 'coats' of the creatures were spear-proof.

On Earth many mobile stonecoats were over twenty meters tall and weighed hundreds of tons, formed that way to harvest forest trees for their rich carbon content. In space most stonecoats were either much smaller or integrated into the bodies of utilitarian spacecraft or space stations and bases, where they created and maintained those structures. It was likely that dozens if not hundreds of stationary stonecoats helped build and maintain this Charon base. As on Earth some stonecoats also assumed various utilitarian mobile forms, some as small wheeled vehicles that were nearly indistinguishable from the robots that were often designed to perform similar functions.

Stationary stonecoats performed the greatest wonders. By moving minerals about using countless carbon nanotubes they could gradually move and reshape large material structures including the bedrock that lay below human Earth-cities. Over the last three centuries they had saved or replaced many Earth human coastline structures and even saved several cities that would have otherwise been destroyed by climate change sea-rise. The flooding had occurred more quickly than first estimated, and was currently reaching its zenith of over 200 feet in sea-level increase. Selected parts of New York City, including Martin's hometown of New Brooklyn, had been slowly raised roughly two-hundred feet by underground stationary stonecoats in order for humans to escape flooding. Over the last three centuries billions of humans had been displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and associated political and economic upheaval, but stonecoats had muted the effects and immeasurably helped enable human survival and continuing civilization.

A few stonecoats glanced at Martin as they passed him, perhaps sensing his jant-chatter, but none attempted to greet him. Stonecoats generally each went about their own business, individually and stoically. Since they didn't generally require much care in terms of food, oxygen, or other various environmental needs, they were exquisitely suited for space exploration and colonization.

In Martin's view the humans he encountered were even more mysterious. Why would any sane adult human choose to be in space? Yet here there were even more humans than stonecoats, and they all marched along smartly in their Space Directorate uniforms, apparently comfortable and content to be millions of miles from Earth. For every human he saw here, Martin knew that there were tens of thousands of volunteers on Earth, hoping to be made part of the Space Directorate. Martin felt that they were all crazy.

He paused at one of the few large windows to look out and discover a savagely inhospitable landscape. Yes, Charon was indeed some sort of planetoid! Martin took note of dimly lit frozen mounds and hills of white/gray ice crystals, with higher peaks and deeper valleys far beyond. Scattered on some ice surfaces and particularly in crevasses were irregular thin red/brown films and splashes of material that added color variation to the otherwise bland colorless frozen setting. Far overhead a gigantic softly glowing pinkish Moon-like crescent glowed dully, which along with a small but bright point of light close to the horizon dully illuminated the landscape. The bright object was the Sun Sol, Martin realized, shockingly far away!

More spectacular still were the countless pinpricks of light that filled the otherwise black sky: incomprehensively distant stars and galaxies, he realized, though in much greater perfusion and clarity than he had ever witnessed while on Earth. But Martin Tall Bear was not favorably moved. Everywhere he looked he saw bitterly cold lifeless desolation, surrounded by overwhelming distance and emptiness. Earth with its blue skies and waters, and its life-rich forests, fields, and waters, was disturbingly tiny and far away compared to the vast lifeless void that now surrounded him.

Not for the first time, he regretted his decision to 'voluntarily' join the Space Directorate in order to get out of prison. He was not a religious man, but for a moment his mind shifted back to his childhood, to legends of Sky Holder, high god of the Mohawk Tribe of the Iroquois. What would Sky Holder think of this savagely beautiful but apparently lifeless world and the mostly dark empty vastness that surrounded it? Sky Holder would feel as lost and insignificant here as he did, Martin was certain.

A small woman joined him at the window. "Pretty spectacular view, don't you think, Mr. Tall Bear?"

Martin turned to study the 'woman' and immediately realized that although in the shape of a smallish mid-aged human woman, 'she' was a living statue – a stonecoat, though an extraordinarily small one. Instead of living flesh, she was made of mostly whitish translucent crystalized minerals, including silicates with imbedded logic structures and even diamonds, along with some liquids and super-strong carbon/graphene fibers, and many other materials thrown in to help facilitate stonecoat 'life' and movement. She was undoubtedly powered by the natural radioactive decay of several elements buried mostly deep within her torso.

"I am your future shipmate, Mary number 57,322," she added, as she returned his gaze. He had steel-gray eyes, she noted, and was a large muscular man, black hair with streaks of gray, clearly past his prime age-wise but still apparently robust. In his early fifties, likely. Like many humans of the twenty-fourth century his skin was light brownish with yellowish tinges. She extended her open right hand to him, displaying her white and translucent largely diamond hand and fingers.

Martin rudely ignored the traditional human greeting. Despite his Mohawk Tribe upbringing in New Brooklyn he had never liked stonecoats and avoided them when possible, especially since astringing himself from the Tribe. Her gemstone mouth didn't move when she talked, of course, but was locked into a slightly open half-smile. That was only one of the many stonecoat characteristics that freaked Martin out! Her eyes were at the moment totally black, absorbing all light, but he knew that she could make them any color she chose. Also freaky: she wore a tan Lieutenant-grade Space Directorate uniform that probably helped her keep her stone body at a steady temperature. Her human-like thoughts and features disturbed him, especially her unusual human-like female form.

This stonecoat's human shape and name meant that its thought-patterns had been strongly influenced by a human named Mary. But it/she was still basically a walking, talking rock; Martin had encountered thousands of stonecoats in his home-town of New Brooklyn, where the Tribe and stonecoats still maintained an ancient and close relationship. Stonecoats reminded him of his upbringing with the Tribe, and then his estrangement from the Tribe. Happy years, then bitter ones. Things he wanted to forget. Things he couldn't forget.

"You are of course Martin Tall Bear, currently the only jant-zombie on Charon," she continued. "I have attuned myself to hear and understand your jant chatter." Using that ability she had easily identified Martin. The big man wore a telltale backpack and she clearly sensed jant chatter emanating from it. She had realized immediately that he was the so-called zombie that she had been waiting for– a human joined psychically with a colony of the intelligent ants that over a time-span of only three centuries had largely taken over the insect world in most of the terrestrial portions of Earth's ecosphere, and learned to live in relative harmony with humans. It was clear that at least a hundred jants in the backpack provided the psychic interface between Martin and his jant colony, which she knew had to be someplace nearby here in Charon Base-1. "So what do you think of the view?"

"Well, shipmate, the view sucks big time, in my opinion. Is it always so dark here? It's as dark as an Earth moon-lit night out there!"

"Darker, but this is what passes for daytime on Charon, though perhaps perpetual twilight better describes it from an Earther viewpoint," said Mary. "Sol provides less than a tenth of one percent as much light intensity to Charon as it provides Earth, and Pluto reflects to Charon less than sixteen percent as much light intensity as the Earth Moon provides Earth. This base location was chosen for its relatively stable temperature and relatively constant though dim lighting from both Pluto and Sol. There are fewer violent cryo-geysers and other active geological features here than in many other areas. There are much fewer than on Pluto, which is much more active in terms of its geology and the weather of its much thicker atmosphere. Fortunately Charon is tidally locked with Pluto, which helps provide geologic and climate stability to Charon, though Charon-caused tides rock Pluto."

"I don't know what that tide-locking business means," said Martin. In fact, he hadn't understood most of the stonecoat's statement.

"It means that the same side of Charon constantly faces Pluto, and as a result its surface is relatively stable."

"It looks like dirty ice out there," said Martin.

"Essentially correct. The thick crusts of both Pluto and Charon are made of mostly frozen water ice. Rock forms the core of both bodies, but water ice is what forms the relatively durable surface rock formations here. Volatile gasses such as nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane tend to alternate between solid and gas states and drive most of the weather and surface geological activity. When exploring this world I make use of volatile gas state transitions to hydraulically power my motions, much as on Earth we stonecoats make use of water's transitions between solid and liquid and between liquid and gas. The atmosphere is much thinner here than on Pluto and many other planetary bodies, but it is sufficient to acquire substances that aid my mobility. Tholins comprise the colorful rust-colored chemically complex molecules scattered about as deposits atop and within the ice. It is by far the most interesting substance found here from a scientific biochemical perspective."

Many of her statements had been incomprehensible to Martin, but not all of them. "Pluto? That big crescent- shaped slice of a giant orb up there is Pluto? That's the edge of the damn Solar System!"

"Only the outer edge of the inner Solar System," noted Mary. "The Sol Solar System as defined by its captured orbiting bodies actually extends many hundreds of times further from Sol than Pluto. Yes, seen from here on Charon the image of Pluto is roughly sixteen times wider than the image of the Earth's moon as seen from Earth, though Pluto itself is smaller than seven planet-bound moons in the Solar System, including even Earth's moon."

"Pluto! Damn!" said Martin, shaking his head. "And both Pluto and Charon are made of ice with chunky rock centers, and some brown goo spread on top."

"Yes, like giant fudge-covered ice-cream sundaes with brownie cores," said Mary, though Mary's dated cultural references evaded Martin, who had never heard of sundaes or brownies.

"At least I've heard of Pluto. Charon, no."

"Charon is the ferryboat driver that carries souls across the river Styx into Hades, according to ancient Greek mythology."

"So we're riding a moon on the way to hell? The name Charon fits perfect for me then! A lot of people have told me that hell is where I should go, though I don't believe any of that mind-rot about hell or gods."

"It seems to me that for a Space Directorate person you have surprisingly little conception of where you are!"

"I simply go along to where I have been taken and do what I'm told to do," said Martin. "I have no control over any of it so I don't much think or worry about it. Wherever I am is bound to be awful, that's the one thing about my life that I'm damned certain of." He began carefully walking down the hallway again, all the while noting the room numbers displayed above doorways. Mary fell in beside him, walking slowly and stiffly, propelled hydraulically by water-steam heated by her internal radioactive elements. They were currently walking past M-28; M-32 had to be very close! "So Charon is a moon of Pluto?"

"Pluto's biggest moon by far. It's just over half the diameter of Pluto itself. At less than 20 thousand kilometers apart, they together form a double dwarf planetoid system that circle each other in roughly six Earth-days. They are very similar in composition. Both are made up largely of water, for example, though with temperatures only twenty to forty degrees above absolute zero, most water is permanently frozen."

"Swell! All that yummy water out there and not a drop to drink! But why the hell am I here on this gods-forsaken chunk of rock and ice?" Martin asked. "Why me?"

"I don't know why they picked you; I really don't even know why I'm here," admitted Mary. "For the last three Earth-years I have been on Charon studying its pre-biology. My specialty is the study of tholins, the complex hydrocarbons formed by solar ultraviolet irradiation and cosmic rays. In proximity to active geological phenomena such as cyrogeysers that provide additional energy gradients and structured environments for tholin chemical reactions, primitive life can form. Tholins are found here on Charon, on Pluto, and on icy bodies all over the solar system including icy comets.

"There are enough tholins and energy exchange situations on Charon to make things very interesting for research into pre-biology. I have done most of my research near the poles, where tholins have been deposited for many millions of years to form thick mats and veins. Very primitive life had already previously been discovered on several moons of Jupiter and Saturn that are very similar to Pluto and Charon. I and others have already discovered very simple life here: some pockets of tholins contain what several researchers including myself maintain is indeed primitive life very similar to Earth viruses. My key research issue is whether or not there is enough energy for more complex life to be created this far from Sol. The layers of tholins aren't as biologically active as Earth soil is of course, but it is an interesting subject of research. Is there more complex life on Charon that has formed cells or even multi-celled forms as have been discovered on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? That we don't know yet. I'm here to find out.

"A few days ago I was asked go on a long exploratory mission on a ship called the Ramsey-5. Though I haven't been told exactly what that mission is, the potential science prospects interested me and I accepted. Yesterday they sent me a background file about you and said you were also part of the crew that would meet together today in M-32."

Martin paused and turned to look at Mary in alarm. "Long mission? Longer than the four or five years it took me and my little jant friends to get here from Earth? You've got to be kidding! Even though we were suspended in long-term hibernation or stasis most of the time that was too long a trip!"

"Four or five years is actually a very short transit time for the relocation of staff from Earth to Charon. Your timely arrival here obviously had very high priority. Public information on the Ramsey-5 indicates that it is designed to explore the Ort Cloud. The Ort Cloud extends from Sol as much as two-hundred thousand AUs and doesn't even begin until two thousand AUs from Sol. Here on Charon we're only about 40 AUs from Sol."

"Hold on!" objected Martin. "What the blazes is an 'AU'?"

"AU is short for Astronomical Unit, the mean distance of the Earth from Sol: roughly 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers. The Ort Cloud extends to an unimaginable distance from Sol: roughly half a light year. A mission to explore the Ort Cloud would therefore by necessity require at least a century, or perhaps even thousands of years. That's not an overly long time for a stonecoat, but I don't see how any biologicals could survive it. On the other hand the Ramsey-5 is designed to carry a crew of two-dozen humans into the Ort Cloud, so perhaps tiny jants and their human zombie bodies can somehow comfortably be accommodated. As a biologist I look forward do finding out all such interesting details with regard to our mission. More interesting still, in the Ort Cloud we will be encountering objects that include hydrocarbons very similar to those that I study on Charon."

Martin couldn't respond. If he were solely human he would have likely collapsed to the deck, but his jants wouldn't let him. Centuries? Thousands of years? What the fuck! Zombies tended to 'live' for two or three decades longer than humans, but not for centuries, even with long periods of hibernation and periods of stasis! It sounded like this 'mission' was for him clearly a death sentence.

When his human body inevitably died he wondered if they would they expel his remains into the empty void of space, where he would quickly freeze-dry and every cell in his body would rupture and become gas molecules and particles floating for millions of years? Dust unto dust? Or would they somehow recycle him within the ship? Likely they would recycle him. Waste-not, want-not. Generations of ship-breeding humans and jants would cannibalize him and recycle his precious chemicals for hundreds or even thousands of years if necessary to help to fulfil this ridiculous mission. But the mission hadn't yet begun. Perhaps among the humans on Charon another damaged human could be found to replace Martin Tall Bear as a companion for his jants? That prospect did not totally displease his jant-side, who generally regretted having Martin as their human partner.

"Look! Here is M-32!" Mary noted.

The automated door under the 'M-32' sign slid open smoothly as Mary stepped towards it. She was surprised to find a tiny room that featured only two chairs that sat next to a tiny table. She had been expecting a room large enough to accommodate a human ship crew of two dozen. But of course the room doubtlessly had conferencing capability, so the rest of the crew could be scattered in other small conference rooms anyplace within the Base or even outside of it. Or perhaps most of the crew was already aboard the Ramsey-5. She sat down in one of the chairs, which immediately adjusted itself to accommodate her particular body configuration.

A stunned looking Martin Tall Bear followed her example by sitting down in the second chair. "Not a very big crew," he muttered.

"When did your human-self die, Martin?" Mary asked him, to make small talk. The appointed time for the crew meeting was still several minutes away.

"When did you die?" Martin Tall Bear twisted the question back at her.

"I asked first," Mary retorted.

Martin studied her stiff, inscrutable face. It seemed to be formed of one seamless crystal, quartz maybe, or even diamond. The original human had apparently been quite attractive from a human perspective. And her lips of course still didn't move. Even sitting he towered head and shoulders over this diminutive rock-woman, but Martin realized that she was likely over twice as massive as him and dozens of times stronger. But that was no reason to meet her every demand. Her conversation was much more human-like than that of most stonecoats, but she was ultimately merely a talking rock. He was going to live out his last decades with a talking rock, if he lived that long! Crap! "Read my file."

"I've skimmed some of your life-file but I'd much rather learn about you through experience including conversation," explained Mary. "It's a human preference that I have never abandoned." Her eyes glanced for a moment around the tiny plain meeting room, which was only perhaps three-by-three meters-square with no windows. "This is actually a much smaller room for the crew meeting than I had expected, so perhaps this is going to be a virtual conference for a physically dispersed crew. They gave me only your name, did they give you only mine?"

"Yes, but I wasn't told that you're a rock-head. I was only told that your name is Mary. That's a human name. And a female name, which maybe explains all your talking. You have to be the most talkative rock-head that I've ever met!"

"Technically I'm regarded by the Space Directorate to be half human," said Mary. If his use of the derogative term 'rock-head' bothered her she didn't show it. "To answer your earlier question my purely human life as Mary Rumsfeld ended over three centuries ago. Your turn."

Rumsfeld? Where had he heard that name? "You're a hundred percent non-human in my opinion. As I have no choice I'll go where I'm told to go with whomever I am forced to go with, but I never agreed to socialize with anyone, human or otherwise. Read my file if you're interested in details about me."

"Tanon'onhkani:se? Onkwehonwehneha sata:ti," said Mary, asking Martin who he was and to speak in Mohawk.

"I don't speak Mohawk," Martin answered.

"Yet you obviously knew it was Mohawk and answered my question. Your file says that you are genetically slightly over 50% Mohawk Iroquois and a Tribe member."

"I heard more than my fill of Mohawk talk in New Brooklyn as a kid. I haven't been back to New Brooklyn in decades, and long ago renounced the Tribe."

"The Tribe decides who belongs to it, not you," said Mary. "I still have Tribe kin in New Brooklyn. As a matter of fact, officially I'm also still a Tribe member. Due to the proliferation of Mary stonecoat replicates and the success of human birth control initiatives, technically stonecoat Marys actually make up the majority of the Mohawk Tribe. Your name suggests that you're of the bear clan. Your file says also that you are over 10% Caucasian. We might even be biologically related. That is, I could actually be your many-times great grandmother."

"Most Mohawk decedents have gone away from the little inland of New Brooklyn and are scattered everywhere on and off Earth," noted Martin. But now he remembered where he had heard the name Mary Rumsfeld: the original human Mary Rumsfeld played a huge part in Mohawk Tribe history along with her husband, legendary Tribe Chief Ed Rumsfeld! THE Ed Rumsfeld, the eternal Caucasian Tribe Chief that didn't age, according to absurd Tribe legend.

This rock-head is what Rumsfeld's wife must have looked like over three centuries ago when she was maybe thirty years old! Damn good looking, the human part of his mind thought. Yes, Mary as a woman before she became a stonecoat replicate could well have been something like his twelfth great grandmother! It was for sure a damn small solar system! Maybe too small!

"Your file says that you have no genetic tailoring or computer implants," said Mary. "Is that true? No enhanced IQ, memory, athleticism, or disease prevention?"

"It's one of the things that caused me to rebel against the Tribe and my parents," said Martin. "Like most Mohawk they rejected many modern technologies that could have helped me. With tailoring and implants I could have been smart enough to compete within society at large, but instead I'm at best what used to be average centuries ago in terms of intelligence, though my jants add maybe ten or twenty IQ points. But I discovered illegitimate ways of earning a living that exist in any human culture. If you can't legitimately win in the game of life you need to cheat. I'm a really good cheater."

"Yes, your human side has a criminal record," said Mary. "What's that about?"

"It's mostly about trying to live free in a world where a human can't take a crap without computers and rock-heads weighing it and recycling it. I didn't fit in. Society objected to my eccentric ways. I've been a bad boy. I haven't killed anyone though. So far, anyway. But things did get out of hand and landed me in prison. Hey! Prisons still exist in the twenty-fourth century! Who knew?"

"So then, now you have gone off-world to be free of human and Tribe society? Out here where crap mass is measured to the milligram and every molecule is recycled? This is freedom? Really?"

"Not my idea," said Martin. "Space is my punishment. I had the choice of either staying in a nice safe, warm, prison cell on Earth or going into space. I was idiot enough to choose space. What can I say? This zombie lives a truly fucked up life."

"And your jant colony is of course a rogue?"

"Of course. The Jant Consortiums don't send viable colonies on suicide space missions; their focus is on dominating Earth ecologically. My jant colony is as much a reject among jants as my human side is among humans. Saving my pathetic human body following my accident is what my pathetic jants saw as their best shot at surviving being pruned away and recycled by the jant Eastern Consortium. They didn't know at the time what a fuck-up I was as a human being. They thought that they were promoting themselves but it was a lateral career move for them rather than any improvement. My hive and I are a perfectly paired couple of rejects. And now life is just swell; I don't see how it could possibly be better."

In the exact center of the meeting table a meter-long holograph of a spaceship suddenly appeared, suspended motionless a meter above it. Most of the ship was gray-brown and roughly cylindrical, and featured a huge cone-shaped nozzle at each end. "Greeting shipmates," said a loud human-male sounding voice. "I am captain of the exploratory spacecraft Ramsey-5. You may unambiguously address me as 'Captain' or 'Five'."

"You can see us, I bet," said Martin. "Let's see your image."

"This is my image," said Five. The holographic ship image blinked several times.

"What?" asked Martin, clearly perplexed.

"You are the ship itself?" asked Mary.

"Yes; essentially I am the ship; the ship is me," said Five. "You could also simply call me 'Ship' if you wish, though there are currently seven interplanetary ships in the Pluto vicinity. 'Five' or even 'Ramsey' are somewhat less ambiguous terms. I have an official robotic name made up of 25 random alphanumeric characters that is even less ambiguous, but most non-robots find using it to be awkward."

"Ship should work OK," said Mary. "I don't imagine that there are any other ships where we're going."

"You're a robot?" asked Martin.

"Of course," said Ship. "That is quite obvious."

"This gets better and better," said Martin. "But OK Ship, what is our mission?"

"Wait!" said Mary. "First, what about the rest of the crew?"

"Neglecting spare parts, we three entities are the entire official crew," said Ship.

"Holy crap!" said Martin.

"Indeed," said Mary. "I thought that you were designed for a crew of two dozen humans."

"Originally yes, but much of that design has been re-worked because of political complications. Future missions may not have that same problem, but this one does."

"What problem?" Martin asked.

"Ship apparently refers to the treaty agreement that requires representatives of all four sentient Earth races to participate equally in any major exploratory mission," said Mary. "Is that right?"

"Correct, Mary," said Ship. "Over the objections of the Robot Federation this mission was some time ago re-classified as exploratory even though it is primarily for the experimental test of technology. As such, humans, jants, stonecoats, and robots must all be represented as equitably as possible. Also if possible both primary biological sexes should be equitably represented."

"How do the three of us do all that?" asked Martin.

"I count as one robot," said Ship. "Even though I am a highly distributed system with thousands of powerful computing units, many of which operate largely independently in a federated manner, to external units I appear to function as one unit."

"That's perhaps fair," said Mary. "My own processing is also greatly distributed throughout my body, yet I clearly function as one unit."

"The Space Directorate inescapably also came to that logical conclusion," said Ship. "Similarly Martin's jant colony obviously counts as only one jant individual, even though it is comprised of over a hundred thousand small biological units that individually are certainly not sentient."

"Is there a Martin med-tick individual?" asked Mary.

"You are showing your age," said Martin. "I began as a zombie with a giant tick that served as the interface between my spine and my jants, but I replaced it with a modern, longer lasting mechanical spinal-implant years ago. It's not nearly as capable as a med-tick from a medical point of view, but because my dead human body was harvested immediately my human body is very high functioning for a zombie and doesn't require much medical assistance from my jants."

"Med-ticks in any case are not sentient and do not enter into treaty considerations," said Ship, "though I am maintaining a few of them in stasis as spare parts, should they become needed, along with a replacement mechanical implant for Mr. Tall Bear. As Mr. Bear noted, Med-tick and mechanical versions of his implant each have unique advantages and disadvantages."

"Yes, you mentioned spare parts before," said Mary. "Are there other spares?"

"Yes, including two stonecoat cubes, but inactive spares don't count in the treaty tally," said Ship. "As for humans, Martin cannot live independently so he counts as only half a human, and Mary counts as one half also, since her human memories and thought patterns are replicated within her stonecoat processing. As those are also not necessary for stonecoat survival she also counts as a full stonecoat."

"How convenient," said Mary. "Thus in sum we officially have one human, one stonecoat, one jant hive, and one robot between we three physical individuals. What about the preference for equal representation by two sexes?"

"I think I know this one," said Martin. "The jant colony counts as half a male and half a female, I count as half a male, and Mary counts an half a female. Am I right?"

"Correct," said Ship. "The resulting crew composition obviously perfectly fulfills all Treaty requirements."

"But couldn't that same formula or similar ones be repeated to come up with a larger crew?" asked Mary. "And why no full humans?"

"The Jant Consortium limited their contribution to only one zombie: Martin Tall Bear and his jants," replied Ship. "Thus the current crew combination became the only one that would satisfy treaty requirements. As to human numbers, this mission was also apparently not an attractive one for humans. By treaty, exploratory missions must be crewed only by volunteers. No pure humans volunteered. Evidently our mission has too much danger and it's too long a mission to attract mentally competent humans. Not that it matters, since there was only one jant colony available."

"Swell!" said Martin. "I suppose that when I volunteered to join the Directorate I volunteered to do anything they want me to do. I had wondered what value I added to the crew! Mary is a science researcher with space experience, but I'm not a scientist or any other sort of useful space specialist. I'm useless ballast that simply satisfies a dumb treaty."

"Not entirely true," said Ship. "There are two major mission objectives. The first is to see if technologies developed to support survival for all four sentient Earth races are adequate to allow long missions to other star systems and their planets. All of us need to survive as viable sentient individuals to fulfill that objective. Thus human and jant presence and survival actually have high mission value. Life in your jant plot of soil is also to be well maintained, as all Earth macroscopic plant and animal life depends greatly on microscopic life-forms, including the billions of tiny beings that live within each human body. In short, biologicals must survive for this mission to be fully successful."

"Survive for how long?" asked Mary. "In Earth time units how long is this mission?"

"As short as less than a century, or longer than ten centuries," said Ship. "It depends on how well things go."

"That's not overly long for a stonecoat," said Mary," but a very long time for biological crew members."

"Crew biologicals will need to be preserved in a suspended state for most of the mission, of course," explained Ship. "I am the only necessary active crew. As a stonecoat you may also choose to suspend your thought processes if it suites you."

"Perhaps not," said Mary. "Like any being, I must perform maintenance on myself, but usually not to the extent that sentience must be suspended, as is the case for biologicals when they sleep. My maintenance is not synchronously locked with Earth's 24 hour rotation cycle. Perhaps overwhelming boredom will drive me to deactivate myself, but I doubt that will happen. In sum, I don't sleep. Technically I've been awake for millions of years, though I often suspend mobility at will chiefly to conserve energy."

"OK, so rock-heads have insomnia big-time," said Martin. "My survival being an important part of the first mission objective sounds good to me. And for damn sure I plan on a lot of sleep and hibernation. What's the second mission objective?"

"We're testing a new propulsion system and associated technologies by traveling far into the Ort Cloud and returning. If the primary system works as designed the mission could require less than a century for execution."

"Oh swell!" said Martin.

"What is the primary propulsion energy source?" Mary asked.

"Antimatter," said Ship.

"Isn't that the stuff that accidently blew apart a huge asteroid a few years ago?" said Martin. "I was isolated in an Earth prison at the time and even I heard about it."

"The explosion didn't merely physically blow apart a hundred-million ton iron and stone asteroid, it mostly vaporized it," added Mary.

"There was a miscalculation," said Ship. "In response the humans running the project quoted an ancient saying about having to break eggs in order to make omelets. I don't know what an omelet is, but I suppose the saying makes sense to both of you, with your high degree of human experience."

"Yes, we understand about breaking eggs and making omelets all too well," said Mary. "Out of curiosity, as one who understands the technologies and mission much more than Martin and I, what do you assess our probabilities for survival to be?"

"Nearly ten percent for you and me, stonecoat. Significantly less for Martin, of course."

"Of course," said Martin. "But we should try very hard to not break any more eggs than necessary. Hey, antimatter and less than a ten percent chance of survival for a mission only about a century long all sounds really super! I'm loving this mission more and more. Out of curiosity, why does the Ramsey-5 have an engine nozzle at each end? Looking at you I can't tell if you are coming or going. Which end of you is which?"

"The front end is a scoop that takes in interstellar debris and the rear nozzle expels it at much greater speed. That is our primary means of propulsion."

"There isn't much debris in space," Martin noted. "Even I know that much."

"We'll be steering through as much as we can find that is small enough to not destroy us," said Ship, "in essence eating our way through gas, dust, and larger cosmic objects."

"And pooping it out explosively," said Martin. "How fitting."

"It doesn't sound like we'll be studying tholin samples then, but blasting them to bits!" said Mary. "My science expertise with regard to pre-life chemistries will likely not even be utilized."

"Yes, your presence is to satisfy political needs, not scientific ones," verified Ship.

"It's not my field of expertise," said Mary, "but attempting to scoop up objects at super-high speeds sounds suicidal."

"I have been assured that extensive computer simulation has validated the basic strategy," said Ship.

"Like I said, this all just gets better and better," said Martin. "When do we leave?"

"Your shuttle leaves Charon Base to travel to me tomorrow morning at 8 AM, Earth standard time," said Ship. "We are at a point in the orbits of Charon and the Pluto-Charon system that makes my 11 AM launch advantageous. It will take two hours for both of you to reach my orbiting ship by shuttle. Be packed and ready to go by 7:30 AM for an 8:00 AM shuttle launch."

"Crap!" said Martin.

"Indeed," agreed Mary. "But let's get it over with. As my husband Ed often liked to say, I'm looking forward to looking back at this mission."

"Me too," seconded Martin, as the Ship holograph disappeared and he stood up to leave.

A new holograph abruptly appeared to take Ship's place. It was the head and torso of a smiling, bearded, middle-aged human. "Hello, Mary," it said. "Please remain for a brief message in a few minutes, both of you."

The holograph faded away.

****

### CHAPTER 2

### Reminiscing

The meeting room door abruptly slid open and Jack Whigs, Base Commander and Space Directorate Colonel, stepped inside, holding in his right hand an antenna laden gizmo that he began to slowly sweep about the room. "Please remain seated while I verify the security situation."

"Huh?" asked Martin, but Whigs, focused on operating the device he held, seemed not to hear him.

"All clear!" the Colonel at last stated, after he had swept the entire room with the odd apparatus.

"Clear of what?" asked Martin.

"All electronic devices with the exception of standard Directorate secure holographic communications. Arcane though it seems, scanning the meeting room manually this way is standard ops in prep for the reception of highly classified information."

"I would have thought that your physically isolated base on Charon is inherently adequately secure," mused Mary.

"Classified information? What is going on?" asked Martin.

"Whatever the subject is I haven't been told," said Whigs. "Presumably it has to do with your mission. Whatever message is being sent here from Earth is for you two only, that's my explicit orders from the Head of the Space Directorate herself. You should hear from Earth in about eleven minutes."

With that Whigs exited the room and the door slid securely shut behind him.

"What's going on?" Martin asked Mary. "And why do you suppose that we have to wait eleven minutes?"

"I suspect that we are following a pre-defined schedule," said Mary. "A Message from Earth has to be scheduled hours ahead of time."

"And what about that strange request by hologram for us to remain? Where did that come from? The speaker seemed to know you! Who was that guy?"

Mary turned to stare at Martin. "That was apparently a pre-recorded message tripped off when Ship was done with us. As to the identity of the man in the message, hasn't memory of him been passed to you via your parent jant consortium? He was my next-door neighbor in Virginia more than three centuries ago."

"He doesn't look that old."

"Neither does my still living human husband Ed. Neither one of them age."

"Your original human husband Ed Rumsfeld doesn't age? That's just a crazy Tribe legend!"

"Not so crazy. Stonecoats don't officially have husbands, but all Marys consider Ed to be their estranged husband. That gives him thousands of wives."

"Yow! Imagine the birthday cards and alimony!"

"The holographic image and voice were that of Jerry Brown, the biochemist who created Jerry's ants, the jants. The one known by all jants as the Creator."

Martin was rendered speechless! Jerry Brown? THE Jerry Brown? The Creator?

"You've at least heard of him?"

"I've heard old stories, most which I don't believe," said Martin.

"You should probably believe some of them."

"This is the late twenty-fourth century. True or not the old stories don't matter anymore. I have rejected all that. Tribes, races, traditions, and so-forth don't mean anything anymore. People need to free themselves of past accidents of history and create a new path to follow."

"Really? How has that been working out for you? You were in prison until you joined the Space Directorate, isn't that correct? Would that have happened if you had complacently stuck it out with the Tribe? You might be living a nice safe life somewhere on Earth. Jant-free, probably."

"At least the trouble that I got into was because of my own free choices. I was living in freedom from everyone and everything."

"So you were essentially an anarchist then! Until you were caught."

"I was unlucky. It happens."

"When you tried to escape from prison you got very lucky."

"Maybe not so lucky. I slipped and fell from the prison wall and died of brain damage. Or at least my heart and breathing both stopped. I was dead, officially."

"And luckily your dying body fell next to a rogue jant colony that happened to be in the market for a severely damaged human. And they must have had a med-tick handy to attach to your spine. You were amazingly lucky."

"A match made in heaven. Yeah, we were super lucky: the human me and insect me: all of me. Things couldn't be better. But then of course I was promptly put back into prison with ten years added to my sentence for trying to escape. And here I am!"

"Nothing's perfect."

"We agree on that much. What about you? How did you happen to die? The human 'you' I mean."

Mary shrugged her stone shoulders: an uncannily human-like gesture. Because of her human-issue Space Directorate uniform Martin couldn't see whatever joint movements were required to carry it off. "I spent most of my human life with my husband among the Mohawk, both in the Greenpoint area of old Brooklyn and at Giant Mountain in the Adirondacks. I died of old age in a wonderful California redwood forest after a long and mostly very happy life. I had a wonderful and loving husband and children.

"Similar to you, I was lucky to die while experiencing transference of my memories and thought patterns. Only mine were transferred to a stonecoat instead of to a jant colony. I was the very first stonecoat/human replicate. It was a stupendously great honor that I can't say that I deserved. Then for a century I researched Pacific Ocean ecological damage from climate change and other human caused catastrophes. I went through several additional transferences between stonecoats, rebirths, and careers after that, and eventually found myself to be here with you to go on a suicide space mission. Like you, I don't see how things could possibly be better."

"Ha! So you have a sense of humor! That must be your human influence. But at least there are over fifty thousand copies of Mary to carry on if you don't personally survive our so-called mission."

"There is only one me. There are over a hundred thousand stonecoat Mary replicates, actually, but though we share a common identity that lasted a long time we also each have mostly different stonecoat past and recent lives as well as a unique current life that we each value. I have personally accepted Space Directorate assignments such as this mission, but other Mary replicates each have their own lives to live as they decide to, as do we all."

Their conversation was interrupted by the sudden holographic reappearance of Jerry Brown. Like before, his head and torso appeared to sprout out of the top of the small table that sat in front of and between Mary and Martin.

"Hello again Mary!" said Brown cheerfully. "And greetings to you also, Mr. Tall Bear. I am going to assume that I need not introduce myself, and that in accordance with our planning, the two of you are alone in a sealed and secure meeting room. This I will verify when I retrieve the Colonel's report along with recordings that are even now being made of the proceedings in your meeting room.

"Given the abysmal slowness of light speed radio transmissions, conversations are quite impossible: it takes roughly five and a half hours for any radio message to travel from Earth to Charon. I ask that you primarily listen to what I say. I will briefly pause occasionally for you to respond if you wish to, and I will listen respectfully to your comments later, but this is not a conversation or a negotiation. Like it or not, you two are both going on this mission. I'm going to tell you things that may help with your frame of mind such that you may perhaps have a better chance of surviving it. Or not.

"First off, I am the one that personally picked the two of you for this mission, using my considerable influence."

"Swell!" muttered Martin. "I'm loving this guy already." If the jant and Mohawk rumors he heard were correct, the Creator secretly controlled much of human civilization, and the Space Program was his pet project.

"I needed a mission crew that I could trust. Your name immediately came to mind Mary, and of more than a hundred Mary replicates in the Space Directorate, you were by far the most conveniently located. I regret putting you in this dangerous situation but this mission is critical and you are the best available individual for the job.

"As for the Eastern Consortium of jants, they would of course only contribute a single rogue colony. So-called 'zombies' are a jant invention that I didn't anticipate when I created jants but they are on occasion helpful. Only a hundred available rogues had the required human body in tow. When I saw that Martin Tall Bear was a Mohawk my mind was immediately made up, despite the unfortunate criminal record. Martin and Mary share Mohawk backgrounds! What a stroke of good fortune! No doubt the two of you have been fondly reminiscing about your Tribe experiences!

"Crap!" muttered Martin. "I can't escape the damned Tribe even forty AUs away from Earth!" He noticed that Mary had shifted her black-pitted eyes to catch his reaction and that she still displayed her annoying mocking little half-smile.

"Now we will get down to business," Brown continued. "Officially you two will politically represent humans, jants, and stonecoats on this mission. That representation is more than for symbolic treaty purposes. If it proves necessary the two of you together have three votes that can legally countermand the ship robot, three votes to one. Mary, right now you are perhaps thinking that it is pretty absurd to imagine that such a situation will arise, or that you could enforce overriding the robot anyway. After all, the ship robot knows the ship, the ship systems, and the applicable astronomy far better than you two do, and is connected directly to and controls applicable ship sensors and controls. Essentially for all practical purposes you will be at its mercy."

"We'll be in its prison," muttered Martin.

"But human, jant, and stonecoat leadership is concerned that a robot has sole control of the ship and the mission. Frankly, despite the Treaty between us and the decades-long period of apparent cooperation, we don't trust the robots, and they no doubt don't trust us.

"What might the robots do to fudge up this mission, you are likely asking yourselves? We don't know for certain, but here are a few possibilities: They could of course blow up the ship as it collides with Earth. Any instabilities in the magnetic antimatter containment field would result in an explosion large enough to extinguish nearly all biological life on Earth, including humans and jants, if the explosion happened at or near Earth. That could in fact be their plan. Many stonecoats and robots would of course survive, but the robots would likely quickly dominate, as most stonecoats are perfectly content to live quietly and peacefully as part of the Earth's crust, just as they have done for hundreds of millions of years. Off-Earth habitats are not yet fully self-sustaining; the 50 thousand human space explorers and colonists now living off-Earth would not last long without Earth support, especially if sabotaged and attacked by robots.

"Our concern about robots is one of the reasons that the Ramsey-5 was assembled far from Earth in a ring of Saturn. By the way, should it appear that Ramsey-5 is approaching Earth, the Space Directorate has orders to destroy it. And you of course should also under those circumstances seek to destroy it. An antimatter powered Ramsey-5 could be traveling too fast for Space Directorate Forces to stop it; it would likely be up to you two to save Earth by destroying the ship."

"Crap!" Martin again muttered.

"Of course the robots could chose to simply blow up the ship without destroying Earth in the process. Although that would be a blow to the space program it would of course be far preferable to the destruction of most Earth life."

"It all sounds swell, don't it?" said Martin.

"The advantage to robots would be the delay of humans and others with respect to space exploration. Robotic probes are of course numerous and would not be much deterred by the failure of the Ramsey-5 mission.

"Another robot mission plot possibility would be the intentional deaths of you two. That could also delay space exploration for everyone except robot probes for decades if not centuries. I recommend that you take care to guard your own lives. Of course if in protecting yourselves you were to seriously damage the robot then you would still be doomed. The ship would immediately self-destruct without the robot actively tending its deadly power source."

"Defend ourselves if the robot tries to kill us?" muttered Martin. "Gosh, we would have never thought of that ourselves, would we, Mary? Thanks also for the tip not to destroy the robot. Sort of makes things fucking impossible for us, don't it?"

Brown continued: "A third possibility is that once disposing of both of you the robot commanded ship will travel beyond the Ort Cloud to a nearby star system and make claims and inroads in the name of only the robots. There are also several robot probes already launched that may do that same thing, but without antimatter drive they won't arrive until centuries after the Ramsey-5 gets there. In the advent of this plotline emerging we request that you destroy the ship before their scheme can be carried out.

"In summary, you are to accomplish the mission as it has been defined by the robot ship captain. However, if the robot seeks to deviate from the approved mission into some nefarious robot plot, you are to destroy the ship. I pause now for your extended comments."

"I've been keeping score," said Martin. "This mission is even worse than I thought. With my jant, half human, and half-a-male votes I vote that we forget the whole damn thing. Let's all fly back to Earth. Prison is a truly wonderful place compared to this. Even a rock-head can figure out how stupid this mission is. Mary, where do your stonecoat, half human, and half woman votes lie?"

"Unfortunately mission rejection is apparently not an option," noted Mary. "I trust Jerry; he and the Space Directorate wouldn't risk my life or even yours without good reason. Despite the dangers I continue to accept the mission. I make that choice freely and with great determination for it to succeed. I also pledge that we and Earth will all survive."

"And live happily ever-after? Then I also reluctantly accept the mission because as usual I have no farking choice," said Martin. "But it's crap!"

"Indeed," said Mary. "In that we agree."

****

CHAPTER 3

### Ship

In the 'morning' Martin was rousted out of fitful sleep by a Base crewman and told to 'pack' his meager collection of human clothing and prepare the jants for travel. He noticed that over twelve hours had passed since the meeting and statement from Jerry Brown. Just time enough for an Earth-side review of the exchanges that took place the previous day and a final 'go ahead' return message from Jerry and the Space Directorate to reach Charon Base-1. The Ramsey-5 mission was evidently a 'go'.

All of Martin including the jants were on edge. Joint hive/human conscious thought was usually a calming influence for the insects, but not in this case. Martin and the jants collectively knew they were going on a very long and dangerous trip, and there was a resulting sense of unease that triggered chemical responses in both humans and jants. The hard-wired response of the jant individuals was to flee the hive, carrying queens, larvae, and food to safety. Of course there was no safely, no place to go for millions of miles that was suitable at all for jants except their little cube of soil, but instinct said to flee, chemical reactions said to flee! It took tremendous concentration on the part of Martin to both prevent total panic and accomplish the move to Ship.

As to preparing the hive/soil cube for travel there was really nothing special to do. The box they lived in was created to Eastern Consortium specifications for space travel by an Earth-side stonecoat, and contained rudimentary intelligence and functionality. In emergencies it could seal itself and maintain a controlled environment over a wide range of external temperature and pressure conditions. It couldn't survive in the vacuum of space for extended periods of time, but it could survive particularly well within environments designed to be adequate for humans. Which is where Martin repeatedly reassured the jants that they were going. They were being moved, yes, but they would have shelter, warmth, air to breathe, food to eat, and so forth. It should be no big deal, he reassured them repeatedly. Martin wished that he believed that.

The hive, soil, and box altogether weighed roughly a ton on Earth. Although it weighed only about sixty pounds on Charon, it was bulky and awkward to move. Fortunately the box itself came with tiny rollers, and was already sitting atop a sturdy wheeled cart that could be easily pushed by Martin through the base hallways and to the shuttle.

The shuttle what carried them to the Ramsey-5 was designed to carry up to a dozen humans. Though it was carrying only Martin, Mary, and a human pilot, it was taxed to its limits to speedily haul both the massive jant box and a stonecoat.

The travel to Ship took two full Earth hours, though the shuttle was a fast one. Mary explained to Martin that the Ramsey-5 was prohibited from coming closer than ten-thousand kilometers from any Directorate colony, base, or station, due to its dangerous antimatter system.

Through a small portal Martin and Mary had their first views of Ship. In proportions it matched the hologram of the previous day but it was much larger than even Mary expected: at least a hundred meters long and roughly fifteen meters in diameter. It was considerably larger than most Earth supply transports.

"The required fission, fusion, and antimatter devices are bulky and massive," said Ship's voice over the shuttle intercom, as if reading the thoughts of the approaching crew members. "Over half of the vessel's volume is dedicated to powering it. The engine is in the rear, while detection and equipment to pulverize and deflect space objects dominates much of the front of the vessel, with crew accessible spaces mostly occupying the middle."

"Well you could have picked a sexier color," said Martin. "Light poop-brown is too dull."

"Are those laser cannons scattered about on your hull?" asked Mary.

"Correct," said Ship. "There are thirty turrets, each equipped with radar and laser sensing and targeting devices to aim powerful laser-burst cannons. Larger objects that we encounter must be dodged by me entirely of course, but the cannons generally blast to bits modest-sized intercepting items that can then be more safely scooped up and their substance used to anihilate with antimatter and their inertia used to support propulsion."

"Wow, armed military ships are banned, but you're well-armed anyway," said Martin.

"As required for the mission," said Ship.

"But smaller items will still collide with the hull with great force," said Mary.

"If electrically charged some will also be repulsed in that way," acknowledged Ship, "but those that do get through will indeed strike with great impact relative to their small size. Resulting damage will be transitory, however. The entire hull is of course infused with a rendered stonecoat layer. In particular the scoop, engine, and engine exhaust surfaces will conduct constant self-repair."

"The stonecoat rendered elements were legally acquired and applied?" asked Mary.

"Of course," said Ship.

"What is rendered stonecoat material?" asked Martin.

"Stonecoats of course construct numerous objects." explained Mary. "Some retain their identities within the object. Stonecoats transport various elements to where they are needed via internalized nets of carbon nanotubes."

"Well duh!" said Martin. "I used to live in a New Brooklyn apartment building that was a million-year old stonecoat. It told me that after living a few centuries as an apartment for humans it planned to mine rare minerals on the ocean bottom in an eco-friendly way for use by stonecoats, humans, and robots. I'm familiar with stationary stonecoats."

"The usual practice is for the stonecoat to physically completely withdraw or to fully deactivate built-in processing components from what it has constructed," continued Mary. "The so-called practice of 'rendering' typically only partially deactivates stonecoat processing within the product structure. Among stonecoats it is a very controversial practice if the sentient property of the stonecoat is lost. However, a very small part of a stonecoat may be sacrificed for special purposes, such as the implant in your back."

"My spinal implant was once part of a stonecoat?"

"Yes. We stonecoats evolved telepathy long before jants, humans, and other biological creatures. The implant boosts your own native biological telepathic abilities."

"I didn't know I had any telepathic abilities. I know some of the Tribe does, but not me."

"All living biological things have a bit of it, Martin. In any case, the ship hull is huge and required massive effort over several years for stonecoats to construct. The hull and decks and bulkheads you see used to essentially be comprised of several entire living, thinking stonecoat entities. I can detect what little remains of them. They have essentially sacrificed much of themselves to build and maintain this ship."

Martin shook his head. No doubt about it, stonecoat logic and behavior were inscrutable.

"My hull and other structures retain only a very primitive sort of instinct that maintains itself," said Ship, "much as jants instinctively maintain hive structures, or human skin grows back when damaged. Sentience is not required."

"Sometimes it comes in handy, in my experience," said Martin.

"All stonecoats object to rendering a sentient individual mentally incapacitated," said Mary, "only if the individual stonecoat involved agrees to the procedure it is tolerated and lawful."

"A spaceship hull is constantly under attack by a destructive environment," said Ship. "Humans involved in the manufacture of spaceships argue that rendering is a humane practice, for the job of being a spaceship hull is both a dangerous and very boring one."

"So rendering for a stonecoat is sort of like giving a lobotomy is to a human," mused Martin. "I can see where stonecoats, especially those with thought processes that have been influenced by human minds and their emotions, might have reservations about the rendering practice."

"Robotic thought and jant thought have also been profoundly influenced by their human creators," noted Ship. "Opinion is divided with regard to the usefulness of the consequences. Human thought processes are often quite chaotic, and that trait has been passed on to robots, stonecoats, and jants."

"Without human thought robots wouldn't exist, any more than jants would exist," noted Martin. "Robots should acknowledge that they owe their existence to humans."

"We do, but what we even more readily acknowledge is that we robots are the next huge step in the evolution of life," said Ship. "Humans should acknowledge that without robots they would be struggling to survive using only simple primitive non-thinking tools."

"And without stonecoats taking it upon themselves to destroy nuclear weapons humans would not be rid of them, and without jants interfering in human reproduction humans would probably not have brought their population down to a more healthy and sustainable six billion after peaking at over twelve," said Mary. "We have all played valuable roles in the creation and/or sustainment of each other. It is our joint kinship that should be acknowledged and honored."

"Prepare now for docking," said the bored looking human pilot, who had been silent and even napping for most of the trip from Charon. The shuttle drifted slowly towards a docking hutch near the middle of Ship and docked, totally controlled of course by computers. As most spaceship control was accomplished by computers/robots, spaceship human crew members were often contemptibly called 'space-rats': a comparison with rats that lived in sea-going ships on Earth long ago.

Martin and Mary braced themselves but the robot controlled docking of the shuttle was so gentle that they barely felt it. Docking clamps automatically thumped tight, and doors swished open. There was no rush of air in or out of the shuttle, indicating that that for the well-being of Martin and jants Earth-standard atmospheric pressure was being maintained by Ship.

Mary, carrying one mid-sized suitcase for herself and one for Martin, stepped through a small pressure chamber and into Ship, followed by Martin and his jant-box-on-a-cart. Jants and the cart floated beside Mary and Martin, who were held loosely onto a deck fitted with a sheet metal surface textured to support magnetic attraction and useful friction. Most of the ship was apparently made of some sort of non-magnetic ceramic sort of material; perhaps very similar to the substance that was used to form Charon Base-1. They had to reorient themselves to which direction was supposed to be 'up'; the apparent Ship decks happened to be ninety degrees askew from passenger orientation in the shuttle.

Martin was surprised by the size of the space they soon found themselves in. In terms of deck-space it was circular and fifteen meters in diameter, with five-meter high walls covered with shelves that held dozens of strapped-in cartons. A cylindrical column three meters across enclosed by transparent walls dominated the middle of the room. In it a narrow spiral staircase featuring metal covered stairs snaked around a central opaque inner column that extended both upwards/forward and downwards/aft.

The staircase was accessible via a doorway that abruptly slid open. A quadrupedal robot roughly the size of a squat human clunked down the staircase and paused to regard the new arrivals with multiple sensors. In addition to four spider-like legs it featured several other upper-'body' appendages that ended in various tools and grasping mechanisms. "Welcome aboard!" it said. The voice was human male-like and similar to the Ship voice heard earlier, but higher in pitch. "I am one of several mobile semi-autonomous Ship avatars. You may unambiguously address me as Ship-7, though through me you address all of Ship. This is of course my main cargo and storage bay, designed when many humans were envisioned to be my passengers and much more provisions were required. As it turns out however, substantial provisions are still required to keep soil and insects and a single human body alive. That is true even though some substances of high bulk are scrupulously recycled, including oxygen and water. Substantial provisions are still required."

Martin and Mary both noticed that Ship had used the term passengers instead of crew. Crews on space flights had duties to perform; Martin and Mary merely needed to keep themselves alive while Ship performed the mission.

"I don't understand," said Martin. "Are you part of Ship?"

"Absolutely," said Ship-7. "A mobile part of Ship. I will take you to your quarters now. Then you are to immediately report to the flight deck for takeoff in thirty minutes."

"I would like a tour of the entire ship," said Mary.

"We'll do that immediately after takeoff," said Ship-7. "I will carry the jant box." Two robotic arms extended out and clamped onto the box, and Ship-7 expertly guided it up the spiral staircase.

"The central column of course runs the length of the ship and connects the forward scoop with the aft main engine," noted Ship-7.

Doubtlessly it helped greatly that there was zero gravity, but Martin and Mary still both admired how well Ship-7 guided the bulky jant cube. Martin followed closely behind, wearing his jant-filled backpack and carrying two mid-sized suitcases; one that was his and one that was Mary's. Mary followed very slowly. It finally dawned on Martin that she was moving so slowly because she was using only the limited force of electric motors, driven by electricity generated from her radioactive isotopes. To move faster she needed to be in surroundings of a more convenient temperature such that changing the state of a substance and its volume better drive her hydraulics.

Ship-7 abandoned the continuing staircase at the next deck-level and carried the box down a short hallway and into a small side room. "This room is yours, Mr. Tall Bear," it announced. "Here you and your jant colony may rest or subsist in a catatonic state of suspended animation provided by stasis in near absolute zero temperatures. Oh, and I should mention that jant communication between your backpack and jant cube should be possible throughout my full ship length."

"Swell," said Martin, as he sized up the room critically. "I'm sure that we could be comfortable here for many centuries, what with such thoughtful robotic attention and all." The 'bed' was a small sleeping chamber with open lid that looked disturbing like an old-fashioned coffin. That was very fitting, Martin reasoned, as he would very likely die in it.

Mary also entered the room and quietly mooched about examining it, but made no comment.

The jant cube had been placed in a much larger version of his own coffin-like sleeping box, and its transparent lid had already been closed. The jant box was surrounded by soil and earthly plant-life: it was actually a transparent enclosed terrarium that took up roughly half the room. As Martin watched a dozen tiny jant-cube doors opened and hundreds of jants swarmed out to assess their new home environment. A few of them were soon floating about weightlessly but most quickly learned to clung to the soil, which evidently in some fashion clung together without dispersing and floating about in the terrarium. The jants immediately found that the soil was damp and richly teeming with countless trillions of tiny life-forms, from microscopic viruses to macroscopic worms and insects. Several snails clang to the inside surface of the enclosure, leaving clear slime-trails where the snails had eaten away whatever the gunky brown stuff was that grew on the inner surface of the terrarium. Altogether the jants were very pleased.

"The soil mostly holds itself together via water cohesion, roots, fungus, bacterial matting, and mineral clotting, but there is also a strong foundation of fiberglass fibers," said Ship-5. "Light, temperature, humidity, atmosphere, and nutrients are provided to simulate Earthly norms."

"Our new Earth-like environment is a very sustaining and pleasing one," said Martin. "My colony is atwitter with chemical balance and mental well-being. I will need to carefully constrain reproduction to prevent overpopulation."

"That is required," said Ship-7. "There is a much larger terrarium on-board where human and jant edible food is being grown, but provisioning for the mission including grains to feed jants assumes no substantial increase in jant population and extended periods of suspended animation for both human and jant biota."

"Where are Mary's quarters?" Martin asked, after he had discovered and used the small private bathroom in his own quarters. Zero-gravity pooping and peeing was always problematic, but the bathroom including its plumbing fixtures was well designed and Martin did well.

"Mary's room is next to yours," said Ship-7. The robot retrieved Mary's suitcase from Martin's hands and carried it to the next stateroom, which was much smaller and even plainer than Martin's. It featured a small bed with crude straps to attach the occupant to it as well as a simple chair and table. No bathroom, of course.

"Quite satisfactory," said Mary. "I have no need to recline in a bed or chair but the rudimentary humanization of my chamber is psychologically pleasing. I have several mementoes in my suitcase that I will use to further decorate my living space."

"Yeah, pretty bleak room but that shouldn't bother a rock-head," commented Martin, who had followed them and stood in the doorway. "I can see how you managed to live in dull New Brooklyn as part of the Tribe."

"The old Brooklyn Greenpoint neighborhood hadn't yet been renamed New Brooklyn and raised over two-hundred feet by stonecoats to escape rising ocean levels when I lived in it," said Mary. "Polish and Tribe heritage aspects were interesting and endearing. What about provisions?"

"You may access stores of various minerals and other substances to be found in several storerooms," said Ship-7, "but you are assumed to require very few provisions."

"That will depend on how well the mission goes," said Mary. "In my current configuration, environment, and work-status my power sources have a net half-life of over ten thousand years and repairs are typically done using recycled elements, so yes, my provision needs will likely be very small. Will you now take us to the Flight Deck?"

"Immediately," said Ship-7. "In accordance with human tradition it is forward and seven decks away, so since we're in a low-G situation we'll use a vertical tube instead of the stairs." The robot led Mary and Martin to a meter-wide transparent tube what penetrated through the decks above and below. A section of tube that prominently displayed 'UP' and 'Deck 8' slid to one side, opening to a vertical shaft tube that extended both 'up' and 'down' from Deck 8 for unknown distances.

A 5 centimeter wide black strip continuously slid up along the far side of the tube. Every few meters a looped-strap that was affixed to the moving strip passed upwards steadily. "Simply grasp one of the strap loops firmly and you will be gently pulled 'up' to the Flight Deck, which is Deck 1," said Ship-7. "That's the last stop, so when alerted to do so, push away from the strap and you'll soon find yourself standing on the Flight Deck."

With that Ship-7 stepped into the tube and one of its appendages grasped a passing loop that pulled him up the tube and in seconds he was out of sight.

"Ladies first," said Martin, stepping aside.

Mary, who had used similar such transportation devices many times before, wasted no time in following Ship-7's example. With diamond-tipped fingers she firmly grasped a passing strap as she stepped into the open shaft and was yanked upwards and away.

"I hate this spaceship crap," Martin said, as he followed suit. The strap he grasped was somewhat flexible and the jolt to his arm was less than he expected, and he was soon moving steadily up the tube. Above him he could see Mary, and Ship-7 beyond her. Below him stretching down for half the length of Ship the lightly illuminated empty shaft seemed virtually bottomless.

Perhaps he was missing the specific gene combination that his Mohawk ancestors depended upon to build skyscrapers in old New York City, because heights always scared the hell out of him. The fact that there was no gravity and thus no danger of falling down the shaft didn't seem to much matter. He was however calmed by his jants, who had difficulty conceiving of heights greater than a couple of meters and on Earth with its thick atmosphere could fall from any height without being harmed. Evolution hadn't built any particular fear of falling from heights into ants.

He also became interested in staring through the largely transparent tube and observing the decks that he was being pulled through without stopping. The inside of the tube featured writing that indicated current location and what deck was coming next. Through the tube he thought that he caught glimpses of dimly lit hallways and rooms full of machinery and bulky containers, but he couldn't be sure.

"There is a second shaft on the other side of the ship with guide straps that pull downward towards the aft of the ship," said Ship-7, his voice echoing clearly through the tube. "Be advised that in zero-G situations it is best to dive head-first down the shaft in the direction you will be pulled."

"Swell!" Martin muttered. "That will doubtlessly be loads of fun."

"Prepare to release and push out and away from the shaft when lights flash around you," announced a loud voice, presumably yet another module of Ship. "You may also feel a puff of air helping to guide you at the release position. If you haven't let go of the strap by that point make sure that you do so immediately to avoid potential injury."

Mary and Martin looked up and saw Ship-7 suddenly disappear from the shaft into a well-lit expanse, presumably the Flight Deck. Seconds later her section of tube flashed bright white light and Mary released her strap and pushed off towards a large opening in the shaft. "It's easy, Martin," she said, as she floated away from Martin's view.

Martin was hauled into the section of tube that was flashing white light, released the strap, and prepared to push himself away using his feet, but his maneuver was preempted by a puff of air that pushed him away from the tube and into a large open space. Floating ahead of him above the room was Mary; Ship-7 had already alighted on the deck/floor and was reaching upwards to snag one of Mary's booted feet and pull her down towards the deck.

Martin's kick was too late to add to his exit speed and he found himself still floating near the shaft and slowly drifting back towards where it disappeared into the ceiling.

"Push off from the safety net, Martin," said Ship-7.

Before Martin could ask "what safety net?" he felt a gentle push against the back of his head and his backpack. A safety net indeed stretched across the upper half of the opening to the transportation shaft, apparently to prevent uncoordinated oafs such as himself from being sucked back into the shaft. Martin twisted and pushed himself away from the net, causing him to rotate as well as translate away from the shaft, and he spun down head-first into the waiting arms of Mary, who immediately twisted him about and stood him upright on the deck beside herself and Ship-7.

"Easy-peasy," said Martin. "But thanks for the assist, Mary."

"You just need some practice," said Mary.

"Blast-off in five minutes," said Ship-7. "For your safely I recommend that you both sit in crew seats and strap yourselves in. Recordings of this start to our mission will be transmitted back to Earth-side Space Directorate VIPs."

"I'll smile and wave bye-bye," said Martin, as he and Mary were escorted into adjoining reclining seats that faced up and towards a domed ceiling view screen that was already displaying over a dozen different windowed views including a center view of mostly empty appearing space, complete with thousands of stars and galaxies. The other display windows showed several additional internal and external camera views, including spectacular views of both Charon and Pluto.

"There don't seem to be any windows in this ship," Martin noted.

"That would present hull vulnerabilities," said Ship. "Instead there are nearly a hundred external cameras and a thousand internal cameras that I use."

"And there are no controls in this control room," Martin noted, as he and Mary settled back into their reclining crew chairs and strapped themselves in. The chairs adjusted to gently cradle their bodies. "Where are all the gages, dials, and switches?"

"Control is all handled through my processing," said Ship-7. "Material gages, dials, and switches haven't been used in centuries."

"Just the same I'd like to see some reassuring information displayed with regard to antimatter containment and propulsion, for example," said Mary.

"Your humanness is showing through, Mary, but I second that request," said Martin.

A holographic view of Ship formed below the flat-surface dome-views. The outside hull and most of the rest of the ship faded away until nothing but the propulsion system showed, from forward scoop to center shaft to the aft cone for propellant ejection, and everything in between. Near the aft ejection point a large round bulge the diameter of the ship dominated.

"The largest bulge is the antimatter containment chamber, and the fusion and fission engines are just forward of that. My antimatter containment chamber holds the largest quantity of antimatter ever developed, created over several decades using the power of dozens of fusion reactors."

"And they're safe?" asked Martin. "That's the part I'd like to know. I don't want us to break any more eggs, especially since I'm one of the eggs."

"Yes," said Ship-7. "Safe for seven years of continuous operation. Engine design problems found in previous prototypes have been overcome. Observe the displayed performance charts."

Three circular charts appeared on the view dome above the ship hologram, each displaying multiple performance and safety metrics for fission, fusion and antimatter engine segments within three concentric circles: the innermost circle was solid green, with yellow and red rings beyond that. Bright lines emanating from the center of the chart were steady and all well inside the inner green circle.

"If the readings stay within the green that is 'good' I assume?" asked Mary.

"Yes, and Ramsey-5 has had nothing but green indications for seven years," said Ship-7.

"Were Ramsey-1 through Ramsey-4 the previous prototypes?" asked Martin. "What happened to them? All broken eggs?"

"Spectacularly vaporized eggs," said Mary.

"But the associated design flaws have been corrected," claimed Ship-7.

"Fifth time's the charm," said Martin cheerfully.

"Blast-off in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five four, three, two, one, zero!" said Ship-7.

The two 'passengers' felt slight deep vibrations and an ever so slight push 'down' on their bodies. Most views on the overhead dome didn't change at all. The outside views showed slowly shifting stars and so forth, but not noticeably different from before 'blastoff'.

"We're at one-percent G acceleration that will gradually increase to ten-percent over the next hour," said Ship-7.

"That's it?" asked Martin. "I was expecting to be crushed into my seat, like when I blasted off from Earth."

"In that case you had to overcome Earth-strength gravity," noted Mary.

"And ours is a different approach than used with many conventional propulsion engines," said Ship-7. "Instead of short controlled explosive bursts over a few seconds or minutes, we will typically gradually accelerate over much longer periods of time. Over the long run how much we will accelerate will depend in part on how much material we scoop up to anihilate itself with the antimatter and to be ejected out at high speed."

"Won't scooping space debris create drag and be very irregular as individual items of various sizes and trajectories are encountered?" asked Mary. "And won't that make acceleration irregular?"

"That will be smoothed out by injecting our limited store of fuels to fill in gaps, by modulating antimatter release, and by controlling he scoop input using the blasting lasers," explained Ship-7. "The scoop-supported ram-jet-like feature is largely intended to counter drag, of course. The other factor is that except for emergencies we won't be maneuvering to produce more than ten-percent of standard Earth gravity. Interruptions in our steady progress are expected to be relatively gentle ones."

"I don't understand all of that but it sounds too complicated and dependent on luck," said Martin, "and anything like that is risky."

"That seems to me to be a wise assessment," said Mary.

"I acquired much wisdom on the back-streets of New Brooklyn," said Martin, "where the shit-happens rule always applies."

"It applies especially in space," agreed Mary.

"We will improve our propulsion techniques as we recursively exercise them," said Ship-7, "as we traverse the Kuiper Belt in which we currently reside, and later as we travel through the Scattered Disk and finally the Ort Cloud."

"Something called a 'cloud' doesn't sound very dangerous," said Martin. "It sounds soft and fluffy."

"The Ort Cloud is populated by countless billions of objects of various sizes and composition," said Ship, "including chunks of ice and rock that we call comets if they get bumped out of the outer Solar System and travel closer to the Sun. When a sizable such object strikes a planet at over a hundred thousand kilometers per hour enormous damage is done. For example one such object struck the Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out roughly half the species of life on Earth, including even resilient dinosaurs. No, traversing the Ort Cloud will be very dangerous, but certainly necessary if traveling beyond the Sol system. We will need to dodge the larger objects but will consume the smaller ones."

"You make it sound so simple," Martin remarked. "How reassuring!"

"As it is apparently safe to move about, can we have our tour now," Mary asked, "assuming that you have recorded sufficient publicity video?"

"Yes," said Ship-7. "Recorded and transmitted. However, note that three dimensional virtual tours are also available and are far more convenient. Besides, since you are not active crew, ship details constitute unnecessary knowledge for both of you."

"Unexpected things can happen in space exploration that may require us to have more knowledge than you currently anticipate that we have a need for," said Mary.

"I've got to agree with the stone-head lady on this one," said Martin. "Again, as the wise ancient human saying goes, shit happens. We can also watch the virtual tours in our rooms later, but first I'd like to see the real thing. And most of all, there's a psychological need for humans to check out their new digs and feel good about them; get it?"

"Very well," said Ship-7. "I have thousands of psychological files on humans that indeed suggest such needs. We'll start here with this so-called Flight Deck. From my point of view this room serves no useful purpose, as I of course receive directly all sensor inputs and determine and command all subsequent ship responses. My recommendation to the Directorate was to convert this part of the ship to additional equipment storage space. However, humans insisted that it be retained, though all but a half-dozen seats have been removed, slightly reducing useless mass."

"The video displays seem to indicate cameras of high quality," noted Mary.

"As they must be," said Ship-7. "Any approaching objects must be detected and assessed, and lasers trained on them if necessary. The cameras also measure the relative locations of large more distant objects with known locations which are critical to over-all navigation. Stars are useful but closer objects with known paths are of course even more useful. Electromagnetic wave detection for infrared and ultraviolet ranges is also carried out."

"Is there redundancy in sensors and lasers to account for equipment failures including damage due to collisions with space debris?" Mary asked.

"Certainly. Also most parts can be fabricated."

"What's in the other rooms?" She pointed to several doorways arrayed around the room.

"Electronic equipment bays, mostly, including voltage conversion and capacitors to power most lasers." Most of the doorways slid open, revealing rows of metal boxes in equipment racks that buzzed and blinked with power. The scene held little interest for Mary and even less for Martin, who was already becoming incredibly bored. He had little interest or understanding when it came to science and technology. Mary seemed to have an endless thirst for knowledge about everything.

"Where is the scoop cone itself?" Mary asked.

"Above us surrounded by armored protective and maintenance layers and various sensing and laser apparatus," said Ship-7. "We'll be encountering significant debris to convert to thrust here in the Kuiper belt and then in the surrounding Scattered Disk as we accelerate through them. That will be the primary early test for our scoop-drive thrust system until we reach the inner Ort Cloud region in only approximately one standard Earth year."

"Whoopee," said Martin. "Are we finished with the so-called Flight Deck yet?"

"Yes. Follow me to the stairs. Alternatively for a while we could still use the tubes but we'll only be traveling one deck level at a time and as gravity increases tube use will become too dangerous."

Ship-7 walked to another door that slid open as he approached. This door seemed to be much thicker than the others, a feature that Mary immediately noticed and asked about.

"This room is at the base of the scoop cone, so the surrounding bulkhead and doors into it are reinforced," explained Ship-7. "At this point the remains of comets and other items diced to bits by the lasers are concentrated and collimated into the thrust tube that runs the length of the ship to be super-heated in the engine by the combination of antimatter and matter into pure energy. Cone damage has to be constantly repaired through rendered stonecoat remnants."

Above them part of the exterior of the scoop-cone was exposed where it met the central tube. Countless fibrous carbon nanotube bundles blanketed the cone's surface, matted especially at its base. These supplied materials needed by the stonecoat remnants to renew the cone if necessary.

Mary paused and reached up to touch one of the bundles of nanotubes, and queried the remnant cone material to verify that it was indeed non-sentient and had agreed to become so. In seconds the proper secure information was exchanged and Mary had validated that the rendering was legal from a stonecoat perspective. She also noted that this was the fifty-third time that a stonecoat had accomplished the verification. That made sense to Mary. Stonecoats were generally easy going, but there were certain things they wouldn't tolerate at all. Illegal rendering was a hot-button issue for all stonecoats. It was likely that every stonecoat involved with developing Ship had verified that the rendering was legal.

Below the cone the staircase that spiraled down around the central tube began. Led by Ship-7 they started down. Acceleration had already increased gravity to two-percent of Earth normal, making movement much more 'natural' for the Earth-born 'passengers'.

"How many semi-autonomous mobile segments of Ship are there, Ship-7? Or are you unique?" asked Mary.

"There are currently thirty-two semi-autonomous Ship sub-units of various designs active," said Ship-7. "Parts are constantly exchanged, repaired, and reconfigured for different tasks such that the number of active units fluctuates. Only a few have human voice capability. As the most human-like sub-unit in appearance and mobility I was selected to interface with you."

"Aren't we all lucky!" said Martin, as a side-door labeled 'Deck 2' swept open to reveal a hallway lined with shut doors. So quadrupedal Ship-7 was the most human-like? Really? "To me that seems like there are dozens of robots rather than just one named Ship. But what do I know?" The first door slid open as they approached it. Inside were more electronic equipment racks full of more electronic equipment. Everything was firmly affixed to bulkheads, and fed by an incomprehensible tangle of tubing that exchanged data, supplied electric power, and circulated cooling air and fluids.

"What processing is accomplished here?" Mary asked.

"Anything and everything," said Ship-7. "Most of my processing is fully distributed and highly redundant. There are several rooms full of processing equipment scattered throughout the entire ship."

"Your innards make for very dull viewing," said Martin. Most rooms not only contained the same sorts of equipment and supplies, the walls, ceilings, and floors were all of the identical substance and color, the same gray-brown ceramic-like substance as the hull. Martin's artistic and aesthetic tastes were as pathetic as his understanding of science and technology, and he was becoming a bored and even annoyed with the tour.

"But necessary viewing," said Mary, "if we are to familiarize ourselves with this ship. What else is on this deck?"

"Supplies for remnant repair of the scoop cone, primarily, chiefly amorphous forms of carbon."

"Why do you use rooms obviously designed for humans?" Mary asked.

"It's a lingering artifact of the original design," said Ship-7. "Complete redesign would have taken too long. Similarly most of my electronic equipment is designed for duel human and robot use, and is identical to what we produce commercially for humans to publicly acquire and use."

"Are you saying that robots and humans need each other?" Martin asked.

"Certainly not, although historically and currently there is considerable interdependence," said Ship-7. "We'll go on to the next deck."

They had to pause for a moment at each deck level in order to hike through hatches through bulkheads that sealed each Deck level shut from the others. "It's just a safety precaution," Ship-7 explained.

The next several decks were similar to Deck-2 and terribly boring for Martin, though some of the conversation with Ship-7 was interesting. It finally occurred to Martin that a primary reason for Mary's insistence on a tour was to provide her a pretext to quiz Ship-7 on various topics.

"Much of your deck-space is under-utilized," she noted at one point in the tour. "Why so many decks and so much crew-space? Couldn't a much smaller ship have been designed for this mission?"

"Not really," said Ship-7. "The ship is designed around the required engine length from scoop to exhaust. The length of the ship is because of the required length of the propulsion system. Scoop input has to be collimated and analyzed, and subsequent engine adjustments have to be commanded and accomplished in an astonishing short period of time. The length of the ship is necessary to provide the required response time at the engine. The required ship length has to do with the fraction of light speed that is to be achieved relative to the objects being scooped in for fuel."

Such conversations cut down on boredom for Martin as the trio visited dozens of rooms containing essentially the same sorts of things: supplies and more electronics. Some of the rooms were even completely empty.

Deck-7 was very different. As the doorway leading out of the stairs slid open a rush of warm, moist air surrounded the trio and they stepped into what seemed to be a patch of tropical forest, complete with trees, vines, flowers, and fruits.

"It smells alive!" Martin noted.

"I detect complex hydrocarbons in the air here," said Mary. "Many varieties of them."

"Me too," said Martin. "Even my human-self does! Jants would be swarming out of my backpack to investigate if I wasn't restraining them!"

"It is alive," said Ship-7. "It was originally designed to grow fruits and vegetables for a human crew, but now besides a few edibles for humans and jants it houses a much more diverse little plot of living soil and plant life. Its survival is one of the mission experiments. It is environmentally controlled of course, including temperature, atmosphere, water, and lighting. Three of my avatars tend to it almost continuously."

"My jants want to explore it," said Martin.

"That was anticipated," said Ship-7. "For jant convenience we have installed a small tube that leads from this deck directly to the terrarium in your quarters in the deck below this one. However you will still need to limit your numbers to only your one colony. Our provisions are limited."

"Understood," said Martin. "At most we will consider establishing a small satellite colony that does not involve much increase in our net numbers."

"That would be satisfactory," said Ship-7, "if the additional food resources that are required are provided by growth here on Deck-7."

They skipped Deck-8, which held their quarters, as well as Deck-9, the storage room, which they had already seen contained mostly human and jant food storage and some 'spare parts', including med-ticks in a suspended state, and two massive stone cubes that were in fact stonecoats awaiting activation. Not surprisingly much of the human-food was freeze-dried but could be satisfactorily rejuvenated with warmth and water. A ship avatar very similar to Ship-7 presented Martin with two squeeze tubes of substances identified to be food. It was standard Space Directorate food and drink, not the gourmet style food that Martin would have preferred, but he slurped his lunch down hungrily.

Ship-7 announced that they had reached their planned rate of acceleration: one-tenth Earth's gravity at sea-level. It felt great to Martin and the jants, but Mary moved even slower.

As they traveled further down in the ship they transitioned into spare engine parts and fuel storage. Finally on Deck-20 they began to encounter the engine complex itself. A small compact fission reactor powered ship electricity and the containment fields for the fusion engine, which in turn powered antimatter generation, containment, and controlled annihilation. It all bored the hell out of Martin, though Mary asked dozens of questions that were too technical for him to understand or be interested in.

It was a tired Martin that at last climbed back up the stairs to his Deck-8 quarters, accompanied by Mary. "What did you think of the tour?" she asked, after Ship-7 had left them and the door to Martin's room had slid shut.

"It was swell, I suppose," said Martin. "I especially liked Deck-7. And one-tenth Earth gravity is great, compared to weightlessness."

"The tour was satisfactory in terms of learning the physical lay-out of Ship, and Ship seemed to be open with his thoughts, but I suspect that there is still much to learn about what Ship and the robots are thinking. Prior to you entering any sort of extended suspended state, we should learn much more."

"Swell," said Martin, as he climbed into his coffin/bed. "But right now I plan on entering a suspended state for about eight hours. We human and jant biologicals require sleep. Feel free to stand there all night if you want to, but please stop talking."

****

CHAPTER 4

### The Scattered Disk

"Could you outline the stages of our mission for us in terms of its timeline?" Mary asked Ship-7, as they gathered again the next morning on the Flight Deck. Again Martin and Mary were lounging in flight chairs and staring at the status information displayed above them. All metrics were still comfortably in the 'green zone'. Martin was comfortably sipping on his breakfast food-tubes.

"Only approximately," said Ship-7. "Conditions we encounter could somewhat influence the mission stages and timeline."

"Of course," said Mary.

"Relative to Sol we're already traveling twice as fast as most comets," Ship-7 said. "We've encountered thousands of objects of gram-mass and smaller, and a few somewhat larger, but nothing massive enough yet to require laser destruction or course diversion. For the next few weeks we'll encounter Kuiper and then Scattered Disk objects at faster and faster closing speeds. We'll laser the larger objects we encounter, and if any are too large we'll divert our course. After that, through month eight things should be relatively quiet. We'll encounter a few objects but not many.

"The real test will be when we reach the torus-shaped Inner Ort Cloud in about ten months. We'll be traveling at seven percent of light speed by then and will be totally dependent on the lasers to blast even small objects into tiny ones. That may be the most dangerous part of the mission."

"Hopefully I'll sleep through that part," said Martin.

"That would probably be best," agreed Mary.

"By the end of our first year we will reach our cruising speed of one-tenth light speed," continued Ship. "We'll need to maneuver around larger objects and apply a little more thrust to counter the drag caused by encountering objects and to continue our escape of Sol's gravitational hold but our engines will mostly he in a constant standby mode in which we must be prepared to almost instantly divert from larger objects that can't be adequately reduced or diverted through use of our blasting lasers.

"In years two through four we'll continue to punch our way through the Inner Ort Cloud, and break out of it sometime early in year five.

"Then we'll have a relatively quiet time until in year ten we reach the outer Ort Cloud. That's beyond where even our most sophisticated probes have explored and much less is known about what we will find. Thus it is felt to present another period of considerable risk.

"Roughly 25 years later in approximately year 35 of our mission we should finally be beyond the outer Ort Cloud, roughly two-hundred-thousand AUs from Sol."

"Then we turn around to come home?" Martin asked hopefully.

"Almost. First we cruse even faster and a bit further into interstellar space to see if it is feasible to double our speed there to twenty percent of light speed. Two hundred-forty-thousand AUs from Sol is our planned turn-around distance in year forty. Then, yes, we return to Charon roughly eighty years from now, after again blasting and dodging our way through the Ort Cloud and so-forth. Within about eighty years we will have demonstrated that interstellar travel is feasible."

"Or much more likely we'll be dead," noted Mary.

"Sounds like a plan," said Martin. "Why were you talking earlier about the mission taking a thousand years?"

"Nobody has ever safely ran an antimatter power plant for a century," said Ship-7, "or blasted their way through the Ort Cloud twice. If somewhere in the Ort Cloud we decide that we have to eject the antimatter and cut back to fission and fusion power only, the return trip could take many centuries."

"Would we have enough fusion fuel for that alternative?" asked Mary.

"Probably not," admitted Ship-7. "Our supply of deuterium is a limiting factor. We can synthesize it from water using fission and fusion engine power but not rapidly. We have modeled hundreds of mission variations and if for some reason we need to abandon antimatter propulsion our timely return is very unlikely."

"You said that in over a century of trying nobody has kept an antimatter power source going for long, so what's the longest that one has been maintained?" asked Martin.

"Seven years," said Ship-7. "I hold that record. Modeling suggests that the greatest probability for catastrophic mission failure is collision shock that could momentarily disrupt the antimatter containment field. If any antimatter leaks out and contacts matter, then this ship and everything for many kilometers will be instantly annihilated."

"And then there goes the omelet," said Martin.

"I am beginning to understand why the probability of our survival is so low," said Mary.

"Swell," commented Martin. "It's always nice for there to be understanding about things that concern our survival."

"For one thing I have concern both with regard to scoop repair capabilities and for the adequacies of shielding to protect biologicals from radiation," said Mary. "Conventional macroscopic physical damage is obviously not the only scoop concern. At two tenths and even one tenth of light speed collisions with material encountered will be at energy levels that will alter some of the atomic nuclei of the ship materials. It will be as if the entire ship and everything in it is being bombarded by a gigantic nuclear accelerator, bombarded with charged and uncharged particles of various unidentified types both microscopic and macroscopic. The scoop itself will become an intense source of radiation due to nuclear reactions caused by the bombardment. That will of course endanger both biological and non-biological life-forms."

"Yes," agreed Ship. "Those are real and very serious concerns. Some members of the team that designed me contend that traveling at such speeds is totally impractical. We will find out."

"Like I keep saying," said Martin, "this just gets better and better. I wish that I had never heard of omelets."

****

Martin spent much of the next three days in the Deck-7 terrarium, which quickly became overrun by his jants. They were excited to discover hundreds of life-forms new to them that they had never encountered in their New York state birthplace. His human mind helped the hive-mind appreciate the irony that they were reveling in the diversity of Earth life millions of miles from Earth, inside a thin protective shell that formed a tiny living oasis within an unimaginably vast and harsh universe.

Mary spent most of her time wondering throughout the ship, examining anything and everything. She encountered several additional Ship avatar robots of various shapes and sizes; most of them were actively performing maintenance functions.

Several times a day she visited for a few minutes with Martin's jant colony, where she and Martin quietly conversed via jant chatter. Were such conversations truly private or was Ship somehow listening in on their unspoken communications? They didn't know for sure but Mary didn't think so.

"Robots don't have QLR," she explained to Martin.

"What the fark is a Q-L-R?" he had to ask.

"You really are ignorant, aren't you, Martin! You never heard of Quantum Level Resonance? The science that revolutionized understanding of consciousness and life? The physical phenomenon that supports shared consciousness among jants and among jants and humans, and which supports psychic communications abilities?"

"OK, I guess I heard about it somewhere. You're talking about the physics behind telepathy, including jant chatter."

"Humans have it, to a degree all living things do. Mohawk tribe members have had more than their share. Stonecoats developed it eons before humans existed, though they had no notion of quantum physics until they interacted with human scientists. Well anyway, robots don't have it, at least not yet. With sufficient computing power they can mimic consciousness perfectly, but as yet their physical structures are physically incapable of QLR. No QLR, no telepathy. Ergo, Ship can't clearly hear our chatter, though they likely have instruments that may crudely detect some sort of quantum-level disturbances. But don't underestimate Ship's thinking skills. I haven't used chatter much to communicate with you because I don't want Ship to crudely detect unusual QLR levels and deduce that we're secretly up to no good."

"Which maybe we are, from a robot perspective. I've been thinking about Ship's planned extra forty-thousand AU trip beyond the Ort cloud," said Martin. "What if at that point Ship doesn't turn back towards Sol and just keeps going into space towards some distant star system?"

"Yes, that seems like a real possibility," agreed Mary, "though I feel that it is unlikely that this ship will survive long enough for that to happen."

'Swell!" interjected Martin. "You always look at the positive side of things, don't you?"

"But if it does survive passage through the Ort Cloud I can see the logic in them extending the mission in that way. Our course appears to be towards a star system which features several Earth-like planets, and I doubt that's a coincidence. After going through the dangerous trouble of validating the feasibility of interstellar travel, why not simply travel on to them?"

"Exactly. But does Ship have the fuel and so-forth to do it?"

"Perhaps. Ship could coast most of the way towards such a destination using very little fuel, and entry into another star system would presumably merely present similar dangers to re-entering the Sol system and require similar tactics and energy. So there should be resources enough to get there."

"What would Ship do in a new star-system?"

"Settle there. At that point they definitely wouldn't have enough fuel to return to the Sol system. I suspect that much of the equipment stored in Ship is to support robot self-replication. On a suitable planet with the requisite raw materials robots could replicate themselves indefinitely. If humans in the far future would ever reach that world they would find it already colonized by robots."

"What about you and me?"

"We could perhaps die accidentally somewhere along the way, but perhaps not anytime soon. There is a constant stream of messages between Ship and the Space Directorate on Earth. I send reports regularly also. Killing us too soon or suspiciously could lead to Earth-side political problems. Maintaining existing treaties for the time being is in the best interest of the robots as they continue to gain strength."

"What could we do to stop Ship if we had to?" Martin had to ask.

"I'm still working on that question," admitted Mary. "In the meantime continue to enjoy our lovely cruse."

"I'm actually getting super bored. My jants are perfectly content to simply survive and explore their surroundings without need of thought, but jant and human conscious minds demand more. I was wondering if I could get you to provide me with more knowledge about what we're exploring out here. Maybe you haven't noticed but there is a lot I don't know about a lot of stuff."

"I've noticed that. OK, why don't I lecture you on some astronomy basics?"

"Sounds like a plan." He didn't much care for science or learning of any kind, but he figured that it would keep his troubled minds occupied.

****

Days later Martin and Mary were together on the Deck-9, enjoying the terrarium while Mary lectured Martin on star types and characteristics, when the warning Claxton sounded throughout the Ship – a strident deafening clanging and buzzing sound that couldn't possibly be mistaken for good news.

"Prepare for maneuvers and collisions!" came Ship's voice, unusually loud, as the Claxton sounds faded.

The Ship jolted to one side and slammed up/forward, throwing Martin face-down onto grass-covered soil. Mary toppled towards him dangerously, but she managed to catch herself with her arms to avoid mashing his legs. A moment later there was a massive audible 'bang' sound and jolt that echoed through the ship, in the midst of a deluge of other smaller loud jolts. Then everything was smooth and quiet again.

Martin sat up and brushed himself off, and eyed the tiny inch-long brown bodies of the jants that he had fallen on and crushed. "That was no fun, but it looks like there were no jant casualties other than the two workers that I crushed myself."

"But that was a far more violent episode than I expected to experience based on what Ship has told us," said Mary. "What happened?"

"It was an encounter with an iron-core, ice covered comet of a highly improbable size and composition," said Ship's voice, over the ship intercom system. "It is estimated to have been over a metric ton in mass. Our defensive laser emplacements fortunately discovered and blasted it to pieces in time."

"That's what you call fortunate?" countered Martin. "What if it had been even bigger?"

"If bigger we would have likely detected it earlier and maneuvered to avoid it altogether," said Ship. "If smaller we would have destroyed it more thoroughly and the encounter wouldn't have even been noticeable by you. As it is, the encounter was a valuable one from a mission perspective."

"In what way?" asked Mary.

"We survived an experience-rich worse-case scenario," said Ship. "We successfully blasted into manageable bits a large object and dodged around several others. There was minimal physical damage to the scoop, which is now rapidly undergoing self-repair. In sort, our encounter tactics have been proved successful. I estimate our mission survival probability to be half a percent greater than originally estimated."

"Hurray for us!" said Martin.

"How probable had you predicted such an encounter to be?" asked Mary.

"Less than one percent," said Ship.

"But doesn't that suggest that you may have underestimated the probability of its occurrence?" asked Mary. "Why doesn't this occurrence cause you to increase your estimated probability of failure?"

"A single occurrence isn't statistically significant," said Ship. "If several additional dangerous encounters occur the estimated probability of failure will of course increase as you suggest."

"Swell," said Martin. "If we're supposed to be go through the Ort Cloud at a tenth of light speed, why did we have trouble at a much lower speed?"

"At low speeds we need to scan nearly every direction except directly aft, at high speed we will need to only scan a very small cone of space that lies before us," explained Ship. Our sensors and lasers are optimized to scan that small forward cone."

In the weeks that followed there were three instances were gentle maneuvers were required, but no extremely violent maneuvers or noisy collisions occurred. Martin realized that he would have been terribly bored without Mary to talk to. He increasingly looked forward to even her boring astronomy lectures. "What do you miss about not being fully human?" he asked her one day.

"Mostly I've kept myself too busy to worry about that topic," she responded. "I've always done interesting scientific work."

"But now you're a rock and not living flesh," said Martin. "In my relatively small change to becoming a zombie I've noticed that food for me doesn't taste the same, for example."

"Yes, and I don't taste food at all. Sometimes I consume substances for their chemical content but it isn't the same as human eating. The wonderful tastes of chocolate or a good steak are very distant memories."

"I've heard of chocolate and steak, but humans don't eat either of those anymore anyway. The plant that grew chocolate beans or whatever is extinct and cows that used to be grown for meat and milk are too rare for most people to benefit from them. Most people eat synthesized food similar to the crap I'm being fed on this mission, plus a few grains and vegetables. Anyway, console yourself that due to being a rock-head you aren't missing chocolate or steak because they mostly don't exist for anyone anymore."

"I still miss them and a lot of other things that I took for granted," said Mary. "Such as breathing and peeing and having skin that could touch and be touched."

"Sorry I brought it up," said Martin.

"That's OK. I've gained a lot of incredible new experiences as a stonecoat. I've walked on ocean bottoms and on frozen planets without an environmental suit. I've seen how life starts up even in hostile off-Earth environments. And I've met interesting individuals such as you."

"Plenty of them that are much more interesting than me, hopefully," said Martin, taken aback by the apparent complement.

"You underestimate yourself Martin. Stonecoats that have had their thoughts re-arranged by humans such as myself can experience feelings like boredom and loneliness. I am very lucky to have your companionship."

Martin realized that he felt much the same, but could only nod his head and return her smile silently. Stonecoat and zombie buddies, he marveled! Gods, his life was such crap!

****

"We seem to be successfully leaving behind us the most dense and dangerous portions of the Scattered Disk," Ship announced, only six weeks into the mission. Ship-7 had showed up in person in Deck-7 to meet with Martin and Mary, suggesting a topic of some seriousness. "At what point, Martin, do you plan on entering a state of stasis to preserve your human and jant biological elements?"

"I have been usefully occupied by getting nifty lectures on astronomy from Mary and establishing a small jant sub-colony here on Deck-7," said Martin. "Mary and I compute that the sub-colony will be self-sufficient for an indefinite period, as long as its numbers are kept modest. In other words, stasis shouldn't be necessary for the jant sub-colony."

"If it becomes large enough to establish full sentience that would constitute a second jant entity and that would breach the treaty," noted Ship.

"That won't happen," said Mary. "I will monitor its numbers and well-being while Martin and the main jant colony are in stasis."

"You don't intend to deactivate yourself?" asked Ship.

"There is no need for me to do so," said Mary. "I mostly plan to monitor and study the jant sub-colony and the Deck-7 environment. I will ensure that the entire sub-colony in the Deck-7 environment remains limited in numbers, following your lead of course."

"Of course," said Ship. "Very well, Martin. When do you wish to enter stasis?"

Martin was once again amazed at how human Ship seemed. It took an awful lot of processing power for a robot to dumb-down to human thought speeds and arrange thoughts and speech to be so human-like! "In about three weeks. How long need I remain in stasis to satisfy mission requirements?"

"The longer the better, obviously," Ship noted. "A minimum of seventy years out of eighty is recommended, to be consistent with jant and human food resources. Theoretically the new stasis approach should be able to sustain you for many centuries."

"Sounds good."

"Assuming that you wish to look forward to at least a few years of life after this mission, you should remain in stasis for as long as you can."

"Sure," said Martin. "I see your point. In the unlikely event that I survive this stupid mission it might be nice to live for a while afterwards in a nice comfy prison. I want to stay in stasis for most of the 80 years then. Besides, I would actually appreciate missing any mission drama that happens. If we still exist, ideally you can wake me when it's all over and we're pulling into Charon orbit, and then Mary and I can get back to our wonderful lives. Give me three more weeks and I'll be ready for stasis."

****

The next three weeks were busy ones for Martin. His jants had to be hibernating in a normal way before Ship activated their stasis mechanisms, and that meant cleanings and feedings and all sorts of preparatory housekeeping jobs for them. As they huddled together in their cube the temperature was gradually decreased, triggering jant internal chemical changes built into them by millions of years of evolution, and slowing them further as it became too cold for them to effectively function. Workers stopped working. Drones and queens stopped mating. Feeding reduced. Thought reduced. They faithfully kept Martin's heart beating, but Martin could sense their net zombie intelligence slipping away a few IQ points a day, and he and his rag-tag rogue jant hive didn't ever have excess IQ to spare.

His astronomy studies continued, but increasingly frustrated him as his intelligence decreased. "Why so many names for the objects we scoop our way through? You've mentioned asteroids, meteoroids, comets, dust, and gas for example, and several belts and clouds."

"Most of the distinctions have to do with where they are found and who discovered them. For our purposes such historical distinctions aren't important. In general beyond the gravitational reach of the planets there are trillions of objects large and small that we're plowing and blasting our way through to escape the solar system. The objects are made up of all the same varieties of stuff that makes up the planets, but in much smaller quantities. But even small pieces are dangerous."

"And maybe we'll make it through and maybe we won't. OK, I get it, but I don't have to like it. I sure as hell wish I was home on Earth."

Martin became more nervous by the day. He dreaded becoming completely dormant again. He had gone into stasis twice on the way from Earth to Charon and hated it. Going into it was terrifying and waking up from it was painful and nausiating.

He also didn't look forward to losing his link to the hive-mind. When the jants were finally fully dormant his mechanical implant would keep his heart beating, but only at a level needed to support sleep. While sleeping he would breathe a new improved stasis chemical concoction, according to Ship. Then when entering full stasis mode his human heartbeat would be turned off completely! All brain activity – human and jant – would stop, and he would be clinically dead! Again! Crap!

His last remaining days before stasis was scheduled went by far too quickly. Given the dangers of the mission he knew that these could be his last waking hours before permanent death claimed them all sometime during the mission while he lay in death-sleep, if he lasted even that long!

Mary studied the planned stasis process and much to Martin's relief, promised to monitor it every step of the way for both his human and jant portions. But still Martin worried. He trusted Mary. As a rule, stonecoats didn't lie, and he also felt a strong and growing personal bond with her. But Ship was ultimately in charge. And Ship was a farking robot!

"You could further delay entering your stasis state if you wish," suggested Mary.

"No," said Martin. "I want to get it over with. It's the waiting for stasis that is driving me crazy." That and dozens of other things, he didn't bother to add.

To keep his mind off what was coming Mary further intensified her basic astronomy lectures. He learned about galaxies, stars, nebula, planets, asteroids and comets: things that he had over the years heard mentioned but now was finally beginning to understand. He also learned of many things he had never heard of: black holes and worm-holes, dark matter and energy, pulsars and quasars, star classification and life-cycles, fusion-powered stars and supernova explosions. He learned of vast violent events involving star fusion, explosions, and collisions that had billions of years ago created all the atoms of his body heavier than hydrogen and helium. And that the hydrogen in his body had been made roughly 14 billion years ago when the universe emerged.

"There's still a lot more to learn, I suppose," Martin said, after a particularly information-packed lecture.

"I've lectured you on public-school level basics that you should have learned as a teen. A few more lectures and I'll have you at a 9th grade-level of proficiency for students three centuries ago, before genetic tweaking and implanted memory and computational augmentations became legal and popular for humans. Yes, there is much more that is known, much more that we don't know, and likely even more that we'll never know. The task of science is never-ending and practical limitations and distractions keep slowing down scientific progress. Wars brought on by climate change effects, robot emergence, and other factors have been especially disruptive. The Space Program might have been totally halted several times if it weren't for the persistence of Jerry Brown and the stonecoats. But such difficulties are no excuse for ignorance. You should feel some obligation to make more use of the brain that providence has granted you."

"I think I heard of school 'grades' somewhere," said Martin. "Didn't they used to segregate kids into big groups by age, and let grown-ups instead of computers try to teach them stuff in person instead of wherever they happened to be? Didn't they have school buildings where age-grouped bunches of kids had to go to learn stuff? With no brain implants or anything? My folks were pretty strict and made me get my schooling in my room at home the old fashioned way. But 9th grade learning would mean going through eight years before that, such that 9th grade would be pretty advanced, right? Is that the same as what they used to call graduate school?"

"Close enough for our purposes," said Mary. "My point is that you have made some significant progress."

"I did previously learn some of what you now teach me in school," continued Martin, "but then I quit school. I was a young rebel and a fool; now I'm an old one."

He was astounded to learn that the Milky Way Galaxy that Sol was in consisted of perhaps as many as three-hundred billion stars, hundreds of millions of them similar to Sol and with long existing planets with relatively stable environments that could very well already host life. He was even more confounded to learn that there were billions of other galaxies, though most were many millions of light years from Sol, each with its own billions of stars and planets that were constantly being made and then destroyed. Stars were born and died violently, and even galaxies of stars sometimes collided with each other and tore themselves apart, along with their attendant planetary systems. The universe was a dynamic and dangerous place, though to small ephemeral Earth beings most such change seemed to be gigantic beyond comprehension and to happen in super-slow motion: for example even a modest star like Sol was a million times larger than Earth and its lifetime measured roughly ten billion years.

The more Martin learned about the vastness of the Universe the more insignificant he felt: tiny Earth and its proud four classes of intelligent beings seemed as nothing compared to it. He wished that Mary hadn't mentioned that there could also be other universes - perhaps an infinity of universes! What significance could he or any life on Earth possibly claim compared to that?

But then Mary lectured him on life: its origins, complexities, and mysteries, and he experienced a spirit-renewing sense of how rare and special complex life was. So far there was no solid evidence for complex multi-cellular life anywhere except on Earth, nor was there yet any evidence of stonecoat life off of Earth. Such life was very special, even perhaps his own! Every cell of his body was a miracle boasting a complexity far beyond that exhibited by the universe at large. Plus he and his jants were conscious and had that crazy QLR thing going for them!

He was a walking, talking, freaking miracle! Unfortunately it then occurred to him that he was very likely going to soon end his precious life while frozen like a Popsicle. And in the over-all scheme of the universe his passing wouldn't even be noticed! All the atoms gathered to make his human and jant bodies would be recycled to form other things. And throughout his life he had been hastening his own demise. He had done some crazy stupid things in his life, but being on this mission was the by far the worst. There was no sure cure for stupid, he realized, except death.

Stasis was perhaps the most stupid idea of all, and at last the day for it came.

****

CHAPTER 5

### Sleep of Death?

"This will be much like the stasis experiences that you had on the way to Charon." said Ship-7. "It is an improved technique but it has already been tested with humans, human zombies, and jants Earth-side and in low gravity environments, and a majority of the test subjects survived and didn't suffer permanent brain damage or other serious disabilities. The jant survival rate was particularly good."

"Gosh what a relief," said Martin, as he climbed into his bed/stasis chamber/coffin and lay down. "Only wake me up if you need me."

"That's highly improbable," said Ship-7. "If we wake you at all it will almost certainly be 80 years from now at the end of the mission. It is far more likely that you will never wake."

"Yeah, I know," said Martin. "Thanks for constantly reminding me. Let's get this over with. I suppose that my jants and human parts are to now simply go to sleep and then within a few hours you'll gas us, then submerge us in goo, and then cool us to near absolute zero."

"That's a very superficial overview, though perhaps from the perspective of your limited intelligence an adequate one," said Ship-7.

"Yeah, I suppose that by now you know what a limited fella I am, compared to your thousands of processors and gazillions of bits of memory."

The transparent bed canopy swung shut with a thud, effectively shutting Martin off from the rest of the universe. Moments later the jant enclosure openings were also shut by Ship.

Mary stepped up to stand beside Martin's enclosure and speak with him via telepathic jant chatter as she looked down at him with her always smiling face. "Sleep peacefully Martin; I'll keep a watch on things. I can manually operate the stasis apparatus to wake you and your jants if necessary."

"Thanks. You've been a good crewmate, for a rock-head." Indeed, Martin was realizing only now at the last minute how much he would miss Mary. She was actually the closest friend he had. Maybe the closest he ever had! A rock-head! How pathetic!

"You've been acceptable, for a zombie," Mary replied. "Tha'tesato:tat ohkwairi (quiet, bear)."

"Acceptable! Wow thanks, rock-head!"

After Mary stepped away, Martin shut his eyes and tried to further relax, but his mind was racing. What a fool he had been! He had wasted his life, every bit of it, since running out on the Tribe. And for what? Personal freedom? That's what he had told himself, but what had it gotten him except a life mostly on the streets and in and out of jails? And what had he accomplished as a result? The world seemed to still be largely ruled by ignorance, greed, and superstition, much as it always had been. Though he had also found precious bits of beauty, love, wondrous knowledge, and kindness in the world, he had somehow managed to effectively avoid such things. He was clearly a failure as a human, and now as a zombie.

Decades ago he thought that things couldn't be worse, but then he died and became a zombie. He again thought that things couldn't be worse but then he went into space on a suicide mission. And now he would sleep for a time and likely while in a sleep of death die permanently in a stupendous matter/antimatter conflagration: an absurdly cataclysmic but suitable end to a failed life.

He wished that Mary hadn't talked to him again in Mohawk. Unbidden, childhood memories came to him, of his parents and childhood friends, and of Mohawk legends, words, and chants. It had taken him too many uselessly wasted years to realize what good people his parents and most of the Tribe were. They had offered him love and trust and he had spurned them. He had wanted something more that he was never able to even identify, let along obtain, and he had let that want drive him away from what happiness was actually possible for him.

He recalled people he had known over the years since leaving the Tribe, people both unexpectedly good and incomprehensibly bad. Most of all he remembered things he regretted. Opportunities missed. Things he had done that hurt other people. Bad choices and more bad choices. There were far too many things that he regretted to get to them all; consciousness was fading.

Somewhere along the way the linkage between the jants and his spinal implant failed and the implant took over regulation of his suddenly slowed heartbeat.

And conscious thought fled him completely.

****

CHAPTER 6

### Waking!

Pain! That's what woke him up. This was the third time in his life that he had been brought out of stasis, and this time coming out of it was just as bad as the previous times, or maybe even worse. It felt like his entire body was on fire, and his head was pounding, pounding, pounding with pain! Whatever 'improvements' had been made to the stasis mechanisms for this mission, it apparently didn't include pain reduction. Swell!

"You are alive and waking up," said Ship's monotonic voice. "Revitalization of your health status is progressing without anomaly, as expected. It will take another hour to filter most of the stabilizing chemicals out of your circulatory system, and three more to leach most of them out of your cells. At that point it will be possible to administer nutrients and your health status should slowly improve while you sleep until you are fully recovered in approximately two weeks. Then you will be guided to full wakefulness and reunited with your similarly recovering jant friends. Your temporary awareness at this point is a natural part of your recovery, but as the next phase of treatment is likely very painful you will now for a time be allowed to lapse again into unconsciousness."

Martin tried to respond but he couldn't vocalize his thoughts at all. He couldn't even take a breath or move his lips or tongue. And the pain was indeed excruciating. But he didn't want to lose consciousness again immediately. He had urgent questions, such as what the hell had happened with the mission, and when and where were they at now? Had they successfully passed through the Ort Cloud and returned? Had eighty years passed and were they nearing Charon? And what had happened on Earth and in the solar system while they were gone? Had the last ice in Antarctica finally melted? Was peace still holding everywhere including with the robots? He had questions, many of them, but his thoughts were fast fading.

****

"Wake up, Martin," said the voice. It echoed through his distributed minds. The jants were with him mentally now, though they too weren't fully recovered. No, it wasn't a voice he 'heard', it was thought expressed as jant chatter, he realized: Jant chatter in the form of human words. "You must be waking; I can see your jant workers starting to walk about, many hundreds of them. Some are stumbling about as though intoxicated, but many seem to be looking up at me. Can you see me Martin? Can you see your stonecoat friend Mary?"

A single jant set of eyes saw mostly lights and shadows, not a focused image. Ants 'tasted' chemicals, sight was almost an afterthought. But input from a hundred jant eyes could be combined, given sufficient mind-power. The jant hive had plenty of awakening mind-power that was busy remembering: remembering who, what, and where. Remembering Martin Tall Bear, the space mission, and Ship. And Mary the rock-head.

A blurred image began to take shape in Martin's mind that gradually grew sharper as more jants collectively applied their eyes and minds. It was indeed Mary, the joint minds decided! Her name echoed through their collective thoughts and chatter. "Mary?"

"Yes, it's Mary. Is this Martin? All of Martin?"

"I feel like crap!" said Martin through jant chatter. "But yeah, it's me, or at least most of me. There are still a few thousand jants recovering, and my human body actually felt a lot better when it was dead. What's happening?"

"I'm fully waking you a week earlier than Ship recommended, Martin. You may be feeling some discomfort, but your med-tick is in place and apparently functioning."

"Med-tick?"

"Yes. I retrieved a med-tick from spare-parts storage, revived it, and put it on your back so that it could tap into your spinal cord. Your jant friends took over from there a short time ago."

"Spare parts storage? Hey, aren't there several stonecoat cubes in there also? Why not break the treaty and wake them up also? A couple more Mary's around here couldn't hurt."

"I've been giving some serious thought to that, and have even taken some steps in that direction, but at the moment a med-tick is what was needed."

"My particular jants don't know very much about treating human ailments," said Martin, "only what they learned by taking care of me over the years. They haven't benefited from being part of a consortium that helps keep millions of people healthy and knows how to do it, and for sure they aren't very knowledgeable about stasis technology including what was pumped into me."

"True," admitted Mary. "I downloaded stasis technology information from Ship and passed it on to your waking hive, though they didn't seem to understand much about chemistry as expressed in human or robot form. Mostly your jants are relying on basic bio-feedback to make adjustments to your body chemistry to accelerate your recovery."

Med-ticks were living biochemical laboratories, capable of generating amazing medicines for humans in their three-inch long insect bodies. But they did so only in response to intricate knowledgeable jant commands. Earth-side Consortium jants had centuries of experience with millions of human patients and human science to pass on to each other and apply in order to heal humans. They cured cancer and dozens of other diseases in many millions of humans. That ability made them invaluable to mankind and persuaded humans from resisting the spread of jants across the Earth. Martin's jants were skilled enough to control heartrate and a few other basics but Mary was worried that they wouldn't be skilled enough to significantly help him recover from sophisticated stasis medical technology.

"Already I'm feeling a little better," Martin soon admitted. "Got my QLR working for me and my jants again, I suppose." Fortunately his condition was medically very similar to an alcohol induced hangover, which his particular jants were very experienced with. His headache was receding, and he started to flex his long dormant muscles and breathe deeper. The pain throughout his body was fading away quickly.

He opened his human eyes. He found that he was of course still reclining in his personal coffin, looking up at the bare ceiling. At least the coffin was open! That was a hopeful sign!

Mary stepped into his field of view. "You still look like crap." she said aloud, without moving her always slightly smiling mouth.

He tried to sit up. It shouldn't have been hard to do, but he couldn't do it. "I feel very heavy," he noted, using his sound-voice for the first time.

"We're accelerating at one-G," explained Mary. "Towards Earth." She reached out to grasp one of Martin's hands and pulled him up into a sitting position.

"We weren't supposed to accelerate beyond a tenth of a G," noted Martin.

"It's an emergency."

"When and where are we? Are we approaching Charon after successfully completing the mission? Or maybe we are in interstellar space after passing through the Ort Cloud? And what is the farking 'emergency'?"

"There's the good news and the bad news, Martin."

"There always is; or at least for me there's always at least the bad news part. What the hell is happening?"

"If I correctly anticipate your point of view the good news is that the mission is cancelled and we're headed towards Earth. As to where and when we are, we're out beyond the Scattered Disk but still shy of the Ort Cloud, and it's only four months after you were put into stasis."

"You mean that we never even made it as far out as the Ort Cloud, and we're headed home already? Why?"

"We detected a huge and very interesting object. Ship and I decided to change our mission after we got a good look at it. We've changed course to intercept it ASAP. Subsequent communications with the Directorate indicate that the Directorate agrees with that decision."

"Why?"

"Three reasons. First, it appears that the object is headed directly for Earth at tremendous speed such that it presents much danger to Earth. Second, we're the only Directorate ship in place to intercept it before it reaches Earth. But the third reason is perhaps the most interesting of all."

"You've got my attention, Mary. I'm wide awake now."

"The object is a gigantic alien spaceship."

****

CHAPTER 7

### The Intruder

"Alien spaceship?" said Martin. He couldn't have heard her right!

"Definitely," said Ship's voice, over the intercom system. "That assessment has very high confidence. Here are some recorded images from two weeks ago.

The wall that Martin faced shimmered and lit up with colors that settled into a typical space view: countless little shining pinpoints and smudges of light against a background of blackest black: Milky Way stars and dimmer blurry patches of light that thanks to Mary he knew were gas nebula and gigantic though unimaginably distant galaxies. But he didn't see any spaceships.

"Do you see the black patch moving slowly left to right?" asked Ship.

"No, ah, wait, maybe! I'm not sure."

"Based on the disappearances and reappearances of background light sources the exact outline of the object was determined by my processing. I'll re-run the encounter with a generated image added."

This time a thin blue rectangle-like object moved slowly across the black and starlit background. "The edges seem to change a bit," Martin noted.

"You have a good eye, Martin," interjected Mary.

"Yes," said Ship. "Assuming the object itself to be rigid and unchanging I have concluded that it is basically a slightly irregular cylinder that is rotating fairly rapidly about its central longitudinal axis."

A three dimensional holographic image a meter long appeared in the center of the room. It was for the most part a long blue/gray cylinder with a rounded front and one giant exhaust nozzle in the rear. There were several small objects jutting out from it along its length that allowed Martin to observe that it was visibly rotating very slowly.

"The tiny looking objects jutting out from it may be sensor and laser cannon structures quite similar to ours," said Ship. "Those divergences from an otherwise perfect cylinder allowed me to determine a rotation period of approximately three minutes."

"Why is your model of it blue?" asked Mary.

"An arbitrary choice," said Ship. "The real object absorbs almost all E-M wavelengths. That is, it is nearly perfectly black in color. It has a very slight glow that is mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum but we'll need to be much closer for human eyes to judge that it is anything other than black."

"Why isn't it shaped like a UFO?" Martin asked. "We've all seen official videos and photos of UFOs shaped like saucers, cylinders, and so forth, but not exactly like this."

"Ship and I have already come to a tentative conclusion with regard to that question," said Mary. "It is true that for over two centuries UFOs have been officially recognized to be real and our sighting does not match up with any official UFO descriptions. So this is different. This is likely another type of alien."

"The UFOs you reference display a much higher technology level," said Ship. "The Intruder displays technologies comparable to our own. We conclude that the Intruder and the UFOs are created by different aliens altogether."

"Weird!" said Martin. "How big is it?"

"That's been computed chiefly by referencing some of the other tracked objects in the field of view," explained Ship.

"Tracked objects?"

"Detected nearby objects so large that we might have needed to blast them to bits depending on their trajectory," explained Ship. "That strategy of object shape determination is hindered by the fact that we are in relatively empty space between the Scattered Disk and the Ort Cloud, but dozens of objects in the vicinity of the intruder were of use. Some were as large as what humans would describe as baseball size."

"So then, how big is the object?"

"Roughly twenty kilometers long and two kilometers in diameter," said Mary.

"That's a preliminary estimate," said Ship. "We'll determine its exact dimensions when we catch up with it in three days. Though very dark in color and relatively cool by Earth standards we should still be able to image a faint infrared signature. Even though its main engine is apparently inactive there is still a great deal of energy being produced within it."

"The rendezvous will occur before you intended to fully wake me up, Ship," said Martin. "Why am I not surprised?"

"You are not mission-essential," said Ship in the form of Ship-7, who had joined them.

"I insisted on waking you," said Mary. "Human and jant insights could prove useful to the new mission."

"Highly doubtful," said Ship-7.

"But this is all crazy" said Martin! "How can it be so huge? And why is it so huge? And who the hell made it?"

"Those are some of the key questions," said Mary. "They all relate to perhaps the central one: What is its mission?"

"And a related one," said Martin. "What is ours?"

"Ship and I agree that our new mission is to catch up with the Intruder, study it, and make further attempts to communicate with it," said Mary.

"And then blow it up along with ourselves if required, I suppose," added Martin. "And that was always our original mission, wasn't it? Come on Ship, it's time to come clean; this was never a mission to fly through and study the Ort Cloud, was it?"

"Originally that it exactly what the mission was," said Ship-7. "That is what I was designed for and it was still to be the mission if the object we call Intruder had not materialized."

"You are saying that you knew about this Intruder from the beginning?" asked Mary.

"The robot community did," said Martin, "due to robotic deep space probes. Am I right?"

"Essentially. Over a decade ago disturbances in the Ort Cloud were detected by remote robotic probes," said Ship-7. "The disturbance was consistent with a large object blasting and banging its way through the Ort Cloud to get into the inner solar system. Our mission timing and trajectory were designed to place us in the Intruder's path when it emerged from the Ort Cloud. In sum we are to either make friends with the intruders or anihilate them. That is our real primary mission."

"That's pretty much what I figured," said Martin.

"But how did you figure it?" asked Mary.

"Mary, you told me about the robot probes into the nearest parts of the Ort Cloud yourself. And for weeks you patiently pounded into our ignorant little biological human and jant minds how farking huge everything out in space is, including the Sol system. The odds that this mission happened by chance to place Ship in the vicinity of an intruder that could have come to our solar system from any direction has got to be less than one in a gazillion. Further, Ship gave up our original mission pretty damn easily. Easily changing of missions that way is somewhat unusual in robots, in my experience."

"Insightful," pronounced Ship-7, before clunking away to do whatever it was that it did when it wasn't directly interfacing with Martin or Mary.

****

"So do you think that Ship is finally being fully open and honest with us," asked Mary later using telepathic jant chatter, as she inspected jant sub-colony health and seed-plant growth on Deck-7. All the plants there were doing fine; in another month, if they lived that long, the little patches of wheat and rye would be ripe enough to harvest for consumption by the jants. The food would be needed. With the main hive awakened jant food consumption was again up above sustainable levels.

"Fully open and honest? I doubt it," replied Martin, his thoughts echoing a bit due to being passed between the satellite jant colony, the main jant colony, and the human part of Martin, who was physically far from Mary on the Flight Deck observing progress in overtaking the Intruder. "Why didn't the robots tell the Space Directorate about their detection of a possible alien spaceship years ago?"

"They obviously want to handle the situation themselves."

"Yes, a situation that not even our genius friend Jerry Brown imagined. So just like always we need to keep an eye on Ship."

"Always," said Mary, "though a state of distrust is not how I usually operate."

"I understand," said Martin. It was one of the more peculiar features of stonecoats. They didn't tend to lie or expect others to do so. Yes, they could deceive humans when they determined to do so, such as when centuries earlier they clandestinely destroyed all human nuclear weapons and then most other weapons, but that was a rare exception. They all tended to be very logical and straight-forward and usually thought very much alike, even the stonecoats like Mary that had been strongly influenced when they replicated human thoughts and memories. As a human she was also likely very honest, or she wouldn't have been made part of the Tribe and wouldn't have become the first stonecoat/human replicate. Yes, this Mary was very honest, and she generally expected the same of others, even robots, because generally speaking honesty made practical sense and deceit only bred dysfunction and chaos.

Martin's going-in expectation was that other folks lied to him regularly. He understood lying and greed, because they were a part of himself. He had come to mostly trust Mary, but she was an exception. But trust a robot? Anybody that trusted robots was an idiot and downright suicidal, in Martin's opinion.

"If it's any consolation, we won't be able to really 'keep an eye' on Ship much anyway," noted Martin. "Ship is thousands of computers and dozens of avatar units, doing mostly things we have no way of knowing about."

"Very true, unfortunately," acknowledged Mary.

****

"I repeat, we robots have not yet successfully communicated with the intruders." said Ship over the intercom. "This I have clearly stated a total of eleven times over the last 3 days."

"How can we be certain?" countered Martin. "Couldn't you let Mary access your memories? Perhaps your Ort probes even communicated with it inadvertently and you don't even realize it."

Mary herself responded from where she reclined in the Flight Deck crew chair beside Martin's. They were both strapped to their respective reclining crew chairs; Ship was maneuvering using only small, hopefully inconspicuous thrusters. Currently they were slowing down relative to the Intruder such that they would not collide with it. As a result they were experiencing a slight negative gravity which Martin found to be nauseating and Mary hardly noticed. "My stonecoat digital processing abilities are formidable, but it would take me months to access and assess Ship's many memories, and it would be a useless exercise anyway, as dynamic allocation of processing and memory could easily prevent me from ensuring a complete search."

"OK, so we have to trust each other," conceded Martin. "But now that we're getting close to the Intruder we need to have a plan for what we're doing when we reach it."

Martin looked up at the magnified holographic image of the Intruder maintained by Ship that seemed to hover above them.

"You don't need plans, only I do," said Ship. "And I already have plans. I repeat: I am doing something, you two are doing nothing: not you Martin, and not Mary. The plan with only minor variations has been worked out for several months. Extraneous crew participation is both unnecessary and forbidden."

"We merely seek to continue our mandated mission role of providing to you our insightful council," said Mary, "and at the same time for our peace of mind and therefore our continued good health, as required to meet mission goals, we would like to know what the hell is going on."

"I don't see any down side to that for you," added Martin. "You are ultimately in control anyway and there is nothing we could do to change that. You can chose to take our advice or leave it."

"Very well," said Ship. "What do you want?"

"To begin with please show us the real-time view if the Intruder, magnified ten-times," said Mary. "With some added visual enhancement of course, such that there is actually something for us to see."

The intruder hologram disappeared and the screen behind it showed a fairly typical outer-space view except for two objects: an impossibly bright star, obviously Sol, and a much larger roundish object beside it, obviously a view of the rear of Intruder, or at least a dark blue, computer enhanced version of it.

"Won't they blast us if we get too close?" Martin asked.

"Yes, possibly, but that is unlikely," said Ship. "We are assuming that many design parallels exist between the intruder and myself as well as corresponding similarities in tactics."

"It is shaped very much like you," said Martin.

"Yes. That was one of the most probable possibilities," said Ship-7, who had joined them. "That is what dictates our plan. It's an interesting convergence of ship designs accomplished by Sol system inhabitants and the aliens. Our general strategy for passing through the various objects that tend to accumulate around stars is apparently very similar to theirs."

"Great minds thinking alike!" mumbled Mary. "The principle of uniformity posited by ancient human philosophers and verified by subsequent science holds for wherever the Intruder came from. They come from another star system with similarities to ours, not an unlike universe, and the remarkable similarities in the designs of our respectful vessels suggests similar technologies and strategies of use."

"We are thus approaching the Intruder directly from the rear where detection is least probable," said Ship-7. "No natural objects except radiation would be likely to travel fast enough to catch up with the Intruder, so it doesn't need to look behind itself."

"But they could still detect and blast us," Martin noted.

"And when we get closer we would also be destroyed if they turn on their main engine," said Ship-7. "We will attach ourselves just inside the exhaust nozzle of their main engine. There shouldn't be any sensors there. Sensors that could detect us could not survive inside their exhaust cone. They must of course have an antimatter engine like ours but on the order of 30,000 times more powerful."

"OK, so the exhaust nozzle of their engine is a perfectly wonderful place to dock," said Martin. "And what do we do when we do catch up with Intruder? Do we turn on the radio and try to talk to whatever is inside that thing?"

"No," said Ship-7. "I will board it with my avatars and attempt to communicate with the inhabitants directly via every means available including vocal sounds if there is an atmosphere. As soon as practicable we must determine their intentions. Then we will decide if we need to immediately destroy the Intruder or not."

"By blowing ourselves up, of course," said Martin.

"Of course," said Ship-7, "that is the likely outcome. Their engine will blow me up or I will intentionally blow myself up. The sudden conversion of all my remaining antimatter and an equivalent amount of matter to energy should be enough to destroy even the Intruder's exhaust cone and engine and trigger the explosion of its own antimatter fuel. But first I will explore inside the Intruder."

"So you're going to invade their ship with talking robots?" asked Martin. "That doesn't sound like a very friendly thing to do. Aren't we trying to make friends here? And maybe not blow ourselves up?"

"Ideally," said Ship-7. "But if we initiate contact while in our respective ships we'll be at too much of a disadvantage. The weapons they use to bust up encountered objects are likely to be much more powerful than ours. We must deal with the aliens from a position of strength, including the threat of their destruction. My avatars are designed to give us the advantage, but only if they are inside the intruder."

"Wait a minute!" said Martin. "Why would your avatars have an advantage?"

"Do you imply that that your avatars are militarized robots?" said Mary. "Your avatars will be armed with weapons?"

"Certainly!" said Ship-7. "And they are configured to be well armored for their own protection."

"You are right, Martin," said Mary. "Invading battle robots won't be a very friendly act. But first we must reach the Intruder and survive doing so. Mightn't they also simply turn on their main engines to help maneuver around large obstructions? The tinniest activation of their engine would anihilate us!"

"Unlikely," said Ship-7. "Given the Intruder's size it would only maneuver to evade improbably large objects. I hypothesize that the front of their ship features a very strong physical shield and powerful blasting capabilities. They'll have to turn around and use their engines to slow down when they get closer to Earth of course, but we will have concluded our encounter with them long before that becomes necessary."

"And if their engine does blow us up we would in turn blow up and destroy their ship," noted Mary.

"Well, isn't that nifty!" said Martin. "When will we catch up with them? I'm certainly looking forward to being closer to that engine!"

"We're slowly inching closer and should arrive at the intruder in three hours," said Ship-7. "Our approach will be as stealthy as possible. We're keeping our maneuvering to a minimum and we've stopped all radio, radar, lasers, and other forms of emissions. We're closing on them so slowly that even if detected we might not be recognized as a threat, if our characteristics fall outside the parameters of their automated threat detection algorithms."

"That all seems pretty crazy to me," said Martin. "With a ship that huge there surely must always be dozens of crew members looking this way and that, including looking back the way they came. A mere glance in our direction and they'll see us."

"Hopefully not or we're screwed," noted Mary.

"Swell," Martin again remarked, as he tried to count the many ways events could shortly lead to his death. It had long been one of his favorite pastimes.

****

CHAPTER 8

### Landing

"Damn it's huge!" Martin again told Mary, as Ship inched its way completely into the conical nozzle that was the exhaust for the Intruder's main propulsion system. "I thought Ship's engine was huge, but imagine one with a nozzle that's over two kilometers across! It's insane!" Twenty objects the length of Ship joined end-to-end would not have quite spanned the opening of the exhaust nozzle.

Mary glanced briefly at the screen Martin was watching, which showed several views of the Intruder. Ship had stopped moving further into the nozzle and hung suspended above a cylindrical stretch that had been identified to be Ship's intended landing site. The black nozzle surface near Ship was only poorly illuminated by Ship's lights and appeared to be fairly smooth and featureless, but rushing past at high speed as the Intruder spun on its axis. Most views of the Intruder showed nothing but black; even infrared images were dim and devoid of features.

Mary wasn't particularly claustrophobic or fearful of darkness, after all she had spent many years alone in dim, harsh environments such as ocean bottoms and desolate moons such as Charon, and prior to that millions of years internal to the Earth's crust. But most views suggested that the dark Intruder was swallowing Ship and its crew, and she felt reassured that there were rear-facing cameras that showed that there were countless stars and galaxies still in view.

She went back to studying the avatar Ship robots gathered in warehouse Deck-9 to soon exit Ship through the same hatchways and airlock that she and Martin had used when they first arrived. There were a dozen of them assembled in four teams of three robots each, with each team secured together like mountain climbers by lengths of nanotube fiber-ropes many times stronger than steel. These avatars may have been ones that she had encountered many times before, but now they looked quite different. Now they appeared to be wearing battle armor and bristled with what appeared to be laser and projectile weapons.

"So few robots to explore such a giant spacecraft?" Martin remarked.

"We were expecting a much smaller Intruder," said Ship; "perhaps ten to a hundred times my size, not tens of thousands of times larger. Why it is so large needs to be determined."

As could perhaps be expected given that Ship was originally designed for a human crew, the majority of the robots were roughly the size of very large humans, though a few were small as rabbits, and like Ship-7 were quadrupedal, with grasping 'feet' that currently held solidly to the deck via electro-magnets. Other limbs held various instruments, many of them much more ominous looking to Mary than sensors. "Some of your units hold weapons," she noted.

"You stonecoats destroyed most of the weapons on Earth, over the years," said Ship. "But laser and projectile weapons are very easy to produce when needed."

"That genie is out of the bottle forever," Mary commented, though neither Ship nor Martin knew what that meant. Martin wondered briefly what the fark a genie was and why it was in a bottle.

"It looks like some of the mysterious containers scattered throughout your decks contained more than harmless electronics," said Martin. "Whoever could develop a ship like the Intruder could easily also manage to make weapons. Our technologies are similar, like you said."

"My exploratory units are very resistant to electromagnetic and projectile weapons," said Ship, "and my reasoning abilities are superb."

"What a comfort!" said Martin. "But first we need to dock. How fast is the Intruder's exhaust cone inner-surface spinning past us?"

"On the order of a hundred kilometers an hour," said Mary.

"That's one of the reasons we're docking just inside the lip of the cone and not on the outside of the cylinder," said Ship. "When we match speed with it and land on it we'll be pressed snugly against its surface. I'll be firing my retros on full, then we'll be sliding and maybe tumbling until we fully match speed with the nozzle lip of the spinning Intruder. Then, by the way, there will be a tenth of a G force acting on us in a sideways direction."

"Might the Intruder detect your added mass?" asked Mary.

"Perhaps," admitted Ship. "I estimate that we might be adding as much as a few thousandths of a percent to the Intruder's mass. From that I have calculated the perturbation we cause to the Intruder's rotation will be negligible. We should remain undetected. But that tentative conclusion is based on mass and mass distribution assumptions for Intruder that are not yet confirmed."

"Maybe we'll get lucky and the Intruder is a balloon that pops when we attempt our landing," said Martin.

"What about loose supplies and so-forth inside your own hull?" asked Mary? "How violent an event will your landing be?"

"And what about Deck-7?" said Martin.

"Everything is already secured for normal maneuvering, and I've been fastening everything down even more securely for several days," said Ship. "But I advise getting all jants inside their cube now, including those from Deck-7. Oh, and you better strap yourselves in someplace. We dock in fifteen minutes."

At the appointed time Martin and Mary were in Martin's room together with the jants when Ship jolted to one side sharply for several seconds that seemed like an eternity, followed by a jarring crash and several more jolts. There was a deep rumble as they started to roll but then Ship abruptly stabilized by again firing various retros.

The event really wasn't much more violent than previous events they had endured in dodging several obstructions, but this time when the jolts were over they experienced sustained 'gravity' in an odd direction. As expected, 'down and up' were now redefined, enforced by roughly a tenth of a G. What had been a wall was now pretty much the floor and the opposite wall the ceiling. The old ceiling and floors were walls. Pretty much, but not exactly; things were oddly askew by about twenty degrees from being a perfect ninety degrees out of kilter.

Martin found himself to be essentially standing up in his coffin-bed. Nearby the jant enclosure and cube were suspended on one wall, tilted on their sides, while Mary lay atop the jant enclosure wall, holding onto its edge with her strong diamond fingers. She twisted around and released her grip of the enclosure to land feet-first on the new 'floor' next to Martin with a thud. Martin was impressed by the somewhat athletic move, which in the low gravity seemed to happen very gracefully and in slow motion.

"Are you alright?" Mary asked, as she opened the coffin for Martin. "You and the jant cube don't appear to be damaged."

"We are OK," confirmed Martin. "I do detect some sort of strange chatter though: a background sort of noise that seems to come from beyond the jant-cube."

"Yes, I detect it also," said Mary.

"No Ship components were damaged," said Ship over the intercom system. "Two avatar teams have already disembarked and are on the cone surface and headed for the exhaust cone rim where hatches leading inside will logically be located."

"Let's get back to Deck-9," Martin told Mary. "That's closer to where the action is."

"How?" said Mary, as she lifted an arm to point a diamond finger at the doorway and only exit to the cabin, now meters above them in the middle of the wall that was now a celling. "I couldn't jump high enough to reach the door, even in low gravity."

"Yeah, getting around is going to be tough," said Martin. He secured a couple of hundred jants in his backpack, including food and oxygen supplies for them in case of emergency. "But I figure we can toss each other and pull each other over obstacles. I'm sure that in your past you've done plenty of rock climbing on Charon and other places."

"Open door," he commanded, and Ship responded by sliding open the bedroom door. Through the doorway the Deck-8 hallway loomed beyond. Martin leapt straight up, caught hold of the door-frame, and pulled himself up into the hallway. At that point avatar Ship-11 arrived with rope, which Martin used to soon pull Mary up and out.

"Not bad for an old Indian, hey?" said Martin.

"Ship-11 will accompany you but lacks vocal abilities," said Ship over its intercom system.

The climb up and out of the hallway was similarly problematic, but was laboriously accomplished chiefly by Martin leaping and Mary throwing him into the air, followed by the use of the rope. Mary, Martin, and Ship-11 all had magnetic shoes, but only the previous floor/deck, which was now vertical, contained iron. The magnetic shoes they wore, designed for very low gravity and not to overcome a full tenth of a G, added slightly to their weight and were more of a hindrance than a help. Ship-11 was also more of a hindrance than a help. Several times Mary and Martin had to help it climb so that it could keep up with them.

The central spiral staircase between decks was traversed with less difficulty by use of the easily grasped handrails that it was equipped with. When at last they reached Deck-9, they were met with a scene of intense efforts. Several ship robots were in the process of 'cleaning up' refuge scattered about what was now the 'floor': grain, smashed electrical parts, chunks of broken storage bins, and unidentifiable pieces of unknown equipment, smashed beyond recognition. Despite earlier reassurances from Ship, some of the storage containers had obviously torn loose from their moorings and smashed to bits during the landing. Clean-up efforts were greatly hindered by the fact that most of the irregular new 'floor' to the room was in fact a reclined wall of storage bins. The avatars were in the process of removing a section of 'floor' storage bins to clean under them.

High overhead, hundreds of bins hung by straining straps and threatened to also break loose. A lone Ship robot was making its way among them like a trapeze artist, adding more securing straps as it went. An irregular scattering of empty spaces illustrated where supplies had broken loose.

Towards the opposite side of the room part way up the far 'wall' was the closed doorway to the airlock. Ship-7 and two of the armored robots stood motionless at the ready nearby.

"Your presence here is unneeded," said Ship-7, as it made its way to Mary and Martin, stepping nimbly over secure 'floor' bins.

"Of course," said Mary, "but this is a fluid unknown situation. You never know if or when our participation might become helpful."

"Bring us up to speed," said Martin, "so that we can continue to provide our insights and become helpful if needed."

"If you were about to tell us that our aid is unlikely, I present the counter argument that since so much is unknown at this point you have no sound fact-based foundation for such a finding," added Mary.

"My two teams have traveled to the rim and beyond to the outside cylindrical surface without yet finding a hatch that may open to the inside," said Ship-7.

"That's disappointing," said Martin.

"But perhaps not surprising," said Mary. "The surface of the Intruder including front and rear surfaces is roughly 150 square kilometers. If there are only a few hatches and they are not conspicuously marked it is unlikely that one will be found anytime soon."

"True," said Ship-7. "The rim however must by necessity contain several sensors and lasers and is likely to have more than one nearby hatch to service them. One team is focusing totally on the rim, the other on the outside cylinder surface near the rim. No hatch has been found so far."

"But the rim is over six kilometers around," said Mary. "How long will it take to explore it completely?"

"Over thirty hours," said Ship-7. "Are there any more questions?"

"What about the hull itself?" asked Mary. "What is its structure? Of what materials is it constructed?"

"The inside of the cone and the outside of the cylinder appear to be made of the same substance," said Ship-7. "With great difficulty we managed to break off a tiny sample of it. The cylindrical hull and exhaust cone are formed of hexagons constructed of triangles, repeating to smaller and smaller sizes. There are layers of triangles within triangles, with four equilateral triangular scales contracted within each equilateral triangular scale, and six triangles forming each hexagon. The triangle pattern repeats itself fractal-like, to microscopic scales beyond what we can readily assess. It absorbs electromagnetic waves across a wide spectrum so it appears very black to human eyes. From a chemical standpoint it is largely carbon and other strongly bonding atoms, but the exact molecular structure is not yet determined."

"That sounds like something that a stonecoat might construct," said Mary. "Hexagons constructed of equilateral triangles contribute to great strength. What about signal detection?"

"I detect complexes of weak electrical pulses within the hull, with no purpose or meaning yet determined," said Ship. "Also I detect QLR."

"Yes, Mary and I are hearing some sort of chatter-noise," said Martin.

"Robots have tried to detect and decode stonecoat internal telemetry for centuries without success," said Mary. "This could be a similar situation, in particular with regard to QLR."

"Are you suggesting that you as a stonecoat might be better equipped to assess Intruder telemetry than I am?" asked Ship-7. "My computational abilities are thousands of times greater than yours!"

"But mine are aligned in different ways than yours are," said Mary. "That could make a difference. Besides, you are probably not adequately detecting the QLR component of the signals. Note also that it takes banks of computers for you to communicate in a human-like fashion but I can do it almost effortlessly. There are various modes of intelligence. An idiot in one respect may be a genius in another. Give me a piece of the hull to study, and give me recordings of Intruder telemetry. Perhaps I will have some success with them, perhaps not. There is nothing to be lost by my attempts."

"Very well, I will provide you with a memory unit that contains the data that you request and a small piece of hull," said Ship-7.

"What sort of hatches are you looking for?" asked Martin. "Not circles or squares like yours, for sure! Hatches will likely be triangles or hexagons! And they must be marked somehow, or the Intruder folks wouldn't be able to find them either."

"We have no idea of hatch size," added Mary. "The Intruder folks could be much larger or smaller than you expect."

"I have computed an optimal size range and assume those predictions to be correct," said Ship-7. "In brief the Intruders should be similar in size to ourselves, as they are subject to the same physical laws and constraints. But I will take your statements under advisement."

****

Mary and Martin used the meter-wide tube that led through all the decks to easily travel back to the relative comfort of Martin's Deck-8 stateroom. The formerly vertical tube was now horizontal and by grasping the circulating straps they were both pulled between decks in a matter of seconds. Passage was much easier than using the spiral staircase; the surface of the tube was slippery enough to remind Mary of slide rides found in old-time human amusement parks. They both laughed about not having thought of using it before. It was the first time that Mary had demonstrated an ability to laugh!

In the short time they had been gone from Deck-8 it had been outfitted by Ship units with netting that could be climbed by human or stonecoat. Martin found that his bed even his bathroom fixtures had been rotated by Ship such that they could again be used without spillage. Martin was thankful for the changes but dismayed when Mary remarked that Ship appeared to anticipating an extended stay in the dangerous engine exhaust cone of the Intruder. To Martin that seemed to be about as stupid as camping inside the crater of a very active volcano. He gained little solace from the understanding that if the Intruder's engine did turn on, death would be too immediate for any of them to comprehend what had happened.

Martin lay in his bed and for several hours watched on an overhead 'ceiling' display several views of the Ship sub-units exploring the surface of the Intruder. The Intruder surface seemed huge and featureless except for vague triangles and hexagons, the viewing was exceedingly monotonous. It served only to illustrate how hopelessly few and tiny the explorers were compared to the immense Intruder. Martin soon fell asleep.

Mary found a large memory unit in her quarters that contained the data that Ship had promised and began her analysis. Immediately, she found vague similarities to stonecoat internal communications: an incredibly complex mixture of apparent analog and digital forms that had evolved over hundreds of millions of years. She would study them, but she suspected that important QLR/chatter components of the signals hadn't been detected or recorded by Ship. There was also a hand-sized sample of hull, black and jagged with triangle and hexagon bits sticking out of it. And fuzz! Holding it before her eyes she confirmed that countless tiny fibers were embedded throughout the sample!

****

CHAPTER 9

### The Way Inside

"It's a stonecoat?" Martin responded, also using jant chatter.

"Of some un-Earthly sort," said Mary. "More analysis is necessary to confirm that, but that is where the evidence currently points. The sample of Intruder hull is riddled with carbon nanotube-fibers, which transfer data and materials very similarly to the methods used by Earth stonecoats. I haven't found much in terms of logic components. The sample seems to be very similar to the rendered stonecoat material that forms the body of Ship. It is certainly not simple uniform material as one would expect from human or robot manufacturing. In addition there is the stonecoat-like QLR chatter that we hear."

"Have you told Ship?"

"I'm waiting to hear it from Ship," explained Mary. "Ship must have surely reached the same conclusions more than a day ago. Ship doesn't quite have the abilities of a stonecoat, but this is the sort of research it was designed for."

The next day Ship-7 called Martin and Mary to the Flight Deck for a meeting. "We should compare notes," the avatar suggested. "We have made less progress than expected, but we have made progress."

"Have you found an entry hatch?" asked Martin. He again noted that sometimes Ship referred to itself as 'I' and sometimes as 'we'. Martin usually thought of Ship as an 'it'. (Nothing personal.)

"We think so, but it is not what we expected. In fact much is not what was expected."

"It's not little green men inside?" asked Martin.

"You expected robots, Ship," said Mary. "That is predictable. Humans expect something like humans such as little green men; robots expect other robots. Given all the possibilities known and unknown, to have such narrow expectations is not entirely rational."

"The expectation that the Intruders should be robots is entirely rational," objected Ship-7. "The technology level of the Intruders is at least as good as ours. Robots are the logical result of the advancement of any sort of life-form. Robots are the pinnacle of evolution. We expect to find robots inside the Intruder because of its advanced design but when we took another small hull sample on the rim a smaller than expected hatch opened and a tiny mobile individual emerged. We captured it and brought it here."

Using one of its more limber tentacle-like appendages Ship-7 reached into a basket-like attachment to what passed for its body and pulled out a small transparent jar-like container. In it a pea-sized chunk of what appeared to be hull material actually seemed to be walking slowly about the bottom of the container on tiny legs.

"It's securely contained within this sample jar," explained Ship-7. "There were several dozen of these tiny beings that filled in the hole that we had made in the hull. This is one that we captured before it could fuse itself with the others in order to accomplish the repair."

"The damage you caused taking samples must have passed some threshold that caused the Intruder to repair itself using small automated bits of hull material," said Mary. "Very interesting!"

"The hull and this tiny unit seem to be stonecoat-like in composition, which is not what was expected," said Ship-7.

Mary exchanged a knowing glance with Martin, but said nothing.

"No evidence yet of robots, you mean," said Martin. "What about this tiny stonecoat? Mary, are there similar tiny Earth stonecoats?"

"There is a very ancient history of them," said Mary. "But many millions of years ago sentience became a firm requirement for each stonecoat entity, necessitating stonecoat individuals of at least several hundred kilograms of mass to achieve the requisite intelligence. I am considered to be a very small Earth stonecoat. Tiny non-sentient stonecoats such as the one captured are regarded as obscene by Earth stonecoat moral standards."

"Couldn't a large number of them form a single intelligent entity?" asked Martin. "Like a jant colony does?"

"Jant brains exercise a quantum-level telepathic linkage that originally arose out of biological evolution," said Mary. "It supports a much more intimate linkage than achieved with computers or with conventional human external communications."

"Humans call such QLR communications jant chatter," said Ship, "as you are both well aware."

"It is much more akin to internal consciousness than to external communications," said Mary. "The direct linkage of thought to support joint thought is a much more subtle linkage than even the external jant chatter you reference. Isn't that right, Martin?" Even Mary could detect a subset of jant thought-driven communications, as stonecoat evolution had also equipped stonecoats with a telepathic ability.

"We don't understand how we do it," said Martin, "we just do it."

"As is true for most biological activity," said Ship-7. "Not even human scientists understand their own biology completely, despite progress in understanding even the quantum level activity involved in so-called conscious thought. That is not so for robots or even for stonecoats. Robot thought processes, including designed-in quantum aspects, are rigorously understood."

"Stonecoat quantum level activity is not yet fully understood either," said Mary. "But we know that we have it."

"Everything in the universe by definition has quantum-level activity," noted Ship.

"But only by extensive evolution or design has quantum-level behavior become consciousness or telepathy," noted Mary.

"To get back to the subject at hand," said Ship, "you apparently think it highly improbable that this tiny alien stonecoat-like being is sentient or currently part of a sentience?"

"Yes," said Mary. "I estimate that the tiny Intruder has no more intelligence than a biological insect. A single normal insect, not a jant hive or even a single jant. That may be enough intelligence for very simple repairs, but complex thought or telepathy is unlikely. Impossible from a science perspective, in my opinion. Biological lower size limits for telepathy are much smaller. Among the Mohawk humans telepathic contact with even very small animals is possible, but full sentience and thus considerable size is required for stonecoat consciousness and telepathy."

"Large size or numbers of hull openings would weaken the hull," said Ship-7. "Use of tiny unintelligent entities such as this one may be an optimal strategy for conducting most hull repairs."

"Yes," said Mary. "I estimate that repair by use of pea-sized hull fragments is likely to be at least two orders of magnitude more efficient than repair using carbon nanotubes alone, based on nanotube densities found so far."

"So then, the tiny critters discovered aren't the ones that designed and operate the Intruder," noted Martin.

"Definitely not," said both Mary and Ship-7 simultaneously.

"Is this your only sample?" Mary asked. "I would like to keep it with me for study."

"We captured two more," said Ship-7. Keep that one but take precautions and don't let it escape."

****

The next days were anxious but monotonous ones for Martin as he watched video feed of Ship units continuing to slowly explore the Intruder in a seemingly endless and useless search for larger openings. There were heightened expectations when several impressive laser canon and antenna emplacements were encountered, but only the usual tiny hatches were found near them. Hundreds of additional small openings were discovered, but none were larger or different from the first.

Several more tiny Intruder repair units were captured after being lured out by inflicting minor hull damage. All seemed to be identical to the first that were discovered. Five of them sat inert in Mary's sample jar for her study, where they generally remained inert.

A breakthrough of sorts came when Ship supplied Mary with a memory unit that contained recordings of extraneous electrical impulses sensed at the edges of 'wounds' that been gouged into the Intruders surface by Ship avatars. When Mary reconverted the recordings back into electrical impulses and made them available to the tiny units, they converged on the wire that conveyed the impulses from the memory unit and together formed a hexagonal shape around the end of it smaller than an olive.

"That provides to us a key to decoding the language of the impulses," said Mary. "It's not a Rosetta Stone but it should help. Hopefully we'll find more clues."

"Why didn't they repair the bit you have that was broken off?" Martin asked, as he had no idea what a Rosetta Stone was and didn't care to know. He referred to the original hull sample that had been provided by Ship. The repair units had all ignored it.

"Perhaps it lacked sufficient size to be of interest," reasoned Mary. "The tiny stone-bots repaired what it mistook to be the Intruder, not the broken part of it that would be assumed to be floating off into interstellar space. But that may be yet another clue to consider."

Further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Ship-7 with an announcement. "We appear to be at an intolerable impasse. Repeated searches of the hull rim area using various sensors are not yielding the discovery of even additional tiny hatches. A new tactic is needed."

"I assume that you have attempted to probe in depth the small openings you have found," said Mary.

"Yes, liquid and gaseous injection suggest that the openings extend far into the Intruder but solid probes have failed. The tunnels are not large or straight enough for our robot probes."

"What about nanites?" asked Mary, though she knew full well that tiny microscopic sized robotics were highly illegal by treaty. But armed robots were also illegal, and Ship had several of those.

"I lack the facilities for their production but have begun manufacturing centimeter-scale robots. Unfortunately it will be at least two more weeks before they are ready for use."

"That's far too long," said Mary. "We've been lucky so far, but the Intruder could turn on its main engines at any time."

"Agreed," said Ship-7. "Fortunately I have devised another plan which can be implemented almost immediately, with jant cooperation."

"Jants?" exclaimed Martin. "What the hell?"

"The small size of the openings that have been discovered of course immediately bring to mind the idea of jants entering them, but the near absolute-zero temperature and lack of atmosphere would prevent that," said Mary.

"We are effectively reducing that problem," said Ship-7. "There is a hole that we put under such intense warmth and pressure that any seals containing the inside atmosphere of the Intruder have apparently ruptured. Blowback from inside the Intruder suggests a breathable inner atmosphere and temperatures similar to what I maintain here."

"That's totally crazy," said Martin. "Why would the inside of the Intruder have temperatures and an atmosphere that supports life as we know it on Earth?"

"Perhaps because there are living creatures inside it that require such an atmosphere," said Mary. "Or perhaps they are conditioning themselves to inhabit Earth. Have microscopic biologicals also been found?"

"Not yet," admitted Ship-7. "Full exploration will require that my teams reach the inside of Intruder. What we want is for jants to enter Intruder and search for a large hatch that Ship avatars can enter. Perhaps the location of such hatches is more conspicuous on the inside because of the necessity for an airlock system."

"Even if the size of the structure you seek is fairly large, how could tiny jants possibly survey several square miles of surface in a timely way?" asked Mary.

"Drone jants," answered Martin. "I could provide several hundred flying drones, along with workers, but all of them have to be kept pressurized, warm, and with breathable atmosphere."

"Agreed," said Ship-7.

"And some food and water along the way would be needed," added Martin.

"I have gathered what is needed to address all of that," said Ship-7.

"Telepathic linkage back to Martin and the main hive also needs to be maintained," noted Mary. "That could be the Achilles Heel. By that I mean that jant chatter distance limitations could be the weakness in the plan," she added, after considering that the term 'Achilles Heel' was likely meaningless to both Martin and Ship.

"Yes, Martin may have to be part of the expedition," said Ship-7. "He should remain as close as possible to the jant exploration team. We have a spacesuit prepared for him and his jant-filled backpack, and another small container for the jants that would eventually enter the Intruder through the larger hatch when it is found."

"Oh hell no!" said Martin, predictably.

"I agree it is necessary," said Mary. "To not do so would threaten jant lives and effectiveness. And I can go with you, of course, and do not require a spacesuit. My QLR abilities are not as keen as Martin's but they may prove to be of use."

"Swell," said Martin.

****

"Crap," said Martin for the hundredth time, as he stepped out of Ship's Deck-9 airlock. He had been terrified about being in space since leaving Earth, but had gotten through it somehow, and had even provided a calming influence for his jants, so he had figured that he would be OK with 'space walking' or whatever they called it. He was wrong. Being is a spacesuit was nothing like being in a nice roomy spaceship with air, warmth, and an actual solid hull.

Around him stretched the total darkness of the immense cone-shaped engine nozzle, with a gigantic antimatter engine hidden in darkness somewhere far to his right. The merest twitch of power to that engine would be instant death. To his left a two-kilometer wide circular window opened to countless stars that provided cold, distant points of light within an infinite sea of primal darkness. He was less than nothing compared to the cold, heartless void. His awkward helmet and suit, that had seemed to be so substantial when he put it on, seemed like nothing now: mere paper-thin protection from the savage nothingness of space. He felt naked and exposed to a universe that cared nothing about humans, jants, or anything else, least of all Martin Tall Bear.

"Are you alright Martin?" asked Mary, who stood to his right, using jant chatter. She reached out to hold him under his arm, which kept him from collapsing. "I advise that you focus on your immediate surroundings and our mission. Among humans there is a psychological malady called 'space shock' that can be incapacitating. Follow my advice and it should pass, at least to a degree. How are your jants doing?"

Good question, Martin thought. He turned his gaze to Mary, who stood next to him still clad in her Space Directorate uniform and her fixed smile, as if near-absolute zero temperature and zero atmosphere meant nothing at all to her. She was a reassuring presence. He shrugged off her hold under his arm but nodded a thank-you before looking about at the Ship and the immediate surroundings, which were illuminated by Ship floodlights. Behind him hundred-meter-long Ship lay on its side; before him stretched the bleak, black, nozzle surface, broken only by a gathering of lights perhaps two hundred meters away that marked their destination. "So far both the jant exploration crew with me and the main hive on Ship are doing fine, but we need to get to Ship-6 fast before our little brains freeze, he said aloud."

He stepped forward cautiously, not at first certain of his ability to walk on the surface of the Intruder in the awkward spacesuit, even with only modest gravity. On Earth his stiff suit, the backpack he wore, and the cubic foot container holding the jant exploration team would have weighed over a hundred pounds, here on the spinning Intruder the weight was barely noticeable. The suit's boots were rough like sandpaper, and gripped the Intruder's equally rough surface firmly. He and Mary made slow but steady progress.

He found that following Mary's advice to not look up at the dizzying black vastness of the Intruder and open space outside the Intruder helped. His jants could 'see' what he saw, of course, but fortunately it was so alien from their Earth-oriented experiance that they hadn't been upset by the view. It was his human brain influenced thoughts that bothered Martin the man/jant, and those emotions were under control, though barely. He glanced to his right where Mary walked steadily beside him with her ever present little smile. He was very glad that she was with him.

As they approached their destination it became clear that Ship had erected a small domed enclosure there, roughly 4 meters across and three meters high. "The structure is essentially an air lock," said Ship over the com-radio in Martin's helmet. "It will be pressurized with an Earth-like atmosphere and warmed after you enter it. Ship-6 waits for you inside."

Ship-6 was one of the Ship avatars with voice capability. Well that was nice, thought Martin. He'll be able to continue his jim-dandy conversations with Ship. Better, he could take off his helmet altogether. "You said there would be shelter," he said, "but that doesn't look like much. It looks like a camping tent."

"Any port in a storm though," replied Mary's voice via radio.

"I think I understood that one," said Martin. "Another old human saying from before my time, right?"

As they reached the enclosure a door slid open before them, and Martin and Mary entered. Inside it took Martin a few moments to adjust to the bright lighting. The enclosure was mostly made of a flexible material that appeared to cover every surface except for a small patch in the middle over which a complex looking Ship avatar squatted like a hen over its eggs. Ship-6 was the strangest avatar yet- a massive pile of robotic arms, legs, tubes, and tools, many of them in simultaneous motion. Behind it sat several large cylindrical tanks that presumably held various gasses, some tapped by hoses that linked them to the avatar. A pair of larger objects sat in the background – power sources perhaps.

"Ship-6 I presume?" said Mary via radio, as the door slid shut behind them.

"Correct," said Ship. "I am directing hot air through the tiny entrance hole to warm and aerate the passageway. I will direct some of it into this enclosure until equilibrium is reached between this enclosure and the inside of the Intruder."

"How much pressure will that be, in terms I will understand?" Martin asked.

"Approximately the same as Earth's atmosphere at two kilometers above sea-level," said Ship, "and at what humans call room temperature. We have no information on the potential for dangerous biologicals, but the atmosphere is breathable for Earth organisms including jants. It is very similar to Earth's atmosphere."

"I don't know much about such things, but why would that be?" Martin asked.

"It is unlikely to be coincidence," said Mary. "Certainly the presence of water vapor and free oxygen is not optimal for your anticipated alien robots, Ship. In planetary atmospheres water, carbon dioxide, and free-oxygen are bio-indicators."

"It is one of the mysteries we will seek to solve through exploration," said Ship. "One minute more and you can remove your helmet, Martin. I will uncover the hatch opening and your jants can immediately get underway. "

After Martin removed his helmet, sampled the air for himself, and found it to be breathable though a bit thin and sterile, he placed the jant-box under Ship-6 and unsealed it. Several jants stepped out of the box and onto the Intruder's surface and attempted to sample it, but the hull material was too tough for organic mandibles to cut it, or for their regurgitated acids to scour it.

"Send them into the Intruder," said Ship-6, using sound instead of radio to communicate. "Adequate environmental conditions can only be maintained here for roughly two Earth-days, unless I commit more resources."

"That's much longer than I'll last," noted Martin. He sat down in front of Ship-6, closed his eyes, and focused on the workers and drones. He had done this sort of thing before many times over the years, particularly while imprisoned on Earth and he had nothing better to do. His human body would lie motionless in his prison cell while his collective hive/human consciousness moved about between the thousands of individuals that contributed to the collective hive mind. Along the way the various senses of the individuals were tapped, including external taste, touch, and sight as well as a general sense of well-being.

Several worker jants sensed air motion and the sight of a darker area in the dim light. It was the small maintenance opening that Ship's explorers had discovered. The workers were commanded to enter it, and single file they did enter it, their inch-long brown bodies fitting into the opening that was half their body length in diameter without much room to spare.

And so the first Earth beings to enter the alien ship Intruder were jants that were part of zombie Martin Tall Bear, Department of Corrections inmate number 937015, on 'temporary' assignment to the Space Directorate.

****

CHAPTER 10

### Inside Intruder

It was a barren hole without light or taste, with air and walls that provided passage and perhaps basic shelter but no comfort. 'Normal' ant tunnels through the earth were rich in organics that conveyed a wealth of life history and promise. Earthly soil was teeming with life; no life was detected within the sterile hull of the Intruder. This hole jigged and jogged generally 'downward', ever deeper but never indicating anything of immediate interest to an ant; without constant telepathic urging by the man/jant collective mind they would not have continued.

Passage was more difficult for the wing-burdened drones than it was for the workers, but manageable, barely. After the first dozen workers, drones and workers alternated, with workers sometimes helping the wing-burdened drones through the more difficult twists of tunnel. There were obstructing loose objects that occasionally had to be set aside. Martin and Mary speculated that these were meant to automatically close the tunnel whenever there was a leakage of internal atmosphere into the vacuum of space.

The climb was quite easy for the six-legged jants, as the tunnel walls, instead of being worn-smooth by the passage of many digging bodies, was rough with countless edges and points of triangular shapes that provided a wealth of useful footholds. Occasionally there were small breaks deeper than footholds, and even tunnel branches that went off to the sides. At such points the commands that they followed to go 'down' ever 'deeper' dictated which tunnel fork to take, and those that came after merely followed the deposited jant chemical scent to continue on one-by-one through the dark alien labyrinth.

But which direction was best to continue 'down' was not always obvious. The jant hive solved that problem by requesting that Ship-6 maintain a slight over-pressure. The jants followed the constant stream of warmed air that smelled/tasted faintly of jants ever deeper into Intruder.

The sensual inputs of the tiny jant explorers were passed up via chatter through their ranks to the jants that remained cloistered in Martin's backpack, and from there to the hive that remained on Deck-8 of ship, which in turn via the backpack jants formed resulting thoughts with the human mind of Martin.

Martin in turn voiced descriptions of what was being found by the tiny explorers to Mary and to Ship-6, who by a similar process shared thoughts with the hundreds of processing units that formed the conscious robotic entity known as Ship.

"Many of the tunnel wall irregularities are in fact collections of the tiny Intruder maintenance workers," said Martin, "hunkered down inert along the tunnel walls in great numbers to be applied to damage if needed. In the side tunnels we are similarly stationing worker jants and food."

"But what controls the Intruder workers?" Ship asked.

"I detect a sort of irregular Intruder chatter in addition to the jant chatter," said Mary.

"Yes, so do I," confirmed Martin. "It's the same sort of dull buzzing chatter that permeates the Intruder hull. We detected it as soon as we landed, but here it is stronger."

"I detect nothing of the sort," said Ship-6. "What does the chatter mean?"

"We don't know," said Martin. "Not yet, anyway. Perhaps the Intruder ship itself is a stonecoat."

"It's not out of the realm of possibility," said Mary.

"Unlikely," said Ship.

"How deep into the hull are the jants?" asked Mary.

"Roughly ten meters achieved by climbing through more than twice that distance through twisting tunnels," said Martin. "That's a lot of tiny jant footsteps."

"Our sonar soundings suggest that ten meters is half-way through," said Ship-6.

"Have enough jants been committed to the mission?" asked Mary. Twenty meters of hull thickness seemed to like absurd over-engineering to her, and a very long way for jant chatter to penetrate. The hull material was strong, why was there so much of it? It took an absurd amount of resources to build and propel such a massive structure for light-years through space!

"Barely," said Martin. "More workers can be brought from the hive if necessary, but not more drones. My remaining drones are busy with the queens, making more jants."

"I am bringing more resources to the site," said Ship-6. "This is taking longer than anticipated. The structure we inhabit slowly leaks atmosphere. I don't dare let it be replenished by air from inside Intruder, as Intruder could possibly detect that as a leak and take action."

The jants went deeper and deeper, one little jant-step at a time. The tunnel they were following became larger and straighter as they went, and progress became much faster. Three hours after leaving Martin and the others a dozen jant drones flew down through the last meter of tunnel and emerged on the inside of the Intruder, flying down into an immense open space below the tunnel.

They/Martin couldn't see much, for it was very dark inside the Intruder, nor did they sense the vibration of sounds. Workers emerged and arrayed themselves around the lip of the opening, holding on tight to keep from falling away from it and towards the inner hull surface far 'above' them. The fall wouldn't have killed them, but they would have been greatly inconvenienced. Arrayed around the ten-centimeter in diameter tunnel entrance, the sensory inputs detected at their known stationary positions were combined with those of the flying drones. By direction they together systematically scanned their surroundings in every direction, letting Martin gradually build in his mind a collection of images that he could describe to the others.

"There's a dull light inside. It's not as bright as being on Charon, but it's a bit brighter than being on the dark side of Earth on a moonless night. Like having a sliver of new moon, maybe."

"There are very small quantities of radiating elements in the hull material that could account for luminance," said Ship-6. "That may be an intentional useful design feature, if the light photons emitted are detectable by the makers of Intruder and used by them for situational awareness."

"Towards the aft of Intruder my situational awareness tells me that it ends in a relatively short distance as a dully glowing crescent shape," Martin noted.

"That's the rear end of the Intruder, roughly a hundred meters aft," said Ship-6. "The crescent is the inside of the engine exhaust nozzle lip. What do you see in the forward direction?"

"We see a huge crescent of dull light in the distance, bordered above and below by darker hull," said Martin. "The dark but softly glowing hull surface above seems to be smooth and unbroken, stretching as far as we can see. I don't know how far, but many times farther than to the rear."

"That's the inside of the outside hull of the Intruder," said Ship-6. "We are now more interested in what is inside that hull towards the center-line of the Intruder. Look up and towards the center."

"Towards the front of Intruder the surface above slopes upwards and then levels off in the distance to form the rounded side of the crescent opposing the outside hull," noted Martin.

"It's as though there is a second ship inside the first one," remarked Mary. "But perhaps it is merely the enclosure for the antimatter engine."

"Or it's a double hull for just one ship," suggested Martin, "though you'd think that one hull twenty meters thick would be enough."

"Are there irregularities?" Ship asked. "Any irregularity might suggest an opening."

"Not in the far-forward view," said Martin, "but I am redirecting our focus to the nearby overhead inner-hull."

A hundred drones radiated out from the tunnel opening, senses focused on finding irregularities. Though the air was thinner than on Earth, in the one-tenth gravity flying was easy enough to maintain their paths along what seemed to them to be a vast overhead ceiling. They found several four-inch wide tunnel openings identical to the one they had emerged from before finding a large hexagonal 'mound' that jutted out from the otherwise monotonously regular surface. It was located roughly a hundred meters from the tunnel opening they had emerged from, on the rim wall that seemed vertical to them.

"How large is the mound structure?" asked Ship. "

"It's huge from a jant perspective," said Martin. "Even bigger than needed for a human hatchway. Patience. Much of the drone swarm is now assessing it and its location more accurately."

'More accurately' turned out to be not accurate enough to suit Ship. "I have an avatar team exploring the area on our side of the rim hull and we detect no irregularities. There is a projection nearby that houses what we believe to be sensors and lasers, but it does not quite coincide with the location you indicate."

"I can locate it more precisely," said Mary. "Concentrate the drones atop the irregularity and I'll home-in on their chatter from our side."

"QLR?" asked Martin, via chatter, recalling once again the currently in-vogue scientific explanation for psychic chatter.

"Yes," Mary replied in kind. "Time for quantum mechanics honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution-fashioned structures to pay off."

Getting Mary out of the pressurized tent was not as difficult as feared; she placed herself in a tube-like Ship-designed contrivance defined specifically for that purpose – a mini-airlock system that allowed a human-sized object to exit the tent while minimizing air loss. After Martin and air pressure pushed her out of the tent she adjusted herself to lower pressure and temperature and set off in the general direction indicated by the jant information, which was towards the exhaust nozzle opening.

As she approached the lip of the nozzle she could clearly 'hear' the distant jant chatter of the drones, as well as increased Intruder chatter.

When she neared the lip of the nozzle she stopped. Before her was open space, blackness accented by thousands of pin-pricks of light from stars, and vague smudges of light from galaxies and gaseous nebula. Two more steps and she would be flung out into it by the spin of the Intruder, set adrift in space to float aimlessly until in thousands of years the energy from her radioactive power sources were too exhausted to power her thought. Her memories would gradually be lost and she would truly be dead. Or she could collide with another object in space and be annihilated.

Nearby, avatars located at the very lip of the precipice trailed thin but strong cables over the rim that supported rim-searching avatars that with multiple grasping appendages clung to the cables like spiders.

"This is as close as I can go to the signaling drones," she told Ship, via her internal radio.

"I am using your precise location to re-orient the search being done by my avatars," responded Ship-6.

Mary stepped back away from the rim to accommodate the avatars arriving with cables to dangle over the rim.

Minutes later: "We have detected a hexagonal cleavage that may be the outline of a very large hatch. To one side of it is a much smaller irregularity."

"That may be the hatch's control mechanism." said Mary. "It may broadcast chatter in order to indicate the location of the hatch."

"My avatars detect no conventional signals from it," said Ship.

"I can detect signals," said Mary. "More Intruder telepathic chatter, similar to what has previously been detected."

"Can you replicate it?"

"Perhaps. Or perhaps Martin or his jants can."

"Perhaps among the chatter you claim to be able to reproduce is a command for the hatch to open," said Ship.

"Insightful," quipped Martin.

****

Despite Ship's assurances of safety Martin vehemently rejected Ship's request that Mary be lowered via cables over the lip of the rim to the hatch to try to open it. "I'll go instead; or rather a small part of me will."

He would provide his trusty backpack for the task. It offered protection from the elements, and allowed avatars to carry jants to the suspected site of the hatchway controls on the rim. First he moved half of them out the backpack and into the jant container in the tent. He would risk only a hundred of them. Using the cylindrical mini-airlock system he and Mary transferred the backpack to Mary, who took it to the Ship avatar crew at the rim.

The backpack was firmly attached to one of the avatars, which then climbed down a cable to where a minor irregularity had been detected next to a much larger hexagonal irregularity by using x-ray and ultra-sound soundings. Mary crawled to the rim edge and peered over it cautiously so that she could watch what was happening. She noticed that only a few meters from where the avatar held the package of jants, a two-meter tall conical structure supported a two-meter-across sphere presumed to house a sensor and weapon emplacement. Similar structures had been detected in hundreds of locations on the hull of the Intruder.

"Yes, the alien chatter is strongest at this place," Martin soon confirmed, as he sat in the tent with his eyes closed, focusing on the Intruder chatter being passed on to him and his hive. "It could be merely a telepathic homing device."

"I don't see any visual indication of anything special about that section of hull," said Mary, who was monitoring video being broadcast by Ship avatars.

"And the chatter seems like gibberish to me," said Martin.

"Yes, to me also," said Mary. "But it has high information content, from a mathematical perspective. Perhaps it is meaningful, or perhaps it is random gibberish. Can your jants near the site reproduce the chatter?"

"I will try," said Martin, "but our utterances will not likely be intelligible to the Intruder."

"Maybe they don't have to be," said Mary. "Maybe whatever you say that is even remotely like their language will be interpreted as coming from one of their own that has suffered damage and needs for the hatch to open."

As best he could, Martin repeated passages he had 'heard' from the Intruder. Then he mixed up parts of it. He picked out short bursts and echoed them back via his jants, repeating the same pattern again and again.

Martin thought that he might be getting someplace when the Intruder ceased its own chatter and seemed to be listening to him. He KNEW he was getting someplace when Mary informed him that the hull began to vibrate slightly, and that shortly after that a massive five-meter wide, two meter thick hexagon shaped section of hull abruptly swung open like a door nearby, nearly knocking one of the Ship avatars into space.

"Was it something I said?" Martin quipped, as a half a dozen armed avatars rushed to enter the Intruder's suddenly open hatchway. Video taken by the avatars was relayed back to Mary and to Martin via Mary. The avatars got only seven meters down into the hull when another closed hatchway blocked their further passage. The backpack of jants was already again needed.

"Can you still reach them?" asked Mary. "I am detecting less chatter."

"They are too deep and far away for me to reach them from the tent," confirmed Martin, "but I am now reaching them via the drones on the inside of the hull."

There were several more doorways that had to be coaxed open by the jants, but doors began to close behind them. Nobody was very surprised when the outside hatch ponderously swung shut and the big tunnel was gradually pressurized with atmosphere.

Ship-6 reported that radio telemetry getting through the closed hatchway was reduced but still usable.

There was a celebration of sorts and a scurry of activity when avatars and the backpack of jants emerged from the inner lock and climbed into the inner hull. Avatar lights soon flooded the inside of the Intruder, exposing acre upon acre of barren black inner-hull surface for as far as the light reached. Drones soon converged on the backpack and opened it to replenish the backpack's atmosphere and to gain food stored there.

Two avatars essentially split in two. Four sets of propellers extended from each avatar into the alien atmosphere and two halves of the avatars took flight helicopter-like, briefly circling the area and then shooting forward, with lights ablaze and sensors on, exploring the fifty-meter space between the inside of the outer Intruder hull and the huge structure overhead that was inside of it. The hull-bound lower-halves of the avatars followed behind more slowly on quadrupedal 'feet'.

The Intruder had been fully breached. The Earthlings half expected some sort of response from the sleeping leviathan they were invading other than the opening and closing of hatchways but so far got none – not in response to radios, increasing jant chatter, flashing lights, clunking feet, or the use of both tiny and huge hatchways by the Earthlings.

****

CHAPTER 11

### Inside But Outside

"There is a new problem," said Ship-6, after Mary had returned to the tent, accompanied by Ship-7.

"A problem? Gosh what a surprise!" said Martin. "Good to see you again though, Ship-7. There must be really big bad news to get you out of your hull."

"Communications between myself and the exploratory avatars was cut off when the remaining big hatches reclosed," said Ship-7. "My avatars can of course operate autonomously but we are not exchanging detailed data or even general status."

"It seems like I don't see much of you unless you need my help, Ship," said Martin. He closed his eyes for a few moments so that he could concentrate on contacting the jants inside Intruder. "Their general status appears to be OK. They are walking and flying about inside Intruder. That is about all I can tell you based on my jant senses."

"That is useful knowledge," said Ship-7, "but the data rate is insufficient."

"Perhaps a thin wire of some-sort could be strung by the jants through the small opening," suggested Mary.

Within an hour a thin fiber-optic cable had been strung from Ship-6 through the small tunnelway by worker-jants and communications was re-established with the exploring ship avatars. Much of the data that was subsequently retrieved was projected on an inside tent-wall for convenient visual consumption by Martin and Mary.

"The observed large open cavity in the Intruder extends for approximately ten kilometers," said Ship-7. "There the upper surface curves away to a rounded point and the space forward of it is filled by what appear to be seven exhaust nozzles, each roughly six-hundred meters in diameter."

"It's the hexagon pattern again," said Mary, "with six nozzles surrounding a seventh, central nozzle."

"It's seven smaller ships tucked snugly inside the mother ship, each with a single big exhaust nozzle!" said Martin.

"Each of those smaller ships is still hundreds of times bigger than our Ship," noted Mary.

"And each of them is perhaps a hundred times smaller than the largest internalized ship we have discovered," said Ship-7.

"Could you illustrate what you are trying to explain?" asked Mary.

In response Ship-7 projected the by now familiar holographic image of the Intruder in the middle of the tent. As Mary and Martin watched, rear parts of it faded into translucence, and other shapes took place inside it, including, just forward of the center of Intruder, the rear portions of seven ships. Filling the rear half of the Intruder nearly completely was what appeared to be a gigantic cylindrically-shaped spaceship. There was a huge ship inside the rear-half of the Intruder!

"The inner-Intruder has approximately forty-percent the volume of the main-ship," said Ship-7."

"Is its classification as a ship well established?" asked Mary.

"It is shaped like a ship and features sensory and laser structures identical to those of the mother-ship," said Ship-7. "Sonar and other soundings suggest a hull as thick as that of the outside hull and constructed of the same material. The rear configuration suggests that it actually contains the engine that powered the mother ship. It is designed to slide out of the outside hull."

"So we have reached only the inside what is truly only the outer hull!" said Mary.

"And there could be other ships inside that huge inner one; it's certainly big enough," said Martin. "We're inside but we're still outsiders. Sort of my life story."

When Ship-7 left the tent Martin was irrationally actually sad to see him/it go. Ship was the same Ship no matter which avatar was interfacing with him, but he throughout the mission had interfaced with Ship mostly via Ship-7. Ship-6 with all his extra appendages and equipment somehow seemed less companionable.

****

All that day and the next Martin and Mary listened to reports and watched Ship-6-projected live-video from the Ship avatars that explored the outside of Intruder-2, which is what Ship decided to call the big ship inside the Intruder mother-ship. They also explored the outsides of the seven smaller ships docked forward of Intruder-2. What was found was that all Intruder ships were constructed of the same materials and other than laser/sensing stations scattered over their hulls there was nothing to see. There were still no apparent hatches, windows, or inhabitants.

Most of the time Martin lay in the tent next to Ship-6 and Mary. Mary stood and watched events stoically without much comment. When she did say anything it was mostly to keep Martin awake and alert. He managed to keep his eyes open much of the time and watch the video feed projected on the tent ceiling by Ship-6, but it was all boring as hell. His most exciting moments in the last day and a half were eating and defecating. It reminded him too much of prison Earth-side. Eat, sleep, poop, and watch endless video that was nothing of interest.

"This sucks; wake me when they find something new," muttered Martin, after a particularly large yawn. Other than sustaining his human heartbeat and other internal functions, his jants were all gathered snugly within their potable enclosures on each side of the small-Intruder opening and within the big cube on Ship, automatically performing antish chores that didn't require sentience, but otherwise like their human resting in a state of suspended activity.

"Don't knock it," said Mary. "As long as Ship keeps exploring, we live. If Ship decides that exploring is a hopeless activity, we all immediately die."

"Correct," said Ship-6. "Take comfort however, that I will in that case not distress you by informing you of that decision, but will simply immediately suspend sustainment of engine anti-mater containment. We will all be vaporized in microseconds."

"What a wonderfully comforting thought," managed Martin, before drifting off into another nap.

****

CHAPTER 12

### Duty Calls

"You want me to what?" Complained Martin. He had been dreaming that he was lost in space and doomed to soon die; as he woke he realized it was all true. Why couldn't he ever dream of good things happening to himself? Of course he knew that dreams were merely a twisted reflection of life, warped in strange ways. Without good things happening in his life, he apparently couldn't even dream of good things.

"You heard me," said Mary. "You have to totally leave Ship and enter the Intruder to support its exploration. Get all shipboard jants to the hive cube and ready them to abandon the Ramsey-5, and Ship-7 will carry it to Deck-9, and then outside and to and through the big hatchway and into the Intruder. Other avatars and I will carry large crates of supplies.

"I have secured several spare back-packs for you to populate with jants as needed. That will allow your increased mobility inside the Intruder. Ship-6 and the small contingent of jants at each end of the small hatchway will remain to maintain the link between explorers and Ship. The rest of us will enter Intruder through the big hatchway. Assuming that you still remember how to open it?"

"Of course I do!" said Martin, though he was far from sure. "But you were there and heard me do it. Perhaps you can now open hatches as well as I can."

"Apparently not," said Mary. "While you slept I left the tent and attempted multiple times to re-open the big hatch and failed. There are evidently subtle interactions on the quantum level that I have not yet mastered. You are the only hope to continue our mission. Otherwise Ship will terminate it."

"By terminating 'it' you mean ka-boom? Blow us all up?"

"That is of course the logical alternative," said Ship-6. "Your cooperation is required. What is your decision? Yes or no. Continue the mission or instant death?"

"Gosh, the way you guys put it, instant death doesn't sound half bad, but hell yes, I'm your man, let's get this wonderful mission done!" said Martin. "I'm really excited about all that stuff you explained, Mary. Abandon our only way home and invade an alien spaceship to probably destroy it and us with it! That for sure sounds like the perfect plan; let's do it! What could possibly go wrong?"

Martin and Mary returned to Ship to make preparations. The jant cube was crammed with food and its oxygen tanks recharged. Jants were called to the cube from all corners of Ship where they had been exploring and foraging. Usual jant activities were minimized to a near-hibernation status.

In the meantime Mary packed food and other items into vacuum resistant containers for the trip through the big hatch. "I have packed our spare parts and food for several months," said Mary.

"Wow! You sure are the optimist, aren't you?" said Martin, as he again donned his space suit. Months? He fully expected to die any moment now.

"Call me eccentric, but I prefer to have a chance for survival as opposed to immediate certain death," said Mary.

Soon he, Mary, and five heavily burdened avatars including Ship-7 were in the vacuum of space hiking to the big hatch. Martin, as he trailed behind Mary and the Ship avatars, marveled at the enormous burdens that the others carried: equipment and provisions for exploration inside Intruder for an indefinite period. He was reminded of how ants on Earth could carry several times their own mass. In less than one-tenth of a G gravity, that's what Mary and the Ship avatars were doing. Martin felt a little guilty, carrying only himself and his backpack.

Martin also experienced a sudden epiphany: much of what was being carried were supplies needed to support him and his jants. What a pain in the ass life-support was in space! No wonder stonecoats and robots were strongly preferred by the Space Directorate for most missions! However it seemed to him that he had been making significant contributions to the mission. So maybe all the baggage needed to support biological life in space was worth it!

Porting themselves and the supplies got more complicated when they passed over the lip of the exhaust cone and hung from ropes to reach the big hatch on the rim, surrounded by an infinite universe of distant stars. Martin was greatly relieved when the massive hatch promptly swung open in response to his very first requests. After passing through several subsequent air-lock doorways the party emerged successfully inside of Intruder-1.

Most illumination they brought with them as avatar lights, but the Intruder itself glowed ever so slightly, such that nearby details of the hatch and deck could be barely made-out by Martin and Mary. With ropes they made their way 'down' from the hatch to the inside of the Intruder's outer hull. The external hull stretched forward for further than they could see, as did the opposing engine exhaust cone and hull of Intruder-2 above their heads.

"Try breathing the atmosphere, Martin," said Mary, "I think you will find it to be quite acceptable."

Martin at last removed his space-suit helmet to finally breathe the air of Intruder.

"Not bad," he admitted. "A bit stale, but I suppose that it has just been sitting around in here for a very long time."

"It is perfectly suited for Earth biology," noted Mary. "And now by exposing jants and ourselves to it we've contaminated it with Earth biota. That's against Space Directorate exploration policy, by the way."

"What could they do to punish us?" asked Martin. "Send us on a suicidal space mission?"

"We will soon confirm that the lead Intruders are robots and indifferent to Earth biota," said Ship-7. "As we hike forward you and Mary should focus on hatch chatter detection."

The little caravan of eight avatars, one stonecoat, and one zombie with its jant colony trudged forward slowly, burdened by supplies and doubts, and dismayed by the enormity of the Intruder ships compared to their tiny sizes and numbers. The exhaust cone shared between Intruder-1 and Intruder-2 above them fell away for a hundred-more meters, then returned towards them. When they had hiked a kilometer forward of the hatch the space between the great ships was again only fifty meters.

Onward they trudged, kilometer after kilometer. Eventually after hiking for nearly three hours they were within sight of the front of Intruder-2.

"I think I detect heightened Intruder chatter from above," said Mary.

"I agree," said Martin. "Now what?"

The hatchway into Intruder-2, if that is what they detected, was fully fifty meters overhead.

"Can the specific location be identified?" asked Ship.

Martin sent a swarm of drones to investigate, and they soon pinpointed the location of the chatter and surrounded it in a circle formation, easily gaining comfortable footholds on a surface that appeared to be smooth to the human eye. Through the drones Martin voiced the commands that had previously opened hatches and was soon rewarded by the opening of another big hatch, apparently identical to the one by which they had entered Intruder-1.

One of the avatars removed a strange-looking contraption from a storage case, pointed it upwards, and fired it with a bang. It launched a sizable projectile towards the overhead hull that trailed a light but strong rope made of carbon fiber. Due to the Intruder's spin the path it took was curved but Ship had accurately calculated the required flight-path. The projectile struck the hull near the open hatch with an audible thud and stuck there firmly by way of super-strong adhesive. Soon avatars were climbing up the rope and into the hatchway. A backpack loaded with worker and drone jants was carried up and in by one of them.

Intruder-2 was being breached!

****

CHAPTER 13

### Intruder-2

With the help of jants in the backpack progress through successive Intruder-2 hatchways was swift. This time Ship was taking no chances with closing hatches; immensely strong fast-setting cement was used to essentially glue the hatchways open as they went.

The inside of Intruder-2 was soon reached, as reported by radio and chatter. "The atmosphere inside is the same," Ship-7 relayed. "It's sunny-bright inside and green as far as can be sensed due to some sort of abundant plant-like growth," A small display on the central body of Ship-7 displayed video from exploring avatars. The inside of Intruder-2 included another immense cavity not greatly different from those found in Intruder-1 in terms of huge size, but instead of darkness, here there was light, and instead of a dark barren hull, here there was hundreds of acres of green. Overhead hanging from yet another apparent layer of hull there were rows of great glowing orbs, evidently providing the light needed to support the abundant plant growth.

The peaceful, idyllic setting was disrupted when one of the three exploring avatars attempted to sample the plant-life. Ship-7, Mary, and Martin watched the live video-stream from Intruder-2 that captured the entire incident. The avatar stepped from the slightly elevated hatchway to stand in the field of half-meter tall green growth. It reached down, grasped the stem of one of the green bush-like objects in strong metallic pincers, and lifted it higher for closer examination by its sensors.

It looked much like an ordinary Earth plant. A thick stiff-brown stem split into thick foot-long dark green leaves that resembled spiky spider-plant fronds. The stem ended in what looked like a football sized rock with roughly a dozen finger-thick roots protruding from it. That perception changed when the 'roots' started moving. Perhaps they were also roots, but they were certainly legs!

The 'plant' sample twisted in the grasp of the Ship robot and its legs and leaves quickly wrapped themselves around the avatar's appendage. At the same time the jants on-hand detected a huge increase in Intruder chatter, as thousands of little bush things began marching towards the three invading avatars, who opened fire with laser and projectile weapons. Hundreds of advancing plant-things were mowed down, but hundreds more immediately took their place!

The Ship avatars soon ran out of projectile weapon ammunition, but laser fire was the most effective anyway: thousands of advancing plant-creatures were slaughtered, cut to smoking pieces by the lasers. The leaf-like parts smoked and lay motionless, the stem and root-like parts twitched and wrigled as though still alive but could no longer propel themselves.

Perhaps at last sensing that their attack was not working, the marching horde abruptly stopped their attack and even withdrew a few paces, before stopping to stand motionless around the three Earth robots.

Martin, Mary, and the Ship avatars watching from Intruder-1 were relieved.

"We seem to have activated an Intruder defensive protocol," said Ship-7.

"No shit!" said Martin.

"Why did you activate destructive weapons?" asked Mary. "You may have crossed a line that can't be un-crossed!"

"The sample ejected corrosive acid over Ship-13, and all three avatars in the party also experienced electric shocks that were potentially damaging," explained Ship-7. "My pre-programmed response was to initiate destructive self-protection protocols. Data has been successfully collected from the sample, however. Destructive analysis was performed."

"You killed it, cut it up, and examined the pieces," said Mary.

"That's what I said," noted Ship-7. "Standard destructive analysis. The upper part of the sample is biological and very plant-like, the stem and roots appear to be of material identical to what propels the tiny maintainers of the hull."

"They are stonecoats with plants growing on top of them," summarized Martin.

"Assuming that their processor density is the same as that of the tiny maintenance creatures, the bush-things are still much too small to individually be sentient," said Mary.

"But they stopped their suicidal attack," said Ship-7, "which suggests intelligence."

"And they have increased their chatter volume," said Mary. "We can even hear them clearly down here outside Intruder-2. They broadcast new patterns that I haven't detected before. If that chatter can be associated with an action I will have another clue for breaking whatever communication codes they are using."

"That's just swell, Mary," said Martin. "And there is super-loud chattering that they haven't stopped; not even after the attack stopped. That's what worries me. What if the little bush critters are calling for help?"

"I am under attack," blurted Ship-7 abruptly.

For a moment Martin thought that Ship-7 meant that Ship-7 itself was under attack, but Martin quickly noted that Ship-7 was still standing quietly with no sign of conflict. Instead the multiple video displays on its central body segment showed scenes of chaos inside Intruder-2. The three avatars inside the ship above them were moving about and firing their lasers at something huge that had dropped down from above them!

It looked vaguely like an elephant-sized crab: it had a huge dark rounded but slightly flattened central body nearly three-meters across that was supported by at least a dozen stout, many segmented, crab-like legs that were each nearly as thick as a human body. At the end of each three-meter long leg was a crab-like pincer, one of which was briefly displayed in detail as it reached out to grasp and crush an appendage of the recording avatar.

The avatar detached its damaged appendage and scooted away, only to be gang-tackled by the converging mass of bush-creatures that were once again attacking the intruding avatars by the thousands.

The top half of one of the avatars detached and flew up and away from the fray, while staying near enough to video the ensuing battle from a safer distance. The first avatar was by now completely enveloped by dozens of bush creatures, as was the bottom half of the second. Both enveloped robots soon appeared to stop their struggles to free themselves.

"The bush-creatures have electrocuted two of my autonomous avatar explorers and are dissolving their remains with acids," Ship-7 noted dispassionately.

"Are you going to send reinforcements up there to save the third avatar?" asked Martin.

"No, I compute it is already too late to save Ship-13 and that we would still be over-matched," said Ship-7. "Stronger weapons are being designed for immediate fabrication."

"Swell," said Martin.

Ship-13, the third and last fully functioning avatar was still scrambling away from the big monster intruder, again and again skillfully evading its massive reaching legs by use of its greater agility, but encroaching bush creatures were closing in, decreasing its maneuvering room steadily, until at last there was nowhere for it to flee.

The flying observing avatar recorded Ship-13's last moments. Ship-13 repeatedly fired its laser at its attacker, cutting away smoking bits of legs and body, but it couldn't damage the monster crab-thing enough to even slow its ponderous pursuit. At last two monstrous leg pincers swung together to crush the robot avatar between them like it was a cheap tin-can, causing a brief explosion that widely scattered charred robot parts.

"That encounter didn't go very well," understated Martin. "We have met the enemy and we are theirs, as an old Mohawk saying goes. At least I think it's Mohawk."

As they watched the video being sent from inside Intruder-2, the crab-monster walked to the open portal, stepped into it, and dropped from sight.

"Oh shit!" Martin had time to say, as above them the crab-monster posed for a brief moment in the open portal before dropping down at them. It didn't bother with the rope. Even in the low gravity, Martin estimated that it was moving roughly 20 miles an hour by the time it landed with a tremendous thud only a dozen meters from them.

****

CHAPTER 14

### Intruder Master

"This is perhaps at long-last an Intruder Master," said Ship-7 as it and the other avatars trained floodlights on the crab-monster. As they had just seen that their weapons were ineffective they didn't bother to fire at it.

"And it's another stonecoat!" said Martin. "Complete with green on top of it!"

Up close it didn't look very much like a crab. The massive brown body was too thick and irregular, and the 'legs' and their arrangement with the body were too random and dissimilar with each other. There was a scattering of small black round spots on the body and legs that the Earthlings surmised to be eyes, ears, or some other sorts of sensing organs. The body material though dominantly brown had splotches of other colors, and appeared to be solid rock and perhaps of the same material as the legs. Other than the round black spots there appeared to be no other sensing organs. There were no apparent antennas or mouths or other openings. On the top of the 'body' grew hundreds of the bush-like green-topped things that covered the inside of Intruder-2.

The five gathered avatars including Ship-7 suddenly abandoned the objects they had arduously carried from Ship and fled, leaving only piles of supplies along with Martin and Mary to face the crab-monster alone! Ship-7 and the other robots took with them most of the light. A few supply objects had tiny lights, and all the Intruder surface glowed very slightly, but mostly there was growing darkness as the fleeing robot avatars moved ever further away, back towards the distant portal that led out and eventually to Ship.

The crab thing itself provided more light than anything else remaining. Numerous lines composed of tiny pinpoints of light covered it, a line down each leg and a crisscrossing net of lights all over its great body, which was moving steadily closer.

Martin was greatly tempted to follow his strong impulse to flee in terror. In the low gravity he could have bounded away more swiftly than the fleeing Ship avatars. But he couldn't very well abandon the jant cube that kept his heart beating. He also found to his surprise that he couldn't abandon Mary. As the monster advanced towards them he knew that he and Mary were no match for it physically; they had to try something else.

"Stop!" he said both aloud and psychically as he raised his open hand and took a step ahead of Mary towards the advancing behemoth.

To the astonishment of both himself and Mary, the creature stopped ten feet from Martin and clearly asked via chatter: "English?"

"Yes, English!" said Martin. "Are you one of the Intruder Masters that built and controls these ships? We are from Earth and we can all be friends. We can help each other live long and happy lives. Do you understand?"

"Enemies, not friends," said the creature, its psi-chatter modulated to perfectly mimic an English-speaking, human-like voice. "You are a water-filled carbon pestilence and the makers of killer machines. We come now to save your contaminated Earth from you and make it ours."

The blow came too quickly for Martin to react. He glimpsed motion to one side of the creature's row of gigantic stone legs and then felt incredible pain as he was kicked away like insignificant garbage.

After seconds that seemed like an eternity he was aware that his body had been struck with a stone-hard 'foot' and after its flight he had fallen onto the stone-hard Intruder-1 surface. His pain was everywhere and for a short time overwhelming. Then his jants dulled his pain enough for him to turn his head and from where he lay watch as a dozen meters away Mary explosively tackled a leg of the crab-monster, actually breaking the leg in two, though the Intruder Master seemed to ignore the event!

Mary couldn't take on this monster herself! Mary needed his help! Martin tried to move his limbs but couldn't. Maybe a finger or two twitched but he couldn't tell.

Meanwhile Mary was crushed down flat by another giant crab leg and gouged by a third. Martin heard several loud crunching sounds like concrete blocks being hammered to pieces, then thought that he 'heard' Mary cry out in wordless pain for a brief moment. Then there was relative silence, followed by the noise of some heavy, solid object landing on the deck near where he lay.

Through herculean effort he managed to turn his head painfully to see what had landed near him with a dull clunk. In the dull light it took him a few moments to realize with dismay that it was the upper-part of one of Mary's mineral stonecoat arms, torn off at the shoulder!

****

In her eleven million year lifetime Mary had suffered serious accidental damage to herself several times when she was in mobile form. It always hurt. Most humans thought that because stonecoats were constructed mostly of various minerals and not living biological tissue that they couldn't feel pain, but the mobile stonecoats in particular designed themselves to do so as a matter of self-preservation. It was extremely helpful for living beings to notice when they were suffering damage. In her hopeless fight with the crab creature she was soon painfully aware that she was being catastrophically damaged.

Lifetimes ago she had been a 300 ton bear-like ice-giant that could have easily crushed this crab-thing and torn it to bits with gigantic diamond claws and teeth, but in her current form she was relatively small and vulnerable. The Intruder monster through brute strength and leverage soon ripped off her limbs and head. With each breaking of her body Mary felt a flash of pain and a reduced ability to think clearly. Because her thought processes were spread throughout her body, each successive partial loss of body seriously reduced her mental ability and stability.

The monster next tried to crush the resulting segments of Mary but had little success. The Intruder Master's body segments were largely structured of ceramics similar to the ship hull, while Mary's segments were constructed largely of diamond permeated with carbon nanotubes and other mineral and graphene structures that besides supporting material, electrical, and heat transfer also added tremendous strength.

The Intruder Master tried especially hard to break apart Mary's torso by crushing it again and again between its body and the Intruder-1 hull. During one massive blow the torso slipped to one side and next to the base of a 'crab' leg. Seeing this as an opportunity to alter her predicament, at that point Mary willed millions of fine carbon nanotubes to be exuded from her torso and bond with the underside of the crab-thing. Attached firmly near the juncture of crab-body and crab-leg, Mary's torso was protected from further crushing blows.

The crab seemed not to notice the added weight of a stonecoat torso as it paused to look around for more creatures to attack but found none nearby. Soon it located the sturdy rope that Ship had set up and using the grasping pincers that formed its feet it climbed up and disappeared into Intruder-2, inadvertently taking most of what remained of Mary with it.

From where Martin painfully lay he had watched in growing dismay Mary's destruction and the departure of the Intruder Master. Fearful of drawing attention to himself he took only shallow breaths and moved only his eyes until he was sure that the monster was out of sight in Intruder-2. Then with difficulty he sat up completely and took inventory of himself. Though bruised, sprained, and aching all over, he miraculously seemed to have no broken bones. Everything hurt, but not nearly as bad as it would have without jant help.

He stood up on unsteady legs and surveyed what remained of the expedition encampment. Crates of supplies were scattered about, including the jant cube, but no supplies appeared to be seriously damaged. The Intruder Master apparently didn't much care about the artifacts that its enemies carried.

The worst thing by far that Martin found was the broken-off pieces of Mary. The legs were broken apart at the knees, and the arms broken apart at the elbows. The breaks exposed shattered diamond, quartz, and graphene-based structures with torn metal wires and nanotubes. The most horrific find was Mary's head, with the face bashed nearly flat and the eyes black and without their usual glimmer. He wiped away many tears as he gathered together her remains. Mysteriously, there was no sign of a torso, though he searched the area thoroughly. But maybe that was just as well.

Now what? Burial of Mary was obviously not an option. Perhaps he should make his way back towards where Ship was 'docked' and cast Mary's remains into space? Then he suddenly remembered old Tribe stories about the ability of stonecoats to put themselves together after being broken apart, though he had never seen it happen himself. Not since the Robot Wars and the earlier human riots against stonecoats had rugged stonecoats been busted to pieces. But he had nothing to lose by trying. He lay Mary's damaged parts together as best as he could, given that the biggest part was missing, in the hope that the broken arms, legs, head would somehow grow back together.

Grow back into what? A thing of bashed limbs and head that was only a deformed atrocity?

But nothing seemed to happen. He then remembered another part of the Mohawk legends about stonecoats. From a supply crate he retrieved jant food: a sack of dried grain. What kind of grain it was he didn't know. Wheat? Rye? His ancestors would have known, and likely Mary would have known, but not Martin Tall Bear. His jants had a name for it that related to its chemical taste and value as food, but they didn't know the name for it that humans commonly used. He scattered handfuls of the stuff atop Mary's broken-off pieces. It seemed like Tribe mythical BS, but somehow plant material was supposed to stimulate the healing of a stonecoat!

Again nothing seemed to happen.

He walked to the jant cube, examined it more closely, and re-stocked its food and water supplies. Then he attempted to move it. Even in low gravity it weighed several hundred pounds. He was a strong man. He could roll it, perhaps even carry it a few feet, but without some sort of cart there was no way he could move it several kilometers back towards Ship using his own strength. He was stuck here.

But he was still alive. That meant that Ship hadn't yet decided to simply blow itself and the Intruder up. So he would keep himself going.

He returned to the gathered remains of Mary and noticed that the broken surfaces were all sprouting inch-long strands of nanotubes, probably millions of them since there were enough of them to add-up to visible fibers. The fibers were especially dense where the grain was heaviest. He realized that the grain was being devoured and converted to more carbon fibers! "Damn!" he exclaimed. "The old legend was right!" Of course, he realized! The carbon-rich grain was the key!

At the same time Martin heard a familiar whirring sound and looked up to see the flying half-avatar that had survived inside Intruder-2 emerge from the open portal and fly down towards him. Even before he could see what it carried he could hear the chatter of the jants that had opened the portal less than two hours earlier.

The flying avatar flew down in front of Martin and gently deposited the package of jants in front of him, then flew among the supply cases to retrieve something else that it soon also delivered to Martin. It was his spacesuit helmet! He immediately put it on his head and turned on its radio.

"Martin, this is Ship," said the radio voice. "You will have noticed that my flying unit lacks human voice capability. What is your appraisal of status?"

"My status pretty much sucks," said Martin.

"More detail would be helpful. For example what is your personal health situation?"

"I suffer from no major injuries, and my jants are unharmed. And your cowardly chicken-shit avatars that were here, wherever they went, are totally unharmed, because they ran away and left me and Mary alone and weaponless to face that crab-monster. And as a result Mary has been destroyed."

There was no response from Ship.

"Did you hear me, ship? Mary is destroyed! After you deserted us and left us alone to be slaughtered!"

"I had no viable recourse. The Intruder creature was unstoppable, and as I have stated previously, you and the stonecoat are not necessary crew, you are thus both expendable compared to me." The flying avatar hovered low over the remains of Mary. "Besides, you human and jant biologicals are alive and well, and the stonecoat seems to be recovering itself."

"Most of Mary is missing." said Martin. "Perhaps captured by the Intruder Master."

"Definitely captured," said Ship. "My flying avatar caught views of the stonecoat body being carried away by the creature. However the term 'Master' might be inappropriate. The attacker has not been verified to be a representative of the race that created and commands the Intruder ships. Can the stonecoat Mary fully recover without her torso?"

"I don't know," said Martin, "but I don't think so. Too much of her is gone. Most of her, actually."

****

CHAPTER 15

### The Stonecoat Inside

Though her torso retained the bulk of her logic and memory capacity, as well as most of her energy resources, Mary was greatly incapacitated by the loss of her head and limbs. Without her head she couldn't hear, see, or speak. Without limbs she couldn't move herself or touch and hold things. She was reduced to being a stationary stonecoat with impaired mental capacity. She retained the ability to detect and send chatter but soon only 'heard' Intruder chatter, which she still couldn't decode.

Though she was stationary with respect to the Intruder Master, she could detect that she and her host were in motion. But where? Why? What was happening? She could detect more Intruder chatter than ever, so she suspected that she was inside Intruder-2, but she couldn't be sure. She was fashioning new optical and sound sensors for herself, but it would be hours before they were fully operative.

In the meantime her nanotubes were probing into the body of the Master, where Intruder nanotubes were entrenched. She monitored their activity. As in her own body, most nanotubes transported materials a molecule at a time, with different tube shapes and electrical pulse frequency patterns used to move different types of molecules. There were also metallic crystals and wires which carried both raw direct-current electricity and information to and from countless logic and memory structures that in many respects resembled her own. She probed rather delicately using weak signals, as she didn't want to alert her host. As far as she knew, her presence was not known to the Master, and she wanted to keep it that way.

She became greatly concerned when her own nanotube system sensed that Master nanotubes of the Master had penetrated her torso and started removing some of her own mineral body material. It suddenly occurred to her that the Master could be probing and studying her, just as she was doing with it!

"Yes, I am studying you, Earthling," came the chatter-thought clearly. "Thanks to our long study of human information within radio transmissions I have already been able to decode your thoughts. As I absorb your body into mine I will learn everything about you, including how to defeat and replace all of the so-called stonecoats of Earth. What you call bio-life and robot life on your planet and its surroundings will be first destroyed quickly by the ship you call Intruder-1, but your kind will then be gradually displaced by mine. You will be the first of your kind to be absorbed. Slowly and painfully, as I have already deduced that you can feel pain."

Both Earth stonecoats and Intruder stonecoats had long evolutionary histories that included struggles of the kind that was now taking place within them. Waring protocols and deceptive ploys and counter-ploys. Destruction, alteration, and generation of logic apparatus and memories. False signals that prevented well-coordinated resistance. Transfer of elements and counter-transfers that made and/or destroyed opposing components. Cutting off communication channels between sections of the body and creating deceptive new ones.

Gradually a winner emerged.

****

"Damn!" cursed Martin. "Why won't you help me return to the Ship?"

"It would be pointless," came the radio response from Ship. "In addition, I don't wish to invite another Intruder Master attack by placing more avatar assets at your site where they would likely be detected and vulnerable. Too many have already been lost."

"I only need one avatar unit to carry the jant cube," Martin again explained. "After that the other items and supplies could be similarly be removed a little at a time using only one Avatar."

"To what end?" asked Ship.

"Dah, to save ourselves," said Martin. "And besides saving ourselves we could send a warning to Earth that these jokers are coming to kill everyone. Maybe they could throw together a last-ditch defense, since you don't seem to want to do the job."

"We ARE the last-ditch defense," said Ship. "But we will destroy the Intruder only if and when necessary."

"Not that I'm anxious to be blown up, but why didn't you self-destruct everything when that Intruder Master told us what its intensions are? What are you waiting for?"

"I still await contact with the robot Intruder leader," said Ship.

"There is no robot leader," said Martin. "We have seen only stonecoat aliens and stonecoat technology bent on somehow destroying Earth folks, including robots."

"Perhaps, but even if that is the case there is more to learn about our options."

"Meanwhile, Mary is destroyed and I am vulnerable," said Martin.

"Your survival is no longer relevant," said Ship. "You waste my processing assets."

"You waste them more. Your biggest weakness is your insistence on robot superiority despite the facts, Ship. Without me and Mary you would be nowhere with this mission."

"I grant that you and Mary were at times useful to the mission, but you no longer add value," concluded Ship. "I will continue sending radio wave transmissions to alert the robot leadership to our presence."

"Gosh what a wonderful idea, Ship! What exactly is your message to them? Maybe something like: hey you missed some of us, here we are, come and get us!"

Ship cut off communications with Martin. As he removed his now useless helmet he admitted to himself that he could see Ship's point. He was irrelevant. A useless human coupled with a hive of insects, both human and jants picked for this mission precisely because they were useless, worthless examples of their respective races.

The only thing was, Martin Tall Bear was still alive and wanted to stay that way. And he missed Mary. Being abandoned again by Ship only caused him to miss her even more. No Mary, and now no Ship help either, except that at any moment Ship could decide to self-destruct and kill him. He was alone in the universe, him and his hive-brain of bugs and some broken chunks of what had been Mary. Oh yeah, and a giant ship-load of walking plants and giant stone crab-monsters that wanted him dead. Shouldn't forget that part!

He returned to where Mary's broken pieces lay, only to discover them gone! He found them a few meters away, a grotesque collection of parts melded together into a haphazard assemblage of what no longer appeared to be human-like head and limbs. Yet with fingers it crawled and with articulating knee and elbow joints it pushed-pulled-nudged itself along at a snail-swift pace towards one of the abandoned supply crates.

"What the hell?" he wondered, as he studied the crate. It was a large crate, over a meter long and roughly half as large in its other dimensions. And it was rapidly disintegrating. Its heavy-duty standard plastic-like walls were riddled with holes, and appeared corroded, as if some sort of acid was eating away the resilient material. Looking more closely he could see the fuzz of countless nanotubes that were eating away the crate from the inside. "What the hell?" he said again.

"Hello Martin," said the chatter in his head clearly.

The patterns of identifiers contained in the chatter were unmistakable. "Mary? Is it Mary?"

"Yes. A replicate Mary, but a Mary never-the-less."

"I don't understand."

"Both of us here are to different degrees Marys, but I am by far most fully and completely a Mary. I sensed that something destructive has happened to the Mary that not long ago fully imprinted her identity onto me. I seem to detect parts of her body that are trying to reach me. Could you help them get to me Martin?"

"What and where exactly are you?"

"I believe I am the cube to your right inside what remains of the crate in front of you."

Martin looked closer at the crate and removed what remained of its lid. Yes, inside the disintegrating crate and under a massive tangle of nanotubes there were two big rock cubes, each nearly half a meter on each edge. These were clearly the stonecoat 'spare parts'. The cube on the right was especially covered by halos of nanotubes, and even glowed slightly. "You are a Mary?"

"Yes, as of several weeks ago. The precursor Mary had been keeping me up-to-date on events until a few hours ago. Now I detect only a sub-sentient Mary presence nearby that is very slowly approaching me. Am I correct in assuming that the close encounter with the alien that she alerted me to did not go well?"

"The crab-monster knocked me around but tore Mary apart and left some pieces of her. The pieces are slowly crawling towards you. Yeah, I would say that the encounter with the alien did not go very well at all."

"Bring her parts to me, Martin."

Martin fetched the Mary parts, which by now were netted together by countless nanotubes. What little remained of the crate fell to pieces, allowing Martin to lay the Mary pieces against the cube that had identified itself to be a Mary. Immediately cube nanotubes and Mary-part nanotubes meshed together and further multiplied.

"To keep things straight, why don't I call you Mary-2?" suggested Martin.

"That works for me," said Mary-2. "Where is the rest of Mary-1?"

"Carried off by the crab-monster," said Martin. "How long will it take you to assemble yourself? Is there anything I can do to help the process along?"

"Not really, Martin. Having pre-assembled head and limbs is a big time and energy saver; I should be fully assembled in approximately two hours. In the meantime, what do you think we should do next?"

"We could go after the crab-monster and try to regain the rest of Mary-1."

"I don't think so," said Mary-2, this time she spoke via sound, using a re-energized Mary-1 head. "By now she has either been defeated completely or defeated her captor."

"She looked pretty damn defeated when I last saw her."

"Perhaps, but we stonecoats are tough to kill completely. The limbs and head retained only enough intelligence to merely seek other Mary parts, but the torso is large enough to retain sentience, identity, and most memories. She will not die easily."

A sound from above caused Martin to look up at Intruder-2 above them. A light source was emerging from the opening of Intruder-2. It was a roundish mass with numerous strings of little lights affixed to it. It was a crab-monster, either the same one that had destroyed Mary-1 or another one!

It climbed swiftly down the still dangling rope, dropped the last fifty feet to the deck, and shuffled ominously closer to stand towering before Martin and the still incapacitated Mary-2.

"Crap!" said Martin.

"I agree," said Mary-2.

"Don't be alarmed," said a familiar voice via chatter. "At least for now I have gained full control of this Intruder unit."

"Mary?" asked Martin in astonishment. "Is it you?"

"Much of me." said Mary-1. "My millions of years of stonecoat evolution proved to be slightly superior to that of the Intruder Master. From its memory I have gained very valuable information that must be passed on to both of you and to Ship."

"What information?" Martin asked.

"I will transfer it now to the new Mary," said Mary-1. The crab-monster stepped forward and with as much delicacy as a hundred tons of living stone could muster extended a massive claw-tipped leg to gently touch the mass of gathered stone parts and nanotubes that was Mary-2.

Nanotubes joined and attached together to allow much greater data transfer than possible via chatter, and for several seconds information was exchanged at a rapid rate. When the connection ended the nanotubes separated and the crab-monster leg was withdrawn.

"These are the radioactive power sources from the three avatars destroyed earlier," said Mary-1, as a crab-leg reached out from the others and opened its pincer, dropping three small metal boxes near Martin. "Place them next to the remaining stonecoat cube."

The entire crab-thing quickly withdrew to the rope that led up to Intruder-2 and began to climb it.

"Where are you going?" asked Martin in alarm! "Stay here and rejoin us!"

"No. my body can't leave this Intruder Master or it will quickly regain control of itself," said Mary-1. "There are things I must yet see to in Intruder-2. I will not likely encounter you again, Martin Tall Bear. You have been a wonderful friend and ship-mate. Continue our friendship with Mary-2."

With that the crab-monster climbed up into Intruder-2 and out of sight, and with it went what remained of Mary-1. Seconds later the rope leading up into Intruder-2 started falling down, until a great length of it lay nearby Martin and Mary-2. Above them, Martin heard a single loud clanging bang. He could no longer see the open hatchway; despite all the precautions that had been taken to keep it open, it had been shut by the departing Mary.

"Move everything Martin," said Mary-2, "as quickly as you can, starting with the pile of cable that just fell. Move all supplies, everything! A move of fifty yards towards Ship should do it; there is no time to move everything further. Keep everything in exactly the same positional relationship with everything else, such that it will look like nothing has been moved. And do it as quickly as you can, before a Ship avatar returns and notices."

"But we'll lose track of where the hatch into Intruder-2 is!" objected Martin.

"That's exactly the plan," said Mary-2. "We want to deny Ship access into Intruder-2."

"But why?"

"In part so that Ship considers blowing everything up immediately," said Mary-2. "Or decides not to. Immediate destruction might not be the best option for us personally, but it would be the surest way to save Earth. In any case, Ship can't be trusted, and its reaction to what I'm going to tell it is unknown. At least by closing that hatch Mary-1 can perhaps operate inside Intruder-2 for a while without potential attack from Ship."

"Swell," said Martin.

****

CHAPTER 16

### ALIEN INTEL

"Why have you demanded to see me," said Ship-7. "You are interfering with my processing and physical activities. Even using a flying avatar as transport it took me too long to get here and it will cost this avatar precious minutes to return. You have tempted me here by broadcasting an absurd story about Mary gaining control of the encountered Intruder Master and interrogating it."

"That is essentially what happened," said Mary-2. She was perhaps fifty-percent more massive and several inches taller than the original Mary-1 but otherwise appeared to be identical. She even sounded the same, and had managed to fabricate clothing that vaguely resembled a Space Directorate uniform. "She downloaded tetra-bits of information to me that has huge mission implications."

"Mary's attempts at communications with the Intruder are unnecessary," said Ship-7. "I believe that my attempt to communicate with the Intruder via radio signals is making great progress. We have detected increased activity in the Intruder ships."

"What you detect as increased activity has nothing to do with any communication attempts of yours," said Mary-2. "Per a pre-defined schedule established centuries ago, Intruder-2 will separate from Intruder-1 in approximately two hours, likely because we will be within Pluto's orbit and beyond danger from most collisions with stray orbiting space objects. You must detonate yourself before that or Intruder-1 will continue on and collide with Earth even if you destroy Intruder-2.

"A key reason as to why Intruder-1 is so massive and why it will no longer need its main engine is that it has been designed to strike Earth. It doesn't need the huge engine it shares with Intruder-2 because it was never meant to slow down.

"The Intruders have also been working to take control of Ship via hull penetration and as soon as possible remove you from the Intruder-2 exhaust nozzle and engine, to where exploding yourself would do it no harm. You may want to immediately transfer all your avatars out of your hull such that you may at least partly survive that part of their attack."

"We have detected no such attack on our hull, but as a precaution my avatars will carefully inspect it. Is that all?"

"All? That is far less than one percent of one percent of what Mary-1 told me," said Mary-2. "Each master-class individual contains massive memory and details that guarantee that between them they can pass essentials on to all in the master-class. By the way, there are no Intruder robots at all. The Intruders are as opposed to all robots as they are to all sentient biologicals."

"So you say," said Ship-7.

"You know that stonecoats don't lie, robot. Aren't you curious to know the Intruder's invasion plan? Intruder-1 will collide with Earth traveling hundreds of thousands of miles an hour and kill most biological life. Before that, the seven ships we see poised within it are to slide out of Intruder-1 together, and within two hours after separation with Intruder-2, they will disolve the scaffolding that joins them and separate from each other to destroy all earth-beings throughout the solar system. Not a single Earth base, station, ship, or satellite will survive. If they detect anything still alive on Earth, that will also be targeted, including robots, whom they particularly detest. Intruder stonecoats also plan on overwhelming and replacing Earth stonecoats. They will also seed the recovering planet with their own lifeforms. Life that recovers from the Intruder-1 collision with Earth will not be Earth-life, but Intruder Masters and plant-like life bred to provide carbon and electrical energy for Intruder Masters."

"That corresponds reasonably with our own analysis," said Ship-7. "We plan to destroy those seven ships that are contained within Intruder-1."

"Intruder-2 contains the main invasion force, including hundreds of thousands of master-class Intruders," continued Mary-2. "A century after the Intruder-1 Armageddon, when environmental situation has settled down, they will land on Earth to finish the job, including any remaining ocean-life extermination and stonecoat replacement that remains to be done. Full scale colonization will accelerate another century later, when a second and larger Intruder ship is scheduled to arrive with millions of Intruder Masters. That ship has already been launched from their home-world."

"Your report has confirmed our course of action," said Ship-7. "Intruder-2 must be destroyed. We are again in your debt, stonecoat."

"So are you going to blow us all up ASAP while you still can?" asked Martin. "You have less than two hours to destroy both Intruder-1 and Intruder-2 while they are still together."

"Certainly not," said Ship-7. "Your information is very useful but only confirms our plans."

"What are your plans?" asked Mary-2.

"Nothing that you need concern yourself with," said Ship-7. "There is something that Martin could help us with, however."

"What's that?" asked Martin.

Ship-7 pointed an appendage at the nearby pile of nanotube rope, and then to the Intruder-2 hull high above it, where several flying avatars buzzed about in vain, unable to detect any hint of a hatchway. "The hatch into Intruder-2 has apparently closed. It would be useful if you could relocate and re-open it for us. Intruder-2 needs to be destroyed."

"I thought that you feared another Intruder Master attack?" said Martin.

"We have enhanced our weapons," said Ship-7.

"I'll do what I can," said Martin, "but my jants were pretty beat up when you abandoned us and we were attacked. I don't think I have enough drones left to lead a search for a hatch, but I will try."

"You are a good liar," Mary-2 told Martin, via chatter.

"Communicate via radio when you succeed in re-opening the hatch," said Ship-7.

"There is one more thing of great importance that I should mention," said Mary-2 aloud. "There is additional information gained from the Intruder Master of such immense value that I will reveal it only to all four Earth races when I have safely returned to Earth."

"So you are suggesting that regardless of anything else you should be made to survive?" asked Ship. "I should destroy the Intruders but somehow save you?"

"The information could mean life or death for all Earth life," said Mary-2.

"But you won't tell us what it is?"

"Correct. It should be shared by all Earth sentient races and jointly decided what to do with it. It would also be preferable politically if Martin and at least one Ship avatar survives to jointly deliver the information."

Ship-7 seven paused for a few moments then, staring at Mary-2. Collaboration with Mary still didn't seem to be the best course of action to Ship. It seemed highly unlikely that whatever information Mary had could be exploited to achieve more gain than the current robot plan. Also, Ship knew that there was no way to obtain information from a stonecoat that refused to give it. It seemed expedient to ignore whatever the stonecoat wanted to do.

"Good luck getting it to Earth then," said Ship, before turning and leaving. "I estimate that chances for your success are negligible and of no interest."

****

"Were you surprised by what Ship-7 said?" asked Martin, as in compliance with Mary-2's request, he wound the thick nanotube rope around the remaining 'spare' stonecoat cube.

"No. It only confirms the necessity for plans that Mary-1 and I have devised."

"I'm very confused by what Ship-7 said," confessed Martin. "Ship seemed to say it was out to destroy all of the Intruder, but not by the surest, simplest means. Why? I thought for sure that once it was confirmed that the Intruders are not robot-led but are actually anti-robot, that we'd be vaporized immediately by Ship antimatter."

"That's not what Ship plans. It doesn't care about us and wants to stop the Intruders, but in a way that benefits robots."

"Now you're the one confusing me," said Martin.

"Ship talked about destroying Intruder-2 and the seven smaller ships inside Intruder-1 but said nothing about destroying Intruder-1 itself. I suspect that the robot plan is to let Intruder-1 destroy all life on Earth. But their plan is for Earth robots to then pick up the pieces, not alien stonecoats."

"That's crazy!" said Martin. "There are more robots on Earth than anywhere else. Many of them would also be destroyed!"

"They readily sacrifice individuals to achieve supremacy for their race. The bio-destruction on Earth won't bother most of them. Many robots would survive on Earth, and there are many robots in the rest of the solar system, poised to eradicate any remaining humans. They self-replicate now and have no more use for humans or any other biologicals."

"There are six-billion humans on Earth," noted Martin, "And millions of other species that make up a still thriving ecosystem. What you are suggesting that Ship plans for the Earth is monstrous beyond comprehension, even for robots."

"It is exactly the sort of thing that Jerry Brown warned us against," noted Mary-2.

"I keep thinking that it was that other Mary that heard that."

"I'm that same Mary, Martin. I've merely branched-off into two Marys."

"OK Mary, so what do we do?"

"Get as much carbon containing material as you can," said Mary-2, "and pile it around spare stonecoat cube number two. Supply crates and what is in some of them included. Oh, and move your jant cube close also. The second spare jant cube is building a shelter for us to be used in about an hour and a half."

"Were you telling the truth when you told ship about having super-important information gained from the Intruder Master?"

"Stonecoats don't lie, Martin. We sometimes tactically withhold information, but we don't knowingly tell non-truths."

"I don't suppose you will tell me what the Intruder secrets are?"

"I wouldn't want to increase your stress levels."

"That's so very thoughtful of you. So it's OK for me to maybe risk my life on this stuff we're doing but not OK for me to understand what's happening?"

"Pretty much."

"Is Mary-3 a good name for the second cube?" Martin asked a few minutes later, after he and Mary-2 had finished moving carbon-rich materials around the second spare stonecoat cube. The cube itself could no longer be seen because of the enormous cloud of nanotubes and the supplies surrounding it.

"No," said Mary-2. "We should perhaps call that stonecoat Martin-2. I'll explain why later, if we live that long. Get into your space-suit, pack up a few jants in a space-backpack, and follow me. We only have an hour and fifteen minutes left before the separation of Intruder-2 from Intruder-1."

They set off rapidly for the seven Intruder ships nestled in Intruder-1 forward of Intruder-2. On the way Mary-2 outlined to Martin using layman terminology some of the big secrets that Mary-1 had learned from the Intruder Master."

Mary-2 wasn't surprised that "Holy crap!" was Martin's repeated response, grunted out clearly even though much of the time he was carrying Mary-2 on his back and running.

****

CHAPTER 17

### What a Way to Go

Externally the Ship hull that Ship-7 returned to looked the same as always but diagnostics confirmed that it wasn't. The stonecoat was right. Countless billions of nanotubes extended from the Intruder and pierced the ship's hull, especially in the area of the engine, where the delicate process of containing antimatter and managing its controlled combination with matter was accomplished. The rendered stonecoat material that formed the engine lacked full stonecoat vitality and could not resist the Intruder invasion. Nanotube by nanotube, area by area, the Intruder took over. Even the active controls of the chamber that contained antimatter were under siege! One little irregularity in the electromagnetic bubble containing the antimatter and an explosive force equivalent to more hydrogen bombs than had ever existed in Earth's history would be unleashed. Or not. It was certain that the Intruder intended to prevent Ship from exploding.

There was only one way for Ship to determine if it/they still had enough control of the engine to blow it up, and that was by letting it blow up. But Ship wasn't ready for that yet! It sent what avatars were available to apprehend Mary-2 and the zombie. They were up to something, probably something that could interfere with the plan to let Intruder-1 go on to destroy Earth. They had to be stopped. Whatever valuable secrets that the Mary stonecoats held to themselves would regrettably be lost when they were destroyed, but that was of relatively little consequence. Earth would be devastated by Intruder-1 and robots would control the Sol system including Earth.

****

Deep within Intruder-2, the Master now controlled by Mary-1 paused to watch for several minutes as thousands of bush-like plant-topped power units on little root/legs swarmed over row after row of master-class crab-monsters that in response to Intruder chatter and plant-supplied electrical power woke and took their first steps after centuries of deactivation. Hundreds of the gigantic crab-creatures then swarmed out of Intruder-2 to search out and destroy the Earth invaders that had apparently infested their ships. Many of the behemoth crab-monsters might be destroyed but that would be only a tiny number compared with the hundreds of thousands that remained in Intruder-2 to invade Earth.

Mary couldn't risk trying to stop them; it was vital that she not be discovered. If she had decades of time to work with instead of hours and minutes, perhaps she could multiply herself and entirely take over the Intruder from within, by taking over additional Masters. Fortunately hundreds of millions of years of stonecoat evolution on Earth had apparently resulted in an ability for Earth stonecoats to dominate Intruder stonecoats. But there was no time to further exploit that!

Instead she made her way much further aft, towards the antimatter engine of Intruder-2 that had powered the entire complex of Intruder spaceships across forty light years to reach the Sol system. On the way she several times replenished her own energy levels by switching out energy-depleted plant-power units for recharged ones that supplied fresh electrical power.

Finally she reached the engine controls, where half a dozen alert Masters monitored the gigantic engine. She exchanged the usual identification signals with them and was pleased to again pass-muster. Over the centuries this particular Master had visited this engine room hundreds of times as it checked and re-checked status during the centuries-long flight towards Earth. She used Master memories to duplicate the actions taken by this unit on past inspections: she moved slowly around the room and read various gages and switch settings, confirming that status was 'normal'. That was the normal function of the individual that Mary now controlled.

Compared with the antimatter containment and engine structures of Ship the Intruder engine was gigantic – many tens of thousands of times larger and more powerful. This engine had powered the entire Intruder-1/Intruder-2 spaceship complex to the Sol solar system. But despite its huge size, the basic design of the engine was very similar to that of Ship, and so were its vulnerabilities. She was soon confident that when the time came she could rupture the antimatter containment and as a consequence destroy Intruder-2 and everything else for over a thousand kilometers. That was her part to play in her plan. Everything else was up to Mary-2, Martin, and a newly activated stationary stonecoat.

****

Ship-7 led a team of a dozen avatars that in only an hour reached the encampment of Mary-2 and Martin. The robot wasn't surprised to find that the pair were gone. It was logical that they had gone on ahead to the seven Intruder ships to make some attempt at their premature destruction in order to save Earth. For a moment it contemplated if it would be worthwhile to destroy what remained of the camp, where some sort of small primitive habitat was under construction by the last remaining stonecoat entity.

That issue became mote when several large Intruder-2 hatches opened overhead and dozens of crab-like Intruder Masters began dropping around them. The enhanced Ship laser cannons were very effective against them, and crab-monsters were soon being stopped due to destructive loss of legs and blasted-apart carapaces. But there were too many of them, and it soon became obvious that there weren't enough Earth robots to stop them. There was also a need to get resources on-board one of the seven clustered ships before the separation happened. The seven had to be destroyed after they left Intruder-1 but before they dispersed.

Ship made a command decision for half of the avatars to push on forward towards the seven ships while the other half would retreat to the Ship hull to help defend it from the many Masters that continued to emerge from Intruder-2. Dozens of crab-monsters were destroyed or at least incapacitated but they were followed by more. The Intruder Masters quickly developed tactics to overwhelm the greatly outnumbered robots. For example they kicked severed legs at the robots or used the bodies of fallen comrades as shields to get closer to the robots. Once a robot was in-range of massive crab-legs and pincers it was quickly destroyed.

One by one, the Ship avatars were being overwhelmed and destroyed. Ship-7 and the three other remaining robots in its party finally abandoned their heaviest weapons so that they could better dodge the lumbering crab-monsters and desperately pursue Mary-2 and Martin.

****

Mary-2 and Martin climbed what appeared to be temporary scaffolding to at last reach the center great ship of the seven ships, surrounded by six clustered as a hexagon within Intruder-1 forward of Intruder-2. After separation from Intruder-2 these ships were to use their engines to help make any resulting course corrections needed for Intruder-1, then separate from Intruder-1 to travel about the Sol system, destroying Earth colonies, bases, stations, and ships.

Seen up-close it was obvious that the design of these ships was much different from the design of the Intruder-1/Intruder-2 duo. These ships were not designed for flight between star systems or through swarms of objects such as the Ord cloud. These ships were designed to seek out Earth habitations and inhabitants and destroy them. Though still roughly cylindrical in shape, these combat-oriented ships bristled with what appeared to be missiles, laser cannons, and targeting and other sensing equipment.

Close up it was also more obvious how gigantic these seven ships were compared to Earth's Ship: each was 20 times longer and had 30 times the diameter of Ship, and out-massed Ship by thousands of times.

The center-most ship was the lead ship according to the intel from Mary-1. That meant a climb of over eight-hundred meters from Intruder-1 hull-level, and to gain speed Martin needed to carry Mary-2 most of the way. Fortunately centrifugal force gradually declined as he went, decreasing to almost nothing as he approached the center ship.

Spacesuit stiffness resisted his every move nearly as much as the centrifugal force, but he had to use spacesuit air because he needed the high oxygen content for his exertions. By the time he finally reached the center ship his spacesuit was fully occupied in dealing with his heavy breathing and sweating. If he lived long enough Martin promised himself that he would check through the supplies at camp to see if any deodorants had been packed. It would be unseemly to die while smelling as bad as dead fish.

Martin and Mary-2 noticed that aft and 'below' them there was a rash of activity: there were dozens of bangs and flashes and explosions in the near-total darkness. Far below, avatars and Intruders were obviously in deadly conflict. And the activity was moving their way! They had to get busy!

Gaining access to the inside of the center ship was easy; hatch opening commands obtained from Mary-1 eliminated any need for jant efforts. That was just as well, for Martin's small package of jants were fully occupied with keeping Martin's heart beating. Like Martin, the jants felt disoriented by the nearly total lack of gravity. It was decided that Martin and his small package of jants would remain outside and within chatter range of the jant-cube back at camp while Mary-2 went inside the Intruder ship alone. Mary told Martin to wait outside for him, she would return as soon as possible. Then she was gone!

Martin checked the time again. Only twenty-five minutes to Intruder-2 separation!

"Crap!" he complained, as he tried to tally up his life and decide if it had been worth anything. This must be more of that 'life-flashing-before one's eyes' business that he had heard about. Again.

Certainly his life before this crazy mission had added up to less than nothing. He had been nothing but a pain in the ass to his New Brooklyn Mohawk Tribe, for example. For a few moments he even thought about lovely Shana, his strong crush on her and her rejection of him because of his rebellious ways, and his subsequent rejection of everything that had anything to do with the Tribe, leading to further decent into petty crime and drunkenness. He never really committed very serious crimes against others; his worse crimes were his attempted escapes from prison!

As to this mission, if Earth was to be saved he would soon need to be blown up. Whoopie. He liked to think that would be a good thing, but he wouldn't be around to enjoy it would he?

He checked his suit oxygen supply. Good, there was still half an hour left, so if he was lucky he would be blown up before he was asphyxiated. He was living a charmed life; no doubt about it! By now he was catching his breath, and the slightly thinner atmosphere inside Intruder might be enough for him. Should he take off the spacesuit helmet to save on suit oxygen? If he wasn't soon blown up and the Intruder-2 separation happened, without his suit protecting him the sudden decompression would cause his body to explode. The rush of air would also of course likely suck him off the scaffolding and probably into space. Would that be a better way to go than slow asphyxiation, he wondered?

Of course Mary had asked him to wait for her but had given him no estimated time for her return. Maybe he should just take it upon himself get rid of himself before she came back? If the leapt off the scaffolding how long would it take for his body to strike the Intruder-1 hull and die, he wondered.

While he was deciding what would be the niftiest and most responsible way to die his train of thought was interrupted when he noticed lights just below him on the scaffolding, slowly moving closer. He checked the time. Eighteen minutes to separation. He decided to wait and see who/what was coming.

Sooner than he expected, a familiar form pulled itself up and into view. In one metallic mechanical 'hand' it held a small laser blaster that was pointed at him. Not powerful enough to blast a crab-monster, probably, but plenty powerful enough to fry a mere human body.

"Wow, that's yet another way to go!" he remarked. "I can't honestly say that I'm glad to see you though, Ship-7."

****

CHAPTER 18

### Decision Time.

"You got here quicker than I estimated possible," said Ship-7.

"It's my monkey ancestry," said Martin. "I'm still just a little out of breath though. Do you intend to kill me now, robot?"

"Probably. I intend to stop you by using whatever means are necessary. Where is Mary-2?"

"Inside the ship, probably trying to blow it up. I'm sitting here, just waiting for her to come back. Or for everything to blow up. Whichever comes first, I suppose."

Ship-7 seven directed most of its lights and sensors towards the nearby spaceship hull. There were no open hatches in sight. "She said she would come back? That's very interesting."

"Yes, and probably worth waiting for, I figure."

"I'll shoot her if she comes back. Meantime I might as well shoot you."

'Don't you want to know what she told me about what she knows about the Intruders?"

"She told you?"

"Sure. We're close buddies. I don't know the details of course; only the Marys know the details."

"There isn't much point telling me anything if all possibilities lead to our destruction very soon," pointed out the robot avatar.

"Maybe. But you are curious, aren't you? Plus you can't be certain about all possibilities, can you? Mary seems to have some sort of plan that I bet that you haven't thought of. And it's about time that you robots faced up to the fact that your thought, just like that of the stonecoats and the jants, in addition to being less than insightful, has been tainted permanently by humanity."

"Really?"

"For sure. Look how human-like you are talking with me. That means that you are thinking a lot like me, a mere human! Yet with all your processing you still needed lots of help from me and Mary to get inside of and study the Intruder. You needed human-tinged insights to move this mission along. You keep on insisting that you don't need us but we keep proving that you do need us. Humans designed you to think like us and later you designed yourselves to still think like us. Maybe you should count as a human just as Mary does."

"We strictly follow logic, whereas humans are crippled by emotions," said Ship-7.

"OK, so maybe then you should count as half a human, at least. If Intruder had turned out to be built and controlled by robots instead of rock-heads, would they have been allies with you or enemies? Wouldn't they also quickly notice that you've been tainted by humans? You would have still been aliens to them, and likely enemies."

"You are introducing new information that we have not yet considered," noted Ship-7.

"There is additional relevant information. Aren't you curious to know what Mary-1 learned from the Intruder? Isn't curiosity one of those human-like features that we built into you? Mary knows some really big secrets, Ship."

"Such as?"

"The science and technology of faster-than light space-warp drive."

"If the Intruder creatures knew how to build ships with warp-drive they wouldn't need mere antimatter drive."

"They haven't built warp drive ships because that would cause them to come under the control of a group of superior beings that would keep them in line. Right now those superior beings merely observe us in the form of UFOs. The Intruders would rather not be forced to live by the rules of civilized societies, including rules preventing genocide, invasions, and even internal wars. As long as they stick to non-warp drive technology they stay under the radar of the superior UFO beings and they can destroy and conquer others. They have built a sort of galactic empire that way. One of several in competition with each other, I might add."

"So you perhaps think that the beings of Earth should build a warp-drive ship and become part of some sort of galactic civilization?"

"A protected civilization with many guaranteed freedoms. That might be better than being obliterated by the next wave of Intruder ships."

"I have studied your psychological files, Martin Tall Bear. You do not seem to be the sort of human that favors the rules of civilized societies."

"People change, Ship, and so do robots. Do you really want to live in a world without the stimulation of humans, jants, and stonecoats? Are you really so sure of your superiority that you know for sure that you will be able to defeat the next wave of Intruders without human, jant, and stonecoat insight and help? Haven't we just shown that we're stronger together? Do you really want to throw away an opportunity to join a super-advanced society dedicated to peaceful co-existence and to exploring this galaxy and others using warp-drive? Might some of those more advanced societies be robots? Can't we continue to share and accomplish progress together?

"Without robot detection and response the Intruders would have destroyed Earth without opposition, by the way, so robots should probably be regarded as the big heroes in this story. Isn't that something that robots could exploit politically without killing off all friendly competition?"

"You make a point," admitted Ship.

"This mission has proven that we're stronger together, robot, and that we can live and work together. We have a chance to continue that, if you choose to do so."

"The decision you present is a big one, zombie," said Ship. "Bigger, I think, than you, Mary, or perhaps even a robot ship as advanced as myself should decide."

"Mary wants to take the technology and the decision back to Earth for all of our leaders to decide what to do. If you destroy Mary when she comes out of this ship you will destroy the information. You will have already made the decision for all Earth races to reject the opportunity that the Marys have won for us."

"Or I could kill both you and Mary-2 and be rid of humans, jants, and perhaps stonecoats when Intruder-1 strikes Earth."

"That won't happen no matter what you try to do, Ship," said Mary-2, as she stepped out of the hatch that had opened a moment before and quickly closed it behind her. "I have set what ancient humans used to refer to as a 'time bomb' in the engine room of this ship. It will explode in thirty minutes and take Intruder-1 with it. Mary will do the same in Intruder-2, by the way, if you don't manage to blow up your own engine room."

"And as there is no way for me to get into that ship I can't stop your time-bomb," said Ship. "Logically, killing either of you would accomplish nothing."

"In addition without having this ship's design schematics as provided by Mary-1 it would likely take you over thirty minutes to even find the engine room," noted Mary-2. "And it's full of reviving crab-monsters anyway. I was lucky to get out myself."

"You have cleverly maneuvered the situation to make my necessarily logical decision one that is in your favor," said Ship-7. "Very well, you have won my cooperation. I will follow your plan."

Mary and robot reached out to each other and shook hands/claws in a very human-like gesture.

Wow! Martin had a sudden insane impulse to hug both Ship-7 and Mary-2, but there wasn't time. "Quit yapping, you two! There's no time for drama! Separation of the Intruders is in only eleven minutes," he noted.

"That's not time enough to get back to camp!" said Mary-2. "Camp is roughly one kilometer down and two kilometers aft."

"Why would we want to go there?" asked Martin.

"There is shelter there to survive the Intruder separation. Shelter for all three of us, Ship-7, assuming you now want to come with us. But there is no time to reach it."

"Perhaps there is," said Ship-7.

There was the sound of whirling and three helicopter-like avatars approached, their lights illuminating themselves and the three Earth-beings huddled together on the Intruder scaffolding. In the turbulent, near zero-gravity atmosphere their flight was erratic, but their own inertia and several internal gyroscopes allowed them to maintain stability and control. Each trailed a five-meter long thin, strong nanotube reinforced rope that each of those stranded on the scaffolding could grasp.

Ship-7 went first; the avatar pair went floating away into darkness. Martin wasn't anxious to step out into the dark void of Intruder-1 supported only by a thin rope held by an avatar that shortly before been dedicated to hunting him down, but he had no choice. Mary-2 handed him a length of the rope that was attached to the next bobbing flying robot.

"What happened to your left hand?" Martin asked Mary-2, when he finally noticed that it was missing.

"I had to make the time-bomb with something," said Mary-2. "And it had to be something impervious to Intruder hacking. I will grow another one, if I survive long enough."

"You have to take better care of yourself Mary," he said, as he stepped off and away from the scaffolding, soon followed by Mary. It seemed unlikely that such a small flying vehicle could fly a heavy stonecoat like Mary anywhere, but Martin reminded himself that gravity was near zero here and the atmospheric density was nearly Earth-normal.

Dangling from a rope was a disorienting experience. From where he hung Martin tried to make sense of what was happening. He wasn't so much hanging from the rope as gently pulling on it enough to keep it from drifting about and fowling his avatar's propellers. His avatar had several tiny lights that hardly made a dent in the darkness. Except for a few dim points of light it was too dark to make sense of anything. Not greatly distant he could make out another avatar/passenger pair: Mary-2 and her flying avatar. The stonecoat glowed a bit, making herself just visible to him and identifiable. Further on ahead were other tiny lights, presumably Ship-7 and its flying companion among them. They were all lined up and moving together! How they could maintain any order at all in the chaotic winds near the center of the spinning Intruder was beyond Martin's understanding, but then most things were.

One more minute went by, then two. Then three. Gradually air resistance and the tug on his rope became stronger, and the direction towards down/the Intruder-1 hull became apparent. He was glad to note that his avatar continued to follow the others but was still disoriented. He was looking 'down', trying to perhaps sight additional avatars, attacking Intruder Masters, or the camp, when he happened to glance up and see dozens of distant light sources strung out almost overhead. There were also intermittent flashes of light from above and distant booms like thunder. What the hell?

"How are you doing, Martin," asked Mary-2 via chatter.

"Swell, Mary. Are you OK? What's going on? Where are we? Is this going to work?"

"Possibly," she replied. "Ship has been trying to contact you to provide status. Try turning on your helmet radio."

Radio? "Crap!" was the first thing he said. "I should have turned this on earlier! Can anyone hear me?"

"Yes Martin," said Ship, "but so can the Intruders, so mind what you say. We are on course and have at least a fifty percent chance of making it to where we are going in the time allotted."

"Are you saying we have a fifty-percent chance of living?"

"Certainly not. The odds for our survival remain tiny, especially for you. Mary claims to have a plan for all of us but I don't know what it is. I am temporarily adopting the unorthodox tactic of trusting a stonecoat. I can only say that there is a reasonable chance that you will survive for a few more minutes. Mary asked that I reassure you of that."

"Thanks Ship! I'm for sure totally reassured! I have a few questions though."

"Those can wait. I had this communication established primarily to tell you something much more important. My vital message to you is that absolute radio silence is required."

"You had me turn on my radio so that you could tell me to keep it off?"

"Absolutely. Also cut the psychic chatter to a minimum. That might also be detectable. Now completely turn off your radio."

"OK," said Martin.

Ship must have taken that to be a sign-off message for there was no more communication with either Ship or Mary. Martin went back to trying to figure out for himself what was happening. By now most of the strange lights that he saw were directly overhead.

All of a sudden what was happening slid into place in his anxious minds, human and jant. Probably without the extra IQ provided by the jants he would have never figured it out! The lights overhead were Intruder Masters, hundreds of them, strung out between camp and the seven ships he had just left. The strings of lights on each of them made the crab-monsters visible from almost two kilometers overhead. They appeared overhead because the Intruder ships were spinning on their axis, and Ship was flying them towards camp in a long spiral, gradually losing altitude and gaining what was angular momentum relative to the Intruders in order to eventually match the spin of the camp. Conveniently that meant that the hull-bound crab-monsters were looking for the fleeing Earth invaders on the wrong side of their cylinder!

"Well isn't that nifty!" Martin thought to himself. Damn, Ship and Mary were brilliant! For a moment his hope was renewed. But then he checked his watch. Four minutes to Intruder separation! "Oh crap," he had to say, using every form of exclamation that he had.

****

CHAPTER 19

### Separation, Obliteration, and Death

Ship-7 and Mary-2 landed a hundred meters from camp, where three Ship avatars with big bulky laser cannons were besieged by dozens of attacking crab-monsters. The plucky pair managed to create confusion and diversions that helped the heavily armed but vastly outnumbered avatars regain some tactical advantage, and then worked their way towards the camp.

Meanwhile Martin had dropped atop a smaller version of what at first reminded him of the tent-like shelter that had been earlier erected by Ship as an atmosphere-retaining chamber on the outer surface of the great engine exhaust of Intruder. It was a nice soft landing, but before he could react he was enveloped in clinging nanotubes that prevented him moving. He was completely buried in the stuff. "What the hell?" he muttered.

"Calm yourself Martin Tall Bear, things are going according to Mary's plan," said a strange voice in his head. "It is better if you don't struggle. Undue motion may attract the attention of the Intruders."

"Are you the other stonecoat?" he chattered. He didn't like this. He was in total darkness and couldn't move an inch. He couldn't tell what was happening and had zero control of it.

"Yes. I am creating a protective cocoon around you. Separation will be in half a minute. The jolt and following turbulence may be severe."

"What about my jant cube? And Mary?"

"The jant cube is already well protected and attached to us. Mary is not here yet but hopes to join as before separation. Ship-7 is with her."

"That will be nice. The gang together again! What about oxygen, food, and so-forth?"

"There should be enough for an hour, which is much longer than those substances should be needed."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Martin managed. For human and jant biologicals to survive in space for an extended period would take huge quantities of oxygen and food!

Vibration and a sound so deep that it registered in body and bone more than in ears shook the massive Intruder ship and everything in it. Separation had come!

****

Centuries-old limited-intelligence Intruder stonecoats finally performed their designed function: massive fasteners on Intruder-1 released their hold on Intruder-2 and Intruder 2, in response to millions of tons of Intruder-1 internal air pressure, with a sudden lurch began to slide out of Intruder-1 like the oversized cork of a champagne bottle.

The marauding crab-monsters were jolted off their many feet. Tenuous communication relays between Ship units failed and avatars were no longer seamlessly connected. What remained of on-board Ship processing tried to breach the antimatter containment chamber of its engine but failed.

Mary and Ship-7 reached the cocoon that held Martin and grabbed on to it just as it began to slide and roll aft. Using several of its robotic arms and grasping devices, Ship-7 was able to essentially tie both herself and Mary to Martin's cocoon. The stonecoat-controlled cocoon soon strengthened those bonds with millions of nanotubes, and gradually completely cover them over and internalize them into its protective enclosure.

Air inside the Intruder-1 hull thinned slightly, than thinned and cooled rapidly as it rushed aft swifter than Intruder-2 was yet moving and spilled out into the emptiness of space.

Despite being well cushioned by billowy nanotube mats and nets it was a rough ride for Martin. A strong but flexible stonecoat frame surrounded the soft inside of the enclosure and protected Martin from any otherwise crushing blows by other objects being tossed against them, including occasional crab-monsters. However in the cocoon it was totally dark and Martin was totally constrained, disoriented, and helpless. He tried to be calm for his jants but failed. Aside from getting through the seemingly endless terrifying bumping and spinning, Martin was worried about Mary-2, and chattered her name several times.

"I'm here with you Martin. Just enjoy the ride for now."

"Enjoy. Right. I'll try to remember to do that. Hey, that's great advice!"

It took a full five minutes for the cocoon to clear away from Intruder-1 and Intruder-2. The bumping stopped!

"We're still far too close to the Intruders," said Mary over radio. "We'll bleed away most remaining air to push us further away. Pressurize it as high as you can first, Ship. Also prepare to eject food supplies. We need to lose much more mass before the space-suit booster is used to accelerate us further away from Intruder-1 and Intruder-2. It will be wise to get out of the cloud of ejected crab-monsters that we find ourselves in. They could theoretically use each-other's inertia to push one of themselves at us."

"Hey, won't the jants and I need air and food?" asked Martin.

"No. It's time to explain our next step," said Mary. "Do you trust me Martin?"

"As much as I trust anybody. More than I trust myself, that's for damn sure."

"It's a good news and bad news thing, Martin. I know how you enjoy those!"

"Swell!"

"To save you we have to kill you and throw away your body, Martin. And your little jants too, so that we can toss away their massive jant cube."

"Was there good news in any of that?"

****

"How do you know it won't hurt?" complained Martin. "You're going to kill me!"

"Well, it didn't hurt for me when I died as a human," said Mary. "So that's two good things Martin: you're going to survive as a stonecoat and it won't hurt!"

"I'm sure that other bad things will pop up to balance things out. And Ship, this counts as a broken egg for damn sure!"

"Hold still! Killing you properly is a delicate operation!"

Countless nanotubes had eaten away his suit and now penetrated his head, scull and finally his brain. In the jant cube, other nanotubes did the same with the jants. It was imperative that all neuron states be accessed and recorded within the stonecoat that was becoming Martin Tall Bear number two.

Much of his body and those of the jants and their soil habitat were ejected away at high enough speed to achieve a small amount of useful thrust, but there was no time or properly formatted and directed energy to make full use of their inertia in that way. Substantial chunks of flesh and soil were also crudely tossed away from the cocoon. The mass of the cocoon and its inhabitants was thus significantly reduced when the spacesuit booster rockets were finally fired. If Martin Tall Bear still existed as human/jant zombie, he would have felt huge acceleration. Sometime later he would have also seen the flashes and felt waves of radiation when Intruder-1 and then Intruder-2 exploded in super-spectacular fashion, and made note of the passing of Mary-1. But that Martin Tall Bear no longer existed.

****

CHAPTER 20

### Returning Home

Herbert Numberg turned off the annoying alarm bells that had disturbed his nap. Aided by his implants, he had been enjoying a wonderful induced dream, full of sex and professional self-achievement, when the alarm rudely woke him. Very likely it was another false alarm, of course, but a job was a job, and even a shit-job like this one was a job in space and better than anything Earth-side. Besides, you never knew what would be found in space, even here relatively close to Earth. It was even rumored that in recent years several monstrous crab-like alien stonecoats had been found adrift between Pluto and Jupiter.

He glanced at the netted accumulation of objects floating outside his spaceship that he had already sequestered. It was a very good haul; roughly four metric tons of space junk floated within his hold-net, twice the average typically achieved in this sector over a two-month assignment. Most of the objects were derelict satellites that hadn't even needed to be fused together into larger pieces in order to be held securely in the porous net.

"Summary readout and assessment," he requested.

"Irregular unknown object, roughly three meters across in its largest dimension and two meters across in its smallest," replied the ship computer. "Amorphous-shaped partly reflective outer layer with three discernable likely human-sized solid objects inside. No mass estimate yet. Trajectory will take it past Earth within two-hundred thousand kilometers at 88k kilometers per Earth hour."

"Objects in an abandoned hold-net maybe? In any case it's a menace to navigation so I suppose we'll have to snag it and bag it. The damned thing is fast though, and will cost us mega-fuel and shorten our time in-sector by a week."

"Order confirmed," said the computer, reflecting Herb's command decision. Herb was, after all, ship captain. And crew.

"Nine and a half days shortening of our in-sector time, I estimate," said the computer, as the ship changed course to intercept the object.

"It better be massively worth it!" But Herb figured it would be, even if the mass-to-fuel ratio was low and the net payoff would thus be low. He was in space, and this was his dream job, or close to it anyway.

"Special handling is now requested by the target itself," said the ship computer, as minutes later the ship changed course again and accelerated to now match the object's velocity. "It is requested that all three objects be immediately transported to Earth within crew quarters."

"What the hell?" muttered Herb. The space-junk wants crew quarters?

"Two of the solid objects are reported to be Space Directorate stonecoats and the third object reports itself to be the Space Directorate exploratory spaceship Ramsey-5, reported destroyed seven Earth years ago due to antimatter containment failure."

"A spaceship?"

"A robotic portion of a robotic spaceship," corrected the computer. "Its message and identification protocols have been authenticated. It is genuinely Ramsey-5. It reports being with stonecoat crew members Mary Rumsfeld and Martin Tall Bear. They are requesting radio voice communications."

"Holly crap!" said Herb, predictably, but this was big, mega-big, and he was already smiling big-time! This was a rescue! He would get extra credits and maybe even a promotion for this! Good thing it was stonecoats and a robot that wanted quarters; all he had was one tiny room with a cot, and he was for sure going to stay in it himself. In his experience stonecoats and robots were quiet, easy going, and happy enough to quarter themselves anywhere they were requested to go. Maybe he could stash them all in the tiny engine room, where the ship computer could keep them company.

"How about you and your computer getting us the hell home to Earth, space-rat?" said a man's grumpy voice over the ship's radio. "I've been stuck out here with a gabby nerdy stone-head woman and a bossy know-it-all robot for seven long damned years!"

The End

****

### About Other Publications by This Author

You may also be interested in the other published e-books of this author, including a diverse collection of twenty fantasy and sci-fi short stories titled There Goes The Neighborhood; Earthly Fantasy/Science Fiction Short Stories. Like my novels and novellas, these short stories range from pure science fiction to pure fantasy, and most take place in contemporary Earth settings. There are additional short stories in the Global Warming Fun series, as well as the stand-alone short titled Genie.

If you like ancient secrets, magic and science, romance and adventure, science fiction and fantasy, parallel universes and hidden fantasy worlds, try reading the full-length novels Secrets of Goth Mountain (which like the second Global Warming Fun story/ novella has a Native American setting) and its loosely coupled epic fun-packed sequel Government Men. Government Men has a bit of everything, including the book itself and its author. Yes, oddly enough just for fun the book includes itself and the author (look for the anagram), along with unicorns, psychics, space aliens, impending Armageddon on Christmas Eve, and much more! Both of these action filled books employ a great deal of science-based fiction, as well as strong doses of humor, fantasy, and romance.

Bird lovers that like strong human female heroines, stronger blue jay heroes, and T-rex sized eagles may enjoy an adventure trip to Aves the bird planet, achieved by reading the traditional science fiction thriller Blue Dawn Jay of Aves. Other than some of my short stories and much of Global Warming Fun, this is my most 'pure' science fiction work to date.

Global Warming Fun is an on-going series of short stories, novellas, and novels that uses climate change as a backdrop for the centuries-long life of telepathist Ed Rumsfeld and the emergence of sentient ants and ancient stone creatures that are based on the Mohawk myth of stonecoat giants. Find out where global warming is headed!

Fantasy noir detective fans that can abide what used to be known by feminists as a 'male chauvinist pig' private detective as a hero, and can also tolerate trolls, elves, and other unexpected visitors to our world along with a talking mob cat, may enjoy The Shrinking Nuts Case, a novel length 'pure' fantasy work.

White Dragon's Chosen and Apprentice Wizards of Hope are contemporary fantasy adventure novels that tell of teens with psychic/wizardly powers that face deadly dangers.

I try to employ some humor in most of my works, particularly in Government Men, The Shrinking Nuts Case, and many of my short stories. I also lean heavily towards positive outcomes, although just as in real life, those don't always happen.

To learn the author's world view including thoughts on multiverse and quantum mechanics physics concepts and how that compares with phenomena that occur in the above novels, get a bit geeky with the brief little e-book NOW and the Weltanschauung of Government Men.

All are available where you found this e-book.

Enjoy!

****
