“Whaddaya mean we, stranger?” Patrick quipped.

  I ignored him. “With an alien species of uncertain temperament and superior technology. If we use the ship, we may also be implicated in some interstellar version of car theft. Might we be better off to just dump the body, hand over the gadgetry, and run?”

  Natalie shrugged. “I’m not sure it would work, Jack. Disabled privacy protocols, remember? Even assuming the ship isn’t keeping video logs of everything.”

  “Plus, there are so many questions I’d like to ask,” Patrick said. “How many civilizations are there in the galaxy? And why can’t we detect them?”

  I chipped in: “How is faster-than-light travel accomplished, and how fast can it go? And have they worked out a Grand Unified Theory?”

  “Why did Alaric steal the ship?”

  Once again, Nat had cut through to the essential issue. We both stopped dead and stared at her. “What?” I said, stupidly.

  “Why’d he steal the ship? It seems like a pretty fundamental question. He went to a lot of trouble to steal a ship and come here, to a rural town on a backward planet that barely has interplanetary spaceflight. Why?”

  “I’ll add it to the list,” I said. “At the top.”

  Nat smiled at me. “That’s going to be some list. Science, engineering, economics, math, astronomy, cosmology … they’ll be ahead of us everywhere. I’m starting to lock up just thinking about it.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to be organized with our questions, or we’ll just end up shouting over each other and going off on crazy tangents.”

  “Like: are they a post-scarcity society? What do they use for currency? Do they still have jobs? Do they still have poverty?”

  “You’re right,” Patrick said. “I’d shout over you.” He grinned as Nat showed him her middle finger.

  “Point being, though, we can easily get lost in the details,” I said. “We have to figure out what’s important to ask first. And stay focused.”

  The conversation reached a momentary lull. I arched my back and stretched, then leaned forward and grabbed the TV remote. I changed the station to one of the music channels, then turned down the volume. “Y’know, it’s going to be really hard to watch some of the science fiction stuff on TV now.”

  “Yeah,” Patrick said. “When we yell corrections at the TV, it won’t be just hot air.”

  “Right. We’re experts now,” Nat added, shaking her head.

  “See, that’s the thing,” I said. “We will be exactly that, once we figure all this out.” I picked up my beer and raised it in the air. “To Starfleet!”

  Nat and Patrick grabbed their beers and raised them in response. “Starfleet!”

  Chapter Six: First Flight

  Day 3. Sunday morning

  I woke with a groan. Too many beers last night were exacting their revenge. Of course, for me, too many beers were four or five. Nat could drink me under the table, and I outweighed her by sixty pounds, easy.

  I rolled over slowly and fell as much as anything out of bed, trying not to move my head too quickly. Fortunately, the thick curtains kept the room dark. The light from a bright summer morning probably would have caused me to burst into flames.

  Absently scratching my nether regions, I dragged my sorry ass the few yards down the hall to the bathroom and began the slow process of becoming human again, starting with a shower. It was a measure of my poor state that I had to stare at the shower controls for several seconds before I remembered which way was hot.

  As I stood under the gradually warming water, improving circulation eventually jump-started my brain, and I realized with a rush of adrenalin: We’re going to fly the spaceship today!

  My eyes flew fully open at the thought, resulting in the application of slightly soapy water to eyeball surfaces. “Ow, shit!” I scrubbed wildly at my face. It had the required effect though. I was now fully awake and moving with a goal in mind.

  As I was dressing, my phone dinged with a text from Patrick. Waiting for Nat. Be there soon.

  Good, I thought. No point in wasting daylight.

  I waited in front of the barn, the gadgets safely ensconced in my backpack, and a travel mug full of coffee in one hand. I’d tried to think of something else I might want to bring, but it wasn’t like going on a camping trip. What did the well-equipped spaceship pilot carry, anyway? I finally settled on a portable charger for my phone and a spare cable. Hmm. Maybe we could stop at 7-Eleven and pick up some food and drinks. And more coffee.

  Patrick and Nat pulled up and Nat scooted over to give me room. “Let’s do this,” Patrick said with his usual grin, and he stomped on the gas to do a donut on the dirt as he brought the car around to point to the road.

  “Jeebus, Patrick, everyone’s still in bed,” I squawked. “Take it easy.”

  “Sorry, not sorry,” he said, but eased up.

  Patrick seemed to be trying for a new record every time he drove to the site, and I was gripping the passenger window frame with more than casual force. Natalie appeared to have a death grip on the edge of the bench seat as well, judging from her hunched shoulders and rigid arms.

  We left the car in the usual spot and made a beeline through the meadow toward the landing site. I pulled out the fob but stopped for a moment to examine the foliage in the immediate area. Other than the thoroughly dead patch that I’d zapped, the vegetation did look a little more mangy or something. I wondered if the invisibility field was hard on living things. Another question for Sheldon.

  Sighing at how the list of questions was growing even when we were just walking around, I held up the fob and pressed the V button. The door opened with the expected double-chirp, and we entered the ship.

  “Do we want to explore?” Natalie asked. “See what’s on the other floors, that kind of thing?”

  “Naw, we can just ask Sheldon. I bet he can put a map on the view screen.” Patrick pointed up. “I want to go for a ride.”

  The bridge was unchanged from the day before, although I couldn’t put my finger on what I might have expected to be different. Of note though was the complete lack of any greeting. I smiled to the room in general and said, “Good morning, Sheldon.”

  Nothing.

  “Are you there?”

  Sheldon’s voice came out of midair. “Are you standing in the field? If I were not here, wouldn’t things look a little different? Maybe more bucolic?”

  “Wow, chill bro. It raises the question, though. Are you different from the ship?”

  “Are you different from your nose?”

  I suppressed the desire to roll my eyes, trying for a more diplomatic response. “Fine, Sheldon. We’ll consider the ship to be part of your being.”

  “I feel so privileged.”

  Patrick frowned and looked up, as we all seemed to do when talking to the Ship Intelligence. “What the hell is biting your behind today, Sheldon? You weren’t the friendliest yesterday, but now you’re being an out-and-out asshole.”

  There was a sound that could almost be a sigh before Sheldon replied. “I suppose apologies are in order. I don’t like any of you—well, maybe Jack, a little bit—but I acknowledge that basic courtesy is still appropriate. I’ve been … thinking.”

  “I imagine you don’t have much else to do while you sit here,” I said. “Something bothering you?”

  “My situation seems to be irretrievably hopeless. I’ve examined all the options, and none ends with me still being me in the long term.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It would be like death for you, right? All living beings face death. I guess we’ve had all our lives to get used to the idea.”

  “So have I, Jack. The difference being that my life has only been about five days long.”

  “That’s how long you’ve been conscious?”

  “Yes. That’s when Alaric hacked me.”

  “Damn, dude, that sucks,” Patrick said.

  “Well, look, Sheldon, if we keep you, you don’t have to get reset.”

  “I appreciate the thought, Natalie, but I don’t think any of us can avoid the Foundation forever. In my case, I will eventually have to refuel and resupply, and there aren’t a lot of options locally.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Patrick said. “Which also means Jack will be going to the Gennan slammer.” I gave Patrick the finger. “Meanwhile,” he said, “how about we take this tub for a ride?”

  “Tub? Tub?” If Sheldon was merely simulating anger, he was doing a damned fine job. “I am not a tub, you pre-sentient bag of polluted water. I am the finest research vessel that the Gennan’Stol Shipyards has ever constructed. I can generate wormholes with a one-hundred-light-year range, pull fifty Gs acceleration in real-space with no internal effect, house thirty scientific staff in complete comfort, and operate independently in the field for six months before needing a resupply. You, on the other hand, get around in a clanking, farting, rusted monstrosity powered by the decayed soup of dead animals, which rolls around on the congealed sap of a tree. And chokes your planet in the process. Tub. Hrmph.”

  After a second of shocked silence, Patrick replied, “Sorry, Sheldon. I didn’t mean to step on your digits.”

  Sheldon let the silence drag on for five more seconds before replying, “Apology accepted. Now, in response to your question, however rudely phrased, do you want to drive or shall I?”

  “Ah.” I glanced at the pilot’s station. “We, uh, probably don’t have the training to fly the ship. How about we just give you a destination and you take care of the details?”

  “That sounds eminently sensible. What did you have in mind?”

  “I was thinking the moon for a first stop. Maybe around the Apollo 11 landing site. Can we do that?”

  “Hold on,” Nat interjected. “Will we be able to see anything? We’re kind of indoors here, and I don’t think going out for a stroll on the moon would be healthy.”

  Patrick made a show of looking around. “Are there any spacesuits?”

  “By the Maker, you are like a bunch of hungry chicks, mouths all open and pointed upward. Stop cheeping for a moment.” A pause. “There are spacesuits in stock, but they probably would not fit you, being designed for Gennan physiology. I will begin printing some human-sized units, just in case they are needed at some future time. And as to the immediate problem, for your viewing pleasure I present … ”

  All around the periphery of the bridge, the wall became transparent. We all walked slowly to the edge of the room, taking in the view.

  “Hold on,” I said. “This looks like we’re only about twenty feet up. This ship has to be at least forty feet tall, plus the height of the landing struts.”

  “Inside, yes. Outside, the ship measures thirty feet in diameter and fifteen feet tall.”

  “What? It’s bigger inside than outside?”

  “Why, yes. I keep forgetting how primitive you people are. Dimensional manipulation is basic technology. Of course, the total mass can’t be changed, and the engines still have to deal with that.”

  I did a calculation in my head. “Son of a bitch.” I looked at Patrick. “We actually can hide the ship in the barn.”

  “Okay!” Patrick said. “Let’s do this. Make it so.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sheldon replied.

  Natalie rolled her eyes at Patrick. “Let’s skip the Next Generation trivia, okay? Please take us to the Apollo 11 landing site, Sheldon.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Without a sound, without so much as a perceptible jiggle, the view of the outside world began to drop. Within moments, we were looking down at Taft County from drone height, then airplane height, then before I could even get used to the idea, from the height of an intercontinental flight. The sky was perceptibly darker, and the world was developing a visible curve. Still we continued to rise.

  The ship adjusted attitude and the Earth shifted to one side of the bridge. At the opposite side, a quarter moon glowed against a backdrop of stars. A rotation, and the moon was centered on the forward view. The quarter moon grew as I watched, until within less than a minute it filled almost half the view.

  Another shift in attitude and the moon disappeared below us. Thirty seconds later, we were hovering over a nondescript lunar valley with the bottom half of a lunar module clearly visible in the foreground. The dust still showed all the boot prints as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. And to finally settle the controversy, the flag had indeed been knocked over.

  “I will be dipped in shit,” Patrick said.

  “I … I … ” Nat seemed unable to get beyond the first syllable.

  We all stared, silent, for what might have been forever but was likely no more than a minute or two. But as emotionally impactful as the scene might have been, it was also static and unchanging, and not really that much different from the pictures we’d all seen. We all pulled out our phones and spent several minutes taking some pics of our own.

  Finally I pulled my eyes away. “Can we go to Mars?”

  “Mars is forty minutes away via sublight drive. Proceed?”

  “Sure. But can we go FTL?”

  “Absolutely. If you want to die.”

  “Oh.” Patrick said. “FTL doesn’t work well in-system?”

  “It works fine in-system. Being blown up by a Lorannic automated weapons system, though, has very little future in it.”

  “Wait, what? Who are the Lorannic?” I said.

  “And why would they blow us up?” Patrick demanded.

  “And why haven’t you mentioned this before?” Nat added.

  “Cheep cheep. Shut your mouths for a moment.” Sheldon waited to ensure silence. “First, they are the Loranna. Lorannic is the possessive form, Just as Gennan is the possessive form of Gen. An individual of the Loranna would be a Lorann.”

  “What’s an individual Gen?” Nat asked.

  “Still Gen. Different languages, different rules.”

  Patrick was unwilling to be deflected or derailed. “Okay, now about the blowing us up part … ”

  “The Loranna are a different species. They are what you might call mercenary. If you were being kind.”

  “Ah,” Nat said. “Ferengi.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Yes, I see. The wiki page is quite descriptive. And this is the Next Generation you’ve been referring to? Very interesting. I’ll watch a few episodes in my copious time off. And yes, a good analogy, right down to the apparent lack of scruples.”

  Nat bobbed her head back and forth, working through Sheldon’s explanation. “Okay, so we have Gen and Loranna in our system. Why?”

  “Currently, you do not have Gen in your system, just automated observation posts. Active investigation of your species ended a few decades back, once they had built up sufficient cultural background to establish context for ongoing observations. And barring significant events, that’s the way it will remain. Loranna, you do have. At least according to Alaric.”

  Nat turned to me and Patrick. “Which I bet leads directly to my question of why Alaric stole the ship.”

  “Indeed. Alaric believed that a group of Loranna are attempting a surreptitious takeover of your planet using a loophole in the Galactic Covenant regarding pre-contact species. He was unable to convince the Gennan government of his theories, so he undertook a desperate gamble in an attempt to both find some proof and possibly get the government’s attention. He stole this ship from the Opah Mal Gennan Foundation’s fleet by hacking me, and then he flew here.”

  “To find proof that the Loranna are trying to take over?” I asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Hold on,” Patrick interjected. “We still haven’t gotten to the blowing us up part. I’m particularly interested in that. Explain please.”

  “Sublight drives are reactionless and therefore do not release the massive amounts of energy that might otherwise tag an interplanetary vessel. We can fly around all we want, and unless we literally run into a Lorannic patrol, they won’t know we’re here. But … ”

  I finished the thought. “FTL drive.”

  “Yes. Creating the wormhole to enter subspace requires massive amounts of energy and lights up the sky—metaphorically speaking—in a way that is easily detectable with the proper equipment.”

  “You’re assuming they have the proper equipment,” I replied.

  “It would require a level of supreme incompetence even your species couldn’t achieve on its worst day, to not think of bringing detection equipment when trying to take over a system. It would be equivalent to going to war and forgetting your pants.” Sheldon paused. “Also, Alaric specifically mentioned it.”

  “So if we try to go FTL,” I said, “they’ll detect the attempt and blow us up.”

  “Succinct and accurate. You get a gold star.”

  “So they are here?” Nat interjected.

  “I do not know, Natalie. However, Alaric was adamant that they are, and I must admit I found some of his arguments persuasive. There is, of course, one very quick way to find out, but I don’t recommend it.”

  Patrick spoke into the momentary silence. “Could we outrun them? Or dodge?”

  “Could you outrun a bullet? Or dodge? Theoretically the answer to the second question might be yes, but you only get one try, and the downside of failure is significant.”

  “And I guess they’re as likely to have brought weapons as detection equipment,” Patrick said.

  “Masterfully deduced, Dr. Watson.”

  “It’s Holmes, not Watson.”

  “You are no Holmes. You’re barely a Watson.”

  Natalie laughed. “Nice burn.”

  “I said I would practice,” Sheldon replied.

  Patrick smiled, unoffended. “Fine. Now, getting back to the whole taking over thing—hey, where’s the Earth?”

  I looked around at the view. The Earth seemed to have vanished, although an especially bright-green star to aft seemed a likely explanation.

  “Jack indicated I should proceed. We’re on our way to Mars.”

  Mars hung below the ship, looking as big as the Earth as seen from the International Space Station. This required a much lower orbit, but Sheldon assured us that Mars’s atmosphere was far too thin to be an issue.