The lower deck wasn’t any more spacious. In places, Daniel could stand upright but he had to duck under wires, valves, and pipes that crossed the ceiling. Two workstations were slotted into cubbies on either side of a narrow corridor. Complex control panels were covered with displays and dials. A third Chitza occupied one of the seats.

  “Veronica,” Aussik said. “Our safety officer.”

  Daniel reached down to her height and ended up doing an awkward fist bump with the Chitza. Gender distinctions were fairly obvious in this species. Females had red-tipped quills instead of white.

  “Interesting name, Veronica. We Humans use it too.”

  “I know,” Veronica squeak growled. “I used to go by Onner, but I liked the sound of Veronica better, so I borrowed the name. V, vvvv, vverrr. Cool sound. We don’t use it in our words, but we should.” She rubbed her fur-covered ear. “Human language hurts a little. Probably the immersion training. No matter, I’m getting used to it.”

  “You all speak it well,” Daniel said. “Sorry it hurts.”

  Aussik and Veronica chanted in unison, “Pain heals a wounded soul!”

  The Chitzas seemed to have a clever motto for everything, but the power of their existential messages might be forever lost on Humans. Daniel made a mental note to ask about this particular chant later, assuming his relationship with the crew moved into congenial territory. Veronica seemed nice enough.

  Aussik led Daniel a few paces down the corridor and stopped at a Human-sized chair positioned next to a window. “Obviously yours.” He slid back a panel in the floor revealing a second window that looked straight down to concrete. “Once we’re underway, you’ll have the best view on the ship.”

  Opposite the chair, a half-sized door interrupted the maze of pipes and wires crisscrossing the bulkhead. Aussik cracked the door open to reveal a narrow closet, dark. “Water, toilet, that kind of thing. Big enough for Humans.”

  “Ha!” Veronica laughed from her workstation which was only ten feet down the corridor.

  “Give it a rest, V,” Aussik yelled to his colleague then turned back to Daniel. “Yeah, maybe she’s right. We don’t normally get Humans on a scout ship. Hell, we built a giant dummy back at base just to measure stuff. Might still have a few things wrong.”

  Daniel surveyed the collection of equipment performing who-knows-what function covering every surface. “Don’t worry, it feels cozy in here. Thanks for showing me around, Aussik.”

  A soft whir kicked in from somewhere further aft.

  “Stations!” Zeeno called from the upper deck. Aussik scrambled back up the ladder to the cockpit, and Veronica flipped a few switches on her panel. The second workstation remained unoccupied. Captain Zeeno seemed to be missing his fourth crew member.

  As whirring pitched higher, several clangs rang out from somewhere deeper in the ship. Was there a third deck? Given the window view straight down to the concrete tarmac, an additional deck couldn’t be thicker than a Chitza’s head, even with quills flattened.

  “Jeepsa crack fratz!” a muffled voice yelled from below. “Jockin’ Humans!”

  Veronica looked up at Daniel and smiled, showing two rather sharp canines. “Sorry, she means well.”

  “No offense taken,” Daniel said. He had no idea what might be going on below but staying polite would ensure their fourth crew member didn’t bare her own sharp teeth in anger. He imagined a Chitza bite could easily take off a finger.

  The whirring became a piercing whine, sending vibrations through the floor. Daniel found a seatbelt and buckled up. Just behind him, a floor cap the size of a sewer cleanout popped open. A Chitza head poked out, streaked with dirt. Drips of grey-green sludge hung from her chin.

  Intense eyes beneath filthy fur locked onto him like a cheetah spotting a lame impala. Her head quills had been sheered down to stumps on one side and dyed pink on the other. A metal bolt skewered one ear, causing the normally upright appendage to sag. Luminescent paint covered the claws on each paw giving them a distracting shimmer.

  Daniel smiled as best he could. “Hi, I’m Daniel Rice.”

  Eyes rolled to the top of her decorated skull. “Fratz!”

  “Nice to meet you,” Daniel said. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”

  He had no idea if her name was Fratz, or if he had just been the target of the most repugnant of Chitza swear words. Probably the latter by the foul look on the Chitza’s dirty face.

  The ship’s fourth crew member climbed out of the drainage pipe then pulled off a red checkered cloth tied around her stout waist and started cleaning fur and quills.

  “Stations!” came the call from above once more. The whine of spinning turbines outside had become too loud to ignore. “That means you, Beets.”

  Beets tossed the now-filthy rag into a bin then ambled up the corridor to the empty workstation. She punched a button with a balled-up fist. “Fratz!”

  Context, Daniel thought, is a wonderful thing. Now that he’d separated Chitza swearing from names, this journey could begin in earnest. It was a good crew on the whole. He’d dealt with a few unapproachable coworkers in his career. One eccentric among four wasn’t a bad ratio.

  The captain of this mission would be the key to its success, and Zeeno was clearly in charge. Being sympathetic to Human participation helped, but the captain hadn’t stated why Daniel had been invited. He knew about Nala, but that hardly seemed reason enough to have his crew take immersion language training or remodel his ship to accommodate another Human passenger. For now, Daniel tabled his questions. A long journey lay ahead. There would be time to get things sorted.

  Daniel turned to the only other passenger, who still clung to his shoulder. “What do you think, Sprig? Are we in good hands?”

  Sprig spoke softly, with the barest of vibrations flitting across its leaf. “Chitzas are excellent pilots. But they make poor confidants.”

  “How so?”

  “Litian-nolos have a saying. When a Chitza tells you two things, it is only because they are withholding a third.”

  “Interesting. I hadn’t heard that before.”

  “Now you have.”

  “What’s the brother and sister thing Zeeno mentioned?”

  The leaf adjusted its position on Daniel’s shoulder, hopping closer to his ear. “Chitzas are born in litters of twelve. Every time, exactly twelve identical twins. Dodeca-twins you could say. But more than twins, clones. Identical appearance, identical personality. For their first year of life, all twelve even share a single consciousness, a fascinating pattern of brain development that has been widely studied.”

  “Huh.”

  “Littermates are given the same name too, though adults sometimes adjust their name, as Veronica did. More importantly, all twelve undertake the same profession. It is their way.”

  Daniel began to put the pieces together. “So, it works like that for every profession? Pilots included?”

  “Yes. Pilots, copilots, safety officers, and mechanics. The Chitzas you have just met are siblings of those who were lost.”

  Daniel tapped his lower lip. “Important to understand, given the mission. Thanks for telling me.”

  “You are most welcome,” Sprig said.

  It explained the name Zeeno, used by both pilots of both missions. But it also revealed that the personal stakes in this mission weren’t limited to Daniel. Every crew member had a reason to grieve if it failed. A littermate might not have exactly the same meaning as a Human sibling, but Zeeno had already distinguished between the value of a brother or sister versus any other Chitza citizen. Humans had no lock on compassion and might not even rank in the top ten when it came to empathy for others. Daniel would need to keep that in mind as their journey played out.

  With a rumble, the scout ship lifted from the ground. Daniel peered through the floor window and watched the Litian-nolo spaceport shrinking beneath. They passed through several layers of clouds then banked to one side. The gas giant, Nolo, appeared through Daniel’s side window. No longer filtered by Litia’s atmosphere, its bold striped face looked a lot like a bluer version of Jupiter. A minute later, the last bit of atmospheric haziness disappeared, leaving only the stark darkness of space.

  “Stand by for 4-D,” Zeeno said from the top deck. His voice carried easily in the small ship. No need for an intercom or headsets.

  Veronica kept her gaze fixed on a large display where colored bar graphs overlayed diagrams of the ship from several views. At the opposite workstation, Beets studied a stream of text—portions highlighted—that apparently were enough to keep her informed on system details. With no view into the cockpit, Daniel could only assume Zeeno and Aussik were busy manipulating controls that would soon put the vessel into unnatural space created from curled up quantum dimensions.

  “Three, two, one,” Aussik called out. A dull pop and a slight twisting sensation were the only indications of the magic that had surely happened outside.

  Daniel peered out the window. Stars were still visible but now appeared strangely flat, like pinpricks on an immense sheet of black paper. A grin spread across his face. Soyuz astronauts who had been zapped into a fourth dimension of space several years ago had provided similar descriptions: a flat wall of stars.

  Nothing like being there yourself.

  Nolo’s crescent still filled most of the sky, but it now appeared thinner, like a basketball that had lost its air. Its moon Litia, still visible through the floor window, shrank rapidly.

  “Tau is within parameters,” Veronica announced.

  “Systems nominal,” Beets said.

  “Set Tau to minus nine, smooth transition,” Zeeno said.

  “You got it, Boss,” Aussik said, then yelled what appeared to be a cue for everyone else. “Initiating…”

  All four Chitzas shouted in unison, “Mash it, crash it, nothing stops us! Nobody beats a Chitza!”

  On either side of the ship, the whine of spinning turbines ramped up to a roar. Colors on Veronica’s display turned blood red. The wedge lurched, temporarily pressing Daniel into his seat.

  “Minus three,” Aussik called out. “Minus four.”

  Daniel had a vague understanding of what was going on. Nala had done much the same thing several years ago when she and Daniel had sent a cobbled-together probe thousands of light-years from Earth to a special place on an alien map. Now Daniel sat inside a similar probe. They had just ballooned a fourth dimension from its quantum size to a bubble big enough to surround the ship. As the bubble expanded, ordinary three-dimensional space along a chosen vector compressed. They weren’t really flying through space, though it looked like it outside the window. Instead, one dimension of space collapsed, folding like an accordion toward them. They measured the collapse using Tau. A value of 10-9 would compress by a factor of one billion, reducing light-years of interstellar space to almost nothing.

  “Minus seven,” Aussik called out. Tau equal to 10-7, already a compression factor of ten million.

  “Systems looking sweet,” Beets said.

  “Safety check is damn fine extra sweet,” Veronica said with a fist pump.

  “Keep her going then,” Zeeno said. “Take us up to minus twelve.”

  “Gotcha, Boss. Climbing to twelve.”

  Daniel no longer felt any pressure against his seat and wasn’t sure why it had occurred at all. Compressing space wasn’t the same as accelerating. More likely, the initial lurch had something to do with ramping up the spin on their turbines. Daniel was beginning to see why Nala had jumped at the chance to fly with the Chitzas. This small, claustrophobic ship was performing miracles of technology.

  Out the window, stars began to slide by. As Aussik called out ever higher Tau numbers, their apparent velocity in this weird expansion-compression state of spatial dimensions skyrocketed. Soon a blur of stars streaked by like water droplets on an airplane window at takeoff.

  Daniel checked in with his traveling partner. “You doing okay?”

  “I’ve never traveled like this before,” Sprig answered. The leaf bounced on its stem.

  “But you’re okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “Not scared?”

  “No. It feels… fun.”

  Daniel smiled. They’d been given a front row seat to spatial compression on an impressive scale. Indeed, nobody beat a Chitza.

  Veronica noticed their quiet conversation and leaned back from her workstation. “Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah, we’re loving it,” Daniel called back. “You really know your stuff.”

  “Guess where we are now.” The Chitza ruffled her red-tipped quills. She looked quite delighted with herself.

  “I have no idea,” Daniel said. “A hundred light-years from Litia? A thousand?”

  “Twenty thousand,” Veronica said. Tiny quills just above her eyes twitched. “We’re already leaving the galaxy!”

  “Really?”

  “No lyin’, no cryin’. Check it out yourself.” She waved him over to her workstation. Daniel unbuckled and gingerly walked down the short corridor. Except for a vibration in the floor, there was little feeling of motion.

  “Look here.” Veronica pointed to a display showing their current position among a field of stars. When she zoomed out, an arm of the Milky Way stretched across her screen. Their departure path, marked in yellow, crossed the arm and was just beginning to emerge from its top edge.

  The floor window provided visual proof. The enormous spiral arm filled the view. Uncountable stars mixed with glowing gases of violet and green along with darker patches of dust. Still oddly flat, but the 4-D weirdness didn’t subtract from their glorious perch above the Milky Way. More galactic arms stretched into view, each a magnificent spiral covering an impossibly vast region.

  Like looking at the intricate threadwork of a European palace carpet from one inch above its surface.

  “Definitely the best view I’ve ever had. Any chance I could get a peek of where we’re heading?” Daniel pointed to the deck above, hoping for permission.

  Beets grunted, but Veronica shrugged congenially. “Don’t touch anything. But ask the Boss when you get up there if you can hang out.”

  “Will do. Thanks, Veronica. You too, Beets.” Beets flashed teeth—more a snarl than a smile.

  With Sprig riding on his shoulder, Daniel climbed the ladder, squeezed through the hole between decks, and surfaced behind the cockpit hatchway. He leaned his head and shoulders inside.

  Zeeno held a yoke in one paw and stared at a panel that displayed a black wedge inside a magenta bubble. Lines to the left and right of the wedge seemed to indicate the boundaries of their trajectory through compressed space. Aussik had his own set of displays. One clearly showed a plan view of the Milky Way. The same yellow line marked their departure route, now poking well above the galaxy’s edge.

  “Mind if I watch?” Daniel asked.

  Zeeno glanced over his shoulder. “No problem. This part of our cruise will be routine while we monitor systems. A good time to talk.”

  “About?”

  “You, mostly.”

  Aussik called out, “Tau minus nine.”

  “What happens when you get to twelve?” Daniel asked. If the captain wanted to talk about Daniel’s reason for being here, getting a few basic questions answered seemed fair.

  Zeeno squeaked with gravelly elements in his voice. “My friend, getting to Tau minus nine is easy. We’re currently squashing space a billion times over. Interstellar distances. Any adolescent Torak with a backyard particle accelerator could do it. But getting to a trillion, Tau minus twelve? That’s intergalactic stuff. Way harder. Nobody gets that far without a Chitza compression turbine, and damn if we don’t have two of them!”

  He lifted one clawed finger in the air. “Now try a quadrillion, Tau minus fifteen. I dare you. Can’t be done.”

  Daniel lifted his own finger. “Unless you’ve uncovered a few secrets about additional quantum dimensions?”

  “Ha! I see the rumors were flying on Litia!”

  Daniel grinned. “Only the best. Can you do it?”

  Zeeno grinned with canines showing. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Out the forward window, another galaxy came into view, still faint compared to the Milky Way behind them, but enormous. It already filled most of the viewport.

  “Andromeda?” Daniel asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Big piece of real estate. But you have to get away from the glare of our own galaxy to really see it.”

  “Tau minus ten,” Aussik called out. Andromeda grew larger and brighter, showing beautiful strands of red clouds intermixed among its innumerable stars.

  “So, about you,” Zeeno said.

  “About me,” Daniel replied. Time to talk. This mission wasn’t just a joyride to the neighboring galaxy.

  “We could use your help.”

  “You have it, but I don’t know much about compression technology.”

  “Nah, we’ve got that covered. But you’re good with alien communication, shall we say.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I’ve met a few species, but we’re leaving them all behind.”

  “Not all. We’ve already discovered four compression-capable civilizations in Andromeda.” He gestured to the giant galaxy filling the viewport like a tour guide who points out the sights. “Three more in Triangulum. A couple in Whirlpool. There’s bound to be more too, but none of those places are where we’re going.”

  “Fifty-two billion light-years, or so I heard,” Daniel queried. “Is that distance even possible?”

  “Not easily,” Zeeno answered. “But you’re not a passenger on an ordinary Szitzojoot tug. On my ship… aw hell, the numbers don’t matter.”

  “Tau minus eleven,” Aussik called out.

  Andromeda drifted past the viewport like a mountain adjacent to a highway. They were already two million light-years from home. Dozens more smudges of light lay ahead, some with spiral shapes, some elliptical, some just amorphous blobs. Not a single one of them was a star. All galaxies.

  “We’re headed to a place we recently discovered. Beyond the horizon.”

  Daniel had no reason to believe the pilot was exaggerating. They’d already traversed a full megaparsec of space, several million light-years. A gigaparsec—even the estimated 14 gigaparsecs to the horizon of the observable universe—might be within reach. As Zeeno had suggested, distances were beginning to lose their meaning. Tau seemed more important now, and the captain had already declared that a compression factor of minus fifteen was a hard limit.