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The team came out of the technicolor sling web, and found themselves near
another ship. It wasn’t looming over them this time but underneath their
feet. Had they failed? This far out in the galaxy, no one should have
reached by now. Sure, Extremus was traveling this far, but the chances of
happening upon them were literally astronomical. Leona sighed. “Magnetize to
the hull. They will sense us, and send a probe to investigate.”
“You don’t seem surprised,” Mateo pointed out.
“I’m not,” Leona replied. “Rambo?”
Ramses was desperately tapping on his wrist interface, looking for what
could have happened, no doubt. “It worked. We’re 152,000 light years and
change from Barnard’s Star. We should be alone. I don’t understand. Is this
Extremus?”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Leona confirmed, looking at her own data.
As she predicted, they felt the vibrations of something moving several
meters away. A giant metal ball flew up from an opening, and rolled towards
them, hovering against a local magnetic field. It stopped before the team,
and began to scan them.
“Place your hand upon it if you want to hear the conversation,” Leona said.
They all did it.
“Report,” came a voice.
“Leona Matic. This is my team. We are of peace...always.”
“Pirate got jokes,” the voice said.
“We’re not pirates. Look in the central archives. We were there when your
ancestors were preparing for this mission. We helped come up with it.”
“We lost the central archives.” The voice paused. “We’ve lost a lot since launch. But we still have our oral stories. I know
who you are, Madam Matic.” A graphic appeared on the probe’s screen. “This is the basic schematic of the ship. I will shut down the
teleportation regulator for exactly five seconds. You better come in
before then.” A red circle in the corner of the screen suddenly turned green.
“Now,” Leona ordered.
They teleported inside, landing on the bridge, inside of the horseshoe pit.
It was just like when Pribadium’s ship showed up. “Déjà vu,” Olimpia noted
after they had all receded their nanites into more comfortable clothing.
One woman was the only other person here. She took hold of a control
console, and pulled it towards her. It swung on a hinge, giving her room to
step down into the center of the horseshoe. “Welcome to the TGS Extremus
Prime, Team Matic. My name is Watchstander Actilitca. The captain is in
stasis, and I would like to keep her that way, unless you have some reason
we should wake her up?”
“There’s no issue here,” Leona began to explain. “We came on accident.”
“I don’t know why,” Ramses said apologetically. “Did you change vectors, or
are we off the mark? I deliberately chose a destination away from where I
knew you were supposed to end up.”
“We’ve changed course before,” the Watchstander, “but by reputation, I know
you would have aimed for something sufficiently far away. We’ve ended up
just about where our ancestors planned to.”
Ramses shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I know what happened,” Leona said to him. “I don’t know the why, but
I know the what. The slingdrive doesn’t necessarily go where you want
it to. It can’t go absolutely anywhere in the universe. It can only go where
there is already an established presence. I don’t know whether it’s looking
for some level of technology, or organic life, or what, but we can’t ever be
alone.”
Ramses stared at her blankly as he went back through his memory, trying to
retrieve even one instance which might point to her being mistaken. There
were times when they certainly might have been alone, but there
wasn’t proof one way or another. Her hypothesis didn’t sound too
far-fetched. That wasn’t so far necessarily a bad thing as they weren’t in
the business of being remote and isolated from others, but that
was Linwood’s goal. They thought they could help him, but it was
going to be much harder than they thought. They needed a ship. Specifically,
they needed one with reframe technology. They needed to get somewhere far
from here; far from everything. They promised him extreme solitude. “Oh my
God,” he said in disappointment.
“I’m sorry to have gotten in your way,” Actilitca said.
“No,” Leona countered. “We couldn’t have come this far out at all if not for
you. I suspected that this was a limitation of the technology—”
“No,” Ramses interrupted. “It’s a limitation of my implementation of
the technology. I doubt your...um, the others have the same issue.” He
evidently didn’t want this stranger knowing anything about Leona and Mateo’s
children. That was logical.
Angela wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “It hasn’t caused us problems.
You’re always so down on yourself about this, but we have always ended up
exactly where we belong.” She looked up to the ceiling. “Maybe these old
powers that be have still been with us the whole time, and understand that
we’re no good to the universe if no one else is around who needs us.”
“Someone needs us now,” Leona said to Actilitca. “He requires total
isolation and privacy. We promised it to him. But wherever we try to go,
there’s always going to be someone else there.”
Actilitca stepped back up out of the pit, and started working on one of the
standing workstations. “We sent hundreds of unmanned scouts in all
directions, in search of our new home. We no longer have reframe technology,
which means at most, they are 52 light years away. Now, if that’s not far
enough for you, keep in mind that we are only drifting here for the moment.
Once one of our scouts finds a suitable candidate, we will be heading that
way, which in all likelihood, will take us even farther from whichever scout
I give you the coordinates to.”
“You would do that?” Ramses asked. “You would give us coordinates to one of
your scouts?”
“As I said, it’s unmanned,” Actilitca replied. “We never intended to scoop
them all back up later. Not only will I find one for you that you can
transport to—using whatever faster-than-light technology you have access
to—but you can have it. It has life support, it just needs to be
turned on. In fact...” She went back to her screen to look through the data.
“A few of them were sent up towards the top of the galactic plane, which is
quite sparse. And yes!” She flung the image on her screen to a
hologram in the center of the horseshoe. The team stepped back to get a
better look at it. They were orbital images of what appeared to be a barren,
lifeless planet. “This one has reached a particularly isolated region
of the galaxy. It has chosen to halt there, rather than moving on to find
other candidates. It must have calculated that the chances of finding
anything useful beyond it were too low to waste the energy and time on. You
can absolutely have that, unless...you’re looking for paradise too.”
“No,” Leona contended. “He just needs raw material. That looks perfect. Not
the planet. The gravity well is too deep, but I assume there are other
celestial bodies there?”
“It hasn’t surveyed them,” Actilitca explained, “but it has spotted them.”
“We would be grateful for it,” Leona said.
“Wait, should we wake him up and ask?” Romana suggested regarding Linwood,
who was still asleep in his own stasis pod on the floor.
“We already did ask him,” Marie reasoned. “He wants to be alone on
the edge of the galaxy. We’re giving him that, we’re just going to be a bit
delayed. He shouldn’t know anything about the Extremus.”
“We’ll have to strip out all mention of it from all the systems on the
scout, if we provide it for him,” Mateo decided.
“Yeah,” Leona said. She looked back up at Actilitca. “Does this all sound
acceptable?”
“Sounds like a fine idea to me.” Actilitca tapped on her screen.
Their interfaces beeped, having received the message. “It won’t take long
for me to incorporate the coordinates into the slingdrive.” Ramses stepped
over to the corner to focus on the work.
“While we’re here,” Leona began, “is there anything we can do to help?”
Actilitca seemed to think about it for a moment. “No, I believe that we have
everything well in hand.”
“Are you certain?” Leona pressed. Hint, hint.
“No, we’ve been doing this a long time. The scouts are out, the crew and
passengers are asleep. The skeleton crew schedule is working.”
“You said that you lost your copy of the central archives.”
Actilitca bobbled her head. “Yes, there was...a disagreement in our past.”
“I can give you a copy of it,” Leona offered. “Our tech is compatible with
yours. You should be able to plug and play.”
Actilitca looked over at a door as if something on the other side might sway
her decision. “The disagreement is...ongoing.”
“Which side are you on?”
“I’m on the fence,” Actilitca admitted. “Look, we came here for a fresh
start. Some believe that holding onto our past holds us back. There are some
things we kept, like...how to grow plants. But the reframe engine is sort of
a no-go. It only took us 216 years to get here, and now that we have a
stasis pod for every Extremusian, any trip back would feel instantaneous. We
have had issues with people quitting on us, and we don’t want that to happen
again. We’re stuck out here, and that’s the way we like it. Most of us,
anyway. Technology threatens that stability. It threatens to undermine the
entire mission, negating everything our ancestors worked for.”
“That’s a very Amish position to have,” Leona reasoned. “You don’t shun all
technology. You shun tech that can take your people away from the
community.” She contemplated it. “Is there any knowledge you lost that you
regret? Perhaps it just got filed into the wrong category, or someone
destroyed the wrong data drives?”
“That happened a lot,” Actilitca confirmed. “We lost all of Earthan history
and entertainment. We lost most of our virtual stacks too, but a lot of that
had to do with how much space they took up.”
“It’s done,” Ramses announced. “We can go.”
Leona didn’t move. She was studying Actilitca’s face. “You and Matt should
go. Ladies, one or two of you have to go with them, but no less than two of
you need to stay behind to keep my slingdrive company.”
“You really don’t have to do this,” Actilitca claimed.
“I don’t know much about what happened to you in the last 216 years,” Leona
said to her, “but we were last here in 2397, and things didn’t look great,
so I know you’ve been through some things.”
Actilitca brushed it off. “That was in another timeline. You were never
here, not for us. You don’t know anything about what has happened.”
“Fair enough,” Leona acknowledged.
“We’re ready.” Mateo and Ramses were holding Linwood’s pod again.
Romana was sitting on it wearing a sexy red dress, holding a microphone, or
rather a holographic microphone. “Fly me to the moon! Let me play among the
stars!”
“Bye,” Mateo said.
“Let me see what spring is like on...” Romana’s voice trailed off and echoed
from the aether as they slung away.
“Hey, that’s my thing,” Olimpia complained.
“Yes, it is, dear,” Leona agreed. She turned back to the Watchstander. “We
have all day, but depending on how your skeleton crew shift works, maybe no
longer than that. Let’s develop a list of what you need. I can write an
algorithm that will copy admissible material, and ignore forbidden
knowledge.”
“Okay,” Actilitca said. “I accept those terms. But we must quarantine the
data so it can be purged all at once if we vote against it.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Leona replied.
