The coordinates we had set course for, a location taken from the files Jesse had liberated from Enigma Osiris as her severance, were still five days away, even by giobhioni hyperdrive. We had no idea if Enigma Osiris had already explored the site or not, it being beyond the borders of explored space, but we still hoped to glean some information from it when we got there.

  It just might require us to be more stealthy if they’d already gotten there.

  In the meantime, I was splitting my time between belly crawling through the guts of engineering, working on projects to solidify the theory Stacy was pumping into my brain every night, and catching up with Boudya, Trindron and Jesse.

  Oh, and I can’t forget the evening meetings with Jo, which were not as dreary as one might think, having come as part of a disciplinary action. My report on the day's maintenance tasks didn’t take long at all, and once I was finished, Jo would fix us some graptak, and we would just talk for a while. We hadn’t had much of an opportunity to just talk since the first of the giobhioni in stasis had been revived on the station. Once they had, she’d gone into ‘Commanding Officer’ mode, and I was mostly dealing with her subordinates, who gave me blunt instructions, but mostly didn’t interact.

  Now we were gradually opening up about personal lives, and in those short few days, I found myself looking forward to our evening meetings, no matter how tired I was.

  Getting reacquainted with Boudya and Tindron was an interesting time. The two of them hadn’t been formally bonded back when I originally knew them. They were lovers for sure, just as Boudya and I were. It was a fact I had to get used to because I’d neither been with a benastian before, nor been in any sort of polyamorous relationship. I’d heard of it before, of course; Humans weren’t ignorant of the idea or the idea that someone can love multiple people after all. But even in the twenty fourth century, monogamy was the norm. Most of us just had insecurity issues when it came to love.

  With the two of them being life-mates now - which to benastians seemed to mean some sort of connection beyond a simple legal ritual - I found myself a bit awkward in the room with the two of them at the same time, but Tindron put me at ease.

  “Being life-mates does not change anything,” he explained to me that first breakfast we had together, “I still do not own her, or her time. And neither does she, me. It just means that we are biologically linked for the rest of our lives. For the rest of our lives, there is connection there. Even if we go our own ways for years we are still bonded. If she finds herself loving, or simply dallying with someone else, as long as she does so safely, and in a way that doesn’t endanger our family, I have no complaints. Be at ease, vathrowa.”

  That discussion made things a lot more comfortable between us, and while Boudya still made me feel like I was being stalked by some ancient predator when we were alone, we were getting along better then as well.

  The weird part was finding Jesse and Toftri at a table in the mess hall on the third day, heads close together and talking quietly. They were hunched over a tablet, and Toftri was pointing at things on the screen, which told me he was explaining something to her, which was good - Jesse needed things to do as much as I did. What was odd was the way I could see their knees hesitantly touching under the table, and pinky fingers placed deliberately a bare millimeter away from each other.

  I had raised my eyebrow when I’d seen that, but Boudya had quickly grabbed my elbow from behind and steered me to another table, applying her usual charms to distract me until it was time to get to work. Once in engineering, she made sure to take a moment to remind me that my sister was old enough, and so was Toftri, that it was none of my business.

  Laughter had escaped me at that point, and I’d poked her nose, leaving a smear of gasket sealant on it. “I’m not that kind of brother.” I told her, “It was just weird and unexpected.”

  “Just so long as you aren’t planning on interfering.”

  “Jesse can handle herself probably better than I can.” I told her, “She’s the one with martial arts training. I’m only stepping in if I have to. Now, I’ve got a big list of work to get done, and a lot of cramped spaces to crawl through to get it done. And you’ve got studying to do, let’s get to work.”

  When we’d first started trying to familiarize ourselves with giobhioni technology, Boudya and I had been a bit stubborn, counting on our own background in engineering, and had asked Stacy not to give us any pointers. After I began the sleep learning, Jo had asked if Stacy had just been that bad an instructor. When I’d informed her about our ego driven stubbornness, there had been another dressing down, this time for the both of us. The words “Only a void-damned fool doesn’t use the resources available to them to better prepare for an assignment!” had been the mildest of what she’d said.

  So now, we were under strict orders to avail ourselves of Stacy’s ability to access and cross reference the entirety of giobhioni engineering material whenever we found ourselves stumped.

  The dressing down had led to another conversation over graptak one evening, which thankfully did not end in a dressing down.

  “I have been meaning to ask you about something Thomas.” Jo began, after offering me my cup, “You’re people don’t seem to be falling too short on medical technologies, and Tratsa has even commented that some of the material she’s read says you have your own cybernetic implants available. I’m curious as to why, as an engineer, you didn’t have any implants before we gave you the translator back on the station.

  “Was there a medical issue that our implants didn’t have?”

  I shook my head, “Nothing so…excusable, I’m afraid.” pausing, I took a sip of graptak, then sighed, “The issue is more vulgar than that. You’ll find that most humans don’t have any cybernetics, and the ones that do have one thing in common.”

  “Which is?”

  “Money. I noticed your people don’t seem to make any kind of mention regarding wealth in any of the material I’ve read so far. I thought maybe it was simply because all of you that remain are military as far as I’m aware. I asked Stacy about it at one point, and she explained you don’t really do the whole money based economy thing, resources are put towards bettering your society as a whole. Right?”

  “Well….yes.” she said, frowning, “Once we could move about our home solar system at decent speeds, and then after we could enter hyperspace, there was such an abundance of resources, why should we hoard them?”

  “Yeah, I wish you could explain that to our leaders.” I idly drew designs on her desk with my finger, “back about two and a half centuries ago, the poverty on Earth got so bad that the richest of us finally clued in that if they didn’t revise their habits even just a little, there was likely to be a full out revolt. The kind of revolt that ended with their heads in a basket. So they consented to the idea of what we called Basic Income at the time.

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  “Everyone got a basic stipend that was enough to pay for basic shelter and living needs, but anything further than that, they still had to work for. Money still remained a motivating factor, we just eliminated the depth of poverty that had people dying for no good reason. The wealthy still kept hoarding the bulk of the resources though, and kept certain things for themselves as status symbols.”

  “And one of those things were implants?”

  “Exactly.” again I shook my head, “It didn’t matter that those cybernetics could help people do their jobs better. They still saw that there were plenty enough people wanting to work for better things in life that they didn’t need to allow those luxuries to become commonplace. The only humans that aren’t wealthy who have implants tend to be criminals who stole those implants out of the bodies of the wealthy people they murdered, and the surgical process done by unscrupulous doctors that don’t care that second hand implants often end up causing…problems for the subject fairly quickly. Violent psychosis being one of the most common problems.”

  Jophixa leaned back in her chair, a look of disgust on her face as she contemplated all this. “And the Benastians?”

  “I never honestly asked her about that.” I said, scratching my head. “It never came up as a subject, probably because I just never thought of implants as a part of life. I could ask her about it if you want?”

  She waved the idea off, “I can ask her about it myself. I’m mainly curious due to having three people on the ship without the advantage of integrated translation and transponders in an implant. If they become part of our long term mission, it would be to all of our advantages for that fact to be changed. I don’t want to misstep by suggesting it if there is some cultural taboo.

  “I’ve honestly been contemplating sending orders back to the station to get them to relocate somewhere closer for a short time. If only so that Tzaki Gwatri can do the implants. Especially if we want the ansible functionality included in them. I admit I’ve been talking to Stacy about if my own implant can somehow be retrofitted with that functionality. Your ability to be always in contact with her has come in handy on a couple of occasions, and the sleep learning could benefit both Jessica and Boudya in the roles they’ve expressed interest in filling on board.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Boudya was an easy one to anticipate, being another engineer like myself. The Elegance was a relatively small ship, sure, but having two engineers on board seemed prudent, especially if we ended up in any more combat situations. But Jesse was a computer geek. Her job at Enigma Osiris had been as an analyst and networking engineer, which is what had allowed her to gain access to those files she had liberated for us. There were ways those skills could help aboard a ship, but one this size?

  “Surely you’ve seen her and Toftri almost attached at the hip?” she said with a chuckle, answering my question before I could speak, “While I admit there is an aspect of, shall we say, friendship, blossoming there, Toftri is also helping to tutor her in starship helm and communication operations. Seems your sister wants to try her hand at piloting a starship.”

  Drifting, alone amongst the wreckage of the Enigma Osiris flotilla, a long range fighter struggled to regain some semblance of power.

  It had been forty six hours since the disastrous engagement between the flotilla and what had once been a derelict vessel hauled back from uncharted space by the despicable Johnathan Barstol and his crew of outlaw salvagers. Forty-six hours since Lieutenant Giselle Kintzel had watched the ship containing virtually everyone she knew and called friends, be feasted on what that ship seemed to have become.

  A giant black thing that seemed both biological and mechanical to her scanners, and impervious to the vacuum of space, it reminded her of the bugs they called centipedes back on earth, glistening black on black, with the stars reflecting off its carapace, it was barely visible to the eye.

  Her fighter had suffered a collision with wreckage from the Daedalus, sending it spinning out of control amidst the chaos, and rendering her unconscious in the process. When she finally came too, the only thing keeping her alive was her flight suit and the emergency O2 scrubber. Her fighter was dead in space, reactor offline, backup power glitching erratically, she didn’t even have a means to call for help.

  It was a very real possibility that she’d die out here when the life support systems in her flight suit finally ran out of power.

  But one thing a Kintzel woman was not was a defeatist. Certainly not a quitter in any way, shape or form. So as soon as she had checked herself for injuries, and did what she could to scan the area for the hellish beast-ship, she unbuckled from her seat, and started working to see what could be repaired.

  Five hours later, the situation was not looking all that great. While it looked like getting both the reactor and the backup power online was possible, it was going to take some jury rigging to do so. Backup power would be the easiest, as the glitch simply appeared to be wiring issues that would need tracing down and splicing around to get power to critical systems - like life support. The reactor would take a lot more work, and she wasn’t sure if it was even going to be worth bothering with, since any flight control systems were completely mangled. There was no getting them working again without access to a repair bay and full replacements.

  That wasn’t even including the tunnel drive.

  She was out in the void between stars. Even if she could get the flight systems operational, without the tunnel drive operational, she was still stuck. It would take a couple hundred years to reach the closest star to where she was drifting aimlessly.

  There was only one option for rescue, and that was getting the comms array working. If someone out there picked up her distress call in time, maybe she’d survive this mess and get back to civilization.

  “I swear Gerty,” she spoke into the black, “if I get out of this, I’ll put my resignation in with EO. The pay is not worth this.”

  “Excuse me Commander, I know I’m not supposed to intrude on your evening meeting with Thomas, but this might be important.”

  Jo and I had been in the midst of a discussion regarding my EVA suit, and how it compared to standard Giobhioni suits just then. I hadn’t been aware that she had given instructions to Stacy not to interrupt, but it certainly explained the lack of input from her.

  I noticed Jo give a small sigh before responding, “What is it Stacy?”

  “I’ve picked up a weak communication signal. It’s a distress call. Telemetry places its origin only two or three lightyears out of our way.” Stacy explained, “The distress call states they have no propulsion, no tunnel drive, and are completely reliant on their flight suit for life support. I doubt their signal is going to reach anyone else in time for them to come to the rescue Commander.”

  “Damn,” Jo swore under her breath, “I hate to lose even the small amount of time that such a short side trip would involve. Is there anyway we can boost the message and relay it in order to get someone to them in time? Without having to divert ourselves?”

  I was about to open my mouth to interject when Stacy answered, “We can certainly do that, and that would improve their chances quite a bit. It would still not be a sure thing that any rescue effort would get there in time, however.”

  “Jo,” I spoke up, “Commander, I’m not sure about Giobhioni spacer law or tradition, but Commonwealth, and hell, universal agreement in known space, states that anyone picking up a distress call must render aid if they are able to.”

  “This is a Giobhioni law also, Thomas.” Stacy replied

  The scowl on Jo’s face rivaled the one she’d worn just a few days ago when she’d chewed me out for being in engineering without being properly attired. “Ordinarily, I would uphold those laws to the letter,” she said finally, after brooding for a minute, “but we don’t know how far ahead of us Enigma Osiris is in visiting the rest of those coordinates Jessica provided. Such a delay could very well mean us missing out on clues we need to stop all this! We’d be sacrificing countless lives for the sake of what? One person?”

  “What if I’d died before I managed to find a way inside the station? Nobody would even know any of this was happening until it was too late.”

  “That’s different! You saved yourself through your own skills and ingenuity!”

  “And Stacy, according to security protocol, should have had station defences eliminate me with extreme prejudice to protect your people. Weren’t those protocols the ones in place? If she hadn’t achieved sentience in the intervening centuries, I’d be dead, you’d still be in stasis, and who knows what could be going on.”

  I could see her grinding her teeth as she admitted to herself I was right, but she still wasn’t ready to let go of her argument. “That might just be but…”

  “Commander.” Stacy interrupted, “there’s one more detail that could make this diversion worth it.”

  “What is it?”

  “The person in distress is one Lieutenant Giselle Kintzel of Enigma Osiris Strike Flotilla Two.”

  “Enigma Osiris!” Jo bolted to her feet, “All the more reason to…”

  “Why does that name sound familiar?” I said, cutting off Jo for a second time in the conversation. “Kintzel, I’ve heard that name recently.”

  “Very recently,” Stacy explained, while Jo glared at me, “She is the twin sister of one Major Gertrude Kintzel, head of System Security for the Yantari system. She was the one I was able to negotiate with to get you both off the planet. She is also quite aware that your sister, Boudya and Tindron are aboard, but has decided not to report it. In fact, she has pushed the evidence I provided up the chain. The warrant for their arrest is within days of being rescinded due to her.”

  At this, Jo sat back down heavily. I could still see she did not like the decision she had to make, but I could see she was going to make the one I thought was the right one. I made sure to keep my face as neutral as I could when she announced it, however. Nobody likes a gloater.

  “Very well Stacy. Please let Be’tsar Toftri know to change course to the coordinates of the distress call.” she shook her head, “And let Tzaki Tratsa know she’s likely to have another human patient soon.” Then she looked at me. “And you. You get yourself ready for a space walk. I want you out there pulling whatever remains of that ship's flight recorder. I want to know where it’s been, why it was so far out here without escort, and how the hell it ended up in distress.”

  “Sepaq, Commander!” Both Stacy and I responded in unison.

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