Shoshanna was nearly in tears though. She activated her jumpsuit’s movement jets and floated toward me, colliding in a hug as the crew began retreating to their various areas. I held her as she shook and tears began ejecting into the cabin with us. Thankfully the ship had scrubbers that would draw in and capture any lost moisture during zero-g travel.

“Hey, it's okay,” I said, comforting her. From my peripheral vision I saw the camera crew heading our way, so I activated my gravity harness and flew us away through the halls to her room.

“It went so bad!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe how bad that went!”

I let her go and moved to grab a towel for her tears. It was best not to intentionally overload the scrubbers, each compartment had their own and it was a pain to change them. I knew from reading the ship’s manual.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I told her. “They’re just afraid.”

“Afraid!” she exclaimed. “What on Nu-Earth do they have to be afraid of?”

“Shanna, we’re in deep space where rescue is unlikely if something goes wrong, there’s no stars out the viewports anymore, and we’re on our way to pick up a massive, extraordinarily dangerous animal with an intelligence that even BuyMort struggles to understand,” I explained.

Her brow furrowed and she thought about it. “I never really thought about it like that,” she said after a few seconds.

“There’s a reason Cubes get thrown away like this,” I told her. “There’s the ethical failing at the heart of it, but people typically do things like this because they’re afraid. The reality is that Cube could blow out every electrical component on this ship and maroon us all as easily as you or I breathe.”

Shoshanna nodded, refusing to look me in the eye. “But he wouldn’t do that,” she pouted.

“He might,” I immediately replied. “The truth is that this is a dangerous mission with a lot of down-time in the leadup to a single, big, scary moment. The crew is right to be tense. But we can handle it. I can almost certainly convince Cube to let us take him back.”

She frowned suddenly. “Almost certainly? That’s not very encouraging. Now that you’ve outlined how scared I should be, I’d like a little more assurance than that.”

“Well,” I said, floating over to the sleeping area. I grabbed a sheet on my way by and a set of gummy tack-ups that we kept all over the ship. Anytime we needed to stick something to a wall, we’d grab a little chunk of the sap-like material and use it. It wasn’t sticky, just magnetic. So anything thin enough was pinned to the hull easily, even with a small glob.

“I guess I should have thought and talked all of this through with you before we got moving,” I said, after a long pause. “But basically, he’s been out here lost in space for a lot longer than I ever knew him. I’m not sure what state his mind will be in.”

Shoshanna nodded. “Alright . . .” she said.

“He has to want to come with us,” I said. “They all do, if we’re going to really do this on a large scale. Talking to them could be very dangerous, especially the older ones.”

She finally calmed, then started laughing. “What have I gotten myself into?” she chuckled. “Daddy always said I’d do this.”

After the meeting, things smoothed out a bit. The crew seemed to accept my explanation, or at least the down time they were getting. The expedition had turned into a cruise. I overheard one of the net-handlers talking to the camera crew while floating and eating a package of grapes.

They were in a mesh bag and he carefully took one out at a time.

“Hell, this might be the best job I’ve ever been on,” he told them. “Just so long as we’re not stuck out here too long.”

And that was a real concern, of course. If the mission took months before we even found Cube, that could lead to some real concerns with the crew, something the host immediately reminded me in a follow up interview.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I did my best job to be cordial.

Three days into the void, the Navigator made contact and had some concerning news. Its sensitive scanning arrays had picked up an anomaly twelve hours prior, and the crew had written it off as a momentary fluctuation in the reading equipment. A false positive.

But it continued. So the crew of the Navigator began running maintenance checks on all their equipment. That crew was part of the non-profit, Shoshanna kept three dedicated employees on payroll from her trust fund. They were true believers, people who had signed up early on and helped the mission however they could. Most of our map flowers were thanks to their dedicated work and they were more excited than anyone but Shoshanna to go on the expedition.

Once the maintenance checks revealed everything operating as intended, the crew ran out of options and brought us the news. They informed us that there was a tiny gravity well following our ships, close enough to disrupt our warp bubble.

It was a miniscule amount, something a non-specialized ship’s sensors would easily miss. Our own shields barely registered the fluctuation, we had to go digging through the reports with a magnifying glass to find the little bump.

Shoshanna scowled at the communication, up on the bridge with me and the captain. He looked sober enough, because his scowl was far more concerned than hers.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

I sighed and shook my head. “It means there’s a ship behind us. Probably a stealth ship.”

Her color faded a bit and she swallowed hard. “And what does that mean?”

“Nothing good,” the captain answered. He took a whiskey pouch out of his jumpsuit and started fumbling at its opening tab.

I floated silently, in thought. Shoshanna had glanced at the captain when he spoke, but she was staring at me with that same intensity, that same need to know as she had been.

“Let’s walk through this,” I suddenly said. “Stealth ship in pursuit, but not trying to knock us out of our warp bubble. Most of the stealth ships I knew in my day had that ability, so why would that technology walk itself backward? That means it might not be an attack craft, but someone who wants to watch us and not be noticed.”

“BlueCleave, maybe?” the captain offered.

“Maybe,” I replied. “More likely Axle’s personal guard, if that’s the case. But BlueCleave is far from the only option. I have a complicated history with BuyMort’s delves.”

Shoshanna nodded and took a breath. “Right, there was a protest against you on Midnight, Molly told me about it.”

I nodded back, but my face stayed tight. “I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but if it is delves, there is a significant chance of violence. I only wonder why they aren’t attacking already if it’s them.”

“Hence why a spy ship is more likely,” Shoshanna said, looking to me for approval.

I nodded. “More likely. It could also be something we’re simply not thinking of.”

“But it’s a stealth ship for sure,” she said.

I nodded. “Thank the Navigator crew for us. Bit late, but I understand why they didn’t recognize the anomaly.”

Shoshanna took her phone out and started tapping into it while I floated over to the captain. “Look,” I said. “We’re obviously going to need to keep this quiet. Don’t tell the crew, at all. You good with that?”

His bloodshot eyes went wider and he nodded, sucking on his pouch. “I don’t talk to them anyway.”

“Good, keep it that way. I’ll deal with this, whatever it is, and I’ll keep you in the loop. If there comes a time we need to let them know, you’ll be handling that,” I told him.

“It is?” he asked in distress.

“That’s your job, you liaise between the owners and the crew. At the owner’s direct order,” I told him, flat faced.

He nodded slowly, eyes still wide.

“Good man,” I said, before I clapped him on the shoulder and turned away.

“They said they’re sorry they didn’t report it sooner,” Shoshanna said.

“Naw, send ‘em a bottle of champagne or something. It’s a great catch for a non-military crew. Someone was being obsessive over the shield readouts to even notice that. They did good,” I replied.

I floated over back to her, and then took her with me near the viewport. We sank down below it, since the view disturbed her, and I stopped once the bank of computers and terminals was between us and the captain. I also wanted to avoid the documentary crew, they tended to follow us up to the bridge anytime we went, and it was a minor miracle they hadn’t walked in on the transmission or our discussion of it so far.

“This might get a little ugly,” I quietly told Shoshanna. “I’ll handle it if it does, but I wanted to mentally prepare you.”

Shoshanna nodded. “Ugly how? Or should I not ask?”

“You’re fine. I just may have to destroy that ship. If it turns out to be a threat, I’m not going to risk either of our ships, I’m just going to destroy it,” I explained.

She nodded, but she didn’t look particularly comfortable. “I understand.”

The rest of that day was spent in tense silence. We avoided the documentary crew and mostly stayed in Shoshanna’s cabin. She was quiet and withdrawn at first, but shortly after we arrived she began working on the portal in our sleeping area.

By the time she was finished an hour later she’d replaced my jury-rigged sheet and covered the entire portal with a decorative blanket that displayed a sea of stars against a swirling, colorful background. It had a smattering of small lights tucked away behind it to provide the illusion of twinkling movement, as they slowly activated and faded.

I smiled at her when she was finished and admired her handiwork. “Beautiful,” I told her. “Thank you for fixing that for us.”

Shoshanna turned and grinned, then pushed toward me for a kiss.

That night I floated silently, awake while my new girlfriend slept. Thinking about my tiny, vulnerable fleet and about the ship that followed.