One brief jaunt later, Team Owl arrived in the outer limits of Beta Centauri. We kept a low profile. All we wanted to do was to take a visual scan. From far out we hoped to make out any possible other craft. There would be a good chance that a Chinese probe would be making its way here. Or a probe from a different nation. Either way, we wanted to be careful.

We had spent the last month decelerating to do a pass at around the distance of Pluto’s orbit. Out far beyond any of the planetoids, moons, or asteroid fields, we spent a week doing passive surveillance. We planned to then split up and meet close to the other side of the system. Of course, man plans, and God laughs. Or in this case, Beta Centauri laughed.

Passive surveillance was boring and meant that we would only be looking into the galaxy rather than using sonar to actively look with our secondary senses. It was fun being a dolphin, but after the lunar incident, I was more than wary enough to tell my team to slow their roll. It just wouldn’t do to arrive in a system and announce our presence like a drunk roommate arriving at three in the morning. I didn’t need that kind of heat.

“Anomaly detected.”

“Anomaly?” I said to FERMI. “What could it be… FERMI bring it up.” Levi, Kiernan, and Killmonger popped into my VR. Thanks to our close probe connection, there was no lag, so we frequently were together. I happened to be the officer of the day and was on point. Also, I was the Team Leader, and this was my team, so even if I wasn’t on duty, I would want to take the lead.

“Aye,” FERMI said.

“Hey boss,” Levi said, “if this is a space fight, Killmonger said that he wants to take the lead.”

“Absolutely not,” Killmonger said, “That is not what I said.”

“Boys!” I said.

Kiernan snickered.

I had the on-duty room set to resemble the day room from the Basic School, where young Marine Lieutenants learn how to lead others. On the walls were the Corps values, written large and bold. Honor. Courage. Commitment. I hoped to live up to those values, even here far from any amphibious landings or Navy ships. Was landing a dropship the new amphibious assault? Probably.

“He isn’t living up to these core values if he doesn’t!” Levi said, pointing to the wall.

“Oh come on, I was never in the Navy or the Marine Corps.”

I glared. Kiernan laughed harder.

“They've been doing this all day,” she said, “It’s probably cabin fever.”

“You had better figure yourself out,” I replied, bringing up the image.

On the big screen what popped was a large oval. On the edges, to the right and the left—was that scaffolding? The image fuzzed.

“Analysis, anyone?” I spat.

“By Asimov’s ghost,” Levi said, moving in closer.

Killmonger and Levi circled the haunting image of the oval. FERMI began to fill in a little bit of the details. The floating silver oval was only showing what was visible to the naked eye, and as we got closer, it became clearer. Not that I had eyes, naked or otherwise.

“Kiernan?”

“Yes boss?”

“Can we work on some predictive intelligence for FERMI? I don’t know what this thing is and it’s hard to extrapolate anything from a silvery lump.”

“Aye,” she said, giving me a salute, “I’ll put it on the projects list.”

“If this was an active space station, we would probably see lights. I think it’s been abandoned,” Levi said, taking active control of the 3d image.

“This could be some sort of habitation ring,” Killmonger said.

“Or a weapon,” Kiernan said.

“...or a weapon.”

The team looked at the image for a long minute, while I tried to formulate a plan. We were drifting near enough to its direction that it wouldn’t take us off course.

“Okay, Team. Let’s split up and take this from three directions. Boys, swing left and right on the X-axis, Kiernan goes straight on and I’ll come down from the Z-axis. Let's take these axes concerning where we are. Any questions?”

“Let’s do it,” Levi said.

“Okay let’s meet at this same distance on the other side of whatever this is. Say about four hours post?”

“Aye.”

“Team Owl! Fly!” I said.

I folded the connector between the probes into my probe and disconnected it from the Team. In a reverse entanglement, all four of our linked probes detached and spun up our Greenstein drives.

#

Coming down from the Z-axis what immediately became clear was that this was not an asteroid. It looked like part of a giant donut. My mind was going wild with the probabilities. I was certain that Levi was going to be stoked. First contact rights were going to Team Owl. This was worth more than a big old medal.

Nearly five hours later, the four of us convened on a point fifty miles out from the anomaly. Levi and Killmonger were equally excited about the possibilities. Kiernan was ready to analyze everything, and then make a VR mockup.

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“You guys! This is a real alien artifact!” Levi said. He was barely controlling himself. You wouldn’t think that an AI could wring its hands and sweat, but he was making a good case for the latter.

“It seems to be a broken habitation ring. The whole section we passed was about a mile long and if it was part of a whole ring…” Killmonger said. “It could support at least 10,000 people and it would be around 6 miles long.”

I turned to Killmonger and stared.

“What? I ran the numbers as we came in. Solving big engineering problems is why I joined the Army.”

“We’re going to have to compile a full report and send this back to HQ,” Kiernan said. “Are we good to do a more intensive search of the insides, Ma’am?”

“I don’t want to get too off schedule, but we don’t have a schedule, except for avoiding danger and exploration,” I said. “Okay, I’ve decided. One at a time, we can go into the donut. This way if something happens, we don’t all vanish. One on Overwatch. One of us can explore the inner system when the other three are up here.”

“How are we going to divide this up?” Levi’s question stuck in the air.

“Yeah. I know as the team leader you kinda set the pace, but some of us, myself included want to explore a bunch,” Killmonger said.

“By some of us do you mean you and Levi?”

The two nodded their heads.

“You both don’t think that we should maybe… secure the system first?” Kiernan said, “And I say this knowing that Stevie is going to tell us that security is first and foremost among our concerns. Also what is our mission, again?”

“Officially? Search for colonization sites,” I said, in a rehearsed manner. “Unofficially? Advance humanity's interests.”

“I’m still in the exploration camp, to be clear. Security is important but space is big,” Levi said, “And understood the security thing because hostile aliens tracking down Earth through us is a problem. The constraints around how much material we can source in a system versus what we need for new probes is another big concern. We are like paper clips in an ocean really, size wise.”

“The last thing I want to do,” I said, “is to leave Earth open for an attack. We might need to look into self destruct systems, though that is a bit morbid, in case we encounter something where it’s evident that we’re going to be caught up and shaken down for information. And noted we could encounter something like the opposite of us where their entire purpose is to turn things into paperclips.”

We’d discussed mindless AIs whose whole purpose was to turn things into a gray wave. Levi and Killmonger didn’t think it was likely. Kiernan was worried but she tended to stick with me on a lot of these strategic level concerns.

“Okay, so what we’re going to do next is draw straws. First into the donut and we’ll send one person to do a visual only flyby of the inner system. Do your best asteroid impression, take lots of pictures. The whole nine yards. Delving the donut probe will mean lots of pictures as well but they can be noisy. The other two will sit with the donut guy and take turns. Next sync meeting with the whole team when the asteroid returns.”

Levi drew the straw for first in the hole. We planned out 8-hour shifts in rotation.

Killmonger said that he would do a fly-by of the inner system, so it was going to be myself and Kiernan in the other two shifts. We said goodbye, made too many jokes about him being the strong silent type and sent him off.

Kiernan and I played board games for about 8 hours.

“So the game itself is deterministic. Candyland doesn’t have a way to shuffle the deck. It’s not the same thing as rolling a dice or anything. Once the deck is placed, the game is set in stone. There’s no way to change the outcome.”

“Even if that’s true, which granted what does that mean?” I replied, drawing a purple card and hopping my meeple a few spaces up.

“There’s no strategy involved in the game. You can’t change tactics here.”

“Are you really going to tell me that the designers of Candyland, blessed be their deterministic hearts, really decided that we don’t geet to implement some special set of rules in my beloved game? I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!”

The fake shocked look I plastered on my face made her giggle.

“When Levi comes back we can play bullshit again, something where there are tells and such. Like there’s no above the board meta tactics.”

“If you’re about to suggest another game of the War of the Ring, yeah I’m all for it, but I thought you wanted to talk about something else, not discuss orcs versus hobbits right now.”

“Yeah. I have been thinking a lot about what….” She gestured vaguely upwards, “What the end game is. Do I retire and find another girl to move in with? Like what does that even look like? I don’t have a physical body. Granted, yes I do have a ship.”

“I don’t know what that would look like. I definitely wouldn’t get pregnant though.”

“I…didn’t even think about that. Heterosexual women and their capacity to get pregnant,” Kiernan shuddered, “Not something that I’m ever going to have to worry about again. Heck, you only let us make one clone of you. Too bad she’s not here with us now…”

It was one of the sticking points I had kept close to the chest. Back on the moon, it had been a difficult decision to join the team. When the other three original AIs had decided what they were doing, they had all created backups and kinda let their backups do their own thing. I’m not going to be the first person to say that I wanted to be the unique and only copy of myself- I’d allowed myself one copy- but I didn’t see the point.

One Stevie was enough for the galaxy, probably the universe. My clone, Seraphina, would close up anything that I had left unfinished from my previous life. Heck, she had left with Malcolm and team ghost and I wished them well, but I was with my team now.

“Anyway, do you want to be the humans or the orcs this time?”

“Now you want to avoid the questions? You can’t just find a girlfriend and get her into an intergalactic u haul on the first date here. Well maybe if you’re open to whatever species we find. I think that finding a husband myself would be a bit difficult given my total body disability.”

“You’re not the only one thinking that, sister,” Kiernan jibed

“You could be the u haul yourself in this instance.”

“Just thinking of the idea… yeah we really have to get on making physical bodies, or a way for physical humans to interact with us.”

“Like a VR suit?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“It’s this about… is this about that?”’ I gestured suggestively.

Kiernan had the good nature to blush.

“I’m an adult. I can handle this kind of discourse,” she whispered, “No, it’s definitely not exactly the obvious thing that you’re thinking of, boss. I can ensure that at the very least. But if it was so, I would be the right person to implement the thing. But I’m not. Honest.”

Kiernan, or rather the woman she was cloned from Jennifer Jones, designed the virtual reality overlay that made life as an artificial intelligence better. She would be the one to make the interface, or at least she would be the one from my team. As a human, she had been a Space Force Lieutenant Commander who had gone deep into the ‘what even is the application of this to the military context’, getting a Ph.D in VR. This was back when we thought it would have intelligence applications. The community had scoffed at it back then, but now, at least according to what she said they were receptive.

I gave her the platoon mommy look that I had to give my Marines back when I knew they had done something, and I just wanted them to say it. I wasn’t mad or disappointed now though, more bemused at her reticence to speak about it.

“You’re allowed to have projects, secret or otherwise. I’m not interested, but do tell me when it’s ready for testing.”

She gave me a blank look. I shrugged.

If she was concerned with determinism, then maybe bluffing the heck out of her would make her forget her current status of being forever single. As the only lesbian on the crew of two dudes and two women, yeah the odds were especially bad for her. Not that we could do much about that out here, but I imagine being the only lesbian AI for a light year would be a little disconcerting.

We got a message request from Levi. He had been down for about six hours. It was a

link to his live feed.

“Hey boss, I think you’re going to want to see this,”’ he said.