Throttle One

“Uh?” Diana asked. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was asking, or whom, but there was certainly a question in her tone.

“Mistress?”

Diana blinked, then blinked again when she found her eyes glued together. Caked-on blood did that, sometimes. The blood would mix with her tears (not crying tears, just the salty water that came from irritated eyes) and then once everything was done and over with, it would dry and crust up her face.

It was rather disgusting, really.

She raised her arms, or tried to, at any rate. Her body felt like she had dived into a raging rapid with nothing but floaties on and proceeded to hit every stone on the way down. Her arms were noodles, and a bit of focusing allowed her to notice the familiar tingle of repair nanites trying to fix all the bones and blood vessels and muscles she had torn.

That was… inconvenient.

“Mistress, we are currently outside of the bounds of charted space.”

“That’s bad?” she said. The piercing pain in her head, and the dizziness, suggested that she currently had a concussion. It would pass, probably.

“I cannot communicate with any human devices. The astro-navigation systems are suggesting that we have crossed several thousand lightyears in subjective seconds, and the Star Skipper has sustained massive damage.”

“But did we win?” Diana asked.

There was a long pause before the reply came.

“Without being able to communicate with the System Grand Race AI, it is impossible to confirm entirely.”

“Did we pass the checkered line before anyone else?” Diana asked.

“We did.”

She grinned. “Heck yeah,” she said. Leaning back in her gel seat, she let her head loll back and grinned up at the ceiling. She’d won.

She was rather fond of winning.

The rush hit her then as a burst of giggles that had her shaking in her seat, even though the laughter made everything hurt. “Ah, that’s nice,” she said.

“Congratulations, Mistress. Apropos nothing, we are both quite doomed.”

“Thanks, ChaOS, you really know how to make me feel great,” Diana said.

“Oh? Perhaps we could sit around and do nothing for a few more hours. I’m certain that your run-in with the nearest star will make you feel much better.”

Diana blinked. Her AI companion was only sarcastic when he was being serious, or if she was doing something he considered stupid, which meant that he was frequently sarcastic. But that sarcasm was rarely aimed at her. “Give me the sitch,” she said.

A star-map opened on the centre screen of her cockpit. Her ship’s icon in the centre, a large glowing ball of plasma not too far off, and a few little balls here and there that had to represent unfamiliar planets. She was a quick hand at reading orbits and trajectories, so it didn’t take much to figure that they were beelining towards the star.

“Well, that’s not great,” she said.

“An understatement, Mistress. Please direct your attention to the ship’s status.”

There was a lot of orange, some green, and a sprinkling of red on the screen that displayed the current state of the Star Skimmer.

The nano repair machines were doing their best, but they had resorted to cannibalizing non-essentials to repair the more important systems. The hydrogen engines had been included in that, so she was not just fresh out of fuel, she didn’t even have the thrusters to burn that fuel with.

They still had ion thrusters, and there was power in the batteries. “Solar sails?” Diana asked.

“We required power, Mistress, and our looming death via sunburn aside, being in such close proximity to a sun does provide us with some power.”

“Alright,” Diana said. She had seen a few nice skiffs with solar sails on them before; it wasn’t entirely a bad look.

Shifting her shoulders around, she groaned as she felt new muscles moving for the first time. She would be clumsy for a little bit until things resettled. It would be annoying, but it was hardly her first time playing with insane accelerations.

She leaned forwards and placed her hands on the control surface before her seat. It twisted around to be right under her fingertips, and she started to move things around. “Screen one and three on camera mode, I want visuals. Get me a broad-range antenna going too, all bands.”

“We are outside of any communication range from the Sol system, Mistress. Though we might be able to hear early twentieth century recordings if we wait around here for some millenia.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“You know I never cared that much about normal history. Though… wouldn’t mind seeing some of those first TV races,” Diana said. “Nah, just get us some ears.”

“There will be nothing but star screams to listen to, but as you wish.”

“I like the sound of stars screaming,” Diana said. It had the benefit of even being true. There was something about listening to deep space frequencies that was somehow really relaxing.

She opened the long repair list, sorted it by priority, then started to switch things around manually. Some regulatory things were required by laws that no longer applied if they were way out in the middle of empty space. Navigation lights weren’t a yellow-priority item, in her opinion.

“Okay, we need… a lot of materials that we don’t have,” she said. “We’ll need to fly over to the… does this solar system have something like an oort cloud?”

“Yes Mistress, initial scans suggest that this solar system is relatively simple, as far as those go. Four planetary bodies, two of them gas giants. A smaller planet in the habitable zone with twelve moons, another in near-sun orbit.”

Diana glanced to her third screen where the scans ChaOS had run were being displayed. It seemed like the planet in the habitable zone was perhaps actually habitable, or at least one that she’d be able to land on.

She considered setting her ship down and building some huge monuments to mark that she’d been there once she figured all of her other problems out. Maybe some giant pyramids? That would feel very appropriate.

“Oh no.”

Diana looked away from the priority list. Her plan was simple: get as many ion thrusters working as possible, then aim the Star Skimmer towards the nearest source of asteroids. They could land, send out a grey goo swarm, and pull in the materials needed to make some basic repairs. It would maybe take some days to get everything to work, but it wasn’t going to be too difficult. “What’s wrong?” she asked. None of the ship’s alarms had gone off.

“I have received a signal from the antenna you insisted I install.”

“Great!” Diana said. “Wait, did we run into some top-secret stuff? Military things?”

“Mistress, I believe it is time that we both brush up on First Contact protocols.”

“You serious?” Diana asked. She sat up, brushed a hand down the front of her suit, then passed her hand through her hair. “Do I need to make myself pretty for the cameras? Are they headed this way already? Are there cute blue space babes?”

“I haven’t yet cracked the transmissions, but there are several languages being transmitted across a range of frequencies. The good news is that several seem to use the same encoding system. The bad news is that I will need to decode these before I can even begin to parse them. Additionally, nearly every transmission is coming from near or on the planet in the habitable zone.”

“Nice!” Diana said. “Okay, new plan, we’re turning and burning, let’s bee-line for them.”

“That is entirely unwise, Mistress.”

“C’mon! There’s aliens!”

“Yes, and the Star Skimmer is in no state to meet them. We are currently unarmed, have racing-tuned shields, no hydrogen to thrust with, and barely enough resources to keep the vessel running.”

“And they might have all of that,” Diana said. “It’ll be like… intergalactic neighbours stopping by and asking for a cupful of sugar.”

“This is entirely unwise.”

“Fine!” Diana said. “Let’s jet around the sun, pop into the oort-cloud, grab some things as we shoot by, then loop back around to that planet.” She gestured ahead of her, painting the rough trajectory she was planning. It was more or less an oval with a segment missing.

“That would barely supply us with any resources, even assuming the asteroids we pass are entirely made of useful materials and not just plain rock.”

Diana shook her head. “The longer we wait around, the more suspicious we’ll look. Someone’s going to notice that we’re buzzing around here. Plus it’ll give you time to decode their stuff so that we don’t look like complete morons when we do want to chat.”

The AI took a long time to respond, entire seconds. “Very well, Mistress. I will still insist that you look into the First Contact package.”

“You know I’m just going to ignore everything it says,” she said.

“I am programmed to hope.”

***