Throttle Two

They were fairly lucky on their swing around the system’s lone sun and into the oort cloud. She turned-and-burned to a stop next to a rock the size of New Kentucky and matched velocities before coming in for a landing.

Diana took the time after that as an opportunity to sleep away the excitement while her Star Skimmer ate the asteroid below her.

She woke up, checked her media feeds, realised that she didn’t exactly have a connection to the system-wide net, then she rolled out of her cot and walked the two steps over to her washroom.

Diana stood in the shower for a moment. It was a needless luxury, but the moment she closed the door to the bathroom, the entire thing would be recycled back into raw materials for the Star Skimmer to use. In reality, her entire ship was more like a couple of million tons of grey goo held together by molecularly-aligned armour, with a few tanks of reaction mass hidden away for fun.

“How’s things?” Diana asked as she slipped on a freshly fabbed skintight suit and zipped up the front. The suit—with the appropriate sponsorship logos and all—tightened up around her to support all the things that needed supporting.

“Things are going relatively well, Mistress,” ChaOS said. “I’m bringing up a list of the materials we’re lacking. We could produce those materials, but our energy reserves are straining as it is.”

“Can’t we deploy more solar sails?” Diana asked. She turned the seat around and sat down, then leaned back to take in the displays. “Oh, we’re missing a lot of stuff.”

The list was fairly long, with hundreds of materials listed out by the kilogram: tungsten, gold, uranium, cobalt, a heap of other less common materials like iridum and thorium.

In theory, anything could be turned into anything else. What was helium if not hydrogen that was a little more exciting? The issue was the energy costs, and the amount of feed material needed to be turned from one thing to another.

ChaOS provided a handy timer at the bottom. “We are not waiting here for three weeks,” Diana said after doing a bit of mental math to convert hours to days.

“That is how long it will take to return the ship to a perfect state,” ChaOS said.

“We just need to be able to fly. Are we full-up on rocks?”

“We are. The asteroid you landed us on had small quantities of iron, silicon, and a few other trace elements. Nothing too impressive, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fine,” Diana said. She gestured and a pair of joysticks unfolded from the floor. “Pull in anything that’ll get burned up as we take off and get me a wireframe of the Skimmer; I want to see what we look like.”

“Certainly,” ChaOS said. A holographic projection of the ship appeared next to the main screens before Diana. Or rather, a tangled web of panelling with the ship in its middle, as if some giant space spider had lost its mind around the vessel.

“Good thing it doesn’t matter what we look like right now,” Diana said. She fluttered the manoeuvring thrusters and pulled out of what remained of the asteroid. A large portion of it was entirely missing now, a testament to their presence.

She plotted a trajectory towards the alien-occupied planet and started to give the Star Skimmer a bit of gas.

“Once you’re done tugging everything in, let me see what we look like. We need some weaponry.”

“First Contact protocols suggest not having any visible weapons on a vessel on meeting a potentially friendly alien being for the first time,” ChaOS said.

“You think that’s a good idea?” Diana asked.

The AI hesitated before replying. “I think it’s a terrible idea, but the protocol does provide good justification for it. You’ll note that it specifically says visible weaponry.”

“Oh,” Diana said. “Like those guns we hid under the frame in that weapons free race on Mars?”

“Exactly,” the AI said.

Diana chuckled darkly to herself and tugged the hologram closer, as if it were a physical object. She started to zoom in on parts of it to see if she could fit some surprises around key components.

Time passed, with only a few breaks to use the washroom—during which they would stop accelerating, for comfort’s sake—and a few snack pauses where Diana complained at length about how none of the nutritional tubes actually tasted like what was written on them.

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Diana wasn’t quite bored. She had flown across space enough that she had learned to transcend the boredom; like a long-haul trucker back on scarcity-era Earth, there was just the road and the eventual destination. The new area even made it a little more interesting.

ChaOS, in the meantime, tracked incoming and outgoing ships around the planet they were heading towards.

“I’ve noticed something,” the AI said some six hours into their trip.

“Hmm?” Diana asked.

“The vast majority of ships moving in and out of the planet’s surface are moving to one of seven orbital stations, or to one of the moons which seem to also house some stations.”

“Makes sense,” Diana said. “None of the other planets here are habitable, right?”

“They are not, at least not to the average human, nor do they seem to house large orbital colonies. I brought up the movement of the ships because it seems as though they are moving to the station, but rarely away from it.”

“Huh?” Diana asked.

“Take for example this station, it is the largest and busiest.” One of the tiny dots on Diana’s map overlay blew up. The image wasn’t perfect, more of a distance smudge than anything. The size markers painted it as a medium-sized space station, at least by Sol standards. “One hundred and twelve vessels have moved to the station. Seventy four have left. None of those who left were similar to those who arrived.”

“Maybe these aliens have long refuelling processes?” Diana asked. “Or they inspect ships on arrival and that takes a long time? Or they’re not too busy.”

“The issue is that the station isn’t large enough to house the number of vessels that have entered it, not based on my volume estimates and assuming that the vehicles take a certain amount of space on entering.”

“Maybe they goop all the ships that arrive and build new ones on the way out?” Diana asked.

“Possible, but that would suggest a level of automation that the differing ship designs don’t match,” ChaOS said.

Diana shrugged. “Let’s not presume too much about the unknown aliens just yet. Though… let’s aim for the least busy station. Usually I’m all about making a splash, but maybe it’ll be better to be subtle here.”

She guessed that the AI was impressed by her forethought, because it didn’t comment for a good long while.

Diana was just about to doze off when things started beeping. She glanced at the distance warnings, saw that they were still a good hour away from the nearest station around the outer edge of the system, and then she glanced over to the communication screen.

“Oh, we’re being pinged,” she said.

“I’ve decoded what I suspect is the commercial communication band. I suspect that the hail is meant to ask us about our intentions. Should I send the First Contact package?”

“Without knowing anything about them?” Diana asked. “Heck no. Can you manage some sort of reply?”

“Nothing that would pass any scrutiny, I don’t think. I’ve noticed that other ships approaching a station tend to reply with a unique sequence that I can only assume is some sort of code.”

Diana rubbed at her chin. “In that case, don’t send anything. Can we look like we’ve been roughed up a bit?”

“You’re going to attempt some sort of subterfuge? You?”

Diana sat up straighter. “What’s with the tone?”

“I am trying not to sound as incredulous as I am. I wouldn’t want to offend you, Mistress.”

She sniffed. “Yeah, make us look a little roughed up. Maybe they’ll scan us, maybe they’ll send help out, maybe they’ll try to nuke us out of space. Whatever they do, it’ll tell us a lot about how neighbourly they are. If they ask questions, I’m sure we can figure out a way to talk back and tell them that we’re not hostile.”

“As long as they don’t notice all of the weaponry onboard the ship.”

“Hey, you know what that one guy said. Speak softly and keep your barrels warm,” Diana said.

“That is not, and has never been, a proper quote,” ChaOS said.

It took another half hour before someone started to move in to intercept them, and that’s when Diana found that things were becoming genuinely interesting.

***