The fish had agreed to let the matter of my locking him out of the ship’s system and jeopardising the mission rest for the moment. This coming after I had told him about the potential bounty and solution to our problems currently hurtling into the void of space with the residual death throes of force the earth had belched out with its final breaths. He did however assure me that I should prepare myself for a ‘lambasting’ after we had caught and mined the retreating mass of space rock.

“Scans.” I said with a sigh, the green light responded, fizzing slightly before compressing and exploding out into a new form before me, hovering just slightly off the crystalline and floating desk of emerald radiance I was seated at.

“What’s the plan cap-I-tan.” The fish said in a sing song rhyming voice, his habitual psychic air for dramatic flair made all the more out of place by his perpetual eldritch form and currently tense working environment.

“Jump in front of it, intercept, catch the damn thing and then we send down the shell to mine it.” I said, sending the fish the current coordinates for the two former most parts of my plan.

“Concise and as deceptively simple as ever my friend. Sending hails to the other ships in preparation to jump.” I could feel the air bend and vibrate in its chirping and chittering manner as the fish sent his psionic greetings to the scant cloud of other interstellar vessels and the flight cores within about our intent to jump, common curtesy. The walls lit up, glowing with green, arcane looking patterns with their responses. Affirmation, at least I thought it was.

“Are we clear?”

“Sure are, just waiting for some of them to curb their passive fields so there isn’t as much interference, plus the scar from whoever ferried the waste disposal guys here is throwing a spanner into my calculations, it’ll take a bit to adjust for, must have jumped him all the way back to An’thilmaa.” I winced in sympathetic pain for whichever flight core was forced to cold jump all the way from and back to the federation capital. The fish did to, if the drooping nature of his coiling and grasping tentacles were any indication.

I threw my head back over bare shoulders as I watched the fish, now in my inverted perspective, roil around, pulsating, accelerating the rate at which he compressed then expanded his form, his skin seemingly bubbling and fizzing at the psychic strain, parts of it sloughing off into the gravitational void around him before being consumed and reconstituted into his form by one of the lightning quick tentacles which lashed out and collected his wayward biomass. It was always a disconcerting and somewhat nauseating sight watching him prepare for a jump.

“Preparations complete, jumping in 3, 2, 1, hold on to your butt Titus.” Reality broke and I watched on the scan as our cannonball shaped ship of rippling and squirming metal, the shell of our watery cargo held in orbit as a halo around it, lurched forward into the void. It began by stuttering slightly in the mortal realm like an old tv, its physical form shivering as it forced its way into two places simultaneously, being both here and in the direct path of the moon. The fish then folded the reality in which our ship was in its previous position in on itself and shunted us through the in-between space to reconnect with our other possibility, slamming into it and recombining the two. The space around us violently exploding outward as the ship that may or may not have been there before now very much arrived, space time began to scream and the fish agitatedly rippled as he attempted to console the universe and calm it once more, forcing it to not tear itself apart at the presence of the craft he was assuring reality had always been there.

“We good fish!” I said as the ship began to shudder as fragments of torn space time began to batter against the mercurial hull.

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“You try gaslighting the damn universe and then complain to me when it throws a hissy fit! Just do the catching you promised before.” He said, his body growing small holes and exhaling in a soothing, sighing sound almost as if he were trying to comfort a child. He was right though; it was my turn to bend reality.

I moved slowly from the desk I had been sitting at, scooping up the scans to take them with me as I went. On them I watched as the small, emerald marble of the moon charged toward the diminutive form of our ship as I hovered my way over to the walls of the flight deck. As I approached the previously immaculate metal began to ripple slightly at the point closest to me, vibrating in anticipation of the coming connection.

“A ship to guide them, a core to find them and a captain to bind them.” I muttered the mantra under my breath as I drew closer to the now liquid surface of the wall as it began to deform, pulling itself from its spherical shape as if reaching out for me, a slight, groping tendril of reflective chrome swiping about blindly for its master.

“You ready fish?” His multitude of eyes squinted slightly in consideration as he attempted to rush his soothing of the universe.

“Can you give me a moment more; she is being annoyingly spiteful today.” I looked at the scans, more specifically at the moon which looked as though it were speeding up in an enraged bull-rush, as if seeking out revenge for the annihilation of its former life partner and celestial anchor. In truth it was just my imagination, it was however worryingly close now.

“Not really, we weren’t able to jump that far in front of it and she’s making some good time.” The fish frowned and I felt his gaze settle onto the scans near me, double checking my assertion.

“Fine. I can already feel the backlash from the jump coming on and you know what I always say, the more the merrier.” He sighed out his words, as if trying to force his reluctance out with them. After hearing his agreement I didn’t hesitate, shoving my arm shoulder deep into the wafting tentacle of liquid metal, wincing as the cold needles of it began to seep into my pores and up into my blood stream, roots of its mass spider-webbing their way through my body until the were able to latch themselves onto and burrow into the grey matter of my brain.

It felt as though I had dumped a box of spiders onto my mind, they skittered around, chittering and whispering in their guttural, alien tongue as they tried and failed to subordinate the foreign consciousness to mine. Then the fish came, his presence like a psychic lighthouse he was able to fuse the two divulging minds of the barely sentient ship and myself together. I closed my eyes, revelling in the awakened senses as the ship gave its body to my control, thousands of eyes opened up along the roiling metal outer shell and I saw in every direction along my spherical body into the deep and dark expanse of space. I saw the glass like, translucent halo of water which flew sedately around us, and out there, slowly advancing through the lone and level void, was a small but growing circle of egg-shell white rock. The moon, our prize.

“Fish, anchor us in this spot, I’ll try and spin it around us to bleed off its force.” My voice thundered through the ship, echoing out of countless mouths, dictated through the contortions of innumerable tongues. The fish’s mind brushed against mine, pressing his affirmation into it and I felt the space around us become viscous and thick as honey before compressing and drying into a single, immovable point which held our ship steady.

I then reached out to the moon, now the size of a basketball in the distance when it had once been a coin. Arms began to grow out of the ship’s hull, large, muscled, ape-like and engorged limbs of a mirror-like reflective material they began to grow and grow, expanding and stretching themselves deep into space, their sausage like fingers flexing in anticipation of the now tantalisingly close and frighteningly fast moon.

“You sure you can do this Titus? It’s going awfully fas-“ He wasn’t given time to finish, his sentence strangled mid utterance by the titanic and world-shattering impact of the moon and my arms. I gripped the pockmarked surface, my fingers digging themselves deep into the craters and then further still, burying themselves desperately into the cracking and rupturing surface of the moon as they searched desperately for purchase. I swung it in wide circles around our anchored ship, each time attempting to shave of an ounce of the truly monstrous force it had been flying with. A comically pitiful image we were, a titanic ball of white spinning furiously around a comparatively miniscule speck of gunmetal grey.

I felt the mind scream of the fish and the animalistic howls of effort, pain and exuberance at its own strength of the ship and, between them all, rounding out our triad of pain and exertion, was my own cracking, youthful voice. We roared into space, three minds made one all united in the task of holding onto this damned, lifeless rock for dear life, like how a child grips the leg of its mother on its first day of school. Our arms hanging on by barely the fingernails when we finally brought the moon into a stable orbit around us.

I wasn’t sure who started laughing first, it might have been myself, or maybe the fish, all I knew was that when we were done all three of us were enraptured in a racking, raucous, guffaw, even the ship had joined in, adding his own many voiced chuckle to the mass, his animal-like mind noticing the jubilance of his caretakers and deciding to join in.

We had finally done it, scans of the surface showed enough water to make up the difference we were missing, no longer were we stuck in the loop were our business expenses equalled or barely exceeded our payment. For the first time since we had come together as a trio, it truly felt like everything was going to be ok.