Perfect landing! Textbook, even! I didn’t exactly power down my Ship core, but I did clock it back down to something closer to human normal, and… well not exactly shunt it to the back of my mind, but I did kind of sleep with the shuttle.

I ran through a whole shebang of tests to make sure everything was as safe as could be. Atmosphere, gravimetrics, plate tectonics, sunspots, biological, radiological, even technological.

Hmm, not a busy system. Seems there was some sort of unregistered agrarian outpost on a habitable moon of the fourth planet, nothing too interesting. They’d likely not have much in the ways of ships, they weren’t making much in the way of radio-chatter.

Miss Ausrich and Mister Jensen were still the ones to make any official announcement, but things looked good. I wasn’t surprised when my doors were opened to disgorge a mass of screaming, laughing, shouting, running, jumping kids.

***

Megan and John sighed, part-way happy and part-way exasperated, which pretty much exemplified how things went most days. It was nice to see the kids enjoying themselves, but now came the hard part of corralling them.

“Okay, okay! Gather round! Gather round! Remember your investigation protocols!” Megan clapped her hands as she caught the attention of the majority, and John called over the rest.

Ghorqan took a deep breath, lifted a small silvery device on a string around his neck and blew extremely loudly into it. The piercing shriek of a whistle filled the clearing. “Form up for pre-exploration check-lists!” he shouted, as Tammy and her crew set themselves to handing out notebooks, crayons, butterfly nets, buckets and spades and jars on strings.

In no time at all, all the kids had self-organized into little groups of four or five and were setting off on little expeditions to catch some of the water-dwelling bugs in the nearby rivers, to draw some of the pretty flowers and to dig up interesting stones and shells and other things.

“Shuttle, do you have a transponder lock on all the members of this expedition?”

“I can do one better,” Shuttle Chance replied. “I’ve got a transporter lock on everyone too. If there are any problems I’ll beam them right back here. They’ll also alert your PADD’s if any members of the trip get too far away as per your prior regulations.”

“Sure you won’t, ah, get bored or anything?” John asked, staring at the shuttle’s nose-cone.

“Are you kidding me?” Shuttle Chance replied. “I… guess I can’t actually go anywhere without your supervision, but I’ve finally got a real body! Even if it is just a shuttle.”

“But you’re… there’s a… you… over there,” said Megan, staring between John, the nose-cone of the shuttle which she had decided must be the ‘face’ of the Shuttle, and the little girl who was annoying Ghorqan by jumping up about eight feet and hanging from a branch of a local tree analogue. The little mechanical terror hung by one arm, waving the other at first Ghorqan and then at the two teachers.

“Yeah, but… it’s hard to explain, I suppose, to a humanoid. I’m over there, and I’m over here. Over there I’m climbing a tree,” and Megan could hear faintly that Chance was saying something similar, somehow just in sync enough to match the Shuttle’s words, “and over here I’m scanning subspace chatter, charting some asteroid orbits, examining the mineral deposits on this garden world, running a full sensor suite on the sun in case it gets rowdy and also keeping an eye on the general in-system traffic. The only thing better is if I could actually fly back up into space and orbit the world. Do you have any idea what it’s like to float between the stars themselves?”

John set out two deckchairs, one for himself, one for Miss Ausrich. “Not really, Chance. Can you tell us about it?”

Megan put her fists on her hips and glared at the man as he stood up and wiped his hands on each other. “Shouldn’t we be doing something more important? Like, I don’t know, interacting with the kids?”

“I think we can spare ten to fifteen whilst the kids burn off some of that energy they’ve been building up on the way over here before we interfere. Let them make a few mistakes, then we can show them how to do it better. Besides, I think we need to talk to Miss Chance here. Shuttle Chance has had a big day, it’s important to hear her out.”

“You’re right, though I’ll keep one eye on our PADD’s.”

“As we should.”

“Go on then, Miss Chance, tell us what it’s like, being a shuttle. Please.” Megan sat down on the seat, then glared anew as John went to get drinks from the replicated cooler.

***

“They have not detected us, my Captain,” Thollir said, running his hands across the computer’s touchscreen interface. “Or if they have, they do not display any caution. They have landed here, forty three degrees, twenty minutes North, twenty two degrees, ten minutes West.” Thollir spun the map and pointed, throwing the image up onto the main screen.

“Excellent. Continue monitoring, prepare your strike force. We attack in two hours. Let them get settled in, relax their guard. We’ll keep our shields up, and we’ll use the third planet itself to hide our approach.”

“B-but sir, that’ll leave us blind too! We don’t know what we’ll find!”

“We already know the worst they could have, so prepare for it!” Razzan bellowed, slamming his fist down on the arms of his captain’s chair.

“Sir!”

Thollir slammed his fist against his chest and bowed curtly, before exiting the bridge as quickly as he could. He belted it down the corridors of the ship into what was normally the astrogation lab, now taken up by his men.

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

“Alright boys and girls, listen up. Cap says we go, so we go. We’re keeping a skeleton crew down on the planet to keep the obfuscation field up so nobody sees us until it’s way too late. We’re orbital refineries and nothing else right now, so nobody fucking touch their shuttles or fighters or teleport so much as a fucking cup of piss until go-time or I’ll personally flense you myself, hear?”

There was a rumbling grumble of agreement. Thollir nodded, finally, after giving as many of the bastards the stink eye as he could manage.

“Right. Get yer shit together, pack it fucking manually and then get ready. Keep all systems on low power until I say. Once we’re out of sensor range on the wrong side of the planet, we scramble in a tight window to Mondus III. Cap and the rest’ll stay onboard the Bloodied Knife until we’re committed. We hit ‘em hard and fast, and Cap’ll ‘port in once the Knife is in position above their landing site. We’re not expecting anything much from these guys, and it’ll suck to have to relocate, but a fresh kill like this from the Federation scum? Real feather in our cap, bonuses for everyone, specially those down on the ground, you got me? Syndicate pays good for unfucked Fed tech.”

“We good to ice those Fed fuckers?” asked Madrav, idly playing with her disruptor’s energy core. It was a relatively common Klingon model, older but more than serviceable, with some customizations.

“They’re worth more alive’n dead, and if things go South we can’t barter much with meat,” said Thollir. “Keep that in mind.”

“But yer not sayin’ we can’t off ‘em if we have ta, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thollir grit his teeth. “But kill ‘em if you don’t have to and it’s coming outta your bonus, get me?”

“Fuck, I hear ya. Should we pack lacy pillows for them too? Blankets?” she mocked.

“Just fucking mind where you stick your guns and I won’t have to dock your pay, we all go home happy. We can’t sell dead slaves, Madrav.” Thollir was unfazed, pointing one finger. Madrav glared, but backed down.

***

I activated the queued emergency transport moments before Christoph fell into the pond and deposited him next to Miss Ausrich. Then I beeped her comm link and made yet another note in the Mission Log.

“Another one for you, Miss,” I messaged. “He wasn’t in any danger but would’ve got soaked and ruined his samples.”

“Acknowledged, Shuttle. Ausrich out.” She tapped her badge again to end the transmission before turning to the somewhat startled child, getting him upright and brushing him down. She’d just finished bandaging one child’s leg from a minor graze due to tripping whilst running. She tutted and shook her head. The amount of mischief children could get into! It was a good thing the landing site had been so well chosen ahead of time thanks to the earlier survey maps from the ship that’d found the world in the first place, and preliminary surveys done at range and during approach to verify suitability.

They’d chosen a sheltered valley with a single, shallow river, a number of very shallow pools, a small copse of tree analogs, plenty of definitely safe to be around flowers, shrubs and other grasses and absolutely no dangerous wild animals at all on the whole continent.

And yet still Megan and John had dealt with a sprained ankle, two kids winding themselves falling out of trees — no broken bones, thank goodness — and a number of admittedly very minor cuts and bruises on a number of others mainly thanks to play fighting, tripping or otherwise just… injuring themselves existing, as most kids did.

All in all, a successful field trip. Everything was great.

“Chance? How are you and Ghorqan doing?” Megan Ausrich asked, having tapped her badge to raise the child. All the kids had had comm badges issued, it was a wonder Chance hadn’t gotten them pips to go with the wildly exaggerated numbers of ranks they’d given themselves. Megan swore never, ever, to let that thought past her lips.

“Well,” Chance asked, opening a channel, “we’re on a skirt of the perimeter. It took a while to get up here with these little legs of ours, so it’ll be a while before we finish.”

“You know you don’t have to actually patrol, right?”

“Yeah I know, but Ghorqan wants to and I can’t let him go alone and he won’t let me go alone, so here we are.”

Megan shook her head, trying to suppress a smile. “No going out of bounds, alright?”

“We won’t. Unless—”

“Uh-uh, no, no ‘unless’. If you have trouble on your little patrol you either find a way within bounds or you go back the other way and we all find a way together, clear?”

There was silence on the line for a moment, before Chance answered. “Yes Miss Ausrich.”

“Good. Stay safe, base camp out.”

***

I skipped along after Ghorqan as he prowled around like a frazzled Vulcan Sehlat. I was busy making a daisy-analogue flower crown and he was pointing his ceremonial, but actually very sharp and rather dangerous, dagger at everything.

We’d all been on this planet for a few hours. A short while more and it would be time to head back to camp to make a fire, toast some marshmallows and sing songs and tell scary ghost stories. I had a good one about the unidentified power leak that turned out to be a man-eating tribble nibbling the wiring. That way it would scare Ghorqan as well as everyone else including me! Hmm, on second thoughts that might scare everyone too much.

Well, this trip was peaceful enough, I’d had plenty of time to think up something just scary enough before… I mentally blinked, stopping in my hopping and skipping.

Three small craft, incoming and very fast. Flying like that is so not to anybody’s regulations. I almost said a bad word. This was not good. I contacted Miss Ausrich and Mister Jensen.

“Emergency! We have possible hostiles inbound!” I hoped I was wrong, I very much hoped I was wrong.

“Chance? What’s wrong?” Mister Jensen answered.

“Three impulse signatures, coming very hot. Get everybody onboard me, I’ll fire up the—”

Distantly, there was some sort of explosion. What the absolute shit!? The comm line had cut off! The link between my human and shuttle bodies was still up, but normal comms were down. Definitely not good. Worse, I was detecting something even bigger in orbit and it was powering up weapons, forcefields and transporters. How the hell had they snuck that past me?

I cursed under my breath as I reviewed the sensor logs. They’d been sneaky, very sneaky, and I’d not been a good enough Jovian, not experienced enough, to read the warning signs that, with hindsight, were written large enough across the cosmos to see them from lightyears away.

They’d flown in from behind the planet, deliberately avoiding detection, until they could do a rapid orbital insertion with those fighters then bull-rush their way in with the main force in orbit. It should never have worked. I should have seen them. I felt like such a toaster.

Okay, Chance, sitrep… not good. Even if I could get everyone onboard my shuttle-self before those almost-definitely-fighters could land, I wouldn’t be able to get off planet and into warp before that fugly gunship in orbit would be able to turn us all into so much exotic matter and burning debris.

Worse, they’d set off something nasty to disable long-range and even local comms, so we couldn’t call for help. I bet it would look like solar flares or something mundane for a while to Buran… I felt a yawning chasm open in the pit of my stomach.

Mommy didn’t know.

We were on our own.