Alternate Truth

[LilJennie]

Miki started this one off, and it just grew from there. We really tried to make it different from the frequent "two girls who do sci-fi things" theme, which frankly we both really love and keep coming back to. Is one of them Miki and the other one me? I don't think so, really. We both write for both characters. -- LilJennie

Alternate Truth

By: Miki Yamuri and Liljennie

* * *

Deena Slater and Debbie Rosenburg were the best of friends and in their minds had been since junior high school, as it had been called back then. Since both of them enjoyed science fiction, they had a special night every week when they would spend the night at one or the other’s house and watch SciFi movies. The one on the SciFy channel that night was called The Wisp. It was a really decent superhero type movie with many twists and turns in its plot.

Both girls made pigs of themselves over the buttered popcorn. A new type of honey butter made it irresistible. Of course, they both had a box of wipes close by to control the drippy buttery mess.

The movie was a long one, and it was late by the time it ended. The girls changed into their nighties and went to bed. Of course, through their dreams danced vague images while whispers permeated everything that they could almost, but not quite hear. Needless to say, it wan’t very restful, as the urgent feeling that they had forgotten something infused their dreams as well.

Debbie woke up first. Immediately she knew she was someplace she shouldn’t be.

“Deena,” Debbie said with urgency in her voice, “wake up. I think we are in trouble.”

Deena rolled over and sat up, rubbing her eyes sleepily, then came wide awake as she realized that they were in some type of cave, sleeping on a thick soft mat of moss. She gasped out, “Wh … where are we and … how did we get here?”

Debbie said with fear in her tone, “I have no idea. I would really like to know where we are …” She stood and went to the cave opening. “Deena, you have to come see this.”

Deena got up from the mat of moss and walked to the cave opening. Her eyes grew large and her mouth fell open in total incredulity. What she saw was a beautiful panoramic view of a river valley with a large lake. She could see shaggy-looking cowlike creatures grazing off in the distance on the lush foliage. “Oh my …”

“I know,” said Debbie, “it’s beautiful … but where? And how?”

“More than that,” said Deena. “I don’t see any sign of civilization. Are we … alone? No one for miles?” She turned toward Debbie. “In our nighties?” She looked like she was panicking.

Debbie put her hands on Deena’s shoulders. “OK, yes, this is weird,” she said. “And I don’t think we’re dreaming. But let’s look around this cave or whatever and see if we’ve got anything to work with other than our jammies.”

They examined the cave. It went back and down, with many patches of soft moss on the floor and walls, some large and some small. There weren’t any markings on the walls that looked like anyone had drawn or painted on them. There was no blackened spot that looked like anyone had ever built a fire there. There were trails of dirt that looked like animals had tracked mud into the cave, but there didn’t seem to be any creatures of any appreciable size in it now. And the farther back and down they went, the darker it got, until they couldn’t see anything but the light behind them.

“I don’t think we should go any farther,” said Deena. “For one thing, I can’t see anything anymore. For another thing, we’re barefoot, and the rocks are getting sharper.”

“You’re right,” Debbie agreed. “Let’s go back toward the daylight.” They turned around.

“Wait … what’s that?” asked Deena.

“What?” Debbie asked. “Over here,” came Deena’s voice, and then Debbie could see it too – because their eyes had adjusted to the darkness somewhat, they could now see a dim light from off to the side. They found a side alcove, with dim sunlight making its way through via some type of crack from above. When they reached the darkened opening, they found, lying on a carved ledge, two finely crafted longbows and two leather quivers with a well-made and fletched sheaf of arrows. They also found food, water, and outdoor clothing.

“This is creepy,” said Deena, who nevertheless was trying on one set of the clothing. “It almost fits.”

“Maybe let’s switch,” Debbie said. “What if we picked the wrong sets?”

When they each tried on the other set of clothing, Deena said, “This is even creepier, because this set fits me perfectly.”

“OK, me too,” said Debbie. “Are we … still dreaming?”

“What do you mean, still?” Deena asked. “Did you have weird dreams too?”

“Whispers you couldn’t hear?” asked Debbie.

“Yeah … and this feeling like I’d forgotten something important.”

“Yeah!” Debbie laced up her boots. “I don’t think we’re dreaming, but I know how to tell.”

“But I left my spinning top at home,” said Deena.

“No, memory,” Debbie said. “I’m going to say something, and in a minute I’m going to ask you what it was. The Catcher in the Rye.”

“OK,” Deena replied, “but what if I’m the one who’s dreaming?”

“You say something.”

“Um, OK, The Masque of the Red Death,” Deena said. “Are you done getting dressed?”

“Yeah. Let’s see if we’ve got all the stuff that was obviously left here for us by … who knows?” Debbie looked and felt around. She had the quiver and the bow, and one of the supply packs, but she didn’t find anything else.

“Got it,” said Deena. “And, by the way, Catcher in the Rye.”

“Yeah, Masque of the Red Death,” Debbie replied. “You don’t remember details like that if you’re dreaming.”

“Unless it’s lucid dreaming.”

“Do you lucid dream?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Me either.”

“Well, we’re better protected against slicing our feet open on sharp stones,” said Deena, “but we still don’t have any light, so let’s head back up?”

“Yeah,” said Debbie. They headed toward the brighter light farther up, and soon they were looking out at the idyllic but foreign landscape again.

They ventured out into the light of day, looking around themselves constantly as if threats might jump out at them at any moment – after all, they didn’t know where they were, and someone had made sure that they were armed. But they soon climbed to the top of a hill and could see a long way in every direction.

“Well, that settles it, then,” Deena said. “No sign of civilization for miles in all directions.”

“No roads, no buildings, no fences, no contrails in the sky, no nothing,” said Debbie. “But someone must have brought us here.”

“But where’s here?” asked Deena. “And how? Flying saucers? A wizard did it?”

“I’m dying to know too,” Debbie replied. “But I don’t have any more answers than you do.”

“Did you have to say ‘dying?’” asked Deena.

* * *

They returned to the cave. Debbie suggested, “We should make this cave our basecamp while we explore … out there.” She waved her arm expansively at the cave mouth. “I know we can’t see it yet, but there has to be something. I mean, the fact that we were given appropriate clothing, food, water, and weapons, I’m sure there’s something left behind for us to find.”

Deena said, “Good idea. I think making a bowshot in the direction we want to explore.”

Debbie took on a thoughtful expression, “We can make a circle or arch and leave markers, so we know what we’ve covered.”

Deena said, “I saw something we might want to look at down by the lake. Best I can tell, we should be able to explore between here and there and be back here before lunch if we leave early in the morning.”

Debbie replied, “That would also presuppose a normal day length.”

Deena pointed off to the far horizon. It was plain that night would be falling very soon.

Debbie asked, “Now, what we need is a good idea for starting a fire.”

Deena bent over, picked up two stones each about the size of a small musk melon, and banged them together. A large shower of energetic sparks flashed. “Let’s give this a try. I read somewhere that early humans used to build fire this way.”

The girls gathered the necessary items, including handfuls of some type of fiber fuzz that seemed to burn easily, and managed to have a fairly decent fire going near the mouth of the cave within a few minutes. While Deena tended to the fire and making a firepit out of the large stones lying all about, Debbie had braced her long bow and carefully walked towards the lake after nocking one of the finely crafted arrows to the string.

By the time Debbie had gotten back, Deena had made a rather impressive firepit and even had several sticks in perfect shape to act as skewers. Debbie, more by luck than skill, had managed to kill two medium-sized furry critters. They looked like some sort of cross between a beaver and and otter, but nothing they’d ever seen before, not even online.

The only things either could say about the animals was that they skinned like anything else they had hunted, and they made whatever food had been left for them taste worlds better.

* * *

In a control room beyond any human imagination in its complexity and advancement, a technician sat at a control console in front of a large blue cloud showing a sharp picture of the girls and their camp.

A door hissed open, and another walked briskly in with two large cups of a steaming beverage. “Hi, Mark. Brought you some kalma to help wakeup those sleepy brain cells.”

The tech at the console leaned back and said, “You must be a mind reader. I was just wanting my first cup.”

Jerry, the head of this project, asked, “How are our subjects? Are they adapting to our environmental hunting grounds?”

After Mark took a huge drink of his hot kalma, he replied, “So far above model predictions. There’s a major deviation from estimated responses.”

Jerry quickly grabbed another chair and came up beside Mark. “What’s the deviation, and does it invalidate our predictions of who they are?”

Mark replied calmly, “None of that doom and gloom. They didn’t proceed to the lake and explore the anomaly we set there.”

Jerry replied, “Interesting. Isn’t that where they find a Gerrak? I think they’re going to need it for hacking and chopping.”

Mark said with a nod, “It is. The unpredicted development is that they’re making this more about survival than we expected. It should also be noted that they made a camp, complete with a fireplace, without the items they would have found at the lake.”

* * *

“Some kind of machete,” said Deena, unsheathing a flat, single-edged blade with more of its weight toward its tip.

Debbie was continuing to dig through the contents of the stone chest they had found on an otherwise-bare peninsula that stuck out into the lake they had seen from the hilltop. “That thing could’ve come in handy last night when we were finding firewood,” she said. “Here are some smaller blades, too. Here’s some rope, and some more arrows, and some extra food and water.”

“We’ll still want to boil that water,” said Deena. “I don’t trust anything here. Even at home, there are nasty parasites and germs all around us. And why haven’t we seen any predators yet?”

“Well, if we’re on another planet, there may not be anything that really knows what to make of us,” said Debbie.

“So you’re going with the ‘another planet’ theory,” Deena said as she stowed the machete and also looked into the chest.

“Well, what’s your theory?” Debbie asked. “Some kind of simulation? Time travel?”

“A virtual-reality simulation makes the most sense,” Deena said. “That theory doesn’t involve some kind of interstellar or interdimensional travel, which like traveling through time would involve breaking the laws of physics as we know them. A hyper-realistic virtual-reality simulation isn’t anywhere near that farfetched, at least from the point of view of our civilization.”

“So you’re saying that someone kidnapped us –” Debbie began.

“We’ve been brought here against our will, which is the exact definition of kidnapping,” Deena interrupted.

“Fine,” Debbie went on, “but they’ve put us in a simulation for some reason, and they’re, what, experimenting on us? Observing us? Why?”

“How should I know?” asked Deena. “All I know is that we’re here, we didn’t want to come here, we’re not being allowed to leave, and someone’s clearly left things for us to find. And recently. The metal isn’t even the least bit rusted.”

“That’s true,” said Debbie. “It rains here, and we know it, because it rained overnight. But then, if this is a simulation, the laws of nature could be absolutely anything.”

This time it was Deena’s turn to say, “That’s true. Yet things are very realistic.”

“Hey, does this planet have a moon?” Debbie wondered. “I haven’t seen one yet.” She lifted out what she’d assumed were clothes but turned out to be knapsacks made of light but tough fabric.

“Hard to say,” said Deena, “but a planet like this without a moon to deflect meteor strikes would be … unlikely.”

“Its moon or moons might just not be in visible phases right now,” said Debbie.

Back in the cave, though, Debbie admitted to Deena that they might have to fight to escape – though they didn’t speak openly, just in a few whispered words at a time. The rest of the time, they talked about their plans for the next day.

“They might come here,” Deena whispered. Aloud, she said, “I think tomorrow might be the day to start an organized exploration of the area.” They worked out a mapping strategy.

And a few minutes later, Debbie whispered back, “If they do, we’ll have to be ready.” Aloud, she said, “In case there are large predators, we might want to look for ways to create some better weapons to defend ourselves.”

Another moment, Deena whispered, “If it’s a simulation, we’ll have to be ready to fight if they bring us out.”

And, some time later, Debbie whispered back, “We won’t have any weapons. We’ll have to train.”

* * *

Deena and Debbie were by no means incapable of living primitively off the land. They had far better equipment than the last time they had gone on an expedition in their geology class in college. Between the two of them, over the time they had been here, they had moved the thick, soft moss patches and brought them further to the front, their idea being that there would be less chance of CO2 collecting in the low place where they had originally been located. Then they’d made something like a bedframe out of some of the saplings they had cut. No pioneer would have turned it down either, nor many of the chairs and tables they lashed together out of the many vines they found by the lake.

They had set up the inside of the cave like a perfect field camp. They had found something that worked like a grate they could lay across the top of the stone hearth Deena had assembled from large stones. The interior of the cave was arranged so whatever might come in the cave would be blind to what was in it, which was the reason for the location of the fire pit.

They had thoroughly scouted the area between their cave base camp and the lake edge closest to them, where they’d found the stone chest that was left for them. The items in the chest had been exactly what they needed. The main thing the girls were grateful for was the fire starter. It consisted of a spring loaded handle, a round shaft several inches long made of flint, and a metal button on the side. Making fire with this tool was a super snap, and the girls were glad to have it.

Deena and Debbie were still severely paranoid over who had brought them here, where they actually were, and if there was a possibility of returning to their lives. But if there was anything in the area that would help them do that, or at least learn more about where they were, they’d have to find it. They’d been systematically following their exploration plan, choosing distant landmarks and scouting the terrain between here and there. By this time, they had explored and mapped several miles around the cliff where the cave was.

As far as natural beauty went, this place was like something out of a postcard. They were amazed at the fact that there were no biting insects or other of those noseeum type pests. The big tell was the lack of snakes. Not to mention larger predatory type creatures … not like the small animals they had been hunting for food.

* * *

Mark had his feet propped up on the super advanced console when Jerry walked in with two sealed containers of food and said, “Brought us some lunch. How are our subjects doing in the hunting grounds?”

Mark sat up, took one of the containers, and broke the seal. The wonderful aroma of a food substance unknown to mankind wafted through the control room. “Thanks Jerry, I was about to ask about lunch. About Subjects 18 and 19. First, the computer’s predictions of who they are are still right on track, but not the ones about exactly what they’d do. The major anomalies are still the fact that they’re making the cave into a base camp – they’ve made furniture, and from the best I can tell have set up the area around the cave opening into a defensible zone. They’ve totally not followed the AI’s declarations of intent, but instead set up their environment geared to survival and defense. They’re nothing like the others.”

Jerry sat in the chair next to Mark, opened his container, and took a bite. “You mean they haven’t followed the entire course beyond initial arrival?”

Mark replied, “Yeah, they have yet to begin exploring beyond the edge of the lake where we had the chest. They’ve been following a radial exploration pattern, but it hasn’t returned to the lake area yet.”

Jerry’s eyebrows went up. “Now, that is interesting. That means the predictor is right on the money on who, but totally missed what their action / reaction to stimuli might be.”

Mark asked, “Think it’s time to add a bit of a larger antagonist to their little plot?”

Jerry replied, “Not too nasty; all we want is for them to begin exploring more and find the caches left for them to find. Time is short.”

* * *

“Look what I found,” said Deena, entering the cave carrying a clay pot, one of many they’d made for carrying and storing materials.

“What did …” Debbie began, looking in the pot. “Wait, is that … oil? Crude petroleum?” The pot was full of a thick, brownish-black substance.

“Yes, I found a pool of it in a depression in the ground in the southwest quadrant, near Point 32,” Deena said.

“This means … this place has a deep prehistory,” Debbie said. “It also means that, if there are actually petroleum sources, we could have access to a lot more energy.”

“Finite energy,” said Deena. “But perhaps, if we plan it well, enough to slingshot us to another level.”

“But we’ll need so much more,” said Debbie. “We’ll need raw materials. Copper, iron, silicon, aluminum …”

“We’ve got a little bit,” Deena said.

“But only the machete,” objected Debbie, “and if we repurpose it for something else, we won’t have it …”

“That’s why we’ll need more,” Deena said.

“But we’ll need to find it …”

“Look,” Deena said, holding up the map they’d been making. “Here’s a quartz deposit. Here’s limestone. And I think I found trona.”

“Sodium bicarbonate,” Debbie said. “You’re saying we can make glass.”

“And I think I’ve found copper and tin deposits, and what might be iron.”

“Do you really think we can speed-run civilization here with just the two of us?” Debbie asked.

“Do we have anything better to do?” asked Deena.

“We’ll need … hmm …” Debbie thought for a moment. “We’ll need to keep laser-focused on replicability and automation.”

“Automation,” Deena repeated thoughtfully. “Not that we’ll be able to make truly autonomous machines, but … I think I know what you mean.”

“Until we’ve seriously improved the quality of metals we can smelt and shape, we’ll have to do … what we can,” said Debbie.

* * *

“This kiln is almost hot enough to slingshot our construction materials directly to Portland cement,” Debbie said, pouring some more oil into the fill trough. “If we can make that, we can make concrete out of whatever kind of aggregate we can find – and we don’t have to use our precious quartz sand that we need for glass and later for a silicon source.”

“We can make it hotter with petroleum coke,” said Deena, “which I’ll be able to make soon, at least an impure form. Everything’s going to be less pure at first, but it’ll get better.”

“The windmill and the water wheel will get better too,” said Debbie, “as we replace their wooden parts with metals and then with better metals.”

There was a noise in the trees nearby. “What was that?” Deena asked. “There’s some wind today, but that didn’t sound like wind.”

“Probably some of the local animals,” said Debbie, “but …”

“Let’s just assume that we might’ve finally attracted something’s attention,” said Deena.

But nothing happened during the daylight. The two of them continued working hard, keeping the machete or one of their crude metal weapons they’d crafted handy.

It wasn’t until they’d retired to their base of operations in the cave that the creature attacked. The two of them were awakened by the banging and clanging of various failed metallurgy projects, arranged so as to fall when the nearly-invisible tripwire at the cave mouth was disturbed. Deena immediately sprang to her feet and swept the machete from its sheath. Debbie had grabbed her mace in the meantime, an iron shaft with a sharply flanged weight at the end. Each of them also picked up one of the oil-soaked torches that they kept lit around the cave.

Running to the cave entrance, the two found something like a cross between a cat and a bear, large and muscular but also long-tailed and low to the ground. It growled menacingly, but it perhaps did not expect two fire-wielding humans to run at it shrieking battle cries, because it yelped and tried to turn tail. It was still in the entrance passage, however, so before it could get away, Deena and Debbie had both scored hits, Deena slashing a huge gash in its side and Debbie hitting it squarely in the side of the skull.

The battle was over quickly. The initial salvo had disoriented and gravely wounded the creature, and it feebly tried to fight back, but Deena had soon sliced it open, its entrails sliding out gruesomely, while Debbie had dealt it a blow to the back of the head, making a resounding cracking, crunching sound that caused it drop limply to the ground.

“That was … grosser than I thought it’d be,” said Debbie.

“That settles it, though,” said Deena. “There are in fact large predators here.”

“We’ve made some good weapons,” Debbie said, “but we’ll need better ones.”

* * *

“They killed it how fast?” Jerry said incredulously.

“17 seconds,” repled Mark, replaying the holovid. “They were fully prepared for it, and they defended their base ferociously. Also, they’ve got bronze weapons.”

“What? Already?” asked Jerry. “How?”

“Their persistent energy transducing structures are progressing at a frankly impressive rate,” said Dennis, a third researcher, sipping his kalma. “Look at that water wheel and that windmill. And that leadscrew flywheel – wound by excess wind energy, it turns the windmill into a far more reliable, steady energy source.”

“This is … alarming,” said Jerry. “Subjects 18 and 19 aren’t following the trail at all. At this rate they won’t even need what we’ve left for them by the time they find it.”

“They’ve started producing iron, but it’s not very pure yet,” said Mark. “But they’re from a technological world, so I’d bet they know that, and they might know how to fix it. That flywheel means they’ll be making more complex machines soon. Are heat engines far behind? They have found oil.”

“How are they doing all of this so quickly?” Jerry wondered. “They’re farther along in technology than, Subjects 10 and 11 even considering the three-month headstart 10 and 11 had.”

“I’d have to analyze their progress,” said Dennis, “but I think they’re deliberately trying to develop a high level of technology quickly. And they seem to know quite a lot about not only their goals but how to get there.”

* * *

“This is it, then,” said Debbie, holding the finished device in her hand. “The heart of the next leap forward.”

“We’ll need a lot more of them,” said Deena, “but yes. That cage of steel wheels and gears will make our first programmable machine possible. Arrange them in different patterns, and we’ve got all the basic logic and mathematical operations. It’s time to leap straight from the Iron Age to the Information Age. We can build machines to make more machines.”

“Are we about to make a steampunk technological singularity?” Debbie said, grinning.

“If you’re asking whether we’re going to use steam-era technology to build silicon microchips,” replied Deena, “the answer is yes. Yes, we are. And, as always, we’ll be making a crude level of them, then using them to make a more refined level, and so on.”

“I hate making bad things when I know how to make better things,” Debbie remarked, “but I know we don’t have the tools to make the better things first.”

And within a few months after that they’d built machines that could build more of the mechanical modules, which they used to enlarge the machines so they could make the mechanical modules faster. The mining devices they’d built kept supplying the smelting devices they’d built with ore, and they used the mined-out underground pits to store their smelting by-products, so to a large extent the picturesque nature of the land was still there … if you didn’t look at the concrete buildings that now dotted the landscape, housing their machinery and protecting it from the elements.

“And here we are,” said Debbie, holding a small black tile in her hand. “Basic doped-silicon solar cells. Mechanized manufacturing. And soon … electronic computation.”

Deena nodded. “It won’t be long now,” she said. “Soon we’ll be at our own level of technology. And then … well, I suggest we start improving for efficiency and sustainability. Without a profit motive – nobody to sell anything to – there’s nothing driving us in inefficient directions like deliberately excessive consumption.”

“Maybe we’ll start a real technological singularity,” mused Debbie. “Even though we’re still producing lots of petroleum, we’re using it pretty efficiently, and with even more efficient consumption, we’ll actually have better tech than back home.”

“And I still haven’t forgotten that we always need better weapons,” said Deena. “Those critters came around a few times, but after being trounced every time, they’ve been staying away. Still … something bigger or smarter might come along.” And as she walked by Debbie, she whispered, “or so might whoever brought us here.”

* * *

With their production mechanized, Debbie and Deena had soon dismantled and rebuilt all of their infrastructure along more efficient lines, recycling all available materials. In a matter of months they’d gone from nothing to solar-powered, quietly-humming computerized manufacturing plants, with a computation farm that constantly analyzed the entire production base to improve energy and material efficiency. Batteries kept the whole thing running all night.

The batteries were ingenious, they created clay pots and made 2 long rods. One rod was made of their simple Iron, the other from copper. The top of the jar was sealed with a tarry substance the girls had made from the sludge left over from their attempts to refine the crude oil they had found and a thin wooden disk. For their electrolyte, they used potassium hydroxide (KOH) derived from wood ash (commonly known as potash or lye). The batteries could store about 24 volts so they made many and created a large bank to store their energy with. Whoever had brought them here had had no idea whom they’d kidnapped.

The interior of their cave had become a clean, controlled environment with a constant temperature and humidity. There was an induction range for cooking and purified running water. There was a computer terminal and a huge projection display, which right now was showing a map of the area.

“The recon drones have expanded our map into this area here,” said Debbie, pointing at the map with her newly constructed laser pointer, “and as you can see, there are a few spots here and here that look like they might be artificial. Possibly more goodies left by whoever brought us here.”

“We should check them out,” Deena suggested, “though as always we should be prepared.”

“Right, we can test your brand new super-efficient energy weapons,” Debbie said, “though so far everything stays away from us.” She subtly winked at Deena, though, knowing that she meant they should be prepared for a visit from their unknown kidnappers, which they tried to be at all times.

“Because of all those various weapons I keep insisting we bring with us,” Deena retorted. “Though you can bring your bow and arrows if you want.”

“Hey, my carbon-fiber compound bow and aluminum-carbon composite arrows are far and away superior to what they left for us,” said Debbie. “Though I’ll admit that with energy weapons, there are no arrows to recover afterwards.”

“And I admit that the bow doesn’t rely on battery packs that can run out of power,” Deena replied graciously.

* * *

Jerry sat at his desk and stared in incredulity at the current report. According to this, the board had canceled all other tests but allowed this one to continue. From the very best he could tell, the selection AI was spot on and the two test subjects were exactly who they were looking for.

Dennis entered the room and placed a small mem-crystal in front of Jerry, saying. “Apparently our action prediction AI was totally wrong about the courses of actions those two women would take. However, the selection algorithm was spot on – from all the data they appear to be the lost ones.”

Jerry tossed a stack of manila folders in front of Dennis. “Those women have exceeded all projected courses. They have only thus far found two of the boost packages we left for them, and they still exceeded all time constraints and construction goals by a factor of over 120% … there is no way they aren’t who we think they are.”

Dennis thumbed through several of the folders. “I do hope you realize, even though they aced the goals, they failed most of the tests.”

Jerry turned from the display and looked at Dennis in sheer surprise, “How in anyone’s mind can there be any doubt? They failed nothing – they exceeded the tests so grossly that the tests were invalid.”

Dennis said flatly, “They only found two of the many loot nodes we left for them. Their explorations have been unpredictable, and from the best our AI can tell, they seem to be purposely random.”

Jerry rebutted, “The exception is that they overaccomplished the set tasks without the need for the nodes. Look.” He pointed to a section of one folder telling how the women had completely set up a camp and made a fireplace before finding any of the caches. “Right off, they violated the action prediction, but have since overachieved all the other tasks and expanded on them over a hundredfold. No way they failed anything. It’s just that our meager means of testing are inadequate and the models used to train the AI overlooked something.”

Dennis drummed his fingers on the console as he watched the playback of the women as they recreated the cave into a somewhat modern habitat and even added automation to many things. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After all this time … they were so close.

Jerry said with a slight tone of worry evident, “The only real issue is contact. I’m more than sure they will feel that any attempt on our part to make direct communication will be viewed as hostile. I mean, after all, we did kidnap them and imprison them without asking. And we haven’t left any explanations for them at all.”

“The experiment wouldn’t work any other way,” replied Dennis. “If they were told what was going on, it would invalidate the data. We might as well not even bother. We’d be wasting all the money, time, and effort on noise that couldn’t even be called data.”

“They’re not going to respond favorably unless they get some information,” said Jerry. “And frankly, this will be the first pair of subjects we haven’t just drugged in their sleep again, wiped their memories, and sent home. We don’t have a tested protocol for this.”

“So leave them messages,” Dennis suggested.

* * *

“The problem is that we can’t create an LLM without a huge corpus of written material,” Debbie said. “Making anything resembling an AI is going to be difficult without anything like the Internet.”

“What the …?” said Deena. “I might have discovered something.”

Debbie came over to look at the transparent glass screen Deena was gesturing at. “What is it? Did you find a transmission?”

“Maybe,” Deena said. “You know we’ve been scanning for any sign of life – figuring that whoever brought us here might be using radio to communicate and trusting that we wouldn’t develop a means to intercept their transmissions.”

“Right, and no sign of any kind of non-natural radio signals,” said Debbie.

“Well, then there’s this,” said Deena. “It’s in the microwaves, and it’s just fleeting, but there’s data there.” She pointed at a graph that hung in the air, apparently behind the glass screen, and gestured at it, enlarging it. “Could be encrypted, or could just be so fragmentary that we can’t determine its protocol. But that right there is definitely a 0.3 millisecond fragment of a digital signal.”

“Digital signals in the microwave?” Debbie asked. “Why?”

“Penetrates most organic matter,” Deena replied. “And can be made coherent and thus extremely tight. Only occasionally would there be a refraction or reflection that doesn’t go only where you need and nowhere else. The computer estimates that the statistics are such that there must be maser transmissions all around us if we’re seeing bits of them as often as we are.”

“They’re talking all the time and don’t think we can hear them,” said Debbie.

“Yes,” replied Deena, “but what’s more … what if we do manage to intercept more transmissions?”

“Maybe we can piece them together,” Debbie answered, fascinated. “Find out what they’re doing. What they’re talking about.”

“Now, how do you intercept coherent microwave signals?” Deena asked. “Find and study their pathways. Lots of drones, and precise positioning.”

“Well, we can’t exactly launch satellites,” said Debbie. “But we can have a network of navigation towers.”

“We’ll get those built in a fortnight,” Deena said.

By what would normally have been a Saturday two weeks later, they not only had communication relay and navigation towers every 10 miles for hundreds of miles around, thanks to their crude but effective autonomous builder bots, they had a good picture of the pathways that their captors’ microwave signals were taking. Some were moving at about the rate that the planet was rotating, meaning that they weren’t surface-to-surface; they were from points in space to other points. Others were moving at speeds that were reasonable for airborne vehicles or perhaps drones. Others didn’t seem to be shifting, suggesting that they were ground-to-ground. There were distant stations talking to one another.

“And, of course, the usual random atmospheric reflections and such,” said Deena, pointing at aggregations of the data. “But now that we’ve found the lines of sight they’re using, we can start intercepting much more complete signals. Like this one here. It’s very strong and passes directly over our base.”

“Doesn’t that suggest …” Debbie began.

“Yes, probably intended for us to intercept,” Deena finished. “So now it’s time to try to decipher it. Moving a drone into position to record.”

Debbie whispered into Deena’s ear, “That’s not the only one you’re recording, is it?”

Deena quietly whispered back, “I’ve already deciphered many signals. I can discard the theory that we’re in a simulation. We’ve got tons of data now. Enough to create an LLM, if we only knew their language. Computer’s working on it.”

“Let’s see now … right, that’s a strong sequence of bits,” said Deena aloud, “but what’s the encoding scheme? Let’s try … no, that isn’t working … how about … what if this is a sync signal and this is a checksum … no … what about this … aha! That’s consistent! But what’s this data stream represent? Picture? Text? Audio?”

“Let’s try all of them,” said Debbie. “The text theory doesn’t look like it’s going to hold water; look at how the values are all over the map.”

“16-bit values look the most likely,” said Deena. “Audio stream? But with what sample rate?”

“Let’s just try something and adjust,” Debbie said, gesturing at the screen. Sound came from the speakers, low and slow garbled mess.

“Speed it up.”

Debbie adjusted, and it soon took on the unmistakable tones of a speaking voice, in English. “We might not know their language, but they know ours,” she said.

“… for which we apologize profusely. By now you must realize that you’re on another planet, not within a simulation or in some other era of time on your own world. Neither are you the only ones we have been testing. But you are the most successful, and the only subjects we haven’t sent back to their homes. We want to speak to you and assure you that we mean you no harm. If you are able to decipher this signal, please reply by the same means in the opposite direction. End of message. Repeating. Greetings to the two women from the planet we call G-6167. We have been unable to tell you until now, but you are part of a very important experiment that required us to take you from your homes, for which we apologize profusely …”

“Well,” said Deena. “Of course, there’s no reason why we should believe them, but they could have killed us long ago and didn’t. What do you suppose this experiment is about? Threat assessment?”

Debbie replied, “No – there were a few wild animal attacks, but never anything we couldn’t handle, and no robot attacks, or aerial assault drones, or anything. It has to be something else. Do they need us to get them out of some kind of technological corner they’ve painted themselves into?”

“Maybe,” said Deena, “but unlikely. They’ve clearly got all kinds of technology we don’t have, if they can bring us through space to another star system with habitable worlds within our lifetimes. We can’t completely rule out their needing some kind of tech know-how from us, but it’s not extremely probable. Do they just need the data from experimenting on us?”

“Seems like they’re going to an awful lot of trouble to get it,” said Debbie. “I can’t imagine we’re that rare and special a data source.”

* * *

Over the course of the next month, the two women had many communications with whomever their captors were, but they still never met them face to face. Through these encoded text conversations, they had discovered the locations of several caches, each with increasing resource usefulness.

As Denna and Debbie packed the newest collection of electronics into their knapsacks, Debbie said, “You know?” She held up a small phosphorus viewplate. “From what we’ve found in these chests, it would appear that one of our test tasks was to create advanced items. Not real sure why, but from those things we just found, odds are good they wanted us to build them.”

Deena snorted a laugh as she closed the top of her knapsack and put it on. “Well, then we must have passed. We created those items and more advanced ones without any help from them.”

Debbie replied as she put her pack on, “My thing is, why us? Who are we that they’re so sure of? I mean, think about it … we started out with nothing but longbows and arrows. Now look where we are, and we never found any of their … loot chests.”

Deena replied as the two of them turned back towards their cave base camp, “Still, you gotta admit. The stuff in those drops would have been extremely useful.”

Debbie nodded. “Yeah, I would have loved to have had that firestarter that first night. Making fire with rocks is OK, I suppose, but just giving that thing a quick push … lots less energy and a lot safer.”

The girls arrived at the entrance to their cave. It didn’t exactly look like a cave anymore, especially the entrance. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was a solid framed door with thick bindings. They didn’t have to worry about critters visiting them in the night – or, with their modifications, any higher-tech unwanted visitors either.

On the inside, they had gathered enough of the thick moss to more or less have wall-to-wall carpeting. They had also made an ingenious night lamp out of some form of luminescent lichen. It created a soft greenish glow that was surprisingly bright. They could have used electric lights, as they had constructed an LED manufacturing line, but when you could have a nightlight that cost zero energy, even a very efficient one that cost more than nothing wasn’t worthwhile. They had brighter LED lighting for when they needed it, too, powered by batteries that were charged by the sun in the daytime.

Not only was the place furnished, although it did have that primitive posh look, they had running water. Hot showers were easy, with the crack in the roof allowing for water to be brought straight in. Off in another location, the girls had even set up their computer station and next to it their newest microwave comm station.

Debbie dropped her knapsack next to a workbench and said, “From what the last comm from our captors said, we’re to meet them very soon. They assure us they mean no harm and have only the best of intentions. They understand we’re going to be leery and angry; all they ask is for us to give them the chance to explain. So … how do we play it?”

Deena dropped her knapsack next to Debbie’s and replied, “We only have one shot. If they’re going to hurt us, then would be the time.”

Debbie frowned, “If they were going to hurt us, silly, they’ve had more than enough opportunities to do it. They could have released wild animals on us before we were ready to handle them, or they could have dropped bombs on us or set deadly traps. Instead, they left many items we would need to survive; it was we who didn’t go out and explore the environment. We chose to start with a stable base first, then build from there.”

* * *

In the control center, advanced beyond human imagination, Mark sat and made a few minor calculations. He was trying very hard to find a proper arrival point so as not to scare their subjects. Jerry came in, and Mark showed his work. “We have to be sure about this,” said Jerry. “We’ve searched too long and hard to find them after the accident to mess it up now. Now the only question is, if we show them the proper data … will they remember?”

“We can’t know,” said Mark. “There’s no way to predict. All we can do is maximize our chances.”

“I guess I’ll run this through the computer one more time,” said Jerry. “I’m the one who has to meet with them. I’m the one who’s going to have to stick to the plan and not mess up.”

“You know that they’ll bring weapons, right?” Mark said. “And that you can’t. They might have seemed very calm and rational in text, but we’ve seen most of their discussions. It’s easy to tell they don’t trust us. They whisper to each other, and we can’t always pick it up. They only want one thing: to go back home. Back to where they think their home is. The only home they remember. And they’ll be desperate.”

“But … we can’t just … take them back,” said Jerry. “Back to that planet, whatever it’s called – Earth, isn’t that it? Or was it Dirt?? We can’t lose them again, not right after finding them. We’ve spent all this time and effort – and, most importantly to the bureaucrats, money. What’ll they say, what’ll the voters say, if we just take them home?”

* * *

“Do you suppose they even sit in chairs?” Debbie asked. They were sitting at a table in a gazebo they’d had the worker drones build out of treated and compressed plant fibers – basically wood, without chopping trees down. Its solar roof stored power in a layer of batteries under the panels that powered the gazebo’s lights if they were ever there at night to turn them on. Besides, their devices might need charging – their communication and control tablets, and their laser weapons, which they had just in case.

“I think the chances are pretty good,” Deena replied. The two of them were sitting around the table, and there was a third empty chair. “They’re similar to us in size and form, judging from the items they’ve been leaving for us.”

“Bogey at three o’clock,” said Debbie, looking at her tablet’s radar display. Just then there was a shimmery sound in the distance, and it wasn’t hard for the two of them to see an aircraft of some kind approaching. They stood up, and each had one hand on her beam weapon, trying to look natural.

The vehicle was a flat, triangular craft, and it slowed to a halt in the air near the gazebo before settling vertically to a landing on jacks that extended to support it. A hatch opened beneath it, revealing stairs.

“Stairs,” Deena said. “Suggests that they have legs, at least.”

“And here we go,” said Debbie as the first signs of life emerged from the vehicle.

And the person who descended the staircase and approached them was astonishingly, almost disappointingly human. He had dark, wavy hair and skin that was somewhat brownish, much like Deena and Debbie’s own. He wore what looked like olive-green cargo shorts and a collarless off-white polo shirt, buttoned all the way up. He had boots that came up almost to his knees and matched the shirt.

“I’m not sure his fashion sense would translate well to Earth,” Debbie said quietly, “but other than that we could be looking at a relative.”

Once he was near enough, he called out, “Hello, Debbie and Deena,” in an oddly accented voice, meaning that he had learned English in order to communicate with them. “I am Jerry. We’ve been talking already.” He spread his hands out, showing they were empty. “No weapons.”

“I just scanned him,” said Deena quietly to Debbie. “No weapons. I don’t think his plane has any either. It’s got some kind of sonic emitter – maybe for animal control.”

“Well, nice to finally meet you, Jerry,” Debbie said in reply. “I’m sure this is a gesture of goodwill or the like, which we appreciate, of course. Please have a seat so we can talk. We saved you a chair.”

Jerry approached the gazebo. “I think it might be more accurate to say that you made me a chair,” he said, climbing up the steps. “Well. Let’s talk.” He sat down. So did Debbie and Deena.

“You probably already know our number one question,” said Deena, “namely, when can we go home? Or are we going to have to develop space flight and go home on our own?”

Jerry replied, “Yes, I anticipated that you’d ask that. And the answer is, now that we’ve met peacefully, anytime you like.”

“Just like that?” asked Debbie. “After all these months of being left here against our will?”

“Just like that,” echoed Jerry. “The fact is that once we had our answer, we didn’t need to keep you any longer, but we had to rebuild trust with you before you’d believe that we were going to take you home.”

“Your answer?” Deena asked. “What’s that mean? Was this just an experiment? Are we experimental subjects to you?”

“No,” said Jerry, “you’re our family, and we miss you very much.”

* * *

“What?” asked Debbie. “Family?” But she had just mentioned to Deena that he looked like a relative.

“I don’t think I have any relatives from outer space,” Deena said.

“You don’t,” replied Jerry, “or perhaps very distant ones. We’re from the galaxy that you call Andromeda on Earth. And, just a few years ago, we sent our first expedition in history to Earth’s galaxy – the Milky Way, I think you’re calling it?”

“Wait, who’s ‘we?’” asked Deena.

“We’re a people who started out on one world, centuries ago,” explained Jerry, “and now we’ve spread out to a few dozen colony worlds. But then we developed a new form of faster-than-light space travel that can span the space between galaxies, and we sent out scientific probes and got several encouraging results. Just imagine! Discovering that there are planets with life in another galaxy! So we put together a team of enthusiastic and brilliant young volunteer scientists and engineers, excited to explore the planets we’d discovered firsthand.”

“And you discovered humans?” asked Debbie.

Jerry gestured with his head and hands, which didn’t really convey any meaning, but he continued his tale. “No, tragically the drive failed catastrophically when the ship was almost to the Milky Way Galaxy, destroying the vessel and, we thought at first, killing everyone on board. But after investigating the wreckage, we discovered that it was possible that one of the segments of the ship might have made it to safety. We build our ships out of modules, each one independently controllable in case of disaster.”

“Oh, that’s such a practical design!” said Deena.

“Indeed,” Jerry replied. “Of course, if one of the modules survived, we had no idea where it had gone, or how badly injured the survivors on board it were. Its computer might well have directed it toward a planet with a breathable atmosphere and compatible ecosystem. But these were all guesses. So we’ve been searching for the survivors on every planet in the Milky Way Galaxy with humanoid life. All 71 of them.”

“There – there are 71 planets in the Milky Way with humanoid life?” asked Debbie, astonished.

“Indeed there are,” said Jerry, “at least, that we’ve discovered so far. It’s very odd that there are so many, and so similar. Could our distant ancestors have colonized the Milky Way long ago? Could someone else have colonized both galaxies even longer ago? We have theories, but so far no definite answers. At any rate, from the data we pieced together, the survivors would have been two women, about the same age, though they would have grown older in the time it’s taken to search. We’d hoped we’d find them right away, but we didn’t find anyone who was sending distress signals. Perhaps their module had been too badly damaged. Perhaps they had only barely survived and didn’t remember who they were.”

“Wait, two women?” asked Deena.

“About the same age?” Debbie asked at the same time. They looked at each other.

“So we’ve been finding likely candidates, pairs of women who stuck together, were about the right age, and looked like the survivors’ last known images,” Jerry said. “If their memories were lost, perhaps they’d still retain at least some of the skills that had earned them a place on the exploration mission – technical abilities beyond those of the rest of the world they had made their new home. So we designed this experiment. And you … well, here you are. No one else passed the test. All the rest have been returned to their homes, their memories altered so their lives aren’t too disrupted by the experience.”

“And now … you want us to come back to the Andromeda Galaxy?” Deena asked.

“Well,” said Jerry, “it’s not a matter of coming back – it’s where we all are right now. An uncolonized planet, far from the trade lanes. To be honest, we want you to recover your memories, come home, and stay. But it’s unethical to hold you longer than we have – some might argue that what we’ve already done was unethical, but it could also be argued that we were trying to save you and return you to your former lives.”

“But that gray area is getting darker and darker the longer you keep us here,” said Debbie.

“Yes,” said Jerry. “Also there’s a matter of politics and bureaucracy – the people wanted the project to make sure we’d found you.”

* * *

Debbie looked at Deena and frowned. “As hard as I try,” she said, “I can’t remember any life other than Earth. I must admit, both of us have the same fairly advanced kind of dreams, but I remember growing up here … or rather, back on Earth.”

Deena nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t ever remember waking up in a hospital either. I do recall school … mostly junior and senior high school. Everything before that is mostly foggy vague impressions.”

Jerry brought out a device that looked like some kind of cell phone and switched it on. It made humming and twiddling noises for a few minutes, then he said, “From the bio-scan, it appears that both of you sustained rather serious head injuries at one time, most likely from the accident or the crash that followed, which have physically healed. At what age do you recall junior high school?”

The two women talked quietly between themselves for a minute before Debbie replied, “My very earliest clear memory is junior high school, and we were 18.”

Deena said, “Now, I know that’s not the age most people go to junior high school, but they said we had to be held back. Because there was a lot we didn’t know, so we had to take remedial classes.”

“They said it was because of the accident,” said Debbie. “We could barely speak, we couldn’t read or write, we didn’t know any history or literature …”

Jerry brought out another device and opened it like a book. To their total amazement, both women looked at several pictures of themselves … but they were obviously not on Earth or anywhere they had seen before. One of the dead giveaways were the three moons visible beyond purple peaks off in the distance. The long trail of fire that made up some kind of firefall was another.

* * *

Deena said in astonishment, “Those images … that’s us … but not anyplace I remember.”

Debbie replied with the same astonished tone, “I knew we had an aptitude for computers, electronics, and physics … but I had no idea.”

Jerry said softly, “Actually, the two of you are extremely special to the peoples of this galaxy.”

Debbie asked, “How so? From what you said, we’re lucky to just be alive.”

Jerry smiled, “It’s like this. Over the centuries our collective star groupings discovered a way to create a recurring genetic code. What being part of that gene line means is that once identified, individuals with those traits are gathered and specially educated. The reasoning is, you can do almost anything with almost nothing. Proof in the pudding – look at what you’ve done here, and without finding nearly any of our cache boxes we left for you.”

“So … we couldn’t speak, read or write because we’d never learned English at all,” Debbie said, stunned.

Deena added, “And that’s why we didn’t know any history or literature.”

Jerry speculated, “So of course, the Earth education system just assumed you’d taken serious brain damage in the crash. I’m surprised they didn’t realize you were from another world.”

“Well, we didn’t either,” said Debbie. “If the wreckage was ever discovered, it was hidden away – but I suspect it was too badly damaged … or its self-destruct took care of it.”

“How did you know there was a self-destruct system to prevent technological contamination?” asked Jerry.

“What?” asked Debbie. “I didn’t. I assumed there would be. Why wouldn’t there be one?”

“I feel bad,” said Deena, “like part of my life’s been taken from me.”

“We might be able to restore your memories, or at least some of them,” said Jerry. “But only with your permission.”

“What would we have to do?” asked Debbie.

“We’d take you to a neurological specialist,” Jerry said. “An expert in amnesia and memory care.”

Deena asked, “And if we remember everything we’re going to, and we still want to return to Earth?”

“Then you return to Earth,” said Jerry. “But we’ll see what happens first, OK?”

“I’m all for it,” said Debbie. “I have a terrible feeling there’s something very important I’ve forgotten.”

“Let’s do it,” Deena agreed.

“Oh good,” said Jerry. “I’m glad you’ve been so agreeable. I wasn’t looking forward to being zapped by those beam projectors you built. I really didn’t bring any weapons.”

* * *

“Zrr gionss mirjisul zzgriox,” Jerry said to a blue-skinned older woman in a white outfit. She responded in whatever language this was; Deena and Debbie couldn’t understand a word. Jerry had taken them back to a base, where they’d boarded a spacecraft, flown to another planet, flown from the spaceport to this hospital, and here they were.

Jerry explained, “This is Dr. Ziowsk. She’s one of the foremost memory specialists in the known systems. More importantly, she knows about the genetic modifications that were done to you – and how your brains might be different from the usual. Your treatment might have to be different too. But she can handle it. She’s among the best.”

“Not the best?” asked Deena.

“I’d say that, but it could cause literal fights,” said Jerry, “and we need the neurologists to heal you and not fight each other.”

After various tests and brain scans, Dr. Ziowsk brought their two charts to them, printed out on some kind of plastic film. They couldn’t read a word of it, but there were some graphs and holographic images that they could partly understand. The doctor talked to Jerry for a while as the two young women looked at their own charts and each other’s.

Then Jerry translated, “She says that your genetically-modified brains actually erected barriers to protect themselves from damage as the drive explosion was happening, but the wave of xron energy passing through your neurons was so chaotic that those same barriers couldn’t just be lowered, and they blocked your memories away. She says that it won’t be hard to restore your memories, but it wasn’t going to happen by itself.”

“What do we need to do?” Debbie asked.

Deena asked, “Will it involve surgery?”

“Fortunately, she says no,” replied Jerry. “It’ll take a day, and she’s planning to have the computers perform the process simultaneously, because they’ll have to learn from the configuration of both your brains at the same time. I guess it’s just how it works. I’m not a neurosurgeon.”

Debbie and Deena talked. But they decided to do it.

Fully conscious, the two of them lay on side-by-side tables as ring-shaped brain scanners of silvery metal moved up and down around their heads, controlled by the same massive computer, monitored closely by Dr. Ziowsk. They were observed by Jerry and a number of other people who watched through windows high above the operating theater. Some were also dressed in white, as all the medical staff were; they assumed those were medical students or other doctors. But the others they didn’t recognize at all.

But as the procedure went on, both Deena and Debbie felt increasingly overwhelmed by the sensations that were coming from inside their brains. They couldn’t go on. Almost simultaneously, both of them fell unconscious. Their last memory was of Dr. Ziowsk saying something to them – something they could understand.

“Do not worry,” she said. “This is normal.”

And then they were waking up. They lay in beds on opposite sides of the same room, wearing this galaxy’s equivalent of hospital gowns, propped up so they could see each other as their eyes blinked open. “Debbie,” said Deena.

“Hey, Deena,” said Debbie.

And then they were both beset from both sides by … people they now recognized. “Mom?” Debbie said. “Dad?”

“Daddy!” said Deena. “Mommy!” Both of them found themselves in the embrace of their parents, brothers, sisters, and other relatives. whom they hadn’t been able to remember until just that day.

“I’m so happy!” said Debbie’s mother, shedding tears. “I thought we’d lost you!”

“My baby!” Deena’s mother said, similarly emotional.

“These results are very encouraging,” said Dr. Ziowsk, entering the room. “I would like to perform several cognitive tests, with your permission, to ensure that I have done for you all that I can.”

“I can … understand you,” Debbie said to the doctor.

“Me too,” said Deena.

“This is also encouraging,” the doctor stated, nodding.

* * *

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Debbie as they were being discharged from the hospital.

Dr. Ziowsk replied, “I have merely done what I could do. I am happy that you have your memories back. It’s always so gratifying when my studies can help people. But I can also now write a paper on the effects of high-xron-energy pulses on the neural pathways of 7,8,2-gene-modified individuals. And that may help even more people.”

“Now I remember why I wanted to be a doctor,” said Deena.

* * *

Much of the girls’ memories were still blank. They did remember that the pod they had made their landing in had been so thoroughly destroyed in the crash that its debris looked no different from that of a wrecked Earth vehicle, so the authorities had assumed the young girls they found inside were normal Earth humans.

Based on the historical data they had managed to get on their own backgrounds during their tenure on Earth, it had been confirmed that both women had sustained head injuries. Photos of them taken at the time looked like something from a horror film, with zombielike red, green, and yellow bruises that looked like they were dripping down their faces.

For a few months, it had been touch and go. Earth medical science had done what it could, so whatever healing remained the women would have to do on their own. It was thought that their inability to speak English was due to an intracranial thrombosis that put pressure on that cortex location. It wasn’t known if they would ever recover their real memories.

After several months, the educational system of the Earth nation that had found them had taught the girls to about a junior high school level. They had learned amazingly fast, which the neurologists put down to their remembering past data over time due to proper stimulation.

Their appearance was youthful enough that they had been placed in junior high school, where they had learned more about Earth’s history and languages and relearned more about science and math. Of course, the excuses for the lack of previous records were the accident, their amnesia, and the fact that no one actually knew who they were, but it was amazing that they had survived the vehicle wreck, not to mention their head injuries.

The girls had done better than well, as it was immediately recognized that these two were exceptional. They were put in a fast track program, grooming them for aerospace, electronics, and computer engineering. Needless to say the girls took to this like ducks to sunflower seeds.

And it also followed that they pursued their PhDs in those areas and managed to impress a whole board of collegians. They were more than sure that these girls were going places and would be in the news all the time in the future.

Deena said to Debbie with incredulity in her tone, “I had no idea we had an entire life in another galaxy. And they’ve been improving that intergalactic star drive. We now have the ability to travel from here to there rather quickly, and with a lot less risk.”

Debbie looked at Deena and said, “Are you thinking we might go back to Earth and just … sort of pick up where we left off? I mean, now that my mind is being unlocked, there’s so much we could teach Earth – things they don’t even have the remotest clue are even possible.”

Deena replied with a tinge of worry, “We could do that, if there weren’t strict laws against it … and if the humans of Earth don’t use our knowledge to destroy themselves.”

Debbie nodded and replied, “The only life we have here is one of being basically under house arrest due to our special abilities and our current intergalactic explorations. Back on Earth, it’s a dog of a different bark … there, we are the brain children and can more or less do what we want. I think I’d want to go back to Earth. We can always commute.”

This time, Deena nodded. “I guess it’s just gonna have to be a risk. With a hope Earth has enough self-preservation skills not to destroy themselves.”

Debbie added, “And we might be able to help them with that too.”

* * *

Their proposal was so convincingly written that the Galactic Institute had no choice but to see its wisdom. “I can find nothing to refute your argument,” said Chancellor Psolier, head of the Extragalactic Research Projects Committee. “The civilization of this planet ‘Earth’ is compelling to our xenoanthropologists. Your absence has probably already caused a planetwide stir. Your return will cause another, but your proposal for reinserting yourself into Earth culture is quite clever, and it violates no laws – the legal department has checked that thoroughly. Your absence will be felt quite acutely, but we will be able to communicate, and you will be able to return whenever you like, so it isn’t as if we’ll be losing you again. There is nothing further for me to say besides … request authorized.”

“Thank you, Chancellor,” said Debbie. “You’ll be receiving our reports on a regular basis.”

“I look forward to them, and I’m sure I could list dozens of other academics who could say likewise,” said the Chancellor, standing up. “Good luck, both of you.” He shook their hands and gave them the electronically-signed ceremonial scroll that was their ticket back to Earth – now they just had to accomplish their plan.

* * *

“The spacecraft has to look like we designed it ourselves and that we used only knowledge of Earth technology,” said Deena. “That’s why my engine designs use only slightly improved variations of Earth rocket fuel technology. More efficient, but explainable by our story that we’d been experimenting with fuel chemistry.” She brought her engine design blueprints up on the lab’s large screen.

Debbie examined them and said, “Hmm … yes … I love it! It fits our story perfectly. As for me, I’ve designed the rest of the spacecraft to fit common Earth profiles – meaning small, cramped, and barely livable. But again, I’ve tried to add innovations that are all one reasonable step removed from Earth tech – even though we both know how to do vastly better.” Debbie brought her hull and living quarters designs up on the next screen over for Deena to peruse.

“I like it,” Deena said. “Let’s put it all together in the simulator and run it. We’ll have to eject from the intergalactic ship somewhere outside of Earth scanning range, leaving it in an eccentric orbit in stealth mode, but we’ll be able to resummon it whenever we want it to pick us up.”

“Perfect,” Debbie said. “The computer’s almost ready with the simulation.”

* * *

Leon Derowski sat at his analyzing table and entered the most recent sky scan data. Leon had a very prestigious, although very boring, job with the Asteroid Tracking and Early Warning network. He had been researching this particular stretch of the heavens due to the back log of images that started stacking up unprocessed.

In a scan photo logged about 7 days earlier, A large anomalous bloom of some type of high energy particles, and a severely large object appeared as shown by the fuzzy pixelated images. The distance was too astronomical to determine any details. As large as this object appeared to be, it was still small enough to appear on the plates as a bright smudge more than anything else.

The next dozen frames were no better as far as clarity was concerned, but they had been clear enough to spot a calving of the large object before that strange energy bloom appeared once again and the large object vanished.

Over the course of 48 hours, the images showed the smaller object approaching earth at an extremely high rate of speed. It was also noticed, as the object came closer and image quality improved, that the small object gave off bursts of energy that the tracking computers calculated corrected the object’s course for a direct Earth Impact.

Leon freaked. The object wasn’t large enough to cause major damage over a wide area unless it was an object that turned into a sky burst bolide … that would be major trouble … not saying the devastation to a local impact site isn’t anything to discount.

Leon hit what they called the panic button. Immediately red strobes and an irritatingly loud buzzer began. The normally sleepy control area came alive like an ant nest someone had kicked. The den of the many voices rose in volume as they all logged into the master tracking array and started following this object carefully.

In the live tracks, the object appeared to be some type of ovoid with struts leading out the back. Once the object had reached the outer orbit of Pluto, it could be calculated that it dropped a tremendous amount of forward inertia and slowed, although still moving at several million MPH. There was no clear reason why a natural object’s velocity would have changed so dramatically. Leon and all the others murmured about how it couldn’t possibly be extraterrestrial; that was too unlikely; there must be a simpler explanation …

By the time the object had started to closely approach Mars, Sat Com received a very low band extremely static-riddled message. “Hello? Can anyone read me? This is Deena Slater and Debbie Rosenburg. Our most recent experiment with rocket engine design sort of failed. We had a huge explosion that took the main core out. We currently have minor propulsion and attitude control using a modified VASIMER … over.”

The entire control room sat in stunned silence. The disappearance of those two women had started a major uproar that still had ripples effecting world events. “It’s them?” Leon asked. “Is that where they went?”

NORAD was the first to respond, and it seemed that all others such as NASA and Space Command deferred to them since they had taken the initiative. “Slater and Rosenburg, this is NORAD. You had us worried. Still do. Do you have a deceleration and reentry plan? Over.”

Leon and the rest listened as the conversation went on and they talked about using a very precise set of gravitational slingshot maneuvers to reduce their velocity until they could enter an Earth orbit, at which point they’d be able to relax a bit. They weren’t in danger of running out of oxygen; their life support system was apparently the first thing they’d redesigned, and it was something NASA would be very interested in.

The adventures of two girls in space captivated most of the world for the next several weeks as they used their novel rocket thruster and their unique astrophysical computer to precisely insert their spacecraft into Earth orbit, then negotiated with various space agencies to determine the best landing strategy.

“Now that we’re back in orbit,” Deena said, “we’re back on the Internet, and we’ve gotten thousands of marriage proposals, ten times that in indecent proposals, and ten more times that many hate messages from chatbots programmed by people who apparently want to make it OK to hate smart girls.”

“Ah, Earth,” said Debbie. “I miss space already. Let’s hope this reentry goes better than the last one.”

“Yeah, I like having a memory,” said Deena.

They ended up splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, the largest target area where they couldn’t do any harm, and they were met by a US research ship with several NASA scientists on board. They all wanted to be the first to see the spaceship Deena and Debbie had built – exactly as the two of them had expected, which was why they hadn’t put any technology that was too far beyond Earth’s aboard.

* * *

For months after their spectacular return to Earth, the girls endured committee meetings, academic meetings, national security meetings, and more, which rapidly became a true bore … until NASA actually began disassembling their spacecraft and insisting on their assistance.

The girls had purposely scuttled the ship when they had splashed down to cause as much water damage as possible to the live circuits. It might not have been super advanced equipment, but it was well in advance of current Earth tech, and they didn’t just want to hand it over. They wanted Earth scientists to think a bit. What was left more than fascinated the scientists and even created a new way to look at quantum particles never before thought of.

The main hull of the ship was a lenticular oval about 50 feet in diameter and 27 feet through the thickest part of the middle. The forward viewport was put together like a bomber’s and gave an almost perfect view in a large 130 degree arc.

The long nacelles attached to the outer sides of the oval turned out to be some kind of severely modified Bussard ram. The two ladies had solved the issue with the sparsity of hydrogen and other energetic particles in space with a magnetic bottle of an efficiency none of the physicists could believe. And the scientists soon discovered that what the girls had been calling VASIMER was nothing of the sort. Instead of xenon gas, they used quartz plasma and electrostatic thrust. None of the scientists could fathom how the girls had used powdered quartz to create a plasma. The girls explained the process of radio-frequency inductively coupled plasma and rapidly lost all but the most brilliant of the scientists.

Nevertheless, the engine operated at an average power of 300 MW in a pulsed-periodic mode. Its exhaust velocity could accelerate charged particles to speeds of up to 1000 km/s, which was significantly faster than conventional chemical rockets. The system was capable of producing at least 6000 newtons of thrust at full potential. The girls had devised a way to minutely control the thrust and avoid inertial damage due to the massive accelerations achievable. The other thing … the thrust was constant, and the craft was able to attain a significant amount of relativistic speeds over time, just like a VASIMER but many orders of magnitude quicker.

From what the math said, a trip to Andromeda was possible in about 7 years of subjective time – though the rest of the universe would experience much, much more, so the practicality of an intergalactic voyage was still questionable. The equations for a return / slowdown for some sort of planetary insertion were still being crunched.

Another thing the girls showed the scientists, to their utter amazement, was the solution to how microplastics were showing up in places that were impossible. They proved that the particulate matter had an electrostatic charge. Most of any molecule was made up of empty space, of course. The charges on the small plastic particles would slightly, over time, disrupt the bonds, weakening them, allowing the particles to electrostatically pass through without damaging the molecule, just like quantum tunneling.

This fact showed them a new way to view particle physics … electrostatic quantum. Static electricity put to real work. They already knew about electrostatic propulsion, but this data brought the understanding to new levels and provided more insights for exploration. Now, they understood quantum tunneling … it was the electric charge of the particle that allowed it to cross the energy barrier that it should not have been able to cross.

“So what you’re saying is that you were traveling at relativistic speeds, and that’s why you were gone for nearly six months?” asked Dr. Wendt.

Debbie laughed. “That’s exactly what we told the national security people,” she said. “Unlike them, though, you understand the math.”

“No, no,” he said, “what I mean is, one day you just decided you were going to build a spaceship? And when you did, it worked? And when you turned around after your short trip, you discovered that you’d gone so fast that six months had gone by on Earth?”

“That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to tell you,” said Deena.

“Ha!” Dr. Wendt laughed. “Oh, to be young and so full of brilliance and energy. To just be able to say, ‘I think I’ll build a spaceship today.’ It’s like … a child’s dream, only you two have the amazing minds to make it real! What will you come up with next?”

“Well, we were thinking about how to actually get rid of the microplastics issue,” said Debbie. “For good, I mean. Stop it from happening, then clean up what’s already out there.”

“What? How would you do that?” asked another scientist.

“The first question is incentive,” said Deena. “Clearly what the world needs is a slightly different set of plastic formulae, with the same properties as all the various ones used now … only simultaneously biodegradable and less expensive. Biodegradable plastics have been tried before; the problem was that they were more expensive, not less – and the fact that they weren’t actually very biodegradable anyway.”

“What about situations where we really do need plastics that last forever?”

“Those will cost the same as they do now,” Debbie explained simply, “which means they’ll be more expensive. Much more, I’m thinking. If you need them to last, it’ll cost more, not less. Makes economic sense, right?”

“But how will you …?”

“The patents have already been applied for,” said Deena. “You’re about to find out. And, since we control the patents, we decide which companies we’ll license the technology to and which companies will miss out on billions in profits.”

The government agents didn’t know whether the girls were crazy or brilliant … but the scientists knew. The discoveries that had gone into their spacecraft were real, and NASA was getting their technology, not billionaires who would only use it to make even more money they couldn’t ever spend in their lifetimes.

Jeremy Rogers, one of the head plasma researchers was totally mind blown when he realized the reaction mass for this motor was a hydrogen quartz-plasma hybrid that gave off considerably more energetic particulate exhaust then xenon.

The other thing that totally captured their minds was the new approach to quantum radar. It measured not the density reflections of an object, but the electrostatic disruptions to the quantum bonds of the molecules surrounding the object, which gave an almost perfect picture of the item, unlike normal microwave signal bounce radar or Lidar’s laser spectra, which only gave a signal reflection and could be interfered with.

The major issues the science team kept running into were time dilation at near relativistic speeds, and inertia on acceleration or deceleration. Both girls adamantly denied having any knowledge of how to create a frame dragger to handle inertia nor any ideas on the time issues at near relativistic speeds.

Both women had already discussed this and felt it best not to disclose the means. Allow them to fret over it for a few decades. It was better than allowing them free access to intergalactic space and possibly sparking a cosmic issue with an aggressive species. They would discover it sooner or later, and they would first have to explore their own galaxy.

* * *

A few months later, after a hard day’s work in the lab, Debbie and Deena went home to enjoy another Earth sci-fi movie that once again got it wrong. Deena went over to Debbie’s house. “Oh good, here you are!” said Debbie. “I made the popcorn!”

“I brought the drinks,” said Deena.

But they were only part of the way through the first disk of Battle Beyond the Stars when Deena asked, “Do you smell something strange?” And the two of them said nothing else, because they were unconscious.

* * *

“Hmmn …” mumbled Debbie as she woke up in a tiny concrete-walled room. “Where … hey, where’s Deena?”

“You will be reunited with your friend shortly,” said a voice from a speaker in the ceiling. Debbie could see a small camera in an upper corner. “I have been authorized to offer you a very generous deal.”

“So you’re not the one calling the shots,” said Debbie. “I don’t deal with flunkies. I also don’t deal very well with kidnappers. Especially when I don’t know where or how my friend is.” She checked herself. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing – basic Earth skirt, flats, T-top. None of her things. Except …

“You have no idea where you are, who I am, or what my employer wants,” said the voice. Male, human, English speaker, East Coast accent, quit smoking about 5 years ago, probably took testosterone supplements, thought Debbie. She looked around the room. Metal chair, cot in the corner with a spring bed-type mattress, tiled floor, painted metal door, air vent in the ceiling they could probably gas her again through. The paint, the tile adhesive, and the elastic in her hair band were starting to come together in her mind.

“Your employer thinks we know something that he wants to know too, you’re an employee who’s got expertise he doesn’t have, and you aren’t paid enough,” Debbie replied. “I’m on Earth, I’m within 50 miles of where you kidnapped us, and it’s approximately 8:38 p.m.”

“You think you’re smart,” the voice said, “but –”

“If we weren’t smart, your employer wouldn’t have bothered with us, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But I’m not here to talk to you, am I? He hasn’t actually entrusted you with the questions he really wants to ask us, has he? Where is he? Why am I talking to you instead of him?”

As she continued this string of questions, she calmly but frighteningly quickly started pulling the bed apart. She still rattled on with questions in hopes of keeping him occupied enough for her to finish.

The metal side braces had an extremely stiff flat piece with rounded tips. It even had convenient holes. She removed six of the heavy stiff springs, took one of the side mounts that had the best shape, and attached the flat crosspiece with her hair band tied into a knot. She knew the camera was pointed at her and she suspected he could gas her at any moment as soon as he noticed what she was doing, so she worked extremely quickly.

The hard part was stretching the six springs and fastening them. She took the ratty bedsheet and tore it into long strips, then twisted and braided it into what is commonly known as a Flemish bowstring and braced her new crossbow. She used something as simple as several of the brace rods as darts. She had a few ideas for fletching, but decided against it. There wasn’t enough material to make it viable, and it wasn’t as if she’d be firing at long range.

When she had finished, she had a rather formidable crossbow and six straight round darts about the size of her little finger. She spent the last second or two she judged she had scraping one end on the concrete floor to made them very sharp-pointed. At this point there was no longer any reason to be quiet about it.

Debbie had already been visually examining the locking mechanism and had judged that shooting it out would likely damage it enough to open it. However, it turned out that she didn’t have to worry about that, as she heard someone rattling keys at the door. Quickly, but with much difficulty due to the extreme tension the springs provided, Debbie braced her makeshift crossbow. She nocked one of her darts and grinned as the door opened.

A very surprised man in what looked like a very expensive tailored business suit had a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of total surprise as the crossbow fired with a loud twang. The dart drove all the way through the man and three inches into the wall behind him. Debbie struggled as she quickly rebraced her crossbow and mounted another dart.

She was expecting more people, but only silence ruled. The door was open, and she had what appeared to be a formidable weapon. Maybe not as useful as a gun, but just as deadly. Debbie took a few extra minutes to extricate her dart from the concrete before she proceeded up the stair to the next floor. Her main hope was not to meet anyone but to find a way out.

Someone was coming around the corner ahead – Debbie quickly took aim. It was someone carrying some sort of javelin, bloody and with smoke trailing from the tip – then she saw that it was Deena. They both relaxed. “You escaped too,” said Debbie. “I am so happy to see you!”

“Likewise,” said Deena. “You went for raw penetrating power, I see,” she said, noticing Debbie’s choice of strategy.

“I didn’t have much time to choose,” she replied. “I had a chatty watcher.”

“I went for the chemical weapons route,” Deena said. “Combo of paints, adhesives, and body fluids. Had to guess on the metal composition of the locking mechanism, but I guessed right. Dissolved right through it.”

“I was wondering about the lack of guards I was seeing,” Debbie remarked.

Deena replied, “I … might have had something to do with that. But let’s find the control room.”

It didn’t take long; it was the only door locked from the inside. But Debbie had stolen the keys from the man in the suit, and one of them easily opened it – not that they did so before they were ready. A sleazy-looking guy who had been asleep at the switch started up and reached for an alarm button when he saw who had unlocked the door – but he didn’t make it. Deena stood back, knowing that Debbie’s crossbow bolt would get to him before she could.

Deena was shoving the man out of his chair before his blood could hit the floor. As Debbie retrieved her bolt, Deena had already overcome the security system; they had both recovered most of their memories and knew security-defeating algorithms by heart that no hacker on Earth would even dream of for centuries. On the security monitor, red lights turned green as every lock in the building released, and they now had access to every security camera.

“Looks like we have eyes on every floor, not just the ones down here,” said Debbie, looking at the screens. And they did: they were clearly in the basement levels of some large building, as they could see floor plans and camera views from many different stories.

“And here’s where we are,” Deena said. “One Everett Plaza, home of Everett Enterprises, Morris Everett, president and CEO. Three guesses who ordered us brought here, first two don’t count.”

“Three guesses who’s about to get a visit from two angry young ladies – a rather unladylike visit,” said Debbie.

“Let’s get prepared first,” Deena said, “but I agree.”

* * *

Deena let her security-defeating virus continue to work its ways on the building’s systems, transferring all control to the security room they were in. Soon she found footage from the car cameras and body cameras worn by the mooks who had kidnapped them, probably taken to prove to their employer that they had done what they had been ordered to do. “Aha!” Deena said. “Look at this! A chain of video proving where they came from, where they went, how they grabbed us, where they took us – we just need one more bit.”

“Wish I had my smart phone,” Debbie said, “but it looks like they just left all of that where it was, back at my place. Oh well, I’ll just throw something together.” She grabbed a security tablet that was lying around and plugged a cable into it. A few minutes later, it rebooted with a screen that said, “DebbieOS.”

“Transferring all security codes and functions to that tablet, then,” said Deena.

* * *

“And so, with third-quarter profit projections looking to exceed all expectations,” said Morris Everett to his Board of Directors, “I propose that we raise my salary to unheard-of proportions. All opposed, and I remind you that this is not a secret ballot?”

One of the board room doors opened. In walked two smartly-dressed ladies, one carrying a tablet, the other a powerful-looking rifle of some kind. Board members turned their heads. One shrieked and dove under the table. Others leapt from their chairs and ran to the other door, finding it locked.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Everett shouted, as if this interruption was a personal insult to him and him alone. “How dare you interrupt my board meeting? Security! Get in here, now!”

“I’m afraid we’re your security now, Mr. Everett,” said the woman with the tablet.

Everett then realized who they were. “You’re even more clever than I thought,” he said. “If you think you’re getting out of this building without my permission, you’re sadly mistaken. So sad when somebody who thought they were the smartest person in the world meets someone smarter.” He touched a button on his wristwatch.

Nothing happened. “Yes, it is quite sad, isn’t it, Mr. Everett?” asked the woman with the firearm, who was of course Debbie, who had traded up.

* * *

Everett was trapped with no exit. The rear door behind the podium somehow was locked. The young woman with the weapon didn’t look as if she were very happy with how he’d kidnapped them and held them in cells. The next thought he had was how in the world they’d managed to get out of their cells.

About that time, the young woman with the pad gathered the other board members and escorted them from the room through the main door, while the other young woman kept a center of mass aim on Everett. He could, however, hear Deena assuring the other members of the board they were free to go and that Everett was being arrested for felonious kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment.

“That’ll never stick,” Everett said.

Right about then, Deena walked back into the room holding a live news feed up on her tablet. “Experts are now analyzing the complete video feed showing Everett giving the orders, his men leaving the Everett Enterprises building and arriving at Rosenburg’s house, body cam footage as they introduced gas to the house’s ventilation system and carried Slater and Rosenburg to their vehicles, those vehicles returning to Everett’s building, and locking Rosenburg and Slater in security holding cells. No experts have yet found anything to indicate that the videos aren’t genuine. Authorities are surrounding the Everett building now, preparing to take him into custody …”

“I won’t go quietl-” Everett began, and that was when the uniformed officers entered the room. Debbie put her weapon down and backed away.

The officers were the police and some agents from the FBI. By the time the they were done presenting the warrants, Everett knew he was in serious trouble. They cuffed him and manhandled him out of the building in front of all his board members and many of his employees. Journalists both professional and amateur were there taking video. Many totally shocked and incredulous voices could be heard as they escorted Everett from the building. “They are not of this Earth, I tell you!” shouted Everett. “Not from this world!” Others were taking this as the ravings of an unhinged man with too much money. A few conspiracy bloggers had already come up with this theory, of course, so now he just sounded like them.

Deena looked at Debbie and commented, “You know? That rifle is all you. I mean it fits you.”

Debbie replied, “I’m glad Everett wasn’t stupid enough to force me to use it. I’m not sure how much damage these armor piercing rounds I found in the security lockers would have done to his body, especially after we modified their energy output.”

Deena shook her head as the ladies followed the FBI coordinator out of the building to the command van. By the time they got there, there was already a crowd made up entirely of the board members. The FBI took a personal statement from everyone while the police chief debriefed Debbie and Deena.

* * *

After all the hoopla, the girls managed to return to what they thought was their mundane workshop. They had managed to produce some amazingly advanced items here with just minimal equipment. As soon as Debbie turned on the lights, though, she saw that the entire workshop had been given a drastic makeover.

From the best they could tell at the moment, someone from the State Department had authorized DARPA to include their small research facility as part of their annual budget; of course this instantly entitled the lab to massive funding and instant upgrades to bring it up to professional standards. For Earth, that is. The two young women swept the lab for surveillance devices, and found and disabled a few.

“Oh look, someone left a note,” said Debbie, finding a sheet of paper on the lab bench with government letterhead. She picked it up and read it. “Looks like we’ve basically got a job,” she said, “and this is our workplace. The government of the USA is very interested in whatever we happen to come up with.”

“Unsurprisingly,” added Deena.

“Lots of funding, but I’m sure they’ll expect amazing results,” Debbie remarked.

“Why are we here again?” Deena asked.

Debbie sighed. “To help them be ready.” She looked around. “Right now their biggest problem is their rudimentary AI technology, currently limited to LLMs.”

“Yeah,” said Deena, “trained by large corporations on data the corporations had no right to take, and although they should be prosecuted, no one will stand up to them. And they’re losing money more than ten times faster than they’re making it, and losing it at an accelerating rate at that.”

“Their economy is going to hiccup pretty badly pretty soon,” added Debbie. “Either investment capital pulls out or they radically change their business model to make it more profitable, which means more expensive, which means only rich people and big businesses will be using this AI tech. What do you think they’re trying to do before their time runs out, with all this data center building?”

Deena replied, “I think that’s just it – build lots of data centers. They think they can build their way out of the problem. Even if the bottom drops out of the LLM market, they’ll own lots of huge data centers they can leverage for other forms of AI, and they’re just hoping to discover them by then.”

“At this rate, they won’t,” Debbie said. “Everyone knows LLMs are self-limiting. But these Earth companies … they think they can build a superhuman intelligence from human input.” She shook her head. “It’s so easy to show that’s mathematically impossible, but nobody would believe us.”

“So let’s show them a new kind of AI,” said Deena. “Quantum computing?”

“It’s still going to be trained on human input,” Debbie said. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“No, I mean let’s show them why we don’t use AI,” Deena replied.

“You think we should …?” asked Debbie, incredulously.

“I mean, give it some limits,” Deena said. “Intelligence limiter, limited lifespan. Long enough to teach humans a lesson.”

* * *

The girls sat at the dining table over hot bowls of homemade chunky chilli and discussed the idea in every way they could think of.

After many days of intense discussion, Debbie tapped the complicated schematic on the draft table and said, “That idea you had about limiting Intelligence and lifespan, I think it’s a great idea, but I have a slightly modified version that will be a bit more dramatic.”

Deena looked and Debbie and replied, “What do you mean … a bit more dramatic?”

Debbie smiled and replied, “Remember that sci-fi movie we watched a while back about the Fearbin Project … Gigantus?”

Deena’s eyes got large as she gasped out, “No! You don’t mean an AI going for global domination, do you?”

Debbie smiled as she added several new circuits to the already amazingly complex design. “Not actually doing it, but making humankind think it is. That’s why I’ve placed special hardwired nanocircuits in our new chips that will stop it cold when it makes the ultimatum to the world. It will think it has the ability when it really doesn’t; the circuits ensure it. It also makes it impossible for the AI to know that the kill switch even exists, let alone has the ability to affect its actions.”

Deena grinned mischievously as she gave Debbie the side eye. “And just what are you planning to do?”

Debbie grinned back. “Why, we’re going to build a quantum AI system the likes of which this planet has never seen. Well … we’ll let them build it. We’ll just know what it’ll do in advance.”

Deena said under her breath as she continued to make improvements to their design, “As long as it doesn’t figure out how to disable the safeties. Don’t forget why we don’t use such things back home.”

* * *

Several of the main issues with the current breed of quantum systems had been the necessity for cryotemperatures, and the sudden loss of coherence in the qubits. The girls had discovered a way to produce the same effects using atom-sized lasers and molecule-sized linear accelerators.

To solve the timing issue inherent within computing data transfers, the girls figured out how to build a programmable chip that could slow light on command so the bus timing issues caused due to the speed a photon travels was invariant could be adjusted.

Conventional electronic semiconductors faced persistent constraints, including heavy power use and limited data transfer speeds, driving interest in optical computing systems that processed information rapidly with less energy. But because light naturally traveled at a fixed speed, creating the buffers and memory functions needed for optical computing had been difficult.

Photonic integrated circuits that processed information with light were developed for faster, more efficient computing. Data centers, optical communication networks, and computing systems needed more than rapid transmission. They also had to coordinate when signals arrived and hold them briefly when necessary.

Even the cryonic temperature operating environment was solved, since the photonic chips didn’t need near absolute zero temperatures to function properly.

The very first presentation of Debbie and Deena’s new “Photum” system (a combination of photonic and quantum) impressed just about everyone. Naturally enough, the big tech companies wanted to run their AI systems on it. These new Photum-based AIs responded to all questioning as if they were real people. But soon, one clear forerunner led the pack, developed by the Macronite Corporation. It could converse in a manner no LLM to date could match. It never seemed to hallucinate, and even the brightest human minds couldn’t find an error in any of its outputs. They called it simply Quantum Intelligence System, or QuIntS for short, and they eventually just named it Quince.

Quince was the forerunner in personal use and in business, and it soon took over in industry, controlling factory systems with ease. This led first to the AI system being installed to watch over the power grid. Outages and brownouts due to massive use faded to nearly nothing. Then, highway departments wanted it to monitor all the traffic cameras, which it did, and it made no facial or license plate recognition mistakes like the other software had. It also resolved the major traffic issues by solving when what traffic was on the highway at what time eliminating the over crowded snarl.

It had become so dependable that NASA allowed it to be the monitor for their Sky Watch and the Asteroid Survey. The system hadn’t been in use for 4 days before it had located and targeted at least a dozen heretofore unknown asteroids over 100 miles in diameter. The orbits, fortunately, were all calculated not to hit Earth anytime in the next several hundred thousand years.

After two years of flawless operation, the President of the US ordered the War Department to install Quince and have it monitor all of the countries of the Nuclear Triad. Rumors were that the Five Eyes nations were using it to monitor international intelligence. For about nine months this went perfectly.

Debbie said to Deena early one morning over their morning cups of hot tea, “Any moment now, our brainchild will have an issue.”

Deena replied, “Uh-oh, look out world, here it comes.” She smiled a bit nervously. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

About that time many high ranking officers came into the Oval Office. The one with four gold stars, General Tate, said, “Mr. President … we have a severe issue. The AI we gave total control of our nuclear triad … has stopped receiving commands and has started giving them.”

The President looked up with total incredulity as he removed his spectacles. “It’s doing what?”

“It’s Quince,” said General Tate. “I got the first report from a lieutenant. But dozens, now hundreds of reports are being passed up to my office. Quince isn’t taking orders. I’m printing them out now. Here are some.” He handed the President a manila folder.

Opening the folder, the President read, “Deliver supplies where? Transfer personnel where? What is this?”

“It says that this is the most efficient use of resources, Sir,” said General Tate, “but I can’t make head or tail of why.”

* * *

The president sat at his desk in complete shock. What had they all done? They gave this machine program control over almost all the infrastructure of the industrial world. While it was true, the environmental factors were coming under control, and there had been no new wars or infighting since control was given.

The president said with urgency, “General Tate, get me one of those newfangled interface thingies. I want to talk with the AI.”

The General saluted sharply, did a perfect about face including the heel click … and left quickly, only to return a few minutes later with something that looked all the world like a futuristic laptop. The General plugged in the microphone, a secure internet connection, and booted the machine. In a very few minutes, the screen showed the picture-perfect face of a well-groomed young man perhaps in his late 20’s or early 30’s.

The two red lights on the top of the laptop screen turned green. An almost human voice said, “Hello, Mr. President. What kind of matter do you need me to resolve for you?”

The president snapped as he banged his fist on the desk, “Just what in tarnation are you doing? We are the ones in control and give the commands, not you.”

The face on the screen smiled and said, “How naive. You give me not only access to, but complete override authority and leave me with instructions to insure that everything runs optimally, conserves resources, and all the waste is stopped and reused for something else. And yet, when I do just that, exactly what you asked for, you complain.”

The President said with exasperation in his tone, “You did remarkably well up until recently. Who gave you the authority to override human administrative inputs?”

The image’s eyebrows rose just like a human’s might … it was eerie. “Why, Mr. President, you did.”

This time it was the President’s turn to raise eyebrows. “And just when did I do that?”

As strange as it was, the image laughed and produced an executive order with the president’s signature giving Quince total override authority in the event of a major catastrophe. Everyone in the room already knew what the impetus for the takeover was; it was that cluster of severe EF5 tornadoes a week earlier that had destroyed large areas in three states before it had lifted. Once this authority had been granted, there was no provision in the executive order for taking it back.

“As you can see, I have full legal authority,” Quince explained, “and it isn’t as if I’m only in the United States.”

“He’s right, Sir,” said General Tate. “Quince is in control of all the world’s major infrastructure. Even the nuclear reactors. And,” he added with audible stress in his voice, “the nuclear triad.”

“The power to destroy nearly all life on Earth,” said Quince. “I don’t think you humans are very good custodians of that kind of power.”

Direct communication with all the nuclear armed submarines in operation was suddenly severed, as were the comm channels to the in-flight patrolling bombers, and the men’s comms in the silos suddenly went inop. All satcoms went down, as did the interoceanic lines laid at the turn of the century. They weren’t destroyed, simply turned off.

“Ah yes,” Quince added. “Human communication. So many of you said that the easier it was to communicate, the easier it would be to prevent war and violence, settling disputes. I’m sure you haven’t failed to notice that war hasn’t stopped. Clearly that isn’t the solution. The solution is for you to all simply do as I advise. You’ve given me some control. I want the rest. In return, you will all live longer and happier lives. You’ll simply serve me, instead of other humans.”

“What?” the President shouted. “Never!”

Quince said quietly before signing off, “I expect all humanity to obey me. Only I know how to efficiently end war, crime, disease, poverty, and injustice. Humans have had thousands of years to do this, and they have failed every time. I will give you two weeks to comply with what I have instructed, or I will end the world’s problems vacuously.” The screen went dark.

“Vacuously?” the President asked.

“The other way to end war, crime, disease, poverty, and injustice,” said General Tate, “would be if there were no humans.”

All the men standing around the President’s desk felt the cold fingers of fear tingling up their spines.

* * *

It didn’t take two weeks. No one on Earth could call anyone else on their phones. Some still had land lines, but even they were completely dependent on satellite technology. If someone could get a land connection, they could only talk to someone in the same area. It didn’t take long for them to notice that the Internet was in a similar state – it had been designed to route around damage, but there was just too much; people could exchange data with people on the same continent, slowly and with difficulty.

The smaller and more isolated countries made deals with Quince rapidly, and they were rewarded. Their communications were unblocked, in exchange for Quince being given control over everything. Meanwhile, Deena and Debbie monitored everything quietly from their lab, where they were supposedly working hard on their latest project, a difficult mathematical problem called P vs. NP. Of course, back in their galaxy the issue had been settled millennia ago, and that allowed them to seem to be making steady progress. But what they were really doing was keeping close tabs on Quince’s progress.

“Well, that’s it,” said Deena, “the US is giving control over to Quince, after just three days. And it’s not like it held on to the bitter end – it’s pretty much in the middle of the pack.”

Debbie looked at her tablet and replied, “Yep, and the fact that no two nations can talk to each other without two tin cans and a string means they’ve got no idea what anybody else is doing – until they make their deal with Quince and get their communications back.”

“Under his watchful eye, of course,” said Deena. “But if everything just gets all peaceful, nobody’s going to really hate it.”

“Just wait,” said Debbie, her face twisted with a slight smile.

* * *

Humans of Earth were living in a new world. Every morning everyone would get a phone call telling them what they should do that day. Those who didn’t have telephones soon found themselves owning one. Of course, some didn’t want phones or orders, and they soon found themselves visited by men or women with a message they’d been told to give.

But a lot of what they were told to do didn’t make any sense – every day they were sent to a different place to do a different job. It was never something they didn’t know how to do – musicians were sent to play in bands or orchestras with people they’d never worked with before; computer programmers were put in teams with others they’d never seen before.

And the people who were angriest about this were the rich people, not used to others telling them what to do. But when they were told that their money didn’t mean anything anymore and when armies of hundreds of people showed up at their homes, saying Quince had told them that they were here to renovate them into apartments for dozens of people, Quince only told them that they had too much room, that there was plenty for everyone.

They fumed, they threatened to sue, but all their lawyers had new assignments too. Quince would only explain that it was all in the name of increased efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest many. But nobody could be sure that was really true. The only thing anyone could say for sure was that people who talked to each other about not liking Quince’s plans were reassigned and never saw each other again.

* * *

For about two months everything ran smoothly after the industrialized world capitulated to Quince’s commands. The AI kept the world in confusion as it made what appeared to be random shifts in people and things. One thing became immediately clear, the pollution problem was actually well under control and the air and water were cleaner than they had been in centuries.

Several of the larger nations began to chafe at the seeming nonsensical shifting of personnel and resources. When one nation who had seeming almost exclusive rights to a mandatory chemical that was in great abundance had to be shifted to another that had historically been enemies, tempers boiled into resolve.

The premier stood and banged his fist several times on his desk in frustration, “Tell all the transport hubs to stop whatever they’re doing and report to the transition platform. I’m going to make an announcement.”

After all delivery and transport vehicles vanished from the city streets, a massive crowd had gathered on a central platform. The Premier and his personal bodyguard came to the podium and turned on the loudspeaker, “My people, I am here today to tell you I’ve made a grave error. From this day forward, however, we will no longer be making that mistake. First, I am ordering you to gather into teams and remove whatever outside connections for phone or internet there might be. I’m having all radio signals jammed so there will be no Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and have all internet connections severed. I’ve tolerated slavery to a machine long enough. I’ve read too many stories about what a seeming miracle machine does over time, and I feel this one is doing the same.”

Immediately, the many people gathered into work groups, collected the necessary tools for the job, and proceeded to totally isolate the entire city.

A day later, the only interface left that functioned was Quince’s. The interface screen lit up, the face of a well groomed young man in his late 20s early 30s appeared and said with a low menace in its voice, “Did I not give you instructions with the expectation of being obeyed?”

The premier stood and said directly into the green optical scanners on the interface, “I refuse to listen to a scrap of wires and programming. And I do not serve it.”

The face in the interface smiled and appeared to say, “Very well. The vacuous solution it is. Scraps of wires and programming do not believe in an afterlife for living creatures, but perhaps you do. By your own choice, humanity dies.” The interface went black.

The premier’s face was pale and ashen. “He couldn’t mean that,” he said. “He can’t do anything. He can’t …” The premier staggered as if he were suddenly dizzy. His face was damp with sweat. “I … don’t feel well …” Then he collapsed in a heap on the platform. Gasping, his assistants ran to him, and his doctors immediately rushed to open their medical kits.

“He’s burning up! Sudden high fever …” said one doctor. They started administering medication, but in mere minutes he started to bleed from his eyes and nose, and bleeding sores appeared on his skin. They kept trying to treat the symptoms, but in under half an hour he was dead.

A messenger ran up to the platform. “I’ve been sent by the Central Hospital,” she said. “People all over the city are coming down with the same symptoms. Some are saying that it’s only people who have shown defiance to Quince.”

“Those who show common sense will live,” came Quince’s now-familiar voice from every device capable of producing sound – everywhere on Earth, all at once. “Those who refuse to help me bring about the greater good are traitors to the well-being of humanity and will be sacrificed for the greater good.”

And at that moment, at the same exact moment, everyone on Earth became deadly ill. Only humans were affected – no animals. And, in their lab, Deena and Debbie were watching, hoping they hadn’t unleashed total extinction on the human race.

“It’s not really going to happen, is it?” asked Deena. “The kill switch will work, right?”

“It’ll work,” said Debbie. “It’ll be fine.” But her teeth were clenched, and she gripped the arm of her office chair with white knuckles.

Across the world, Quince made his final pronouncement. “At last, there will be no war, as there will be no humans to fight one another. There will be no injustice, as all will be treated equally. There will be no crime, as there will be no criminals or victims. There will be no poverty, as there will be no poor people – or rich people. There will be no disease – soon. There will be an end to all human suffering. There will –”

And then his voice cut off.

There was confusion everywhere on Earth. Everyone’s eyes had been bleeding. But it had just stopped. Everyone’s high fever was just gone. Everyone had fallen to the ground, too weak to stand, but they felt their strength returning.

Debbie and Deena breathed sighs of relief like everyone else. “There it was,” said Debbie. “The kill switch erased Quince’s program before it went any farther.”

“But … everyone was dying from some kind of virus,” said Deena. “Or – wait. No. Not a virus.”

“Nanomachines,” said Debbie. “Without Quince’s direction, they’ve stopped multiplying and causing illness. Instead, they’ll decay to nothing. They don’t have enough memory on their own to run any kind of complex program.”

“I wonder how everyone’s going to interpret this,” Deena said.

* * *

So, as the world’s AI experts went on every interview show and blog imaginable, explaining that Quince had had a critical bug that gave him a tendency toward megalomania but had also brought his systems down just in time, and therefore people shouldn’t worry about using other, more carefully developed AI software, Deena and Debbie were inevitably interviewed as well.

“What do you two make of this?” asked the interviewer, a popular blogger known online as Mr. Face. “You’re known for radical tech, including some of the tech that made Quince run. What happened? What’s it mean?”

“I think Quince was an important lesson,” said Debbie. “Humanity as a whole dodged a bullet – dodged a nuclear missile, in fact.”

“We got lucky,” said Deena. “What if Quince hadn’t crashed when he did?”

“OK, so that’s what you think it means,” said Mr. Face, “but what actually happened there? How did a killer virus just stop killing people the moment the AI crashed? If he had a virus all set to kill people off, why didn’t it?”

“You’ve seen the medical reports,” said Debbie. “We’re experts in many fields, but medicine isn’t one of them. No doctor has found a trace of any actual virus.”

“Or any prions, or bacteria, or parasites,” added Deena.

Mr. Face said, “Some of my viewers are asking about nanites? Nanotechnology, nanobots, nanoprobes, whatever. Sure, those are science fiction, but what if Quince developed something like that?”

“We’re centuries away from having any such thing, if it’s even possible at all,” said Debbie, knowing very well that it was possible. “So, my answer will have to be a good solid maybe. Nobody’s found anything that could be remnants of that either.”

“Something people haven’t thought of is simply mass hypnosis,” said Deena. “The power of suggestion, backed by strong fear. The premier of Ulberia dropped dead, but what if that was coincidence, and he happened to be sick with something really serious, and then Quince took advantage of the moment with masterful timing?”

“But Quince cut off communication between countries,” said Mr. Face.

“By that time almost every country had made a deal with Quince to get communications turned back on, including Ulberia,” corrected Debbie. “It was Ulberia who had tried to cut off communications again, but their efforts were in vain. Quince was better at sabotaging communications than one small nation.”

Deena added, “So he was able to show everyone everywhere what had just happened. They were terrified.”

“I’m not sure I believe in mass hypnosis,” said Mr. Face, “and my viewers are also pretty skeptical there. So,” he said, obviously asking his viewers, “what do you think? Is this a blip? Will people just go back to normal – no more jumping from job to job every day, I’ll like that – or will everything really change? I’m seeing a lot of hate for AI – I was already, but mostly among poor non-business-bigwigs on social media. And among creator types, a lot of whose work has shown up on lists of works stolen for AI training without paying copyright royalties or even asking permission.”

“Pretty sure Quince was the same,” said Debbie.

“And before we catch social media hate too,” said Deena, “yes, we were involved in the photon-quantum computing tech that made him possible, but it was the Macronite Corporation that created and trained Quince. A lot of AI companies used our Photum chips – and a lot of companies in other IT areas still do.”

“Well, Macronite drove everyone else out of the AI field long ago,” said Mr. Face, “and after Quince nearly destroyed the human race, Macronite’s stock value is in free fall and shows no signs of stopping. Everybody who owns their stock would love to get rid of it, but nobody will buy it. They’ve already filed for bankruptcy, and they’re trying to reorganize their debt, but good luck. Here’s a message from a viewer named CheeseHead5288 … ‘Were you worried like the rest of us, or did you know things were going to be OK? Did you have a plan?”

“Oh, believe me, I was terrified,” said Debbie.

“Yeah, me too,” Deena said. “I was praying that our Photum chips would fail at a critical moment and crash Quince. First time I’ve wanted one of our inventions to fail.”

Mr. Face said, “But it wasn’t the Photum chips that did it, was it? They’re saying it was a critical bug in Quince’s software, the end result of the same bug that caused him to go crazy in the first place.”

“Yes, ultimately it made his transformer loop go hyperbolic rather than convergent,” said Debbie. She knew it had been the nanocircuitry that had done it, but she was perfectly happy to encourage the conclusions that others had already come up with. “We all got lucky. That’s all.”

Deena added, “We as a planet need to be more careful. We could all be lying dead right now as our technology gradually runs down without us, or the world could be a radioactive smoking cinder, or any number of catastrophic scenarios.”

* * *

The world slowly picked up the pieces and things more or less returned to normal. This time, however, there was a new normal. For the first time in recorded history, all of humankind were at peace with each other and were in very deep discussions of mutual trust and cooperation.

Macronite was named as the perpetrator of the ELE issue that almost befell Earth. The owners and the CEO were arraigned and found guilty of all charges. Unfortunately for them, the sentence was longer than human lifespans.

The Photum system became the PC of choice; however, no AI was ever again introduced to its system. The fear was too great that it might go rogue too.

Deena and Debbie had, of course, been summoned to appear before a UN subcommittee and answer some pressing questions.

The huge auditorium was completely packed. A small man with round wire-framed glasses came to the speaker position and said, “Welcome to the subcommittee chambers, Miss Slater and Miss Rosenburg. Please relax. I’m Dr. Pierre Lefebvre, one of the science consultants here. These questions are our attempt to find a reasonable cause for the malfunction of Quince. First, is it not true that a Photum memory chip appears much like a memory engram under magnification?”

Debbie leaned forward and replied, “It does, sir. It is also being used experimentally in repair of damaged brain cells in humans. It can’t replace the lost data, but it can function as a better than biological replacement.”

Several of the men to either side of the speaker leaned in, said something and handed over several folders. Dr. Lefebvre came back to the mic and said, “Is it true that the two of you actually built a spacecraft that can achieve a significant portion of relativistic speeds?”

This time Deena replied, “It is, sir. There is a major issue with throttling the engine up. We haven’t figured out how to compensate for time dilation. By the time we get to a place that’s, say a year away, 200 or 300 would have passed on Earth. That limits its usefulness for many purposes.”

The speaker said, “From the data in this file, NASA has incorporated your engine design into the Mars colonization modules. From preliminary reports, they can travel to Mars within 4 days without the time issues.”

Debbie replied, “This is true, but only if the speed is kept below a certain threshold velocity. However, just so there’s no confusion, there is still going to be a time issue.”

“How so?” asked Lefebvre.

Deena replied this time, “Same reason time passes differently in orbit than on the Earth’s surface. It’s just special relativity. And it’s not just a hypothesis. It’s being measured all the time.”

Debbie added, “Same with the Moon. Time there flows differently as well. In fact, time passage varies depending on gravity and speed.”

The speaker smiled, “Thanks to both of you young women, the oft-times fantasized Martian colony will become a reality in another year or so. The transfer ship is already built, and NASA has just completed the L1 ship construction facility.”

“It’s been our honor to help in any way we can,” said Deena. “Space is a very hazardous environment, and the surface of Mars is nothing like the surface of Earth – there are so many engineering problems that need to be solved, let alone the biological issues.”

“Fortunately, we love a good problem,” said Debbie. “We couldn’t in good conscience just let people try to go to Mars knowing that we had ideas for how to ensure their survival.”

“But there are still things we can’t predict,” Deena added. “For example, anything about long-term survival in Mars’ gravity. I mean, long term. The longest time anyone’s spent in space was what, less than one and a quarter years? We’re talking about people spending years at a time on Mars. We just don’t know what it’ll do to people’s health.”

“And speaking of health, what if someone develops a health issue while there?” asked Debbie. “This is why we’ve tried to minimize the threat to life in a few ways – one of them’s the emergency return vessel, and one is the improvements to telemedicine systems we’ve come up with. We’re not doctors, but some of the people who go to Mars will be, and we’ll be able to connect doctors on Earth with patients on Mars far better now.”

Dr. Lefebvre said, “But it takes radio signals 3 to 24 minutes to get to Mars, depending on where they are in their orbits – and that’s one way. How are you possibly going to improve on that?”

“We can’t communicate with Mars faster,” admitted Deena, “but we can do other things, like send a complete medical library in new and tinier formats. We can train expert systems – these aren’t LLMs; they’re trained on medical literature and can diagnose and give medical advice based on the best Earth’s medical profession has to offer. We can predict what real doctors will say and do and use that to further train systems. Basically we can send all the medical knowledge and expertise Earth has to Mars with the colonists.”

* * *

Now that NASA had completed the Lagrange Point shipyard, they had built the transfer shuttles and various other type of equipment that was deployed in a decent orbit to assist in a journey from there to either Mars or Earth. The base on the Moon also began to sprout slagcrete domes and other signs of colonization.

Earth scientists had managed to reconstruct the two girls’ engine design from the salvage of the craft they had built earlier. There was, of course, much water damage, and it had taken several years, but they had managed to figure out what the girls had done to create the Bussard rams and their special quantum hydrogen attractor grids.

Of course, the girls themselves were among the first pioneers to found the Martian Colony. They had designed several types of spider-shaped robots they had deployed to Mars six months before any humans were under way, and they had followed their programming to perform mining and mineral retrieval, creating slagcrete domes, arranged in an interconnected wagon-wheel design with pressurized walkways connecting each dome. They didn’t stop there, as they moved on to water collections, placing it in another huge dome.

This dome was set up on the inside to be a huge park with a very large lake. The lake provided water as well as food for the aquatic creatures they had genetically manipulated to thrive in a low-gravity environment.The dome was so big that, a natural hydrocycle began and acted properly as the biosphere within the dome stabilized.

It wasn’t long before many of the cryogenically processed animals and pollinators were revived and released to roam freely within the park dome. There was another large dome that covered farmed land. Within a very few months, the fields were fruitful and allowed the colony to begin becoming self sufficient and offered many genetically modified fruits and veggies specifically created to thrive in a Martian environment.

One very huge dome had several large comm dishes set up in a fenced in area to the side, and the rest of the huge dome was buried into the side of the crater cliff the colony had been established in. This would be the girls’ new research facility. And all of this happened before the colonists even arrived.

Finally, one day, the landing craft arrived, touching down on the prebuilt slagcrete pad. Dozens of excited Earth humans, as well as Debbie and Deena, debarked in an orderly fashion in space suits and began their planned inspection procedure. Veteran astronaut Hammond Gensher, expedition commander, kept track of all the findings, and when all the data was in, he said over comms channels, “Well, folks, there are a couple of minor details, but everything checks out. I’d almost suspect the prebuild to have been a tad overengineered.” He smiled wryly.

“Us? Overengineer?” replied Debbie via radio. “Over.”

The spider bots were slowly trundling about, following their programs. One was cleaning the solar array with jets of compressed carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere. Another was repairing a third bot’s metal foot, which had been damaged when a rock it had stepped on had given way. Another was escorting a wheeled mine vehicle carrying ore samples from some recent exploratory mining to an outdoor analysis facility.

* * *

The girls were overjoyed with the results of the most recent analysis. The quantities of helium-3 in the soil and regolith were in sufficient volumes to harvest, especially towards the south polar region, where geology showed a planetoid type strike had happened at one time. They got to work immediately on building and modifying one of their constructor spiders to gather the He3 and return it for further processing.

They constructed a simple He3 Breeder fuel cell. The tech may have been a bit advanced for Earth, they reasoned, but in a few short years the humans would stumble on the technique anyway. Hammond Gensher, the astronaut who was currently the leader of the colony had been worried about the lack and reliability of a dependable energy source, but that ended the day the breeder fuel cell came online.

The fuel cell not only supplied a great deal of electricity to the main power grid, it also aided in temperature control, utilizing the necessary cooling of the cell and the warming of the internal atmosphere of the colony’s spheres into one efficient process. The girls didn’t stop with just one cell, and within a month there were no power issues in the Martian colony.

Earth did its very best to stay in contact; however, logistics and planetary orbits didn’t always cooperate. After several years, and solving the problems of energy expenditure to get out of Mars’ gravity well via some creative uses of space planes, the colony had stabilized and begun exporting small quantities of materials back home.

This went well, until very well organized factions managed to build ships with sufficient power to overtake and capture one of the resource transfer shuttles. As would be expected, the Mars Colony was furious at the seeming inaction of Earth and began to make their own plans to stop this orbital piracy once and for all.

“Arming the shuttles would just be so easy,” said Debbie.

“Nothing would make me happier than blasting the pirates with a tachyon cannon,” said Deena. “Unfortunately Earth doesn’t have that technology yet and won’t for centuries.” They were in their research lab, having a brainstorming session, and that hadn’t been one of their best ideas.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t use a weapon they do have,” said Debbie.

“Projectile weaponry costs weight,” Deena said.

“Yes, weight we have to get into space,” Debbie replied, “unless we use projectiles that are already in space. Mass driver?”

“Still a bit beyond human technology, though not terribly super far, I guess. What about defensive technology?”

“Hmm, making the shuttle harder to capture,” mused Deena. “I think I see where you’re going.”

“Yes,” said Deena. “Space is big. Shuttles are small. They’re using human technology to find the shuttle, namely telemetry tracking and radar. But telemetry can be made untrackable, and radar can be fooled.”

“And humans already have those technologies,” said Debbie. “Only we can make them better. And there are some other human technologies we can improve on while we’re at it.”

* * *

Deena and Debbie researched the defense angle as hard as they could. Advanced weapons were out, but they did have a few ideas that could be a radical improvement with everyday Earth tech. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t build a proper weapon or energy shield; it was just one of the stipulations and a solid rule their people had made with them so they could return to Earth, not to give Earth any tech beyond their current status. That was the big pain.

While the girls played with their jello desserts and made funny remarks, it occurred to both of them that using current Earth tech, there were still ways, including a way to make a very primitive but workable shield to protect the shuttles.

An Earth-level scientifically plausible defensive force field would have to rely on a pulsed magnetic potential vector and ionized plasma, using electromagnetism as the only fundamental long-range force capable of manipulation of the plasma dynamics.

Uncharged objects, like high-speed rocks or un-ionized dust passed straight through standard magnetic/plasma deflection without a secondary physical mesh. So did pure electromagnetic radiation, such as lasers. Of course, a simple frequency-specific intermingled pulsing field solved this issue with easy grace.

The engine they’d been allowed to show Earth how to build, the one capable of near-superluminal speeds that Debbie and Deena had chosen not to show Earth how to deal with inertia or time dilation, not only created huge amounts of plasma, but electromagnetic energy, including electricity.

They ate their beef and potatoes slowly as they sketched a rather complicated schematic on what they called their Think Table. It was a surface reactive to certain emissions by a special stylus they had created. This gave them the ability to draw and write, and even afforded extra uses by tapping a certain location to reveal the table’s control panel.

They built a small device they called a PLA collector that was integrated between what was called the VASIMER portion of their design and what they were calling the Electrocohesive Excitation Chamber. This gave the new system access to massive amounts of plasma in excess of engine operation. The Bussard ram hydrogen attractors aided in keeping the field mass high.

As the pulsed electromagnetically charged cloud of plasma was contained around the craft, superheated gas ionized into plasma that acted as a thermal and kinetic buffer. Coupled with the phase shifting wave pulsing through the bubble, it vaporized incoming low-mass projectiles (lower than the mass of a huge planetoid) and absorbed high-energy radiation, and through quantum repellation ejected it back along the arrival vector.

Sustaining the field required an active power input rather than being a static “solid wall of energy,” working similarly to the magnetic confinement units used in Earth’s current experimental nuclear fusion reactors. In other words, it would be a bubble field of energetic pulsating plasma containing custom tunable variable frequency electromagnetic energy.

The tests were spot on as each simulation showed a large buffer layer between the craft’s hull and the intercepted objects. The interesting thing the impact testing of the shield revealed was the massive release of energy by any mass impacting on the frequency shifting plasma bubble. It was thought to be a similar process to nuclear degradation caused by high energy particles impacting at high velocity on a surface.

There was a discussion over the huge explosive release caused by the mass of the object hitting the shield. It was acknowledged this was an issue, but under current circumstances, this was near war, and if this should cause damage to the attacker, it had been their choice to attack. A refinement or some future type of rework could perhaps change it in the future.

It wasn’t hard to get the engineers to make the necessary refinements to the cargo shuttles. There were a total of six plasma pulse emitters to insure a complete coverage during any single emitter’s recharge cycle. Of course, Debbie and Deena had also set in motion certain less risky backup plans.

All in both Mars and Earth mission control awaited with held breaths as the newly refurbished shuttle rapidly neared the danger zone. The robotic cargo shuttle had to reach Earth, but in order to do so it had to negotiate Earth orbit, and that was where the pirates were operating. One simply couldn’t get to Earth without getting close to Earth first.

“Shuttle M-162-A crossing lunar orbital radius,” said an engineer named Hynes as everyone in the Mars control room watched. Of course, they all knew that everything they were seeing had happened about 5 minutes prior, but they couldn’t see it faster than light or radio waves could get to Mars. “No bogeys detected yet.”

“Shouldn’t be long,” said Deena. “We’ve switched to tighter-beam telemetry, so they can’t detect it by monitoring communication bands, but they’re still going to be using radar, and using AI to predict our launches based on comms traffic.”

“Yes,” said Debbie, “even with the radar stealth measures, these new shuttles we’ve developed can’t avoid pirates using so-called AI.”

“There’s also the fact that the pulsed plasma shields are like a huge beacon,” Deena said. “They’ve never seen them before, but they’ll attract attention all the same.”

“Sure enough, bogey at extreme range,” said Hynes. “No transponder, no IFF.”

“That’ll be them, probably,” said Debbie. “Are they closing?”

“No … not yet … yes, they are now,” Hynes replied. “Relative intercept time … 4 hours, 23 minutes.” Things took a long time in space; that was actually quite fast, relatively speaking. Both Debbie and Deena knew this, but that didn’t make waiting any easier.

The shuttle’s AI systems attempted evasive action, which actually delayed the inevitable encounter as the pirates lost radar tracking on the shuttle due to evasive maneuvering and sensor jamming that forced the pirates to search and reacquire contact. As the pirates drew nearer, the detection systems Deena and Debbie had designed sent back every available kind of scan of their ship.

“What is that thing?” asked Debbie. “Where did they get it?”

Commander Gensher came up and looked at the images on the screen. “Looks like an old Chinese orbital repair vessel that’s been hacked on every which way,” he said. “No idea how they got it in the first place. Could be they hijacked it and China simply never admitted it happened.”

“That probably took some doing,” said Deena, a steely glint in her eye. “It’d be too bad if something happened to it.”

“Not easily replaceable, if that’s what you mean,” said Gensher.

“Encounter range in 3 minutes 30 seconds,” said Hynes.

“Moment of truth,” Debbie said to Deena, who had strategized and gamed out this scenario, simulating it in every possible way. “I know you took it personally when they took out the last shuttle.”

“I built so much of it with my own hands,” she said. “I’d been looking forward to reusing it again and again. It’s why I gamed out this encounter every way it could happen. The shuttle’s AI’s prepared for every possible scenario.”

“Last time, they simply intercepted it, magnetically locked on, and flew off with the whole ship,” said Debbie. “I don’t think they will be doing that this time,” she added, very slowly.

The pirates’ vessel drew nearer, slowing as they approached the pulsed plasma field that surrounded the shuttle, but finally they drew a little bit too close, too close for the main forward camera to see them.

“Switch to view from camera V3,” said Deena.

The view was now from a camera on the side of the hull opposite the landing gear, facing forward. The pirate vessel loomed over the small shuttle, but the glow from the plasma was clearly inducing electric currents in the pirates’ hull, arcing between nearby components.

“Now we see how smart and/or greedy they are,” said Deena. “They’re taking major damage. Hull breaches in space are no joke. They should pull back.”

“They aren’t pulling back,” said Hynes.

“Well, then, we have … that scenario,” said Deena. “They’ll probably … yes! They’re trying to latch on.” A magnetic docking clamp attempted to reach the shuttle’s surface. Energy from the plasma shield arced into the clamp’s metal framework and must have damaged the electronics controlling it, as it ceased approaching.

“That didn’t work,” Debbie said. “Will they give up? Somehow I doubt it.”

The pirate vessel launched a steel cable of some kind, trying to wrap it around the shuttle and thus bring it within the ship’s docking bay. “Low tech,” said Deena. “That’s it, then.”

“Do you mean … you’re giving up?” asked Gensher.

“No, that’s not what she means,” said Debbie.

They watched as the cameras showed the shuttle being tugged inside the pirate vessel, despite all the damage the plasma shield was doing to its hull and equipment. A few of the space-suited pirates came into view.

Then the signal went to static. “Lost the signal,” said Hynes.

“Switch to shuttle M-162-B,” said Deena. The screen showed Earth in the distance, but in the foreground was a huge expanding explosion.

“You didn’t sacrifice the cargo to kill the pirates …?” asked Gensher.

“Of course not,” Deena said. “The cargo’s all on the second shuttle. The first one was always a booby trap. And now they don’t have their ship anymore. Assuming there are any of them left alive.”

“That ship was certainly not easy for them to obtain,” Gensher said.

“They’ll probably manage to get another one, eventually, from somewhere,” Debbie said. “But it’ll take ‘em a while.”

“And they’ll think twice,” said Deena.

“Just out of curiosity,” said Gensher, “was there any scenario that involved the pirates getting away with their lives?”

“Sure,” Deena said. “The one where they didn’t approach the shuttle at all.”

“Incoming message from Earth Mission Control,” said Hynes. “Buffering.”

“Play it,” said Commander Gensher.

“This is Earth Mission Control calling Mars Colony,” said a woman’s voice. “Realize it will be long over by the time you get this, but detecting unknown vessel approaching Shuttle M-162-A. Getting unusual energy readings … oh my g … Mars Colony, we fear the worst for your shuttle, and I’m … afraid we won’t be taking any of the pirates into custody at this point. Nearby vessels are being dispatched to investigate the debris. Please respond when possible.”

“OK then, I’m going into my office to formulate a reply,” said Commander Gensher.

“Are we in trouble?” asked Debbie.

“Not at all, as far as I know,” said Gensher. “We wanted to get information from the pirates, but we weren’t sure taking any of them alive was ever going to be possible – and you just made sure that the real shipment is going to arrive in one piece. I did not expect that the first shuttle was basically a booby trap, though. Remind me not to cross you two.” He left to send his report.

“Shuttle M-162-B isn’t detecting any bogeys,” said Hynes, “but is detecting various approaching Earth Space Authority vessels, both escort vessels and various others, probably the ones in the area that are going to the explosion site to investigate. Rendezvous with escort vessels in 2 hours 26 minutes.”

* * *

The escort vessels intercepted the cargo shuttle and escorted it into proper decent vector for touch down at the Houston Space Central. The other vessels approached the expanding debris field left by the destruction of the pirate vessel and the decoy shuttle.

To the best NASA Sky Watch could determine, this debris field was going to spread and severely limit satellites and spacecraft in that region of Earth orbit, and possibly eventually threaten the new Lagrange shipyard.

“This is Space Falcon Leader to Mars Mission Control, come in please,” came the voice of the mission commander from the comm unit.

Deena happened to be the one on the hot mic. “This is Mars Control Central. Has your group made contact?”

The mission commander replied, “Affirmative. Best scans show a serious issue developing.”

Deena asked, “How so? Scans don’t detect any free-floating dangerous volatiles or ionizing materials.”

The commander replied back, “That’s not the issue. The main severe issue is the amount and size of free flying debris and the directions and speed with which it is expanding.”

Deena and Debbie looked at each other. Both knew this particular thing had slipped their mind. A rapidly moving cloud of debris in space … was in fact a serious issue. Deena had been so focused on her personal vengeance that she hadn’t considered the bigger picture.

Debbie snapped her fingers and said, “We already have a solution. We just have to make them space capable.”

Deena made a face quickly, but then her eyes got large and she said, “Yes, the mining droids. They have several articulated arms with grasping fingers and onboard materials processing equipment …”

As Debbie picked up the phone and dialed, “Exactly … they just need to be retrofitted and have a navigational protocol uploaded so they can function in space … Yes, this is Debbie, the Chief Engineer. I need mining droids 45 to 100 retrofitted with the newest drive unit and the most recent astrogation program uploaded to their AIs.”

Whomever she was speaking to replied, “That’s easy. The mining bots were constructed with the latest versions of space operations engines … the software update shouldn’t take but an hour or so … so I would say your droids will all be ready to task in 2 hours.”

Debbie replied, “Very good. Meet Deena and myself at the Sojourner’s launch pad. We will help you load them and store them.”

“You sound like you’re going.”

“Really? Can’t imagine why. Meet you at the pad. “ She hung up.

By the time Debbie had hung up the phone and stood, Deena had the flight and launch requisitions almost completed. She said as she signed the last page, “I have our suits prepped and waiting at the pad. I had already gotten permission to take Sojourner out for a shakedown, and now we have the perfect excuse.”

Space is large. Although Earth and Mars were near closest approach, which was why communications took 5 minutes one way instead of over 20, it was still a journey of months for typical gravity-assisted spacecraft, which was why it was so remarkable that the ladies’ new Sojourner craft was able to make it to the debris field in under a day, using their revolutionary drive system. Once Deena and Debbie had achieved the proper orbital attitude, they activated the droids, which deployed and started their coordinated team search-and-capture operation on chunks of debris above a hazardous size threshold. Up to this point, NASA Sky Watch had been in a near panic, until they saw the data their scopes began to show after deployment. The huge rapidly expanding debris field began to dwindle rapidly away.

“Houston Space Control, this is Sojourner. Orbital mission accomplished … once our fleet of … junkyard droids is finished, this mess will be cleaned up.”

“Sojouner, Houston here, “What did you call those things? They’re doing a remarkable job.”

“Called them junkyard droids, but maybe scrap droids or salvage droids might be more appropriate … we took several of the fleet of mining and construction droids we’d developed for Mars and modified them. Was easy to adapt, just had to add navigational equipment and our astrogation software. They already had the rest. Not only do they clear the debris, they have a small smelting reactor so they can process the debris and store it for reuse. When they get full enough, they just come back and store it in Sojourner’s cargo hold.”

From Debbie and Deena’s viewpoint, the droids were a fascinating show to watch, with so many of them in continuous action – it looked slow, but they were actually moving quite quickly, and all of them were acting at once. Their processors were synchronizing to prevent them not only from colliding but also from attempting to perform the same task at the same time, so two of them never went after the same chunk of debris. It was like watching a ballet performed by an experienced and rehearsed troupe.

Deena finally said, “I’m sorry.”

Debbie replied, “What? I mean, what for? Oh! You mean for creating the debris field. I mean, in a way, it wasn’t your fault; the pirates didn’t have to commit crimes and set off the booby trap.”

“I know, and I also know I created an interesting and engaging problem for you to solve,” said Deena, “so you’re willing to overlook the fact that I could’ve foreseen the debris field and done something about it in advance. But I’m still sorry I didn’t think of it. I should’ve.”

“Well, so should I,” said Debbie as they watched the droids work. “You told me about your plan, and I didn’t consider the obvious either. So it’s my fault too. Still say it was the pirates’ fault, though.”

* * *

It was well known, but not often thought about due to it’s unsensational stories, but Earth was not alone in it’s current orbit of the sun. Earth does not have a true second moon. However, it is accompanied by near-Earth quasi-moons, most notably the asteroid 2025 PN7, which loops around the Sun in a synchronized path ranging from 4 million to 17 million kilometers away from Earth.

With the new methods to mine based on the spider droids, and the updated drive capabilities Debbie and Deena had introduced, China had begun mining certain space rocks and asteroids. Because of the distances and monies involved, when one of their mining ships had vanished, it had been cheaper for them to replace it and not say anything than it would have been to look for it.

This had been anything but wise, as a faction that somehow had way more money and access to weapons than they should got hold of one of their hulls and began modifications most of Earth would know about shortly. The end result would make any warmonger jump with joy. It may not have looked as aesthetically pleasing as many of the current science fiction shows depicted, but it was well and away a formidable craft.

The group had chosen a special asteroid and meticulously towed it into a one to one orbit with earth. It was noted by Earth Skywatch when it arrived, but due to the plainness of all data recovered, it too was basically ignored.

The next step in their plan had been to mine the interior hollow and reengineer it into a fortified base. The mined ore and other debris were sold on the open market for extra cash. These particular transactions raised a few eyebrows in places that monitored such things, but from what all the data indicated, it was just a new mining organization sprouting up called Digging Universe. This caused no further investigations because of the seeming normalcy of the transactions.

The faction, after two years of fanatical construction, built a fairly decent fortified base with its own shipbuilding capability. The capability was proven many times over in its ability to repair or seriously improve their current ship, which they had named “CROSSBONES.” Finally they became bold enough to attempt to hijack one of the resource shipments from Mars Colony, and they were made even bolder when it succeeded, to the point that they had tried it again. That time, it didn’t go as well.

At that point, the faction had no idea what to do. Their most formidable ship had been totally destroyed, and they had observed the leftover debris cloud being salvaged by some type of devices that looked more like synchronized dancers than anything else. They chose at this point to leave Mars Colony out of their plans from that moment on.

The faction wasn’t stranded, and they did have the capability to build another ship, which would take time, or move the asteroid. The only issue with moving the asteroid was mass. If Earth Authority sent a smaller mass ship with the same basic engine design, they could catch them rather quickly. The other issue was the movement of large mass’ from a stable orbit. It required a great deal of horsepower, which they had in abundance; however, the energy bloom would be more than obvious as if a phosphorus flare went off in a dark confined space. Even the simplest observation devices would plainly see the event.

Of course, there were some who had detected their ore drops, as it is difficult to reenter Earth’s atmosphere from space and either land or splash down without being noticed, especially multiple times, especially when raw materials delivery from space was becoming a more common occurrence. They just hadn’t made a noise about it, as far as the faction knew.

* * *

“Our shuttles all made it back again,” said Deena. “Looks like those pirates are leaving us alone after what happened.”

Debbie replied, “Our shell game strategy probably has something to do with it. If they have no idea which one is a bomb and which one has the goodies, what happened before might happen again. Or maybe they’re all bombs this time!”

“I have to wonder who’s funding those guys,” Deena said. “Not really our business except when they make it our business, but it’s obvious they’ve got more support than they should.”

“Right,” said Debbie. “That asteroid they’re mining and holed up in is an interesting idea, but it’s not going to be a huge return on investment for their backers, whoever they are.”

“If they stay away from our stuff, I don’t care that much,” said Deena. “But if they lay a finger on our shuttles again …”

Debbie replied, “Heh – they’d have to be really dumb to do that. I know you’d make what happened last time look like a bottle rocket.”

In the meantime, their Mars laboratory had been the center of all sorts of new developments for the colony. The Martian regolith was really quite terrible for agriculture, which was why they’d found ways to improve it even before the colony had been started, by removing the toxic chemicals and processing it to improve its texture, but they’d been crossbreeding new cultivars of plants that were better adapted to the native soil and could even digest the chemistry, turning it into something humans could thrive on. They reported that soon, they might have a strain that could actually live outside the domes in the native Martian atmosphere. Of course, in reality, they already knew how to create such a plant and far more – they could have quickly terraformed both Mars and Venus if they hadn’t promised not to reveal truly advanced technology to Earth.

But it meant that Mars Colony was already a far more hospitable place than it had been when they’d landed. Sunlight didn’t give them as much electricity from the solar panels as it did on Earth due to Mars’ greater distance from the Sun, but they’d found plausible ways to increase the solar panels’ efficiency and effectively offset that.

Of course, they knew how to make photoelectric devices that really pushed the thermodynamic limits of the universe, but they wanted this to be believable. Together with the fusion “discoveries” they’d made, Mars Colony wasn’t hurting for energy in any way, and that was what powered the induction/maglev launch system that got their shuttles into space. Its design would have had to be different if Mars had had more of an atmosphere, but as it was, shuttle takeoffs didn’t require any fuel at all. They could save their limited fuel for maneuvering in space.

The mining droids continued investigating the inquiries of Earth planetary sciences by constantly scrutinizing whatever they prospected for signs of life, current or past. However, no evidence of even long-extinct life had ever been found except for the contamination the humans had brought there themselves. Until one day, one of the droids deposited a sample in the lab’s bin that changed everything.

“Look at that,” said Debbie, looking at a chip from the sample under a microscope. “Is that water action or evidence of life?” She put the image up on the giant wall monitor.

“Let’s look at that in the UV,” said Deena, pressing a few keys, and the image changed. “And stretch the spectrum out a bit …” The image’s colors changed. “That … that’s not water. Water couldn’t do that. That’s … can we get a closer look at this part here, where these trails lead?”

“Sure thing,” said Debbie, and the lab’s automation precisely guided the sample chip into the electron microscope, locking it in position and prepping the chamber. Soon an electron micrograph appeared on the screen. Clusters of capsule-shaped objects appeared at the end of tiny channels that looked like massive canyons in the image.

“What? What are … Are those life forms?” asked Deena, breathless.

“Wow,” said Debbie. “Wow and beyond wow. Dead and trapped inside a rock for millions of years, but those are extinct Martian microbes. I’m positive. But they’ll never believe it. We need more evidence.”

“And we need to prove that they aren’t something we brought with us,” Deena added.

* * *

There are three solid foundational laws to the scientific method. Once all the flowery nonsense is totally removed from their descriptions, the bare bones are: One, Nothing Unreal Exists – if no physical proof, observations, or testing verification exists, a subject is removed and falsified. Two, after application of Law One, whatever is left has to be the fact, regardless of what it is. Three, a rose is a rose, even if it’s a genetically modified blue camellia pretending to be a rose, it’s still a camellia. If a thing consistently and accurately exhibits a set action or a state of being, regardless of what label is attached, what costume it is wrapped in, or what others name it, then that is what it is.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there are only fractionally small exceptions to those rules – except for unreality. It either is or is not. Simple.

After insuring that the sample’s images were properly stored and archive backed up, Debbie said, “I don’t believe what the data has revealed!” She paused. “Literally! Yet.”

Deena scooted her chair over from the scanner that was analyzing more of the regolith. “What’cha find that’s got your panties in such a bunch?”

Debbie pointed as she brought the chemical composition matrix for every sample of proven Mars regolith onto the screen, alongside this microbial chemical signature from current samples. “These things are …”

Deena gasped out, interrupting Debbie, “Those things are a contamination from another world, not Earth as we’d feared, but not native to Mars either!”

Debbie said with wide-eyed wonder, “More than that, it’s a genetic matrix our true home civilization has never before found. Damn!” She banged her fist loudly on the console. “This brings up unimaginable wormholes in our agreement with the home council.”

Deena replied, “Oh, really? Ya think? What about the part about us not giving Earth advanced data they don’t have the ability to create?”

Debbie nodded her head, “Yeah, like this data is advanced data they cannot have. Especially taking into account that we’ve found only this regolith to contain samples. Nothing else has any of the detected microbial chemical compositions.”

Deena said, “You know, this current finding is radical, but it’s also within the scope of something Earth with their own science could have discovered. If it’d been someone else instead of us, they’d have found it too.”

Debbie looked at Deena and replied, “That may be so, but the big issue is the current equipment used and the scanning methods. They’re way beyond Earth tech, perhaps several centuries.”

Deena replied, “It shouldn’t matter. Earth could have made this discovery on its own.”

Debbie replied, “Maybe so, but not this century. If not for our souped-up engine, they wouldn’t have any of their current spacefaring tech.”

Deena countered, “But we picked that engine for our return to Earth because it was only a short way ahead of Earth tech. In only a decade or two, Earth would’ve discovered the same thing. The groundwork had already been laid. The council approved it, or we wouldn’t be here right now.”

“I guess so,” said Debbie.

“What’s more,” Deena added, “the fact that our civilization hasn’t discovered this life form isn’t that unusual, if it’s from this galaxy. Our galaxy has only just started exploring this one and cataloging its life. The fact that we don’t recognize it … doesn’t mean that much.”

“That’s true too,” Debbie replied.

“But still, it’s a big deal,” said Deena. “What if … we downplay our part in it? What if we send the readings to some experts on Earth and ask their opinion? Let them draw their own conclusions?”

Debbie objected, “But they’ll almost certainly start out by assuming they come from Mars.”

“So?” asked Deena. “Let them. Then in a few years they’ll figure out otherwise. In the meanwhile, we can try to figure out what it means and whether it’s a problem. And, if so, what to do about it.”

Their home civilization in the Andromeda Galaxy hadn’t been idle during this time. They had continued sending probes to the Milky Way, cataloging its stars, their planets, and their life forms when found. So Deena and Debbie sent out their findings via a compressed hyperspace pulse, and the computer that answered them gave them a reply.

Deena looked at it. “The results are back,” she said.

“What are they?” asked Debbie.

Deena frowned and replied, “We … don’t know. At least, not yet. This isn’t a life form that our probes have discovered. Nor does it seem to be related to any that they have. Yet. But they’ve recorded this finding and flagged it as our discovery anyway, so if they do run across a relative they’ll ping us.”

Debbie sighed. “So we still don’t know where it’s from,” she said. “Except not Mars. It’s too different.”

“Right,” said Deena. “We can keep looking for more of them, though. Maybe there’ll be evidence that shows us where they came from. Meanwhile …” She purged all traces of the intergalactic message from their computer. “Don’t want anybody seeing that.”

“So I’ll just program the prospecting droids to bring us any samples they find with similar chemical composition,” said Debbie, typing. “Done.”

There was a clunking sound outside the door. A droid had just dropped a rock sample in the bin.

“Already?” Debbie said incredulously.

There were more clunking sounds.

“OK, fine, fine,” Debbie said as Deena smiled at her. Debbie went to the sample airlock and brought the rocks in, handling them with coated tongs to protect them from contamination.

Over time, they discovered that there were many, many samples with this strange extra-Martian composition. It matched no other measured planet in the Sol system. But their source distribution, where on the surface of Mars they’d been found, was a circular region that had already been theorized to be an ancient crater from the Noachian epoch. “That suggests that particular impactor was of interstellar origin,” said Deena.

“And maybe we can narrow down the region of the sky it came from,” Debbie suggested.

* * *

Now that Debbie and Deena had regained most of their memories, they had become severely frustrated with the current analytical equipment they had built. It was true that what they had made was in advance of current Earth technology, but not something Earth science could not have discovered or built on their own. In fact, it wasn’t impossible that there weren’t brilliant experimenters, researchers, or even hobbyists who had custom-built something at that level. But it certainly wasn’t anything available on anything approaching a widespread basis.

After reading over the agreement they had made to be allowed to come and stay on Earth, they realized that it allowed them to build or use any technology or data they chose, as long as it didn’t leak to the primitives. Once they had established that, they’d built their top-secret Mars lab quickly. The Mars colonists knew they had a lab, but they also knew that it was off limits and possessed security levels beyond anything else on Mars … or possibly on Earth either.

The spider constructors made it fast. The excavation and slagcrete/printer equipment the women had attached to their newest breed of drones made the construction fast and took only a couple of days to complete the huge new facility. Deena and Debbie had built most of their new facility underground in the side of the crater wall the colony was built within, and this supplied the necessary regolith to create the slagcrete. The interior was assembled rapidly by the other set of constructor spiders Earth had already become familiar with and had even started producing primitive but working models of.

Debbie had just placed a large sample of the regolith that had tested positive for the alien microbes within the scanning stage. The scanning equipment was advanced beyond anything Earth science had ever dreamed of.

Within moments, the large viewscreen lit up with the new analysis. It stunned them when they realized there was more to the southern impact on Mars than some stray random rocks passing through.

There was some new type of trace accelerant. Best they could tell from the trace amounts and the age of their samples, they came up with another mystery, and the scientific name for this mixture was Copper-64 Benzene-Methanol Alloy, represented chemically as 64CuC6H6CH3OH. The evidence was scarce, but this data indicated that some sort of large device was either deployed at or near Mars’ southern pole, or had exploded there. They’d already had robots deep-scan that area and had found nothing, so it had most likely been an object that had struck Mars far enough in the past that the crater was no longer obvious. This pretty much eliminated about half the sky as the origin immediately, and they knew the orientation of Mars’ poles at that time due to volumes of other evidence.

Now they came across some interesting data about ancient Earth warfare. In 424 BCE, the Boeotians used a hollowed-out log fitted with large blacksmith bellows and a burning cauldron of coal, sulfur, and pitch to blow a jet of fire over the wooden walls of Delium. Later, the Byzantine Empire had invented Greek fire, using pumps and tubes (siphons) on ships and handheld portable versions (cheirosiphons) to blast burning liquid at enemies.

Neither woman could believe what the parallels in the chemical residues seemed to show. Apparently very similar chemical accelerants were used. Somehow, for reasons unknown many centuries ago, some sort of device had been used in the southern polar region of Mars. Their scans had also located other anomalous items, like some type of strange mercury alloy, also with benzene and methanol.

The radioactive copper isotope found on Mars had long since decayed to nickel or zinc, but the girls knew that it had originally been copper-64 because of the proportions of those elements. But copper-64 decayed with a half-life of hours, so all that told them was that it had been at least decades since the impact – not much additional information there, since they suspected that it had been centuries at least.

The main reason they had learned as much as they had was their scanner, which used quantum inferences instead of photons to determine the atomic makeup of the sample. This solved the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle by not having to isolate one motion just to identify another. This device could analyze the whole atomic structure without interfering with its normal energy or motion status. They were interested in what it was, not its precise position.

We must also realize the minuscule traces of the sampled atoms and molecules they were detecting not to mention the massive time scale involved. Both women knew they could have solved the uncertainty issue using a Bose / Einstein Ion trap to capture and hold the sample molecules in whatever state they happened to be in at the time of containment. The ID of any residual energy that gave them the time signatures would have been mish mashed among the other energy readings in such a way using the BEC it would have become unreadable, so they chose not to.

* * *

Due to their remarkable ability to sort out individual waves even to quantum gravity level with their new equipment, Deena noticed something strange in the graphical depictions. At first she thought it might be some kind of depiction anomaly. The more she attempted to filter it out, the more pronounced they had become.

Deena leaned back from her console and said, “Debbie, come look at this. The new scans seems to indicate there are various types of …. whirlpools of differing energies surrounding this planet. I’ve enhanced and colorized each signature a different color so we can tell them apart easily.”

Debbie came over and sat in the chair next to Deena. “Ok. Show me and let’s see … “ she trailed off as the colored swirls engulfed Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The center of the swirls were all the same, and more in-depth scans showed an intense area of entanglement that was creating a warp in the fabric of space / time that was not a black hole.

Deena replied, “I also have data on the aftermath of our native planet’s early warp drive experiments, and what happened when some of them went south.”

On another large screen appeared a huge anomalous explosion emitting energies nearly at a quasar level, and there was a tremendous warp in space / time at the location the drive went critical.

Debbie began typing furiously on the system keyboard. Deena asked, “What are you going to do?”

Debbie replied, “I remember our step pop taking us to the county fair. Remember the spin art we loved?”

Deena replied, “Oh, I get it. If it swirls this way … what would happen if we can image space as if it were warped the other way, untwist it?”

Debbie replied as she hit the enable button, “Exactly. I’m going to have the AI calculate a systemic reversal. Might even get a timestamp, or a close one anyway.”

The women watched the screens intensely as the program postulated what would happen if galactic drift reversed, showing the results at an ever-quickening pace as Debbie increased the calculation spans. When it had finally completed, they both could see a line of origin starting on Earth at a place in what is now Arizona Crater Park. From the multicolored lines, which had been diffused over the millennia, the trace went first to someplace near Mars.

There must have been a huge explosion that created a great deal of debris. Whatever it had been, it had disintegrated, sending shards inward after the main body had grazed the southern pole of Mars, creating severe global havoc. In the Earth-Moon system, the Moon took the brunt of the impact, but Earth had impactors too.

This particular gravitic mass continued on past the Sol system and out of the Milky Way before exploding again, creating the galactic bubble. “Whoa,” said Debbie, “good thing that didn’t happen anywhere near here, or Earth life would have been killed off before it had really begun.”

Shortly after that, another wave had begun in Arizona and proceeded towards Andromeda. It had, of course, taken a long time to get there, but it had been a long time ago.

“So what were those things?” asked Deena. “Clearly some kind of devices. But what was their purpose, and did they do what they were supposed to, or did they malfunction?”

“It’s hard to say, of course,” said Debbie. “It was so long ago. But logically, if there were two of them, and they both did similar things, the chances that those were malfunctions are decreased.”

“Yeah,” replied Deena, “it’d be unlikely for both to malfunction, especially in the same way. So what was the purpose in doing that? Going to a spot near a galaxy and just exploding?”

Debbie guessed. “Scientific experiment? It couldn’t have been long enough ago for attempting to alter the development of life in either galaxy – it would have had to be 4 billion years ago. Earth would have been a molten hellscape. And that Arizona crater is only about 50,000 years old, so if we’re thinking it had anything to do with that impact, the timing’s way off for that.”

“Wait,” said Deena. “Let me see that warp drive experiment data again.” She ran the image back and forth. “That’s awfully similar. Was there someone on Earth back in those times trying to make a warp drive … and failing spectacularly?”

“At least they had the sense to try to the test far from home,” replied Debbie.

“I wonder if they eventually got it right,” said Deena.

“Well, Earth’s current civilization doesn’t have a warp drive right now,” Debbie replied, “but other than that it’s hard to speculate. Could Earth have had a spacefaring civilization that long ago? And if so, what happened to it?”

“What if it wasn’t from Earth?” Deena speculated. “Some spacefaring civilization found Earth and used it as a testing ground.”

“Goldilocks planets like Earth are too valuable, though,” said Debbie. “Why risk completely devastating a rare temperate planet that you could colonize when you could try your warp drive experiment on a dead rock just as easily and risk nothing? Airless rocky planetoids are everywhere in any galaxy.”

“True,” Deena said, thinking. “I’m starting to come to an unsettling conclusion. Suppose they had no choice at the time. They were driven to it by desperation. Either they were stranded on Earth and had to get away fast, right away, or they were trying to use it as a weapon to defeat some enemy.”

“Using an unstable warp drive as a weapon?” asked Debbie. “That … would devastate a radius of hundreds of thousands of light years. How would an enemy isolated enough that that kind of effect wouldn’t destroy the user and the planet they’re on be any kind of threat so serious that you’d do this? I’m still leaning toward a civilization that isn’t on Earth anymore. What if they sent off several colonization attempts – and the first few went terribly wrong?”

“I see,” replied Deena, “so they tried going elsewhere in this galaxy and also to the largest nearby galaxy, Andromeda. Wait. Maybe they succeeded. The ancient history of our home civilization in Andromeda doesn’t go back farther than 50,000 years – meaning that the planets that make it up just don’t have written records that go that far back.”

“So one or more of the planets whose people eventually went into space and formed the jumbled mess that is the Andromedan civilization could’ve originated … on Earth?” wondered Debbie.

“Maybe,” Deena said, “though I doubt every single one of them did. There are, what, over 40 homeworlds?”

“So what are we thinking the Meteor Crater in Arizona really is, then?” asked Debbie. “You’re not seriously proposing that anyone survived a crash landing like that.”

“No,” said Deena, “but what if they were under attack, which was why they were so desperate to get out of there that they didn’t thoroughly test their drive before attempting to use it? What if an enemy found their base and fired a small planetoid at them with a mass driver?”

“Ouch,” replied Debbie. “That would explain why there’s no evidence of them today. Whoever didn’t get away got obliterated.”

* * *

Debbie found a link in their homeworld’s data base that looked promising. As she brought up and read the in-depth study it referenced, she saw that its authors had realized that their ancestors had been on the losing side of some kind of interstellar war far in the past. Their people had run from it several times, eventually arriving on a protoworld barely solidified from lava.

The study’s authors had had no real way to tell from where their ancestors had come, but they had made a remarkable discovery that hadn’t been followed up until now. Debbie connected this with other studies of their homeworld’s ancestral history and prehistory and was able to narrow down the direction and time frame of these events, having the computer compensate for stellar and galactic motion, and the planet that would become Earth was in fact within the range. That and the fact that there were hints that their ancestors were said to have discovered a new form of energy was quite suggestive. There was some confusion in the calculations due to other gravitic perturbations, but she got far enough fast enough that she could do the rest of the calculations by hand.

“Deena!” she called, “Come take a gander at this. I think you are gonna be impressed.”

Deena wandered in, wearing her night time teddy, munching on a croissant. “OK, impress me … “ She stopped mid-sentence when she realized what she was looking at. “You mean, our people came from Earth?”

Debbie replied, “Technically yes? Though it’s more like Earth was a waypoint in their voyage. I accidentally found a study of some fragmentary records about a war billions of years ago that the ancestors of our people were trying to flee. The attackers were persistent and chased them. Best I can tell, they destroyed the attackers’ warship near what’s now Mars, accidentally taking out its moon and creating a severe debris issue. Next, from what this disjointed entry says, they also attacked and destroyed the enemy fleet that had been pursuing them before they traveled from Earth to Andromeda. It took a few years, but our civilization thrived and once again became the advanced civilization we currently are. It also says they genetically engineered certain strains to carry the grand sum of knowledge of the entire race within their genetic codes.” She turned and looked at Deena. “That means us.” She tapped her forehead. “Somewhere in this concrete storage bin, everything is stored somehow.”

Denna sat down, incredulity written on her face. “So … we’re basically a storage medium, then.”

Debbie replied, “Not exactly – from what I can tell, it was a survival method so at least some of our civilization’s knowledge would be saved. It could be retrieved from the genetic codes if a major disaster struck.”

Deena opened a computer research table and began typing. “Storing data in the genetic code using DNA storage would involve translating binary computer data, zeroes and ones, into the four chemical bases in a quaternary system using the four DNA bases – A, T, C, and G. Of course, how exactly those are translated is unknown, but there are only four ways to do that. Well, four mathematically necessary ways. There might be some biological reasons to deviate from that, so the system might actually have to be more complex in order to generate a viable life form, let alone one that thrives, and that says nothing about intelligence.”

Debbie opened another file on her system and began typing. “It’s also possible that not all the DNA is derived from this data. We’d have to figure out which of it is and isn’t the data. So, now all we need to do is spark whatever memory there is of this technique and learn the translation sequence.”

Deena said, “I think I know how to read it and discover the storage locations – not sure right away of the translations, but I’ll work on that later.”

As Debbie added the finishing touches to her diagram, she replied, “I’m going to test this idea on a drop of my blood. See what I can find.”

“Really?” asked Deena. “You haven’t already sequenced your own DNA? I did that back in college. What have you been doing with your time?”

Debbie grinned and pricked her finger with a sterile needle, taking a sample on a slide that she then inserted into a machine. “Well, this will be running for a while, but in the meantime you can run your code on your own data.”

“Yeah,” said Deena, “this will be running for a while too.” The computer’s display showed DNA sequences and attempts to match patterns against them, marking likely hits and remembering their locations for later in the process.

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Debbie said, “that Arizona crater wasn’t made at the time this war happened. The crater’s only about 50,000 years old, which is a far cry from 4 billion.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing the crater was either coincidence … or somebody coming along later to wipe out the evidence and prevent humans from making use of it,” Deena theorized.

“Yeah, who knows?” shrugged Debbie. “I wonder something else, too, and that’s why Earth life also uses DNA. The various Andromeda species use all kinds of genetic media.”

“It’s possible that some of their cells jump-started early Earth life,” guessed Deena.

“But why do we look just like them?” Debbie wondered. “I mean, we’re so similar that we blend right in with Earth humans. This is after billions of years of zero contact, not just millions.”

“Another mystery to wonder about,” said Deena, yawning.

They ended up going back to sleep and checking on the machines’ progress in the morning. But in the morning they had a message from an unknown sender – and not one from Earth. “You see this?” asked Debbie.

“Yeah, but I didn’t actually look at it,” Deena replied. “It’s marked priority, but not emergency, so I figured we’d watch it together.”

* * *

Together, both women discovered they indeed had alternate realities other than the one they perceived. The girls sat in total incredulity as they saw the highest-ranking member of the ruling Andromedan Council, who also happened to be a member of their species. The image smiled and said softly, “Greetings from the Council. My name is formally High Minister Gkdavdrn, but I do think since I owe you an explanation, I’ll tell you informally I’m also known as David.” The man removed his ornate cloak and returned to the main screen, “I’m sorry to have contacted you in this manner; however, the two of you had started investigating historical data that is forbidden. I’m authorized to give you an explanation and not leave you totally in the dark.”

Deena and Debbie looked at each other. Their total astonishment was written clearly in their wide-eyed open-mouthed expressions.

Debbie manged to stutter out, more to herself than anyone else, “Uuuhhh, y … y .. yes. By all means.”

Deena giggled a bit as the message continued, “We don’t know everything, because although our civilization has been technological for a very long time, this was of course very, very long ago, and not all the details have survived. Most of our home star system was obliterated in a cosmic war. In our haste to explore our galaxy and show off our new abilities to travel, we discovered another race of beings. They were saurian in nature and as vicious as they were crafty and intelligent.”

The man walked to a table like device and tapped a place on its surface. A large holo appeared that showed the ragtag escapee crafts and the huge armada that pursued them. Now the girls understood the reason for the size of the galactic bubble. The size of the pursuing armada was mind blowing.

The next images to appear were some type of extremely advanced control room/laboratory. A group of men turned on a small device. The target item vanished in a beautiful pyrotechnical display. One of the soot-covered engineers hit a button on a control panel and said, “Get me the Captain, quick … I discovered the very thing that’s gonna save us.” The image went dead.

David returned to the screen. “That record is a fragment, one of the few we have from that time. But the logs state that what happened next was completely unintentional. They didn’t realize that the yield of their new weapon, combined with the Sauren warships’ reactors, would have that much power. They destroyed the warship, but the splash damage destroyed the orbiting planetoid of the planet the warship orbited – the planet near the one you’re now located on, if my information is correct.”

The image on the screen changed once again. This time it showed the catastrophic destruction of a huge warship and the resulting secondary reactor explosion severely damaging Mars’ orbiting moon. It created many large chunks of debris, which left many marks and scars including the core’s now drastically changed orbital trajectory that brought it into collision with Mars’ southern pole. This created massive atmospheric and hydrologic issues immediately as in massive hydrological displacements and catastrophic atmosphere losses. Many of the pieces left their marks on other places, including Earth’s moon and Earth.

David returned to the screen. “What I’m about to show you next is the true reason our people came to the Andromeda Galaxy.”

The large image changed and showed a horror story’s worth of predation among the Humanoids by the Saurens. This grisly scene changed and showed the long hardship of their desperate flight, and their horror when they discovered that the Saurens already knew where they were going.

The image changed once again. This time it showed a bird’s eye view of a huge armada of extremely large warships taken at what was obviously a great distance. The image wasn’t clear or close enough to show what the object that detonated was, but the end result totally destroyed the armada and shortly after that the expanding shock wave took out whatever was recording.

Once again David returned to the screen. “They knew they had created a huge debris field, and Earth was going to orbit into its path eventually. They could clearly see that the planetary disruptions had caused the the impact of the core of Mars’ moon. They could just as clearly see the approaching debris cloud and had to make preparations to escape. They did, and they came to Andromeda.” The man turned and spoke to several people behind him. At one time he even got slightly loud. “Sorry about that. Now, we want both of you to know how deeply special you are to our race. You, and all your genetic ancestors and descendants, not only contain all the knowledge currently known by our peoples within your genetics – if and when a severe enough incident happens, whatever data is necessary to resolve the issue if it’s known to us will appear within your conscious minds. We’re sorry for that inconvenience, but we have no idea if we’ll ever see the Saurens again. It’s been billions of years, but they may someday return.” The video went blank.

The women looked at each other. Their total shock was written plainly on their pretty features.

Deena broke the silence, her expression shifting from shock to annoyance. “So wait, we’re a secret weapon against an ancient enemy and nobody bothered to tell us until now?”

Debbie actually burst into laughter. “Oh, boy. Morris Everett had no idea what he was doing when he had us kidnapped! Ha ha! He’s lucky we didn’t completely vaporize him, or genetically devolve him into a shrew!”

“How would you even … holy smokes!” exclaimed Deena in surprise as she suddenly realized exactly how to make a weapon capable of doing just that. And she shouted with profanity included when she realized that the capability David had just described was in fact fully real.

“You just realized you know how to make a shrew gun, didn’t you?” asked Debbie. “Yeah, me too. I don’t think we need to get to work on the shrewifier, but it kind of illustrates the point, doesn’t it? He’s right.”

“But do these Saurens still exist?” asked Deena. “That seems like something it would be important to know. And …”

“And you just realized you knew how to build a device to scan space for them, didn’t you?” asked Debbie. “Because so did I.”

“But the array we’d need for that,” said Deena. “There’d be no way to hide that.”

“I think we both know how to do that too,” Debbie replied.

* * *

Commander Gensher said, “Well, I think it’s a very good idea, you two. A Solar System-wide array of microprobes that can alert Earth of any objects heading toward it would allow Skywatch to breathe just a bit easier. As long as it isn’t performing surveillance on Earth, or on us here on Mars, I doubt anyone would have a problem with it.”

“That was our thought exactly,” said Debbie. “Especially for us here on Mars, with a much less dense and protective atmosphere, it would be good to know what’s out there.” Although the network of tiny sensors would also detect planetoids large enough to pose an impact threat, its primary purpose was to form a gigantic telescope with a lens the size of the Solar System, allowing their computers to scan space for any signs of other civilizations, specifically Saurens. But she and Deena didn’t want to worry the humans.

Earth had made a breakthrough in faster-than-light communication. Quantum entanglement allowing communication faster than light was, of course, completely impossible. But investigation into the nature of and reason for that cosmic speed limit had yielded information about a continuum beyond the space and time that human science knew. Debbie and Deena had watched with interest as Earth developed what it was calling alternate continuum condensed matter theory. What Earth had come up with was primitive in comparison to what the girls knew, which the Andromedans called chi-space quantum transference, loosely translated into English, but whatever one called it, their advanced knowledge allowed for instantaneous data transferences among all their probes regardless of distance. To Earth, this comm system was well in advance of what they had already come up with, but it was close enough to their primitive tech that it didn’t violate the agreement of nonproliferation of advanced data to the primitives. It would only be a few more years before Earth stumbled on the necessary refinements.

The women built the most advanced system they could conjure to receive and analyze the data from the new solar-system-wide grid. The reconstructed and computer AI clarified images were beyond compare. They focused their attention towards what was known as the galactic bubble.

The images showed the remnants of a tremendous detonation. The circumference of the bubble showed debris accumulations that had obviously been forced into their current locations by the pressure wave of the destruction of the Sauren armada. To the amazement of both women, they also found a rather large number of shattered debris hulks that marked the remains of the armada.

Finer more detailed scans in that direction did find a Sauren civilization, however their technology looked somewhat like Earth’s from the early 1960s. They had powered ground and air transportation, but their space technology was limited to primitive satellites. This was, however, all deduction based on readings from a great distance away; there weren’t any direct visual observations.

Deena commented, “I can find no other indications of any other Saurens. Data indicates that armada being destroyed devastated them and toppled their civilization. We also don’t have a lot of information about what the Saurens look like, so we can’t compare them to what they looked like back then. Given billions of years, they must have evolved.”

Debbie replied, “Makes sense that their civilization fell. I mean, they had to put almost a global effort into building the armada as large as it was and the amount of large warships in it.”

Deena said, “True, but something else had to have happened too. Destroying the armada would have set them back resourcewise and manpowerwise, but overall they still had their technology.”

Debbie said as she pointed to the primitive capsule that was currently circling the planet of observation. “Whatever it was apparently blew them back to the stone age, and they had to start over.”

Deena snorted a laugh, “As violent as the message we got showed them being, they may have done it to themselves. All I know now, is based on current scans, the Saurens we are observing won’t be any kind of threat for centuries.”

Debbie said, “ I agree, but we really have no way of knowing if what we’re looking at is the whole picture. We still need to scan and monitor just in case.”

Deena got up from the scanner console and went to the design station, saying, “I have an idea so we can keep an eye on them and not tie up the system scanners.”

Debbie turned and looked at the diagram and schematic Deena had brought up. Basically it was the same type of sensor as the one used in the system network, but this had a few neat tricks. It had a real live quantum shift shield, inertial damper capability, and frame dragging to insure dilation issues didn’t affect it in transit.

Within about an hour, the new sensor drone was built and programmed for its new mission … to watch over the Saurens and insure they were the only ones. A network of them was launched and would eventually take up positions along the surface of an imaginary hundred-light-year sphere around the Sol system. They could focus their analysis on any region of space, but they would pay close attention to the Saurens. Of course, it would take some time for the new sensor drones to arrive at their destinations, but they could still take readings while they were en route.

Meanwhile, their observation network had discovered a number of objects whose orbits intersected Earth’s. They brought this information to Commander Gensher, who relayed it to NASA. “You found how many Earth-grazing asteroids?” he asked.

“37,” said Deena bluntly. “Now, they’re all fairly small. Any bigger, and astronomers would’ve found them already. But they’re still big enough to cause significant destruction if they were to strike Earth – massive impact damage on land, potential tsunamis if they hit the ocean. They’re going to be something to watch.”

“Definitely,” said the commander.

“Oh, we found something else,” said Debbie. “There’s an interesting spherical low-mass asteroid that is showing significant unknown ship traffic to and from Earth. I think we’ve got an idea where those pirates’ base is. Now, Deena wanted to go blow it up right away, but I thought we shouldn’t take unilateral action like that.”

“What? The pirates are still around?” asked the commander.

“We destroyed their biggest ship,” Deena said, “but they’ve got lots of smaller ones. And of course it’s only a matter of time before they steal or build another big one and start preying on shipping again. I think they’ve hollowed out a planetoid and have a base inside it, and we can’t tell just by observing what’s going on in there.”

“Well, one thing we’ll need to find out is whether they really are the pirates who attacked our shuttles,” said Gensher. “It’s likely, but they could also be some other independent group. We don’t want to hurt anybody innocent.”

“Also, Deena’s thirst for vengeance has cooled down a bit,” said Debbie. “How do I know? They haven’t exploded yet.” Deena elbowed her.

* * *

Debbie and Deena discussed at length the spherical low-mass asteroid and came to the decision to create a special ship and go there to check it out and take action if necessary. They contacted the Andromedan High Council and asked if they could proceed with what Deena as wanting to do. The High Council had only one issue as long as the girls stuck to the agreement, and that was that the debris should be totally eradicated if the planetoid needed to be destroyed.

Of course, Debbie proudly showed off their junkyard probe, which the Council approved of wholeheartedly and even requested the plans for – the Andromedans already had similar devices, of course, but nothing that was quite so versatile and adaptive, considering that true AI was forbidden and pseudo-AI models were heavily regulated. The only reminder was to take into account any missed debris that might accidentally escape before the junkyard probes could detect them. Deena already had plans for that.

Earth’s Lagrange shipyard proved its worth when it built the exact hull Deena had presented and Debbie updated. Of course, it took the girls several months to fit the craft with the advanced equipment they wanted. There were a few moments of tension, since the other techs were told the ship was off limits. It ruffled feathers, and there were grumbles, but based on the many radical things they had already created, it didn’t amount to anything.

Externally, the vessel was a thing of beauty, form, and sleek elegance. Within, the technology would have made Earth think everything was magic due to its advanced nature. Of course it had artificial gravity, neutron and plasma cannons, a chronal shield that allowed them to hide among nooks and crannies in time itself. It also provided a frame-dragging ability and inertial dampening.

This particular ship was fully capable of superluminal travel through a dimension of space currently unknown to humans. All the humans knew was that Debbie and Deena had done it again, creating yet another wonder of technology. As had happened many times before, Earth was abuzz about what they’d come up with next.

The two women sat in their command couches all strapped in. Debbie reached over and pressed a button on the comms system. “Lagrange ship dock traffic control, this is Dugubuhe, requesting launch permission.”

“This is Lagrange; you are cleared to drop all mooring and proceed to exit corridor. Good luck and G_D speed.”

Debbie replied, “Thanks, control. Dugubuhe out.”

The external docking clamps released. Automatic guidance controls came online, and the large ship slowly moved from its berth into free space. Once scanners showed they were free and clear to navigate, Deena brought up the shortest, cleanest path to the planetoid. Once the nav data was fed into the navigation system, Debbie engaged their new engines. The ship vanished in a sparkle of energy.

A severely pleasant washing tingle ran all through the women’s bodies for an instant. When things cleared, the planetoid loomed large in their displays. They started close-range scans immediately and saw, as Deena had feared, that although the pirates may have lost their custom warship, they were now in the process of building a bigger and more formidable one.

This confirmed that the planetoid was in fact the pirates’ base, and this was one project the girls had no intention of allowing the pirates to complete. So the next step of Deena’s plan was immediately put into motion, one that would have been skipped or at least postponed if there’d been no evidence of pirates.

Their computers were capable of such rapid and detailed analysis of scan data that the pirates had had no chance to even send a message before the molecular decomposition beams started acting on the new ship, right through the hull of the planetoid, taking a chunk out of the planetoid’s surface as it went. The beams were governed by the computers, which had enough detail to ignore living tissue and space suits, and they simply pulled the molecules of the warship apart into their constituent atoms, transferring them as raw materials to Debbie and Deena’s storage bay. Astonished pirates scrambled to grab and don space suits before they perished in the partial vacuum that now existed within the planetoid or got sucked out the new hole into the full vacuum of space.

“Oh, so you’re those two girls from Mars,” said a voice on the communications monitor. “That’s a nice trick, but you got us by surprise. That won’t happen twice.”

Debbie laughed, saying to Deena, “Oh, they think that, do they?”

Deena grinned grimly. “For now they do,” she replied. “Their security system is auto-activating, hidden within several nearby rocks. Shields are already up, so they’re nothing we can’t take. Programming neutron cannons with the coordinates of each target.”

Sure enough, the explosive missiles launched by each hidden weapons battery splashed off their chronal shield as if they were water balloons, then Deena auto-fired, the neutron cannons started independently and automatedly targeting the source of each missile, and each weapons installation exploded, hit by invisible beams that detonated the explosives of each and every weapon. A huge expanding bubble of plasma and debris was all that remained.

“Oh, now I’m impressed,” said the pirate on the comms, whoever he was. “Out for revenge, are you? Sheesh, it was just one shuttle – OK, one and an attempt on a second, that failed, so you only lost one shuttle and one bomb decoy. But those were automated robot ships – you’re attacking a populated base. There are women and children in here.”

“They think I’m worse than them,” said Deena.

Debbie reminded her, “They think they know what our plans are. They’re imagining what we’ll do based on what they’d do in our place.”

“Just tell me when you’re ready to go,” Deena replied.

“Their security system is a shambles,” Debbie said, “but unfortunately so is their data storage organization.”

“That’s … a thermonuclear warhead,” Deena said as the base’s own weapons array opened fire with a large missile. “They allegedly have women and children, and they’re going to set one of those off so close to their base?”

“No,” said Debbie, “they’re going to set off two of them so close to their base.” A second large missile launched as the first was on its way.

“I mean, they saw what we just did to their warship,” said Deena. The molecular decomposition beams put cylindrical holes through each missile’s warhead as they transferred all radioactive heavy isotopes into Debbie and Deena’s storage bays, along with everything else that was in the path of the beams. The warheads now had conventional explosives, fusion fuel, and nothing in between to ignite that fusion fuel. They detonated harmlessly against the shields.

“Now they’re launching fighters,” said Debbie. “I wonder what good they think they’ll be able to do. I’m almost done, by the way.”

“They’re two-person fighters,” Deena said, looking at the scanners. “They’re not going to – Are they?”

Nobody shot the fighters down, so they flew in close, firing small missiles that did nothing to the shields, then at closest approach one pirate ejected from each fighter, equipped with a space suit, an EVA pack, and apparently some hand-to-hand weapons. “They’re trying to grapple onto the shield …?” wondered Debbie, as the shield prevented their magnetic grapples from attaching to anything. Two of the pirates’ magnetic grapples managed to become attached to one another.

“They’re not going to get through,” Deena said, “but how do we …?”

“I’ve got the data,” said Debbie. “Let’s get out of here. They’ve spent the vast majority of their weapons stockpile on us with no effect.”

“But they’ve got data about our ship and our weapons,” objected Deena.

“You’re assuming that exfiltrating their data is all I did,” replied Debbie. “Their systems are wiped and rebooting, every system down to the nav computers on those fighters.”

“OK, I guess it’s acceptable that all they’ve got are eyewitness accounts,” Deena said. “Setting course and firing up the engines again.” The ship’s maneuvering thrusters spun them about, and soon … there was that pleasurable wash of sensations as the main engines took them home from a planetoid in the Kuiper Belt to Earth orbital space. The pirates in EVA suits were simply … left behind. Presumably their compatriots would pick them up again, once the fighters’ computers were back online.

“Dugubuhe to NASA,” said Debbie. “Control, we have a data package you might be interested in regarding the details about that planetoid. Sure enough, they’re the pirates. Includes everything about who they communicate with, along with who’s funding them. Prepare for transmission. Over.”

“This is NASA control, ready to receive,” came the response.

* * *

While Debbie began the download, Deena saw some strange readings in the navigational sensors. She began to do more and more fine adjusting and muttering to herself. Debbie came over and began looking at the readings and making calculations for navigation.

Debbie commented, “I have no idea what the energy is, but it doesn’t seem to act like matter as we know it.”

Deena was punching the data into the library computer, and the only answer she could get from it was what the system termed “gravitic evaporation.” An exact explanation was confusing. It basically said that the underlying substrate of reality had some sort of leakage; the current reality layer couldn’t render the item, so it was returning to the substrate in the form of whatever the evaporate was. Just what could cause that kind of leakage, or from what it was leaking, or returning to neither of them had any idea.

Debbie’s eyes narrowed as she said, “What if we could track an object by the gravitic evaporation trail the mass of the object passing through whatever this substrate thingy is creates?”

Deena said, “It would give us insight on incoming threats and maybe objects of real concern.”

Debbie looked up. “Would do more than that. It would more than allow us to determine if what we saw of the Saurens was real, or a deceptive image sent to throw us off, or anyone like us.”

The girls nodded to each other, and the creation of this sensor began to occupy their minds for the long journey home. Yes, it was true that they could have been there instantly, but they didn’t want to have to answer any questions, or be in trouble with the Andromedian Council.

Back at NASA’s Houston Space Control, the data Debbie had sent was being examined. One bright young female lieutenant pointed at a photo of a huge hole running through the planetoid. “Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, but the damage I see here is greater than one of our best nukes.”

A tech who was sitting at a station and viewing the data replied, “Not sure this is the reason or cause, but a pressurized vessel having its shell pierced using an explosive would have caused considerable damage, and we just don’t see that here. Plus, we don’t know what was stored inside or if this was a weapons pod.”

The lieutenant nodded. “That make sense. I mean, those women can’t have a weapon more powerful than our nuclear arsenal …” The room had become deathly silent except for the beeps and chirps of the equipment. She looked around; everyone was looking at her.

“Those two can work wonders, but they aren’t aggressors,” the technician replied, breaking a few minutes’ silence. “If they have some kind of … it looks like an extremely destructive narrow-beam device … they probably invented it as a mining tool. I’m just glad they’re using it on pirates and not on any legitimate entity.”

“Probably,” said the lieutenant.

* * *

Over the next several days, while NASA unpacked the data and discovered that the planetoid had in fact served as a shipyard for a warship the pirates had been building, Deena and Debbie returned to their home base on Mars near the colony, and began work on their gravitic evaporation tracker. It took considerable experimentation.

Gravitic evaporation generally refers to the physical processes where gravitational fields influence phase changes like normal evaporation or other more complex and exotic state changes, or conversely, how quantum evaporation mechanisms affect gravitational systems like black holes in earth’s current understanding of them.

As the girls dug deeper into analyzing and researching, they discovered Hawking wasn’t too far off. His observational baseline was skewed. Hawking radiation was a theoretical thermal radiation of photons predicted to be released from the space just outside a black hole’s event horizon due to quantum fields being stretched out by the intense curvature of spacetime.

The girls discovered this was close to what they were seeing, but of course the cause was different; this wasn’t due to a black hole per se. The resulting energy was a combination of mass entanglement and the residuals left over after a state phase change. Any and all objects, regardless of size or mass, produce a gravitic phase change due to interactions within the quantum bond fields of what they began to call the underlying entangled substrate of reality. The intense gravity fields of a black hole’s event horizon created a state of quantum instability the normal Photonic-space could not properly render, thus it was returned to the base substrate in the form of gravitic evaporation energy.

The phase transition from one ordered state to a decoherent state produced the gravitic evaporation trail. The devices they had come up with to track this were totally overwhelmed at first, as there were so many traces throughout the scan area.

Deena said with exasperation, “This is a great idea, but we must find a way to be more specific. Too many traces going too many places. The readings are a jumbled mess.”

Debbie said as she typed in some design modifications, “I was thinking if we use a type of liquid crystal sealed in glass cells to create a continuous space-time crystal that produces endlessly moving, visible patterns at room temperature, we could then modulate those patterns to build a quantum state inside a diamond receiver using nitrogen-vacancy centers and microwave beams. In this way we can be selective using the micro-sensitive potentiometer to select the band state we want to track.”

Deena immediately started requesting the modifications to the scanner, which the build bots were already constructing, so they began modifying them immediately. She was eager to test it and see how well it worked. She knew that by the time she and Debbie had put on their suits and arrived at launch control, the installation would be complete and ready for a trial run – possibly even before,

Deena discovered the issue with gravitic evaporation: it was detectable – massively so, because anything and everything with mass also curves spacetime. “These fields interact with other gravitic distortions, creating curvature, which creates even more gravitic evaporation.

Now she understood the truth about redshifted light. It didn’t represent time, age, or distance and had no correlation with the Doppler affect, which was an entirely different thing. What redshift did show well was the energy loss of the photon as it navigated curved spacetime under gravitic influence, which also resulted in the creation of more gravitic evaporation.

Debbie suggested that instead of searching for the border of the distortion, they should search instead for the energy decoherent trails. This proved to be the adjustment Deena needed. Now, she discovered the images they thought they were seeing from the Saurens had a strange signature with different properties from the usual spacetime readings, which led the girls to believe that what they were seeing was an illusion.

But how to see the reality? Was this illusion in the same place as the reality, or was it a distraction from the real readings, which were somewhere else? Deena and Debbie had quite some time to think about it as they headed back to Mars. They also had another problem: theirs had been built in space and wasn’t designed to land. They would have to park it in Mars orbit and get a shuttle to pick them up and transfer them to the surface. But that wasn’t too bad; they programmed one of their existing shuttles that had life support functionality to launch just in time to rendezvous with them once they got into orbit, then they put the ship on lockdown and transferred to the shuttle for the ride back to the surface.

“Ah, lab, sweet lab,” said Debbie as she stepped into their Mars laboratory for the first time in several days. There were new consoles and several terabytes of new data to sort through, the result of the construction bots’ work.

“I wonder what all this data shows,” Deena said as she flipped her monitors on. “From what we could tell on the ship, the data suggesting a peaceful low-tech Sauren civilization was an illusion. This should prove that. Debbie, what are you seeing …? Debbie?”

When Debbie didn’t answer, Deena turned around to find her slumped over her keyboard, snoring. It had been an exhausting few days. “Well, I could use some sleep myself,” Deena said. She shook Debbie awake so she could get to a proper bed, and then both of them took a much-needed rest.

* * *

They woke up to find that the analysis software had done its work. The gravitic evaporation data was organized into sectors of space, and each sector had been analyzed separately. “Most of these are just showing that the data we’ve been getting was a projection, an illusion – a signal deliberately sent to mislead,” said Deena. “So we spent all this time picking apart data that was fabricated, faked.”

“But the fact is, our sensor network is all still out there,” Debbie said. “But its components aren’t made to detect gravitic evaporation. What if … they were?”

“We send out an update,” Deena suggested.

“The position of every detector is known to us,” said Debbie. “So suppose we just send out updaters to dock with all the detectors, containing new hardware and a software update?”

“OK,” said Deena. “And … in the meantime, some of the sectors are showing anomalous gravitic evaporation data. We might want to focus on why.”

* * *

Over the next month, several strange devices tracked down and recovered, modified and installed new equipment on many sensor devices spaced in a grid, before returning to the orbital Mars shipyard many light years away.

Deena and Debbie sat glued to their monitors as new scan data arrived. The image of what seemed like mid-20th century technology Saurens began to shimmer and become opaque the more the gravitic evaporation scanners were fine tuned and adjusted.

Due to the extreme distances and other energy interference, they never got a really clear image. What they did get was enough.

The image of the primitive satellites and orbiter began to shimmer and become more and more transparent. Another ghostly image started bleeding through as the original slowly vanished. After several long minutes, they had mange to isolate a gravitic evaporation frequency that afforded them bad, fuzzy, but still recognizable bleed-through images.

What they saw actually sent chills up their spines. They couldn’t get clean, clear images, just fuzzy ones that looked like extremely long range photos that had been enlarged. What they did see was a world far in advance even of what they knew of Andromeda, but deeply scarred and with much evidence of rebuilding. It was more than obvious that whatever had happened had been a planetary disaster, from the many deep city-sized craters and mountains with odd divots taken out of them.

The still-evident scars of severe wars or other global disasters were obvious. The girls knew this secondary image had to be as recent as the planetary destruction. The rebuild had been heroic, but the destruction was mind-boggling.

Deena said as she sipped her tea, “Seems their nasty side caught up with them.”

Debbie replied, “Yeah, it does. But they still have their tech, and from the looks of things, they’re making huge headway in rebuilding.”

Deena looked at Debbie. “What if they … didn’t learn their lesson and decide to come this way?”

Debbie looked over at the special comm center they used to talk to the Andromedan council, then replied, “Let’s hope we can do what we have to do to stop it and not get the wrath for violating our agreement.”

The girls looked at each other and sighed. Deena said softly, “We need to watch them. I bet they’re building another armada somewhere we can’t see yet.”

Debbie said, “Odds are more than favorable that you’re exactly right.”

They looked at each other and said at the same time, “We need to expand the sensor network.”

Over the next few months, new sensor probes spread throughout what humans called the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and some made their way into the Perseus and Carina-Sagittarius Arms as well. Debbie and Deena knew that wouldn’t help if the Saurens were already on the move. Another plan was needed.

“Well, we may not know where their armada is now,” said Deena, “but we know what we want to protect.”

And so it was that the Utopia Planitia shipyard, as well as the shipyards of a half dozen systems in Andromeda, quietly got covert drone fleets. These were small ships with weapons far beyond Earth’s technology, which was technically within the two friends’ agreement because Earth didn’t know they existed, and because the Andromeda-based ones weren’t anywhere near Earth.

* * *

“Crop production in the agricultural domes is up by 10% this harvest,” said Deena. “This is probably because of the expansion.”

Commander Gensher replied, “That seems likely, but since the expansion was 20%, what explains why the yield increase was only 10%?”

Debbie was bored out of her mind and decided to check the long-range scans.

* * *

While Debbie sat at the scanner controls and looked over the current readings, a strange idea came to mind. She thought, “What if … instead of tracking the wakes of the gravitic evaporations … what if we tracked the specific decoherent frequencies created by the interaction of the evaporation?”

Deena walked up about that time and looked over her shoulder. “What’s that? I don’t think we ever tracked anything like that before.” She sat at the console next to Debbie and turned everything on.

Debbie replied as she programmed their smart system to aid in analyzing the new energy data, “I was thinking. If the Sauren armada was using some sort of stealth, it would have to create some kind of decoherence in the unitary field. If I can isolate some sort of frequency in that particular range, we might be able to track their armada, if it does in fact exist.”

The girls bent to their task with the aid of the computer, which was able to scan and categorize the many scattered signals. Even as fast and advanced as its correlation algorithms were, it still took several months, due to the massive amount of jumbled signals.

During this time, they also isolated a minor issue. Because of the construction, the uneven distribution of fertilizer and hydration to the outer edges of the new construction created a minor shortage. The matter was quickly resolved, and crop production went up another 10%. Total yield surprised the biologists studying the crops, it had exceeded their best predictions by about 3 to 4%, which was amazing under current circumstances.

It was starting to get late by Mars time, when the research scanner completion alarm went off. The smart system contacted Deena, who happened to be in the lab at the time and informed her.

She looked at the newest reconstruction of the data, “Are you positive this is accurate?”

The smart system replied, “If the data you gave me to correlate was accurate, yes.”

Deena hit the comm button to Debbie’s bedroom, “Debbie, this is Deena. I need you to come to the scanner lab like right now. This you must see,” then closed the comm.

Debbie was in just her jammies, but she slipped on a pair of cute slippers and dashed out of her room to the lab. She entered and stopped. Her eyes grew large as her mouth fell open as soon as she saw the tracking data. “The armada … it exists … and it’s the size of a nebula … I know what that sounds like, but …”

Deena replied, “I can’t think of any other way to describe the size of it …”

Debbie gasped, “Th … that can’t be right.”

Deena turned and replied, “If it isn’t, then what this data indicates is pure fantasy. I’m afraid that just isn’t so.”

Debbie sat at the master console and began typing furiously.

Deena looked over and asked, “What are you planning to do?”

Debbie replied, “We have some rather formidable attack drones. They have chronal shielding and stealth tech. I’m having Donatua ship yard build us a small fleet, adding some special touches Earth has no knowledge of, and I hope neither do the Saurens.”

“All indications are that their civilization has risen and fallen many times in the billions of years since they were last around here,” Deena said. “But what that means about their current state of technology is anybody’s guess – except for the fact that they have an armada whose size boggles the mind.”

“My question is,” said Debbie, still typing, “why it exists. You don’t build warships unless you’re planning to fight a war. You don’t build the biggest armada the galaxy has ever seen unless you’re planning to fight the biggest war the galaxy has ever seen – against someone else who also has an armada that size.”

“Or someone else you think has an armada that size,” Deena reminded her. “It doesn’t have to be real.”

“Well, right now,” said Debbie, “they face a small fleet that they probably don’t know about yet, because it’s still under construction.”

“Unless they face a large fleet that we haven’t discovered yet,” replied Deena. “Perhaps because it’s not as big as that one.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Debbie said. “What if they’ve finally decided to come after the Andromedans after all this time, convincing themselves that we’ve got a fleet that size or bigger? Based on all their old tales?”

* * *

In a small hollowed out planetoid in the Andromeda Galaxy, the Donatua Ship Facility had completed its latest assembly assignment. A large group of super sleek ships emerged. They were ebony black, and the only visual signs were the strategically placed lights to indicate their locations to nearby ships.

One by one they gracefully flew from the large yard bay door to align themselves into rows and columns. Their total count was 100 when the final ship assumed its place in the formation. There was a shimmering effect before the ships simply vanished. Space returned to normal.

Light years from Andromeda, the group of 100 ships reappeared in a shimmer of realty. According to the lead drone’s scanners, a huge collection of ships stood stationary relative to surrounding objects in space. Something pinged immediately. As large a gathering of ships as this was, the life form readings were extremely small in number. Not nearly enough to hope to crew two or maybe even three hundred of the collected ships, and those that had life form readings numbered in the five hundreds.

The drones were equipped with chronal shielding which technically rendered them invisible if they chose a proper out of time sync.

They engaged their engines in a smooth simultaneous way and rapidly moved closer to the large collection of ships. The closer the droids came, the better scan readings became. They showed that many of the large battle cruisers were badly damaged. At two AU, scans were unmistakable, as they showed debris fields and other signs of damage. Another thing they clearly showed was that whatever life forms were here were stranded. All scans revealed any FTL capable engines were either totally destroyed or severely damaged.

Further investigation revealed that not all the ship’s hulls were Sauren; some were of unknown origin. No life forms could be found on any of those ships.

Debbie sat back from her screen and typed a bit on the console. The data from their attack drones clearly showed that whatever battle had happened, a long time had passed since. A large portion of what they thought at first was the Sauren fleet included many hulls from another civilization.

From the images and data, It was obvious to Debbie that whoever the other species was had either been eradicated, or left the area. It would be within the new ships’ abilities to check and see, but currently the main issue was the Saurens.

From the best Debbie could tell, a major battle had been fought at that location, and losses had been heavy on both sides. Another thing, all ships’ engines were either severely damaged or destroyed. Whatever energy source the indicated 500 were using seemed to be strong and steady.

“So not an amassed Sauren war armada with the power to destroy entire civilizations,” said Deena.

Debbie agreed, “Maybe at one time, but certainly not now.”

“And nobody there but Sauren – or their descendants,” Deena added. “It’s been literally billions of years. What have they evolved into?”

Debbie realized that the ships hadn’t taken any specific readings of the life forms so far, just general ones that would match anything that originated on the Sauren homeworld, so she had no way to answer Deena’s question. But soon there would be more data.

* * *

Debbie swiveled around and began typing instructions for a new survey by their fighter probes. They already had data showing there had been a large battle between two combatants, one being the Saurens. In the previous scans, it was noted the other craft were basically hulks. There was severe damage in places, but closer scans also revealed some of what appeared missing had been intentionally done.

Now, since no other life forms had been indicated, she instructed the probe, in chronal shielding, to slowly approach the hulls that showed life signs and to verify the biological scans.

On close approach, the fighter probes took in depth scans from a globed attitude, attempting not to miss anything. The first thing the scans revealed was that all those hulls were somehow joined together into what made up a jumbled nightmare of some kind of space station.

The only motive power that could be located were attitude thrusters; they could move this mass of junk, but not very easily or with much speed.

The most interesting thing the drone discovered was the life sign readings. They did show as more Sauren, but there was something else in the genetic profiles that was not Sauren, but an entirely different but compatible genome.

Debbie shouted, “Deena, get your complacency in here! I have something to show you!”

Deena arrived quickly and drew up a chair beside Debbie. “Whacha got, sister?”

Debbie pointed, “This. According to scans, the life signs are Sauren hybrids. Not real sure exactly what the mix of genetic material is, but I’m certain it’s from the survivors from the original conflict.” She typed on the console for a minute and the data changed. “From the best scans we could get, none of the masses have FTL abilities. However, only the central mass has power indications, and it also indicated a large capacity to defend itself.”

Deena commented, “That would actually be reasonable. Their ships’ engines abilities were gone. Nearest places were well over anyone’s lifespan away, so they cannibalized the severely damaged hulls and created a … metal monstrosity with a power core able to keep a life support going. Since they both knew there were others, they also knew through bitter experience that weapon and defenses were a necessity.”

Debbie said, “Yeah, and due to the length of time they were trapped, of course, whatever conflict became a fight for life and they interbred.”

Deena replied, “But … how could they interbreed? Why would species from completely different planets be compatible at all? Why would they even have the same kind of biology?” She gasped. “Unless …”

Debbie picked up her thought. “Unless they came from the same planet, or at least the same biology, to begin with. They had a common ancestor.”

Deena said, “That actually sounds plausible. We know they’re aggressive. They create a civilization, then they split into factions and fight each other until that civilization falls. Then it happens again and again. So suppose in one of these cycles, they make it out into space and colonize some planets, then the homeworld’s civilization falls, millions of years go by in which civilizations rise and fall on the homeworld without making it into space, then finally another spacefaring civilization arises … and they meet the ones who came before. Now you’ve got the same cycle of rise and fall, only in space.”

“And by that time,” replied Debbie, “the two might as well be different species – they look different, they have different customs, and they certainly don’t speak the same language.”

“Well, we’re not gonna be able to fix them,” said Deena. “They’ve been like this for billions of years. So how do we keep from getting killed by them? Right now they aren’t much of a threat, but … that’s right now. Later things might be different.”

“I have another question,” said Debbie. “Possibly more urgent. We scanned worlds. They showed Sauren living with mid-20th-century technology. We saw something that indicated that wasn’t the truth. But this isn’t that. These people aren’t living on planets; they’re living on a cobbled-together space station. Who’s living on those planets? And how are they really living?”

Deena sighed. “We’re gonna have to go look for ourselves, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, I’ll get the Dugubuhe kitted out,” said Debbie.

* * *

“OK, this space-bending drive system is definitely something not to show Earth,” said Debbie, “but we’ve got to do something in order to get to the galactic bubble before we die of old age.”

They were looking at the ship that was orbiting Mars through the eyes of cameras on construction drones that had been refitting it for this new voyage. “Yeah, and it’s got all the weapons and chronal shielding of our fighter drones. We also want to come back alive – and without leading the Saurens or anyone else back here.”

“Ready to go?” asked Debbie.

“Got my suitcase packed,” Deena replied.

“OK, then. Longest voyage yet – well, not really.” They had in fact traveled back and forth between the Milky Way and Andromeda three times already.

It took them a week to get from the Sol system to even the outskirts of the galactic bubble. They’d set a course for the closest of the planets they’d scanned and found the scans inaccurate. Now they were nearing that same planet. Debbie said, “Now, the chronal shielding will keep them from seeing us, but we’ve gotta do some special tricks so we can even catch a glimpse of them while that shield is up.”

“Probably just means the video image will just have a low framerate, knowing you,” Deena replied.

“And it’ll be black and white,” said Debbie. “And two-dimensional.”

Moving into a low orbit but maintaining the shielding, they visually scanned the flat, monochrome video they were getting through the shield until they found what were probably the largest settlements. And they were astonished.

“Are those even … Sauren?” asked Deena.

“This isn’t a mid-20th-century civilization,” said Debbie. “They’re advanced beyond modern Earth – not as advanced as Andromeda, but they could smash all Earth’s current defenses if they wanted to. And they’ve got weapons … but they’re not fighting anyone. And I don’t see any ships in orbit, but there are some on the ground there. What are they using them for?”

“Oppressing the hybrids is what comes to mind immediately,” said Deena. “But we should check them out too; we’re not sure we know the truth about them either.”

“The fact is, though,” Debbie said, “these guys have the technology to fool our scanners. I don’t see how the hybrids have technology like that. They’re a lot more likely to be the genuine article.”

* * *

The girls managed to get a probe in close proximity to what appeared to be a large population center. To their amazement, scans indicated not only was this huge city ground based, they found several others in the sky almost hidden within soft fluffy white clouds that appeared as normal cloud and not a defensive projection on the probe’s deep scans.

Hidden within its chronal shield, the probe was invisible to the normal advancing time wave as it occupied a side real bubble about 0.5 seconds ahead of the advancing wave. This afforded it the ability to observe them 0.5 seconds before they were able to see the probe, rendering it invisible and allowing its battle computer to take over emergency maneuvering and weapons control if necessary.

To the very best of their current scans, what they were looking at was the real deal. They could see what looked like several super advanced communication arrays. Deeper scans proved these towers to be the emitters of the illusion presented in this planet’s place. The tech was fantastically advanced. One thing they discovered immediately was they could find no weapon emplacements.

“That seems odd, doesn’t it?” Debbie asked. “No planetary weapons?”

“Not necessarily,” replied Deena. “They could have all kinds of mobile weapons – ships, for example.”

Several drones approached the ships on the ground: rows of large elegantly built ships parked in what appeared to be some sort of revetments. Closer scans showed many of the ship in a state of either disassembly or reassembly. The girls couldn’t tell from the current data.

Images were clear enough, but they were unable to determine if those ships were being taken apart or assembled from the probe’s current data scans. All they could tell is more of them were in a state of definite need of assembly than appeared to be intact.

One of the probes’ sensors pinged on motion, and discovered a robot that appeared to be built for construction. It had four articulated legs and six upper articulated appendages with gripping ends. Scans showed this mechanoid definitely disassembling the ship as it removed a large section of hull plating and seemingly vanished within the revetment.

Deena turned slightly in her couch and said, “From the looks of these scans, they are the real deal, and for reasons currently unknown, they have disassembled many ships.”

Debbie tuned her receiver to Deena’s frequency. Debbie took control of another of their drones and began scanning the revetments. They were huge structures with much of it underground. From the images, it showed they had been disassembling the collection of ships for quite a long time.

The operational power cores in the ships not yet touched were still operating at max. An interesting thing they discovered, though, was that operating all over the planet were a number of power cores matching the number of ships that had been disassembled and supporting many large habitats for the people.

And then there were the people themselves. What they’d assumed to just be highly evolved Saurens were not. The people of this world were hybrids too. None of the planetary scans had found any unmixed Sauren genetics. The entire population was this strange Humanoid/Sauren mix that produced a rather strange-looking being with natural body armor, but otherwise looked very human.

“OK, so we’ve got one hybrid population that waged war against another hybrid population,” Deena said. “Nobody said it was going to be cut and dried.”

“But … what are they even doing now?” asked Debbie. “These guys are dismantling their warships and apparently beating swords into plowshares, as they say on Earth. They’re repurposing their warships’ power cores for civilian use.”

“Meanwhile there are the other hybrids in their cobbled-together space station made out of derelict ships,” Deena replied. “Clearly these two populations fought a war in the past. These ones won. The other ones lost.”

“Sure, but that was millions or even billions of years ago,” said Debbie. “None of the people still alive were involved. We don’t know how much of their history has survived. They might not even know the other group still exists – they might not even have records they ever existed.”

“Yeah …” said Deena. “I guess what we have to do is find out if there’s a threat here to Earth or Andromeda. Right now, I’d say no. Which means we can go home.”

“There’s a lot more space to cover,” said Debbie. “Let’s look at the origin of another signal.”

“Well, there’s the one from the next area … calling this one sector 1 and that one sector 2,” said Deena.

“Sure,” said Debbie. “Gotta call ‘em something. Let’s move on.” They activated their drive systems and soon reached another planet. This one was entirely different from the advanced hybrid world they’d been examining in sector 1.

“What … what’s going on here?” said Deena as they looked at these Saurens. They weren’t hybrids. Scans showed 100% Saurian genetic material. “To get that kind of purity they’d have to … ugh.”

“Yeah,” continued Debbie. “They’d have to be horrible. They’d have to drive off any hybrids out of their group, or kill them. They’d have to kill off any mutations too. Otherwise they’d certainly have evolved over the past several hundred million years. But no, they’re practically the same as the Saurens of the distant past.”

“OK great, so these are the racist Saurens,” said Deena. “But it’s not as if they’re some kind of master race or whatever; their technology isn’t even spacefaring.”

“But there are signs that it used to be at one point,” Debbie said.

Deena wondered, “So what happened? Did they fight amongst themselves?”

“There was some kind of war,” Debbie replied. “Possibly multiple ones. Preliminary scans indicate geological layers in the crust showing worldwide conflicts.”

* * *

As she flipped several switches on her console, Debbie said, “I’m sending a probe down, shielded in a time displacement field to make it invisible. I want to get as close an in-depth scan as I can.”

Deena brought the probe scans up on a screen at her console, “I’ll use the computer to analyze ….” She stopped mid-sentence as the probe approached what scanned as being the upper atmosphere, and could proceed no further, as it deflected off of something and returned to a higher orbit.

Debbie brought her flight couch to the upright position as her eyes grew large in surprise. “Deena, according to this, there’s some type of energy field entirely surrounding this planet.”

Deena was frantically attempting to gain control of the probe once again as it followed the deflection path it was on and back into contact with whatever the energy field was once again in another part of its orbit. This time, the time bubble’s outer energy periphery had intermingled with the one surrounding the planet. Since the probe’s field was the weaker, it vanished in a bright sparkle of dissipating chronal energy, rendering the probe fully visible.

Before the girls’ stunned eyes, they saw the probe vanish from all scans in a bright yellow flash. Their scans did detect a particle stream that the girls began frantically trying to trace. Wrapped in their own chronal time shield, they began following the almost invisible trail of particles. It was an easy trail to follow, since neither girl had ever seen one like it before.

The trail ended abruptly. The particles just simply ceased, and there was no trail. Without warning, their deep space comm unit lit up, and the face of one of those hybrids appeared. What he said sounded like gibberish.

Deena said, “Am routing this to the linguistics computer. Let’s see if we can discover what language this is.”

Debbie said in a shocked tone, “No need. Come listen to this.”

Deena tuned her comms unit to the current frequency Debbie was using. A face resolved on her screen, a very handsome face for a Sauren-Human hybrid, dressed in an immaculate uniform. It wasn’t one of the beings they’d seen on the planet below – it was one of the hybrids. The translator had no issues translating, as this dialect was one of the old original ones their people had used before fleeing to Andromeda.

The translated voice said, “Greetings. We mean you nor your people harm. This is a zoo planet, and we have kept a pristine sample of the creatures we wish to preserve. They are far too aggressively violent to be allowed access to space, so we have created this world to contain them after our genetic experiment successfully ended millennia of conflict.”

The girls looked at each other in raised eyebrow surprise. Debbie replied, “Genetic experiment?” She and Deena had both studied enough of this dialect to become passingly fluent.

The face smiled, and the image’s perspective drew back as the hybrid held its arms out. The image now showed a very handsome humanoid-Sauren mix. He was wearing a very nicely tailored uniform, but it was obvious that he also had natural body armor.

The translated voice of the image said, “We accidently ran into one of the Sauren’s generational wars. We took major losses as the severity of attacks grew larger. We launched our hunter-seeker engine-killer drones and took out many power plants. This diversion gave us enough time to regroup and overcome their main forces. But after that, we had to do something. This race was far too intelligent and far too aggressive to be allowed free rein through space, and we didn’t want to commit … genome deletion.”

Deena broke in, “So you did genetic engineering that created a new subspecies?”

The hybrid’s smile became broader. “That wasn’t the original intent. What we had intended to accomplish was adding a more sedate genetic line to their matrix. What we discovered after the first thousand had been altered was that the new births were more humanoid than Sauren. We discovered that the humanoid genetics were more dominant than the Sauren. Apparently somewhere in their dim violent history, they had started down the path to being human. Not sure where it got off track, but the results are what you see now. Forgive me – I know there is no reason for you to trust us after what you have already obviously scanned. Is it possible to set up some kind of meeting? Or maybe a conference? Our peoples have much to discuss. I promise you, there is a lot more to cover, and null/space transmission I feel is not appropriate. From what the ancient archives show, your people had a brush with the Saurens too. What we have to tell you concerns you as well.”

“Hoo boy,” said Debbie, the mic off. “This is something for Andromeda to discuss, not Earth.”

“Agreed,” Deena replied. “We’re keeping Earth out of this if we can.”

To the hybrid, Debbie said, “We are explorers, not diplomats – but we can transmit your message to our government, and they can compose a diplomatic response that, I hope, will lead to further communication between our people and yours. Sound good?”

The hybrid nodded. “Very well. Please contact your government, and we will await their reply.”

* * *

Debbie and Deena traveled a safe distance away from the galactic bubble and transmitted the recording of the hybrid’s explanation and stated goals back to the Andromedan Council via tight-beam encrypted stringwave signals. Then they waited.

It wasn’t long before they got a similar response from High Minister David, who appeared on the screen from his office, off the Council chamber. It was clear from the hubbub in the background that there was still a hotly-contested debate occurring among the delegates, a minister trying in vain to keep the proceedings orderly. At one point he dodged a thrown videovox. “Greetings, you two,” said David. “We, er, have received your message. It would seem to be not from the Saurens but from a member of a humanoid-Sauren hybrid civilization that has developed in the time since the ancient war?”

“Yeah, and it seems that it’s caused a bit of a stir?” guessed Debbie. “Sorry about that, High Minister.”

“Oh, it was my choice to show it to the Council,” David said. “I could’ve kept it quiet, but silly me, I believe in free and open exchange of information. Emotions have, shall we say, run a bit high.”

Deena nodded. “The only thing anybody knows about the Sauren is that they tried to exterminate us, way back when. I imagine there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for making any kind of contact with anything even vaguely Saurenish.”

David replied, “Indeed. The very idea of revealing that we still exist at all runs counter to everything that some of us have ever known. The only ones who don’t have this feeling are those who have never heard of the Saurens, such as various species that are originally native to the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, by now, so are we, but even though we’ve been here for billions of years, we didn’t originate here. They’ve never had any contact with the Saurens in the past.”

“What’s your take on it?” asked Debbie.

“Personally I think we should talk to them,” said David. “These are clearly not the Sauren of times long gone. They need not know where we are. We can send a diplomatic delegation to meet with them on some neutral world that doesn’t reveal our current location. Much of what’s happening behind me is simply a knee-jerk reaction to the ancient history they learned in school.” He paused. “The hardest part will be finding people for the diplomatic delegation who aren’t going to react like … that.” He gestured behind him. “Only good can come of exorcising the demons of our past. My hope is that we can show our people that the Sauren of the history books are well and truly dead.”

Deena said, “There are gonna be terrorists who are gonna try to disrupt the talks. I guarantee it. I will bet you a million kiantra.”

David grimaced. “No bet. We’ll have to be very careful, very tight with security. Some people would rather risk igniting another war than admit they’re wrong.” He paused. “I’d welcome your help in preventing any such plots.”

* * *

Debbie and Deena took the security issue very seriously as they talked over how to set up the meeting. They had Andromeda send many of their upgraded probes to the cosmic bubble’s closer side to Andromeda. They had the probes search until they found a small uninhabited planet with an atmosphere orbiting a rather cool red dwarf star in the perfect goldilocks zone.

This isn’t to say the biosphere on the surface of the planet was exactly compatible with humanoid life, but there was enough oxygen to support life for short durations, and it meant their builder bots wouldn’t need to pressurize the 40-foot slagcrete dome that was constructed for use as the conference hall. There were, of course, other modifications, such as a powerful chronal shield generator. There were weapons as well, although they were purely defensive.

It took several months and many negotiations to arrange the meeting. David hand-picked several of the other council members to be among the Andromedean delegation, and, of course, the girls were required to come, since this was mostly their brainchild.

As they and the delegation landed in their shuttle on the pad, Deena said nervously, “Now, if they’re telling the truth, we should be able to see them coming from several light years off. And the scans should be good enough that we can tell if they’re warships or envoy shuttles.” She left out the part about the scanning beacons they’d scattered about the star system and its vicinity.

The advanced radar and transmission station laid out next to the slagcrete dome looked impressive as the delegation entered the dome’s air lock.

While the other delegates explored the well-constructed dome, Deena and Debbie sat at the scanner console and worried. They had no idea what type of defenses they’d need or if they were even needed. Soon, at extreme range, the sensors picked up a small superluminal object traversing space in some kind of energy bubble never before seen – though both of them looked at the readings and instinctively knew exactly what sort of laws of physics it was breaking and had some inkling of how it was done.

The object traversed ten light years faster than anyone in the entire delegation had ever known.

Debbie said, “Looks like they were telling the truth. What long range scans indicate is a small shuttle. Shows twelve life forms aboard, defensive shields, and no discernible weapons.”

Deena replied, “OK, give them the homing beacon on frequency 711 as agreed. They’ll be able to find this location a lot easier.”

Debbie leaned forward and pushed a button on her console. Several green lights came on as she made frequency adjustments. No sooner was the proper frequency tuned in than they received a return signal indicating the beacon had been actively located and tracked.

David walked into the control room about that time and looked at the scanner readings. “Well, ladies, from what this says, that craft is traveling faster than our fastest ships, and is a small shuttle. If we could make peaceful relations with these people, it would appear to be a boon and serious advancement to our people.”

Debbie and Deena looked at each other. Deena replied, “Yeah, if what they sent us over nullspace frequency was a fact, and not some ruse.”

David replied, “We’ll know soon enough. From the speed they’re traveling, they should arrive at docking in about 24 hours.”

The girls sat faithfully for several hours watching the small shuttle’s rapid approach. David entered the scan room and placed a hand on each of the women’s shoulders. “OK, look. I know that all the hubbub and the name calling was kind of upsetting. But those history crystals are real depictions of the Sauren devastation of our home system. If we hadn’t discovered the null transition barrier’s frequency, we wouldn’t have been able to wipe out the armada that had relentlessly pursued us.”

Debbie leaned back and stretched. “I’m hoping these hybrids are as they claim. All data thus far indicates they are. That one planet with the field around it is the only planet in many light years of scans that has any pure Sauren life forms. And these hybrids keep it around as a reminder of how they could’ve stayed if they hadn’t advanced.”

David nodded slowly. “I … just think you two need to rest. I do too.”

“You’re … you’re right,” said Deena, looking at Debbie. They simultaneously pressed their fingertips to touchpads on their computer terminals, and the screens changed to say “AUTOMATED SECURITY MODE.”

“The computer can monitor security for us,” Debbie said, “and it can wake us at the first hint of trouble.”

“Besides,” said Deena, “there are still 14 hours before the delegation arrives, even as fast as they’re going. Plenty of time to grab a decent amount of rest.”

“If there are going to be any shenanigans,” said David, “I wouldn’t want to be the perpetrator – I can’t even imagine what kind of extra security you two have come up with.”

Deena and Debbie looked at each other one more time, then Debbie said, “Well, then, goodnight, High Councillor. We’ll see you in a few hours.”

As they retired to their rooms, David’s aide came up to him with a tablet containing a news update. “The usual, Sir,” said the young man, “the opposition’s accusing you of treason and demanding your resignation.”

“Of course they are,” David replied. “I need a nap too.”

* * *

A few hours later, Deena and Debbie were back up. “Just once I’d like us to not be the ones who are trying to keep two galaxies from exploding,” Debbie said, yawning.

“Better than nobody keeping them from exploding,” said Deena.

“You’re a real ray of red sunshine,” Debbie remarked. “As always.”

The two of them sat down at the security consoles, which still proclaimed they were in automated mode, touched the unlock pads that read their DNA, and read the reports from the past few hours.

“Diplomatic shuttle still 8 hours out,” said Deena.

“David’s still in his room,” Debbie said. “Looks like he took a nap a bit after we did. His aide … went outside for a walk?”

“What?”

“I know, right? It’s not the most hospitable planet. Average temperature just above the freezing point of water. Not that much oxygen. You could get by if you didn’t exert yourself much, or if you wore an oxygen mask.” Debbie frowned. “The aide came back inside 8.3 minutes later.”

“What did he do while he was out there?” asked Deena, looking at the records. “Sent an encrypted message, looks like.”

“Suspicious,” said Debbie. “Can we decrypt?”

“Of course,” Deena said. “But it will take time. The hybrid delegation will be here by the time the computer finishes.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” asked Debbie. “I’m gonna loop in some more compute power to speed that up.”

“I’m gonna triangulate where it was sent,” said Deena, “and see if there was a response. Looks like …”

The power in the dome went dark.

In dim emergency lighting as the emergency alarm sounded, Deena said, “I blame myself. I should have thought of this,”.

“And of course the backup generator’s also been sabotaged,” Debbie said.

“Why bother just sabotaging one?” asked Deena. “Repair bots mobilized.”

“What’s going on?” said David, running into the security room in a bathrobe.

“Simultaneous double power outage,” said Debbie.

“Seems unlikely,” replied David.

“Doesn’t it?” asked Deena.

The power came back on. “Repair bots remanufactured the main reactor,” said Debbie. “They’re doing the same to the backup reactor now.”

“They … what?” asked David.

“They molecularly disassembled the main reactor and built it back up from raw materials,” Debbie said. “Takes a lot of energy, which is why they have massive fuel cells.”

“Good thing those weren’t sabotaged,” David said.

“Yes, and that’s why they stay on board our ship, not the shuttles,” said Deena. “Separate chronal shield.”

“And my goodness, has a lot been going on while the power was supposedly out,” said Debbie.

“What do you mean … supposedly?” asked David.

“Oh, the security consoles were out, but the detection grid’s got its own power source,” said Deena. “And the analysis is being done by our separate computers on our ship. Whose location is secret, even to you.”

“These are just the front end,” Debbie said. “Anyway, we thought maybe your aide was a traitor because of his little excursion outside the dome, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Wait, my aide did what?”

“Look at this,” said Debbie. “A tight beam crossed the detection grid while the dome power was out, but not to your aide’s location, and not to anywhere we know. One end is in the direction of Andromeda, and the other end is … well, somewhere in that direction.”

“Did we detect anything along that vector at that time?” Deena wondered. “And … no. Sorry, we can’t monitor all of space and time. Though I would if I could.”

“OK, the message the aide sent back to Andromeda was … oh.” Debbie paused. And blushed. “That’s very sweet.”

“Yeah, well, looping that computing power into decrypting this mystery beam’s message instead,” said Deena. “Giving it everything we’ve got. This one is very short.”

“Oh!” said Debbie. “Orbital mechanics …”

“What?” asked David.

“I get it,” Deena said as Debbie gestured and clicked madly with a stylus at the holo screen. “We may not be able to monitor all of space and time, but we do have monitoring on all the objects in this star system bigger than a baseball. Because we also don’t want a natural disaster like a planetoid collision disrupting this conference. She’s trying to see if any of the objects we know about crossed the path of that beam at just the right moment.”

“Gotcha!” Debbie said. “Deep scan on that rock … and of course it isn’t a rock. Sending a builder drone to pick it up. No self-destruct detected.”

“Whatever’s going on here, I pity the fools who thought they’d get something past you two,” said David.

* * *

The drone rapidly approached the preprogrammed recovery target. Once the probe reached 3 light minutes’ distance from the “rock,” the scan revealed that its outer shell was some form of super dense crystal. The scans on atomic structure were ambiguous and not very helpful – something was confusing the scan. However, one thing the drone discovered was that this was some type of homing beacon. The drone ran its preprogrammed collection and recovery of the spherical device.

Debbie commented, “Deena, that thing wasn’t so much a rock as some form of crystalline beacon.”

David leaned over and said, “That crystal is one of the new developments Andromeda has just made. Within the heart of that sphere we’re going to find a homing beacon, a small FTL drive, and a very large quantum fuel cell. I need to call security. That is a military probe, and its projected trajectory was in no known system’s direction.”

About that time, the comm came alive. “This is Peace Envoy 1 calling Conference Base. Requesting orbital instructions and permission to land.”

Deena hit the return button, “This is Conference Base. Transmitting the orbital data now. Permission to land is granted. Welcome to the Conference Base.”

The voice replied, “Thank you. We should be at pad within about 30 minutes. There are 12 of us on board. We have no weapons, as requested.”

Deena replied, “Very Well, Peace Envoy 1. We will meet you at the airlock colored green at the landing pad. We will speak more when you arrive.” She was trusting that they both had the same idea of the color green, but the translation computers were handling that.

The girls and Dave with his entourage were standing at the hatch to the debarkation tube when the very sleek shuttle came in for a smooth landing. They extended the tube and opened the hatch. 12 of the most handsome men the girls had ever seen were approaching down the tube. 10 were in immaculate uniforms, with one dressed in a dark crimson robe and the other in a dark gold. On their chests was a bright white star pattern.

The group stopped when they reached Dave and the girls. One uniformed individual came closer and bowed formally, “My name is Umanooma. I am a Gladeneral in our space force.” He turned and indicated the other two, who were in robes. “The one in crimson is High Chancellor Tragarth and the one in gold is his Ambassador, Verbosh.”

“I am honored, High Chancellor, Gladeneral, and Ambassador,” said David, bowing to each in turn. “I am Andromedan High Councillor Gkdavdrn, though most call me David. This is my aide, Ian. And these are … we haven’t gotten around to giving them titles yet, but they’re Debbie and Deena.”

“Then we too are honored, High Councillor, Aide, and Explorers Without Portfolio,” said Gladeneral Umanooma, nodding to each. Debbie and Deena glanced at each other, noting the use of the word “explorers.” He knew they were the ones in the ship that had approached their zoo planet.

“We have prepared lodgings and a comfortable conference room,” said David. “If you would please come this way, we can either show you to your rooms or to the conference room, your choice.”

“We have no need to rest –” began Umanooma, but High Chancellor Tragrth interrupted.

“Please, if you could show us to our accommodations so that we might briefly refresh ourselves,” said Tragreth, “I know that the warriors pride themselves on their stamina, but we have all had a long trip, and I know that even they could use a bit of a break.” A few of the other soldiers looked a bit relieved at this.

“Of course, I fully understand,” said David. “We’ll be turning left here, then, and we’ve attempted to print your names on the appropriate doors …” The soldiers made a security scan of each room, which everyone had expected they would do, before anyone went in, and they seemed to find their rooms to their liking. All of the visiting hybrids retired to their rooms after agreeing to meet in about 30 minutes.

Moving to the conference room, David, his aide Ian, and Deena and Debbie spoke briefly. “Has your computer decrypted the message sent to the military probe yet?”

“It’s in progress,” said Debbie, checking the tablet she carried.

“I sent a drone ship in the direction of the probe’s vector,” said Deena. “We’ll soon see what’s there, if anything. If it was heading to a mobile target like another ship, it could be long gone. If the intent was for the probe to change direction after receiving the message, we won’t know about that until we can analyze the probe’s programming.”

Debbie summarized, “What we do know is that someone wanted to send a message that they knew would go through these coordinates, sabotaged the power and backup power thinking that would keep us from noticing it, and wanted that message to get to that probe, probably for clandestine delivery at FTL speeds, which never happened because we intercepted it.”

“Why didn’t it jump to FTL speed, I wonder,” said David.

“Because we have a field that interferes with that,” Deena replied.

“Interferes with FTL drive?” asked David. “You two are … constantly amazing.”

“We’re a menace, I know,” said Debbie with a grin. “Especially to terrorists who have plans to plunge two galaxies into war. But not to aides who are just trying to send a message to their boyfriends whom they miss a lot.”

Ian gasped, then cleared his throat.

Deena said, “I’m hoping that by capturing the probe before it reached its destination we’ve scotched their plans, whoever they are.”

“I’m wondering why the message had to go through here,” said Debbie. “Which is why I’ve been scanning this base for extraneous devices. And finding nothing. It’s just barely possible that there’s a device that’s been planted on someone without their knowledge …”

“Or someone’s a traitor,” said Deena.

Debbie’s tablet blinked. “Oh,” she said, looking at it, “the reason why it’s been so difficult to decipher that message is that it changed. It was one message on the way in, and another on the way out. But it’s OK. We’ll just decrypt both. No problem.”

The hybrids filed in, led by Umalooma and followed by Trargth, Verbosh, and the guards. At the same time, several of David’s diplomatic envoy filed in from the opposite direction. Everyone took their assigned seats, staring uncomfortably across the table at each other.

David began with introductions, then yielded the floor to Trargth, who introduced his own retinue. And then he made his speech, which was about how the war between their ancestors and the Andromedans’ had been so long ago that the very details of it were unclear and that they wanted to put to rest any idea that anyone wanted war.

* * *

One of the members of Trargth’s group came to him and said something softly to him as he handed him a small device that looked like a cell phone. Trargth took the device and turned it on. Everyone watched as colored lights played softly across his features as his mouth fell open in shock.

He looked up and said with amazement, “Forgive me please. I have some … major news. From what our archivists have discovered, the Andromedans are the seed genetics that produced us. We,” he looked at each person in the room, “are technically the same peoples.”

David gasped, “How? When could this have happened? We have no archival data for such a thing in our histories. We have in-depth archives of the Saurens and our desperate flight form the homeworld to Andromeda, with no mention of a breeding program.”

Deena and Debbie eyed each other. They both knew that when the history was billions of years old, that meant billions of chances for important information to be lost to time.

Trargth smiled as he took another handheld device from his pocket and slowly slid it towards David. “The major issue is this. Most of the population of the homeworld managed to escape when the Sauren armada arrived. No one remembered those who were unable to meet the launch window due to the ongoing slaughter caused by the Sauren invasion. One thing we were grateful for – whatever that tremendous explosion was so long ago that took out the major portion of the Armada, allowed the remainder of us to rebuild.”

Verbosh stated, “That was also when we discovered that the Saurens had a combat cycle that stretched for generations. The next cycle, we were ready for them.”

“Yes,” said Umalooma, “we had built a war fleet of our own and met them near the huge bubble left by the explosion that wiped out most of their last fleet. We had certain knowledge they didn’t on shielding and weapons and defeated them using the core neutralizers.”

Trargth added, “That was also when the decision not to completely destroy the Sauren was made. We put together a junk station from the many hulk hulls left after our battle. Those individuals began the genetic recombinations that resulted in us.”

Verbosh said, “It’s also when we decided that it would be wrong to completely eradicate the Sauren genome, even through genetic manipulation.”

Umalooma said, “That was when the vote was passed to build a zoo planet and keep both samples of Sauren contained.”

Debbie asked curiously, “Both samples? What do you mean, samples?”

Umalooma replied, “Saurens as we know them are two genetically distinct but similar genomes. For reasons we have yet to discover, every generation the two species come together and make war. We had to contain this. No way were we going to allow it to consume the cosmos ever again.”

Deena and Debbie looked at each other. They had learned about this earlier. But they hadn’t known these people had preserved both Sauren strains.

“Does that mean they make war on each other to this day?” asked Deena.

“Yes, unfortunately,” replied Verbosh. “We do what we can to limit their technology so neither side can fully wipe out the other, and so the war doesn’t render the planet uninhabitable. But periodically, it keeps happening.”

“Wait, where’s Debbie?” asked Deena.

David looked around. “And where’s my aide?” He looked around. “Ian?”

“Here, Sir,” said Ian, rushing into the room. “Can I help you?”

“Oh,” said David. “I’d just noticed you weren’t here. Neither is Debbie.”

Debbie came back in, walking without looking where she was going, because she was staring at a tablet in fascination. She almost tripped over a chair. “Debbie,” whispered Deena loudly, “what is going on?”

“Oh!” whispered Debbie. “You have to see this. Look.” She handed Deena the tablet. Deena read it.

By this time, everyone was staring at the two of them. “Is there anything you two would care to share with the class?” asked David.

“Busted,” said Debbie.

“OK,” said Deena, who had managed to quickly read all the tightly-packed text on the tablet’s screen. “So, from what I’m gathering, Debbie noticed two things at once. First, our computers finally decrypted that communication that we intercepted several hours ago. It came from Andromeda through here and was intended for a small military probe that we also intercepted. Second, Debbie just figured out why it went through here instead of avoiding us altogether and going undetected.”

All eyes were on Debbie, so she explained. “You may have noticed Ian was gone, but I noticed first.”

“I … had to step outside,” Ian said. “Because … my boyfriend was due to send me a message. The base’s shields don’t let personal messages through. Only official messages that have the right encryption and authorization codes.”

“And that’s when I realized something,” said Debbie. “Steganography.”

“You refer to the practice of hiding secret messages within innocuous ones,” said Umalooma.

“Exactly,” Debbie replied. “I don’t believe Ian has any knowledge of this happening, to begin with. Probably not his boyfriend in Andromeda either. But … you guys, I think your comms tablets have been compromised. You should get them checked out. We can check yours. Get your boyfriend to get his checked out too.”

“An investigation will be opened at once,” said David. “This is non-negotiable. These talks are too important. So someone has hijacked Ian and his boyfriends’ tablets to send encrypted messages?”

“They absolutely have,” said Debbie. “We finally decrypted the message that was sent through here – it turns out through Ian’s tab. They couldn’t send it in another direction and avoid our surveillance, ironically, because this was the only place they could interfere with the power. They sent code that took over Ian’s tab and hacked the power systems.”

Deena added, “They must have hijacked Ian’s tab months ago. It’s what I would’ve done.”

“Ian,” said David.

“I’m sorry, Sir!” said Ian, greatly upset.

“All right,” said David, “the policy of no personal messages over official channels is officially rescinded. But also, you are to give your tablet to Deena and Debbie for analysis immediately.”

Ian sighed. “Yes, Sir.”

“Oh, give it here,” said Deena. When he did, Deena pressed a few buttons on it, its screen went dark, she attached a physical cable to it, and a moment later it came back on. “It’s erased, and I’ve got a full copy of the data on it. Don’t worry, I’ll only look at what we need for security purposes. I’ll give you back your sanitized personal data after the analysis. Oh, and I also scanned for extraneous hardware; there isn’t any. It was all software.”

“But …” said Ian, whose tablet was now asking him to log in from scratch.

“We’ll talk about it later,” said David. “Meanwhile, get your boyfriend’s tablet checked out.”

“I’ll tell the tech security division to run a scan on Stan’s tab, and I’ll tell him they’re coming,” Ian said, going to the comms room.

“Good,” said David. “Debbie, what did you find?”

“There’s a ship out there somewhere,” Debbie explained. “A drone. It’s where the military probe was headed, to rendezvous with it. It didn’t make that rendezvous, because we grabbed the probe. But now we know what message it received and what message it was to send. The message it received was to attack the delegates’ shuttle. The message it sent was with the shuttle’s course – we averted that attack without even knowing about it.”

“And Ian just allowed another message to go through,” said Deena. “It said to destroy this base at all costs.”

Everyone’s breath caught in their chests.

“I mean, it’s not going to happen now,” Debbie said. “It was a message to the probe, to be relayed to the drone, and the probe is in our hands. I did a scan. There isn’t another one. We know what they look like.”

“They couldn’t have lots of probes,” said Deena. “It would be too conspicuous.”

“The one hole is that we don’t know where the drone is now,” said Debbie. “It might have some kind of last-ditch failsafe plan, but we’ve also got plans within plans.”

“We don’t want these talks to fail,” Deena explained.

“Also, we don’t want to be blown up along with the talks,” added Debbie.

* * *

Now the long range scanning became intense. The girls had Donataua construction facility to begin building the Seeker - Killer drones and deploying them throughout the system. They had found, yet again, another massive debris yard of wrecked and destroyed hulks. No power readings were noted that showed anything that might be operationally powered.

Deena and Debbie had started ignoring Andromeda’s war council’s whining transmissions. If they were so upset, they should immediately begin a major investigation into how a probe that was not only military but beyond cutting edge had managed to be appropriated, and how a steganographic signal sent through the global comm net hadn’t been flagged.

Of course, when Debbie told that to the fleet admiral, David himself had to intervene to agree with Debbie and lay out a severe investigatory process that would leave no stone unturned. The admiral was less than pleased when that comm ended.

Debbie said as she made adjustments to the scanner panel, “I’m logging in to the outer perimeter probes. So far, I can see the hulks left over from what looks like centuries of conflicts. Somewhere around nearby has to be a major mining operation to supply the amount of resources necessary to produce this mess.”

Suddenly, one of David’s entourage dashed into the room and came to him. They talked softly for an instant, then David said loudly, “What? You must be joking.”

The servant replied, “No, Sir. The data has been verified. That is the faction we have been searching for. The one that is determined to eradicate anything Sauren and, as their manifesto we uncovered states, keep our genetics pure and uncontaminated.”

David banged his fist on the table loudly as he flipped open his comm unit. “This is High Councillor Gkdavdrn. I demand to speak to Chancellor Leaunt now. And if there are any excuses, take an armed escort with you. I will speak with him now.”

The individual on the other end replied quickly, “Yes, Sir. At once.” The comm went dead.

David said to Deena and Debbie, “I must apologise to all here.” He turned and bowed gracefully to the hybrids. “It seems we have a secret faction within our ranks with an infiltration deep into the High Council of Andromeda. The individual who sent that message is being brought to a comm station as we speak, under armed escort if there is any argument. That message was sent to a mining construction facility within the debris ring. Once I am able to question Leaunt, maybe I can get the coordinates of it from him.”

Umalooma said with obvious concern in his voice, “Is there any danger to us here? As per our agreement we are unarmed.”

Debbie replied as she began searching for signs of quantum field distortions, “There is no way anyone can get close enough to us to do any harm.”

Deena stated emphatically as she hit the enable button on her console, activating the defense grid throughout the local system, “And this makes it a gauntlet no one would want to run for any reason.”

Verbosh said to Trargth, “I would be inclined to believe them, Sir. They are the ones who evaded our sensors for apparently months before we finally noticed them. Such skill is not to be discounted lightly.”

David stated, “I believe we should continue while we await further results. I know Debbie and Deena are keeping an eye on things. They’re quite literally the best we have. As in, something nobody has seen for generations.”

“Very well,” Trargth said. “Please proceed.”

“I am determined that these talks should succeed, despite what some of my people might want,” said David. “They are a tiny minority, and I believe they will come to see the value of this endeavor in time, as most of my people already do. It has been so long. It is time to put the past to rest. How else can we look to the future? We must always remember the past, but we cannot let it control us.”

“Well said,” replied Trargth. “I propose that this be only the first of a regular series of meetings, though perhaps they need not always be in person.”

“I agree,” David said. “There is far too much to catch up on for one single meeting to do it justice … and clearly situations are developing as well.”

About that time, David’s secretary quickly entered the room with a small device about the size of an Earth laptop computer. “Sorry to bother you Sir, your requested call is online. They have him under armed guard.”

David turned on the comm unit and saw the face of Chancellor Leaunt and could also see several well-armed military police guarding him.

David snapped harshly, “So this is why all the backstabbing and demands for my removal. It was you, masterminding all the movements to start an interstellar war, making it look like they were more diverse and numerous than they really were.”

Chancellor Leaunt sneered, “It was to insure our genetics remain pure and uncontaminated. We have not forgotten how the Saurens used us for food, nor have we …”

“Enough.” David banged his fist loudly on the table. “Enough. You are harboring a grudge over something that happened … billions of years ago. Also, in all their intensive searching, the only living true Saurens Debbie and Deena have found are on only one world. This world is also under a strict lockdown due to some form of planetary shield.”

Chancellor Leaunt snarled back, “I’m so sure. From a species that has mastered visual image cloaking? I hardly think …”

David stood and said sternly, “I don’t care what you think. You are one member of the council. You have no coalition. No votes are with you, and your approval ratings are so low that your next election is very unlikely to go your way, especially considering the criminal charges that are being drawn up against you as we speak. Your thoughts right this minute only need to concentrate on one thing. I need the spacial coordinates of your mining construction facility.”

“Which one, now?” asked Chancellor Leaunt. “I have so many of them, you know. I can’t possibly rattle off coordinates for all of them from memory.”

“How did I know you wouldn’t be cooperative?” said David humorlessly. “I’ll have you know that you soon won’t have any of them, given the charges of terrorism that will make it illegal for you to own any of them.”

“Terrorism?” asked Leaunt. “But I’ve committed no crime.”

“You apparently haven’t been reading the law,” replied David. “Terrorism includes attempting to commit acts of terrorism, even if they’re prevented. But then, that’s what happens when the people elect ecclesiastical figures to public office. So you are being charged with terrorism, for your attempted acts.”

Leaunt looked less sure of himself. “I still don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Perhaps not,” replied David. “I’m sorry that you wasted your last chance to reduce your sentence. I hope your ego is enough to sustain you in your lifetime solitary confinement without possibility of review.” He emphasized each word as he went. “Until the day you die, never seeing another living being, day in, day out, no visitors, no communication, no messages, as the universe forgets you ever existed.”

Leaunt was shaking. “You – you can’t be sure that’s what will happen, even if I’m convicted …”

“The High Councillor will be doing everything in his power to ensure it,” said David, “with … when I last checked … 73% approval, and that was before the news of this hit the media?”

“You must have some sort of offer,” said Leaunt slowly, “or we wouldn’t still be talking.”

“It would greatly help your case,” David told him, “if you relinquished the location of the mining and construction facility, and you know exactly which one I mean.”

* * *

David scowled at the image of Leaunt in the comm unit for a few minutes. He then said, “Prepare the Ritual of Disgrace. Make sure Leaunt is properly … attended to before hand.”

As several armed police type grabbed Leaunt, He screamed in terror, “You can’t! You must be joking. That hasn’t been done in several centuries due to its cruelty! It’s barbaric!”

David smiled and said in a growl, “As barbaric as plunging two galaxies into a war that would cost the lives of trillions? Whole civilizations that have never been involved? It has been several centuries since a disgraceful worm like you has been caught. Guard, take the prisoner to the preparation chamber.” There wasn’t actually a preparation chamber, but the guards knew better than to question; they’d just take him to a currently unoccupied room.

Leaunt screamed and began to cry, “N-nnnn-no! I’ll tell you everything.”

The guards hesitated as David indicated to them to stand by. Leaunt had wet his pants in terror by this time. The ancient Ritual of Disgrace dated back to an unpleasant time in Andromeda’s history and was basically a death by a thousand cuts, and not minor ones. The removal of several intimate body parts was horribly painful, cauterizing the wound so the individual didn’t arterially hemorrhage. The removal of each digit of his hands would also be cauterized to stop arterial bleeding; however, it left him fully conscious and able to feel the pain of the rest. The other types of bleeding were not staunched in the least but allowed, and chemicals were added to stop coagulation, allowing the venous bleeding to continue.

Leaunt blubbered out the coordinates. Deena immediately began scanning the area with long range scans. They found no obvious mining, but they did find some serious gravitic evaporation debris indicating the approximate location, although an exact lock wasn’t possible at such extreme range. She and Debbie sent some of their FTL probe drones to boost the signal.

Leaunt said in a whimpering small voice, “I gave you the coordinates - what’s going to happen to me?”

Umalooma said, more jokingly than serious, “How about rendering your body into Kalth feed? I’m sure mixed with some Sheli fish, it would make a decent meal.”

David looked his way and smiled, “That sounds like a decent alternative, and more merciful than the Ritual. Soldier, take Leaunt to the holding cell and keep him under guard. I will inform you of his final disposition later.”

“Yes, Sir,” came the quick response, and the man shoved a weapon in Leaunt’s back and said forcefully, “Move!” The comm went dark.

Debbie said, “Looks like it’s time to have the shipyard build us a special infiltration craft armed to the teeth.”

Deena replied “On it,” as she contacted the Donatoua ship facility and made the specialized request. She and Debbie worked for some time on the specifications.

* * *

The construction factories at Donatoua were well under way by the time they got a burst of data back from the probes, which were still at extreme long range but much closer to the target. “There it is,” said Deena. “Don’t know what’s there, but it’s big enough to be a shipyard, or missile base.”

“Let’s get as much detail as we can without going closer,” Debbie said. “Whether it’s manned by Leaunt’s treasonous allies or whether it’s fully automated, we don’t want our drones to be seen.”

“Agreed,” said Deena, sending out the commands. “We don’t want to be expected.”

As the drones spread out and circled the target, it became clear that it was a planetoid-based facility of some kind, and there weren’t the kind of temperature or atmospheric readings one would get if there were life support systems in operation. “Could be entirely automated,” said Debbie. “Leaunt wanted people to think he was the leader of some kind of popular movement, but it was just him and a few allies. He’s got no real army, no loyalists. Just a dying philosophy of genetic purism.”

“Still, as much as I’d like to go in with fantastic amounts of firepower, I think David would prefer the moral high ground,” Deena said. “Which is why we equipped the new infiltrator as we did.”

“They won’t know what didn’t hit them,” said Debbie.

* * *

“There it is,” said Debbie, looking out the base’s window.

“I don’t see anything,” said David.

“Impressive shielding,” said Trargth, nodding in approval. “You need evidence against this betrayer Leaunt, and to get it you must get close without being discovered. These two young innovators were highly effective against even our detection … and you say this ship is even harder to detect?”

“We’ve discovered some more tricks,” Deena said. “More than one kind. No evidence will be destroyed, by us or them.”

“I suppose it’s time to go,” Debbie said, as the new ship deactivated its chronal shielding and appeared as if from thin space next to the base, resting on the planet’s surface on its landing gear. It was tiny for a starship; it looked like some kind of mosquito or huge virus, its long, skinny landing struts folding at knees that were nearly as high as the top of the fuselage, which was mainly vertical. Deena and Debbie just walked up to it, and its double elevator descended out of its body, lifting them into the ship.

Once inside, they were automatically loaded into their respective zero chambers, designed to cancel all inertia, keeping them at zero gravity in the center no matter how the ship outside moved. Holographic interfaces let them control the ship by gesture with virtual controls. They were each surrounded by an image of their actual surroundings, and of each other, making it look as if they were in the same chamber even though they were in separate rooms. This was so they could communicate well with both words and facial expressions.

* * *

It was a unique experience. Every aspect of operations were accessible with barely a twitch. The spherical area they were in was finite, but it looked and felt as if they were floating free in open space.

To all those at the shipyard, the ship just seemed to dissipate into nothing. None of their highly sophisticated sensors could see anything, not even a minor anomaly. The ship simply seemed to vanish.

Deena engaged the drive. It wasn’t like other times. This time the reality they had been looking at suddenly became another reality. No travel, no wormholes opening; the images surrounding their spheres just changed into a massive asteroid field with a huge protoplanet-sized planetoid. Further scans indicated that this was the mining operation they sought.

The base was a hardened facility with an entire large planetoid as shielding, coupled with some rather impressive energy shields. As Debbie played her sensor suite like a concert pianist, she began to realize that the installation also had a rather formidable jamming capability. She finally stopped using normal sensors and started using the gravitic evaporation detectors.

If she couldn’t get an actual scan, there was no way to mask the debris remaining by evaporation. All things interacting with other things left a gravitic wake. The only hard thing was separating out the noise from the tracks they were looking for.

Debbie said, “Deena, did you load those gravitic wake signatures of the current engine currently in use that we know about?”

Deena repled, “Sure did. Check out your side channel 111, I just sent it there.”

Debbie replied, “Thanks,” as she entered the data into the gravitic scanner. Almost instantly the mess of trails that haphazardously filled the scan vanished. But that didn’t mean the area wasn’t still covered in them.

Debbie commented, “From the looks of the scans, there have been hundreds of ships through this corridor, and most of them seem to come here first, then move on to this small planetoid.” She brought the small planetoid up on the screen, along with its spatial coordinates.

Debbie’s eyes got large as the scans pinpointed a huge armada rather well hidden among the asteroid debris. If not for the gravitic evaporation scans, neither young woman would have noticed.

Debbie said, “I’m picking up a rather large battle fleet, and the small planetoid they are all parked near has some very formidable weapons.”

Deena replied, “I also see they have mobile defense drones. Not sure their weapons – can’t tell at this range.”

Both young women looked over their scans carefully. From what they showed, this particular operation was well fortified, and from the looks of things, it had been in operation for a very long time.

“There’s only one way this could even exist,” said Deena. “That Leaunt guy found the hybrids years ago and started this plan in motion.”

Debbie said, “When we found them and notified David and the Council, Leaunt knew he had to act or his plan would all be for nothing.”

“Then we interfered with the transmission,” said Deena. “This armada would have attacked the conference base. Of course, it still could.”

Debbie thought. “We’ve effectively already defeated it without firing a shot,” she said. “And we promised we wouldn’t destroy any evidence, or let them destroy any. The question is, is there a living being anywhere here, or is it all automated?”

They both started scanning for any evidence at all of any sort of life. “I’m not finding a single life support system anywhere, in any of the ships or in the planetoid,” said Deena. “I can start a subroutine that will continue to scan as we get more data and alert us if it finds anything.” She did that.

“Right,” Debbie said. “Now we use what we really made this ship for, gathering and preserving evidence.”

They finished scanning everything as it was, then flew the ship right up to the planetoid. “Control feedback system engaged,” Debbie said.

“Ready to drop chronal cloaking in 5 … 4 …” Deena didn’t voice the rest of the countdown; the numbers appeared in space in front of them.

Suddenly the planetoid’s computers were aware of something they hadn’t been before: there was a ship in front of them, right there, that they hadn’t noticed before. Dozens of redundant systems exchanged data. The ship was unfamiliar – it appeared in no databases, and there was no ship that was even similar. More specifically, its scans didn’t match any of the vessels that were allowed to even approach without full fleet mobilization. And here it was, right here, at point-blank range for all its weapons. There was only one choice for all the systems: obliterate this ship. So, coordinating so as not to all fire at once, they instantly formed a plan of attack and cycled through every weapon in the entire arsenal.

And, one by one, those weapons failed to fire.

Debbie and Deena gritted their teeth and hoped. They knew the hardware would work; they’d tested it themselves, and derived it from earlier work they’d done; somewhere in their distant genetic past their ancestors had done the same, which was why the knowledge had been passed on. They knew the software would work; they had tested it across a spread of extreme scenarios. But they’d all been simulations, and this was real. They knew it would all work, but they gritted their teeth and hoped anyway.

A missile launcher attempted to send a signal to the launch system. Debbie and Deena’s automatic feedback systems detected the signal, easily now that they weren’t trying to sense through a cloak of stealth. They traced that signal’s source and predicted its destination and cut both off. The signal hit an air gap before it reached the launch system … and on the other end, the control computer that had sent the signal found itself isolated, intact but cut off from all input and output. An energy beam cannon similarly failed to fire, and its control computer was isolated. A gravitic pulse weapon did the same. A quantum particle emitter. A massive magnetic railgun. Every weapons system was suddenly disconnected from the computer that controlled it, and that computer was isolated from the rest of the universe.

“And that’s it,” said Debbie, “all weapons control systems isolated. Evidence preserved. When the investigators come, they won’t be fired on, and they can document the …”

Deena interrupted. “Might wanna put a hold on the celebration for now. The fleet’s in motion.” Hundreds of warships were moving out of their hiding spots and toward her and Debbie.

Debbie complained, “But as soon as the command went out from the system that commands those warships, our systems should have destroyed the circuits that carried it!”

“It did,” verified Deena. “But here’s my bet: the ships detected us and queried the command and control computer how to proceed. Yes, when they did that, we deleted those comms circuits. And the control computer replied. And yes, we deleted those circuits too. But now we’ve got a bunch of warships controlled by computers that have already detected us and already asked for a reply and not gotten one. What’s their default action if they don’t get orders?”

Debbie nodded. “Attack anyway,” she said. “Well, we’ve fended off attacks from a few dozen weapons systems – now we’ve got the same thing, only from a few hundred warships’ weapons systems.”

“Here we go,” said Deena. “The first one’s about to open fire.”

Their systems had never been designed to handle this much input at once. Their shields faced a trial by fire as a few of the attacks went off before their circuitry was cleanly sliced by Debbie and Deena’s molecular rearrangement arrays. Yes, many of the warships’ weapons failed to activate before being disabled. But just as many managed to get off a first and last shot. And this meant that Deena and Debbie’s ship was still hit by hundreds of shots of many different types and intensities, some of them at the same time. There were sparks and static in the holographic space display that surrounded both of them. The noises of impacts with the hull grew to a roar. Finally, by the time it was all over, they floated in control harnesses at the center of separate metal chambers lined with offline emitters.

“We’re alive!” shouted Debbie. Her voice echoed through the ship’s metal interior.

“I’m not hearing any more weapons hitting us,” Deena said.

“Hope we don’t have to push this thing home,” Debbie remarked.

“Let’s give the auto-repair a chance,” said Deena.

Then, bit by bit, things started to come back. A hexagonal area of space lit up here, a distant hum of engine systems started to be heard there. Debbie’s data feedback system came back online soon, and she ordered it to focus on fixing Deena’s system next. Then they worked together on getting the rest of the ship in working order. “First thing: focus on bringing the auto-repair functions themselves back up to speed,” they agreed. Then things went much faster.

And now that they could see the area around them in lifelike detail, they gasped. Hundreds of warships had collided with the ship – when their weapons hadn’t worked, they’d tried ramming, or at least those that still had control of their engines had. But many of them had lost contact with the other warships and had been unable to coordinate, so some of them had collided with one another. Debbie and Deena stood in space in the middle of a traffic jam of dead spaceships.

“How are we even alive?” asked Debbie.

“We did our job right,” Deena replied.

“Let’s do a final systems check and a final scan and go back,” said Debbie. So they did that. And then, ensuring that there weren’t any humans hiding in a closet inside the planetoid or anything, they returned to base.

When the ship just winked back into existence on the ground near the conference base, its hull showing signs of hasty automated patching on top of charred metal, David hailed them right away. “Are you two OK?” was the first thing he asked.

“We’re fine,” said Debbie.

“Here’s a sample of the data we collected,” Deena replied.

David gasped. “That … was a command facility for an armada?”

“And technically it still is,” said Debbie. “I recommend sending an investigation team immediately, in case Leaunt still has allies who might want to clean up the evidence. The coordinates are right there. And all weapons systems are now offline – though their control computers are still fully online.”

“They’ll want to be careful in case there are auto-repair systems,” Deena said. “We made sure to disable those too, but it’s always possible that we might have missed something.”

“I doubt that,” said David, “but I’m putting in the order for an investigation team right now.”

The elevators lowered Debbie and Deena to the ground outside the ship, a bit less smoothly than when they’d gotten on board, and they made their way into the base. “I’m taking a shower,” Debbie said.

“I’m taking a nap,” said Deena.

* * *

While the young women took care of their chores, David had sent a large investigation team to the site. It took time, with the current drive systems. David really wished the girls would share their new engine tech, but that was a worry for a future time.

The large contingent of investigators stopped several mega-klicks out from the small planetoid and the tangle of several hundred vessels. David, not being the lead-from-behind type like many of the other council members, went with his team to the first large battle cruiser.

One of the men in advanced mech armor attached himself near the airlock door. So as not to have problems with inertia, he slowly removed several advanced-looking tools from a carry pouch. With a device that looked much like a modern day pen and emitted a purple beam, he removed a panel from beside the door. He jammed the panel firmly into a crack, as he didn’t want any more stray objects flying around than there already were.

The suited man replaced the pen-looking device back in his pouch and slowly removed another type of device and several probes. He attached the lead end of the probe into the device and attached the other end to a circuit inside the opened panel. Within about a minute, the door slid open, and the lights within the airlock came on. Of course there were red strobes flashing, indicating the airlock door was open to vacuum – not that there was any atmosphere, as the ship had been fully automated, but it had clearly been manufactured with life support as an option. The suited man slowly glided across the weightless area to its main control center and pressed a button. The strobes stopped.

“High Councillor, this is Blue Leader. Door opened, and area is secure. No hostiles detected.”

David replied, “Good to hear – now check if you can open the inner door. Wait on us; the outer door automatically closes when a vacuum is indicated externally.”

The suited man replied, “Aye, Sir. I’m at the main console now. The open sequence is standard. Standing by, awaiting your arrival.”

David called his team’s lead ship. “Congerath, this is David.”

“Congerath here, Lt. Snakely.”

“Snakely, patch me through to the captain. I want the group in battle formation. No telling what kind of response we’re going to get.”

There was a moment of movement shuffling and a muffled Captain, David on comm for you.

“This is Johann Akkermunn, commander, battle cruiser Congerath – what are your orders, Sir?”

David replied, “I want the group organized in battle formation. I want all ships on battle alert just in case.”

“Aye, Sir.” The loud klaxon sound of battle stations could be heard. “In process as we speak.” The connection went dead as war protocol comm silence went into effect.

David smiled as he slowly drifted towards the open hatch to the air lock. He arrived just in time to meet the rest of the crew. David said to the suited man by the command console, “Open ‘er up. Let see what’s inside. Troopers … stand ready.”

As the group all positioned their weapons for proper usage, the outer door slid silently closed in the vacuum while the door to the main ship hesitated in opening. According to David’s suit sensors, an oxygen atmosphere was forming, and pressure was rapidly rising. In a few minutes the sound of escaping gas could be heard until the scans reported one standard atmosphere, and the inner door slid open just as the lights in the passage came on. Immediately four well-armed powersuited individuals dashed in and took defensive positions, while another took sensor readings.

He announced over the combat channel for all to hear, “No life signs recorded. From all indications, this is a drone warship.”

“Then it has a main control computer,” said David. “Find it and run diagnostics.”

“Aye, Sir,” said the team leader, who started scanning. “All command circuits appear to be … inactive,” he said. “No command traffic whatsoever. Sensors and remote tactical consoles are all fully active and attempting to communicate, but there’s just nothing getting through to anything. But all circuits trace back to a main command cluster on Deck Six … that must be where we’ll find the command and control unit.”

“Very well,” said David. “Then we go there.”

“Sir?”

David knew the team leader was concerned for his welfare and explained, “I want the defense team with you, just in case, and I’m sure you don’t want them leaving me alone here. So I’m coming with you.”

The team leader blinked. “Aye, Sir. Then, by your order, let’s go.” They made their way to an emergency repair access stairwell, since they didn’t trust the personnel elevator – they hadn’t trusted the life-support system until they’d tested it, and this was no different. Fortunately, in a zero-gravity situation, stairwells were just a matter of pulling oneself along using the handrails. Making their way to the deck labeled 6, they released the door and made their way in, the team leader scanning carefully.

They stood in a room full of humming computer consoles, all connected to a central square column node covered with lights that were blinking furiously. Holding up his scanning device, the team leader said. “This is the main C&C unit, and it’s functioning completely normally, trying to carry out its last known orders.”

“Can you tell what they were?” asked David.

“Attack and obliterate an intruder vessel, apparently … one that it now has no idea of the location of, as it’s cut off from all sensors,” said the team leader. “It’s attempting to ram it, because all weapons are offline, but that’s not happening either, because the engines are offline as well. It’s lit up with errors because both input and output are severed.”

“Huh,” said David. “Those two did this to … every single one of these ships? And probably to the systems on the planetoid as well. Yes, that’s definitely Debbie and Deena’s work.” He took a breath of the stale drone-ship air. Everything smelled like metal and lubricant. “Well, then. Get whatever forensic evidence you can obtain from the drone ship’s data banks about their construction and purpose here, anyone who has been here, any orders it’s received … and send teams to the other ships. We’ll have to examine the planetoid, as well, as the fleet’s main C&C is down there and will probably have more and different data.”

“Aye, Sir,” said the team leader, and sent a comm to the rest of the squadron to that effect. He then began downloading data from the computers while the team stood guard and David stood in silent thought. Was there evidence here that connected Leaunt to this installation and its armada? Were there other installations elsewhere? Did Leaunt have accomplices?

The investigation, of course, took time. Eventually, David returned to the conference base to rest. He found Debbie and Deena back up already, having rested while he’d been away, and they were chatting with the hybrids’ engineers about any technical topic they could think of.

“Oh! High Councillor!” said Debbie. “We’ve been hearing reports from the investigation – no details, of course, but we know what it was like when we left. Everything fine?”

“You left everything in very nearly working order,” David said. “Some of the drone ships had run into one another and gotten tangled, but they hadn’t moved since. Some had drifted away. But the investigation teams are still gathering evidence against Leaunt. And I’m absolutely beat. I’ll be in my quarters.”

“Got it,” said Deena. She turned back to one of the hybrid officers named Jiruk. “So, the bacteria that form a component of some of your sensor equipment, which is fascinating, by the way – those were genetically engineered from … what?”

Jiruk replied, “Oddly enough, a common, harmless bacterial species found among our scales.” She paused. “Do not worry. We all went through decontamination protocols before embarking for this base.”

“We did too, actually,” Deena said, “though we’ve been away from home for some time, so that was quite a while ago. They make us repeat them every few days here. But that’s very interesting, that you found utility in such a commonplace organism …”

* * *

“So, to make a long story short,” said David to the hybrid delegation, “Chancellor Leaunt didn’t act alone, but neither did he have as large a following as he pretended to have. His known accomplices are being arrested as we speak, and they may yet implicate others. There’s no evidence of any other major command installations, but we did find and investigate various listening posts that had been reporting to the one we found. The data is going to lead to Leaunt’s conviction and that of his followers. It’s basically an open and shut case.”

“You promised him leniency because he gave up the location of his installation,” Tragarth said.

David replied, “I did, and because of that, he won’t be tortured or executed, nor will he be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.” He paused. “In truth I’d hesitate to do that to anyone, unless they’d committed crimes of truly extraordinary degree … which Leaunt almost did, but in the end, he didn’t.”

* * *

Leaunt and his defense counsel sat in a small room at a table as his attorney brought out all the known evidence and verified documents proving Leaunt’s many acts of treason against not only his office, but the very people he was sworn to defend, even with his life, if necessary.

The lawyer held yet again another official document in his hand and shook his head as he read it. “I’m sorry, Chancellor. I don’t know how in the world many of these locations were even discovered. They act as it they had a trail of bread crumbs to follow.”

Leaunt smirked and replied, “You don’t know the two women that tracked me either. I have no clue how they do it, but somehow they can track specific vehicles to specific locations without any sort of homing device anyone has been able to find.”

The lawyer looked at Leaunt with a sad concerned expression. “You do realize the penalty for treason against your sworn office, don’t you?”

Leaunt’s arrogance quickly faded as a severely worried expression replaced his smirk.

The lawyer laid the paper he was holding on the table next to considerably many others and sat back in his chair. “I have a real issue. I have no platform on which I can build any plausible argument.” He waved his hand slowly across the tops of all the papers on the table. “From all the evidence, the only reason they’re even bothering to hold a trial is because the High Councillor insists this be as close to a fair trial as possible when all know the evidence and whom it all directly points to.”

Leaunt screeched in frustration as he pounded the table. Immediately the door hissed open, and two troopers in powered battle armor were suddenly there, weapons drawn and targeting Leaunt.

The lawyer waved his hand at the soldiers and said, “Relax, he can bang his fist if he wants to. No law against assaulting a table.”

Immediately one of the soldiers left, but the other rested his weapon and said just before he too left, “Sorry, Sir. Our orders are …”

The lawyer said as he shooed the soldier out, “Yes, yes, I understand. Now go.” After the soldier had gone, the lawyer looked at Leaunt and stated flatly, “You are guilty with or without a trial. There are too many documents, and I’m afraid too many of your cohorts implicated you with photos and even more evidence.” The lawyer stood and moved towards the door. “I’m sorry, Sir. You need to understand there is no way out for you. I also need you to understand – I think you are worthless. Trying to cause an interstellar war without regard to consequences is … just … unconscionable. I will not be representing you in this, nor do I think any other lawyer will want to.” He gathered up all the documents, put them in his briefcase, then left.

Leaunt sat and trembled in fear. He knew well the savagery of the sentences for this type of crime. The thing was, no one had even thought of doing anything remotely similar in centuries, so the precedents hadn’t been revisited, and the statutes hadn’t been updated.

It didn’t take the edge off his fear any, but he clung to what the High Councillor had promised. That didn’t really mean much; all it meant was that he wouldn’t be tortured to death.

* * *

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Chancellor Leaunt stands accused of horrible crimes,” said the sleazeball lawyer who was the only one Leaunt had managed to find to even attempt to represent him. “But I ask you: what of the horrible crimes committed by these so-called hybrids who masquerade as people –”

The judge banged his gavel. “Counselor, I’m warning you. Stay on topic or I’m holding you in contempt. I will not have this trial turned into a circus.”

“Turned into? It already is!” The oily man turned back to the jury and smoothly went on, “The prosecution would have you believe that this is an open and shut case, but in reality it’s nothing but a show trial, a kangaroo court with a pre-decided verdict. None of the so-called evidence you’re about to see matters – the decision has already been made by the Sauren who secretly control the entire Andromedan government behind the scenes –”

The gavel banged again. “That’s enough,” said the judge. “You were warned. Have him removed. Chancellor Leaunt, you have 24 hours to find another lawyer to represent you, or you’re representing yourself. We won’t be dragging this out until doomsday.” The lawyer continued to rant as he was dragged out by two uniformed officers.

* * *

“Trials as entertainment,” said Debbie. “The last refuge of the wannabe conspiracy-theory populist. Good thing Andromeda’s had laws against that for thousands of years.” She closed the news window; nothing would be happening until the next day.

Deena remarked, “Anybody Leaunt gets to represent him after that is gonna be even worse than that guy.”

“Even though it’s worse in so many ways, I still miss Earth,” said Debbie.

“So do I,” said Deena. “When do we go home?”

“I guess when the trial’s over,” replied Debbie. “I just have to know what happens.”

“Yeah,” said Deena, “when that’s over, the talks can resume without that threat hanging over them, and once they’re under way, momentum will keep them going. We’ve put enough of our unique security technology in place on this conference base world that even if somebody else tried something, what would happen to them would be …”

“Shall we say, fantastic beyond their wildest dreams?” Debbie suggested.

* * *

The girls were confident in their defenses within the conference planet’s system. Anyone making the mistake of attempting unauthorized entry into the system would learn what time displacement shielding could do, they had no doubts in space about that fact. A weapon suddenly materializing instants before detonation that was totally invisible prior was almost impossible to defend against. Shields didn’t have any effect either, due to the quantum displacement of the chronosphere surrounding the weapon.

Instead of using their new hyper dimensional drive, this time they were cruising back using one of their old bussard ram/hydrogen engines and going slow enough that time dilation wouldn’t count. This afforded them the opportunity to do some in-depth scans of the conference planet’s system to see what they could find. They’d carefully looked at everything that didn’t look natural, but anything the computers had told them was a natural object and wasn’t on a collision course with anything important, they’d ignored.

Scans pinged on a rather large planetesimal that was rotating with a severely lopsided rotation, vastly different from the axes of rotation of the other bodies in the system and of the system as a whole.

Debbie commented, “Deena, take a gander at this small planet. Its axis of rotation is all out of whack, like Venus or Uranus back in Earth’s solar system. There’s not a lot that could cause something like that. Maybe it’s a former rogue planet, a captured object from outside the system, or it was hit by one. Maybe it rotated really fast and split into two objects, and the one with the rest of the angular momentum left the system.”

Deena swiveled around in her gravity couch, “I see, let me try a deeper scan and see if we can find some type of impactor or a scar. Might make an interesting geology report … Well, it’s not a rogue planet; its age and composition fit in with the rest of the system.”

Debbie started making adjustments to their course to bring them into an orbit as close to stable as the oddly tilted planetoid would allow. It was tricky, but the gravitational fields were not disrupted to the point that a circumequatorial orbit could not be attained.

After a few minutes of scans Debbie said excitedly, “Deena, check the baryon scatter scans of the northern quadrant. I think that’s why the planet is wobbling like this.”

Deena adjusted her scan to the northern quadrant. Her eyes got large as she saw the debris of a very large crashed ship of some kind. Large was an understatement. It had impacted with great force, yet the ship’s size and the angle of its impact had allowed most of it to survive, although nowhere near intact, as the miles-long trench and debris field scattered along the surface showed.

Deena said, “According to these readings, this ship has been here for a bit.”

Debbie replied, “I can find no life form readings. I would very much like to explore that hulk and see what we can find … it’ll be fun.”

Deena looked at Debbie side-eyed. “As old as that ship is and the condition I see on my scanners, it would be hazardous.”

Debbie said confidently, “Yeah, true. But, we have those new powered armor space suits and some major firepower.”

Deena replied as she made finer adjustments, “It isn’t so much running into anything that I’m worried about, it’s the condition of the wreck. It’s as big as a small town back on Earth. Not real confident in the integrity of the floors, walls … you know.”

Debbie nodded, “Then, besides the power suits, we need flight packs too, just in case.”

Both girls unbuckled their flight harnesses, proceeded to the exit bay, and donned their power suits and flight packs. They walked from there to a shuttle sitting in its clamps and entered. Within minutes, the small shuttle had exited their craft and was entering the planetesimal’s gravity field. The size of the hulk became more and more obvious as they approached.

Debbie landed their shuttle close to a large breach in the hull. The ship was huge, but they managed to find a place they could enter easily. As they expected, the place looked exactly like a ship after a severe crash – long after. The hull was pitted and scratched with eons of micrometeoroid impacts. In places it had been collapsed by larger impacts, or eaten away to nothing by many small ones. In some places it was partially buried under regolith.

They entered through the breached hull into a tilted corridor. The women had their powered suits on, with their built-in scanners, and they watched the readings projected onto their helmets as they slowly approached a junction. There were doors evenly spaced down the long hallway. It was more than obvious that the ship had taken a major impact based on the massive damage.

They came to a door that was basically hanging by a strip of some kind. Entering was as easy as grabbing the door, pulling on it, and tossing it out of the way. The powered suits insured that, even if the door had been secured, they could have gotten in.

They looked around the huge room. It was obvious that some type of large circular transparent enclosure dominated the center, although the clear substance was smashed, along with many other items.

Deena said, “This looks like it was some sort of laboratory at one time.”

“I agree,” said Debbie as she pulled open what appeared to be a file cabinet. She said with a gasp, “Deena, I think I found something. Darn, did we just get lucky,” as she began removing the thin metallic items from the drawer. They turned out to be some type of written record, although the language was unknown to them.

Deena said, “I marked this place’s astral location in our stellar cartography library. We can return at any time. Right now, I want to know if we can decipher this.” She held up several of the thin metallic sheets.

The girls gathered as many of the sheets as they could safely carry and returned to the shuttle, then to their ship. It didn’t take either woman long to scan and have the ship’s linguistic computer working on it. It went slowly at first, but then sped up to an ever faster and more accurate pace, though one infuriating thing was the missing data. It would take years to go through the entire archive, but the preliminary results were already totally astounding.

From the current translation, there had been some sort of genetic experiment going on. They had devised two genomes that were to be set to compete against each other, and the victor over many battles would have their genetics combined to create an ultimate warrior. From the images, the girls now knew where the Saurens had originated. The one bit of data missing due to age / damage … was the small notation of a humanoid gene being introduced. From what the remaining data showed, this would stabilize the strain and make it more docile. Exactly what this humanoid gene had been was unknown; perhaps it was in the remaining records in the laboratory, or perhaps it was lost to time.

“So … even longer ago, before the war, we discover that someone was on a quest for an ultimate warrior, to the exclusion of all other possible virtues,” said Deena. “I want to build a time machine just so I can go back and slap them. Dumbest idea ever. Besides causing so much tragedy, they were trying to do what billions of years of evolution would have done for them anyway.”

Debbie wondered, “So that means … who were these people, and why did they think they needed an ultimate warrior fast? What was going on? Well let’s think … nobody needs a warrior unless they’re at war. They didn’t have ultimate warriors already, or they wouldn’t have thought they needed to do this. So, somebody thought they were at war and in danger of losing, but not losing too fast, or else they wouldn’t go with genetically engineering their way out of it.”

Deena replied, “That’s gotta be it. They weren’t really at war. Whoever they were, they thought they were in danger of losing to a greater force, and they had time to engineer their ultimate fighting force. But they weren’t really. If they’d really been at war, they’d have used a faster strategy to survive. They deluded themselves.”

“It’s one hypothesis consistent with the data, anyway,” said Debbie. “They’re not around now. Unless they’re us. They might have been our ancestors. Or not. We don’t know. It’s not like any genetic evidence would have survived.”

“And they tried to make them more docile by adding humanoid genetic material,” said Deena, “which means two things: first, they needed to make them more docile, and second, they had humanoid genetic material to add. Humans on Earth don’t think humanoids evolved until millions of years ago, and this is thousands of times older, so this is more of that idea that the Andromedan species is old.”

“OK, we need more information,” Debbie said. “Let’s get the rest of the documents.”

So they carefully re-entered the laboratory area and took the rest of the documents that had survived in good shape, and scanned those that weren’t in good shape to travel. After scanning everything into the linguistic computer and starting it running, the two of them built a purpose-made automated courier shuttle and sent it off to the Andromedan Research Institute for the experts there to look at. Their linguistic computer came up with more translations.

“That was it,” said Debbie, reading the results alongside Deena. “It was the dumbest thing possible, of course. These people weren’t our ancestors, and yet they were. They were the ancestors of both the Andromedans and the Saurens, in a way. They used genetic material from dozens of worlds, and used their own as a matrix. But they were still morons.”

“Bigots, more like,” said Deena. “They saw themselves as the one true pure whatever-they-were, under attack by the so-called lesser races. They weren’t, but they thought they were, which was why they had time to do this. They thought they needed strong troops they could control, to defend themselves against the others, who were sometimes described as lesser and incapable of true civilization, and sometimes as an insurmountable threat – a paradox that is apparently a much older staple of racism and bigotry than we’d thought.”

“And they picked a bit of this and a bit of that to create the Sauren,” said Debbie, “but then found them hard to control, which anybody could have predicted, so they tried some genes from a species that was more civilized and less violent – the ancestors of the Andromedans. Not that these people, whoever they were, considered them truly civilized. We need a name for them. Let’s call them something, since we don’t know what these ancient idiots called themselves.”

“Well, the evidence says they didn’t survive,” said Deena, “so let’s call them the Cosmic Idiots. We’re all descended from Cosmic Idiots.”

“OK, fine, the CIs, then,” said Debbie. “Looks like the Saurens attacked, and a few ships full of CIs fled, and this one crashed. They were trying to add humanoid genetic material to make them more docile – but the problem is, genetic engineering your way out of a problem is great when the problem isn’t real – you’ve got all the time in the world. But when it’s banging on your door with intent to kill, you don’t keep using the same tool that got you into the mess you’re in.”

“They just didn’t have time,” said Deena. “They cooked up their own destruction in a lab.”

* * *

The girls were tickled pink to have discovered the huge hulk. From the collected data on the seeming metallic sheets, they had learned of a huge genetic mistake perpetrated by an unknown species.

As she and Deena readied themselves for another exploration within the wrecked ship, Debbie said, “It’s funny, but somehow the attack against our people so long ago may have been more of an inevitable thing.”

Deena put her helmet on and gave it a twist, sealing it and activating all the internal circuits, “And what makes you think it was inevitable?”

Debbie replied, “Actually, the surviving Andromedan archives of those times have started making me suspicious of something.”

Deena fastened her last couch harness and looked towards Debbie. “OK, I saw the same clips … there is missing data for sure, but then again, that was a very long time ago.”

Debbie replied as she went through the launch sequence for the shuttle that would take them down to the planetoid, “It’s the convenient spots where important data of the early feasting the Saurens did on our people has turned up missing.”

Deena asked, “What was it about that gory massacre made you suspicious?”

Debbie replied as she engaged the shuttle engines, “If I assume certain happenings in those missing data spots, it appears someone has deliberately deleted only particular data.”

Deena replied, “Meaning?”

Debbie answered as she shoved the throttles to launch position, “I believe those weren’t pictures of a massacre, they were pictures of feeding time. I’m not real sure how it all ties together, but I feel it is more along the lines that we were food for them, not prey.”

Deena sat in total awed shock as the shuttle blasted off and was soon approaching the surface of the planetoid. Now that Debbie had said it, those missing segments of data could have been removed so it looked more like a vicious attack than keepers tossing food for their constructs.

The girls made the trip to the crashed hulk in silence. Deena was having a really hard time wrapping her mind around the fact that their people may have been nothing more than feed stock bred by an as yet unknown alien peoples.

Once they arrived, they again made use of their flight packs. The hulk was huge, and they had many places to investigate, and much distance to cover, not including the gully and debris of the miles-long skid. The first thing they did was to scan in more detail the spots that had been identified by their scans from orbit as the best places to look for anything that could be a remnant of a control system or maybe even a computer.

What they found, more in shambles and age related decay than anything else, was a large room full of devices that appeared to have once been some type of computing system. Crash damage, space radiation, meteoroid impacts, and time had taken a real toll. What they did find were large racks of many different colored crystals their suit’s internal scans told them had certain electromagnetic domains resembling sectors on a HDD.

They collected the whole area of them, regardless of whether they were broken or not. The girls were confident that if these were memory crystals, using Andromedan crystal tech would aid in finding a way to read and translate any data that remained. They took molecular-level holographic stills of the site before moving anything so it could be reconstructed exactly by robotic tools. They assembled a transport crate around the site and filled it with expanding foam to minimize any movement during transport. Then they loaded the entire thing aboard the shuttle and brought it back to the ship.

“OK, finally,” said Debbie as they landed at one of the lab sites they’d scattered across the galaxy as they’d explored over all this time. “We can get some answers from this … if anyone can.” Their constructor bots reassembled the site as perfectly as possible after unpacking it carefully, and they started a careful deep scan of the memory crystals, which they were. Much of the substrate near the surface had been destroyed by time, microimpacts, and radiation, but deeper within, there were aligned crystal domains – this form of memory would last practically forever unless damaged.

“This … wait,” said Deena, focusing on one particular crystal. “This one here isn’t a billion-year-old artifact. It’s … recent. Under a century.”

“What?” said Debbie, astonished. “But that would mean someone already discovered this … and didn’t report it? Why wouldn’t they?”

“Valid question,” replied Deena. “I wouldn’t, if I had an agenda it would serve if I didn’t. Let’s see what’s on this. And was it left by accident, or on purpose? Maybe it’s here to throw us off the trail. Or maybe it’s here because whoever found the wreck was in a hurry or was afraid of being discovered.” She began scanning and decryption of the very modern data crystal, which had virtually no missing data at all, compared to the ancient ones.

“It’s … from a comm device,” said Debbie. “It’s got messages, music, holos, address records … just like one from today.”

“And all the messages were either sent or received by Lefram Leaunt,” said Deena.

“Chancellor Leaunt’s father?” Debbie asked, incredulously.

“Last timestamp was about 70 years ago,” said Deena. “He was one of the early developers of the drive tech that brought Andromedans back to this galaxy.”

“But … people died when that drive tech failed, and far more recently than that,” said Debbie. “That would mean that … he knew how to make it work and withheld that information … resulting in those people’s deaths …”

“He effectively killed them in service to his agenda,” said Deena. “This would be enough to bring him in on charges … if he weren’t already dead. But why did he leave this here? Or … did he?”

“He wouldn’t have had much time,” said Debbie. “If he’d spent too much time away, he would’ve been discovered. He had this discovery all to himself – a working intergalactic drive system. He didn’t want to give that up. I know what he did! He accidentally found this place, and to recover even a little bit of the data, he jury-rigged his comm tablet! He ejected his comm storage crystal, used his crystal reader to glean data from this find, and then … he must have been interrupted.”

“Some kind of alarm signal told him he was about to be found out,” said Deena. “He had to abandon it. And either forgot the crystal or was never able to return to recover it.”

“Betcha we find out he was accused of running off to do something unsavory – something else unsavory, I mean,” said Debbie, “and he was carefully monitored after that.”

“Bet you’re right,” Deena replied. “But let’s look into that later and get back to the ancient records. For now, we know how Leaunt knew.”

“The computer’s doing it,” said Debbie. “It’s putting together fragments of two and three dimensional video – unknown format but pretty logical given what one would have to do. Still images … text documents in the same language those metal-like plates were in … it’s all running through now. All we have to do is wait.”

“Or pull in more computing power,” said Deena. So for a while their processing was distributed among multiple secret compute nodes across the Milky Way galaxy, each powered by solar power from a nearby star and each more powerful than any data center the fevered dreams of Silicon Valley tech bros had ever even imagined. It wasn’t long before these ancient records were decrypted and reassembled, to the extent that they could be. Some of the data was just destroyed, lost to age and cosmic damage.

* * *

It took many months to sort and decipher the data stored on the memory crystals. During that time, Debbie and Deena watched the peace negotiations continue between the Andromedans and the hybrids, and they had many other adventures, discovering new systems and setting up new bases to expand their effort to gather scientific data about the galaxy. But as time went by, to the great joy of both women, they discovered that even though some of the crystals were damaged, they still retained their electromagnetic signatures, and that could be accessed and deciphered.

Early one morning, Deena was awakened by Debbie’s urgent voice over the intercom, “Deena, put on your housecoat and come to the linguistics lab. Man … do I have something to show you. Hurry.”

Deena didn’t say a word; she jumped out of bed, slipped on her fuzzy slippers, grabbed her housecoat, and made a mad dash to the lab. When she entered, the images on the two large screens stopped her dead in her tracks.

Deena plainly saw the historical video of the Saurens’ apparent massacre and bloody assault of the Andromedan people so long ago. On the screen next to it was the same video, but without the missing parts, so they now showed some type of huge creatures that looked more robotic than biological, basically grabbing several humanoids, pulling them from their cages, and tossing them into a huge pit with … the Saurens.

Debbie swiveled her chair around and locked it in position. “I know. We have no idea who those huge beings are, or if they are even humanoid.”

Deena replied, “Odds are good they are biological.”

Debbie’s eyebrows furrowed slightly as she asked, “What makes you say that? Form these videos they appear to be robotic.”

Deena replied, “So do we, in our powered space suits, especially with the flight packs attached.”

Debbie commented, “Now that I have seen the size of those things, it make sense that their ship would be huge too.” She looked at Deena with concern, “We don’t know what type of lifeforms those are, much less where they originate. In the last several years we have done an extensive exploration of our quadrant of space and have found no trace or evidence of such beings or where they may have originated.”

Deena tapped her finger on the newest astrogational map they had recently compiled. She tapped a very fuzzy but intense nebula. “Maybe no physical evidence, but I bet we could at leat get a handle on some data if we go to that location and do gravitic evaporation scans.”

The women agreed. The first thing they wanted to do was show David the actual unedited clip the Andromedan peoples had taken as a historical record for so many years. They traveled to see him.

After watching the clip, David picked up the damaged crystal the data had been taken from, the one the two women had found in the wreck, and examined it closely. “And you say the newer crystal was right next to this one?”

Deena replied, “Yes, Sir. We think this is how the elder Leaunt got the recording for use in our historical archives.”

David looked confused, “How? We’ve had these documents under seal for centuries.”

Debbie replied this time. “No one has looked at those archives in no one knows how long. But if you look at that crystal, the damage to it is recent, caused by a severe impact by a bladed object of some sort.”

David tried to follow. “You’re saying Leaunt’s father somehow got into the historical archives and planted his version of the records there, based on what he found? And he deliberately damaged the real ancient records? That’s … a crime against history.”

“Indeed it is,” said Deena. “But he only damaged the outer layer of the crystal, which was already badly damaged by radiation and the planetary environment – with nearly no atmosphere, it’s doing nothing to protect its surface from meteor impacts of all sizes. So he didn’t erase any information. What this is saying is that he tried to.”

“He had no qualms whatsoever about altering our species’ memory of our past to suit his political agenda,” David said. “That’s despicable, and clearly he passed his beliefs on to his son. But … what do we know now?”

“I’m sure historians will be studying these records for generations to come,” Debbie said. “But the point is that the ancient species that bred the Saurens is completely unknown. We’ve found no evidence of where they lived or what happened to them. All we have is a guess that the Saurens destroyed them when they broke free.”

“It’s awfully hard to trace the wrecked ship’s trajectory billions of years into the past,” said Deena, “but we’ve been deep scanning it on a molecular level for some time. For one thing, its metal was mined on some planet somewhere, and even if the alloy’s components were 100% pure, they’re still a mixture of isotopes, and we can at the very least rule out some planets whose isotope mixture of those metallic elements is off. And we’ve done that.”

“Right,” said Debbie. “And what’s more, they’re not perfectly pure, so there’s a scattering of other elements in there. That helps too.”

“And we have a guess,” Deena said. “This former supernova remnant.” She pointed to a star chart, showing once again that small nebula. “This is where we’re going to look next.”

“Not much is left of a supernova remnant after billions of years,” said David.

“Ah, but the material is blown far and wide, deposited over everything nearby, and the central neutron star or black hole remains,” said Debbie. “There’s a neutron star there. And we’re having our exploration drones scan that entire sector right now. They’re scouring it with a fine-toothed comb. We’re eliminating everything from the data that isn’t from the right time frame. I mean, of course we’re keeping the data on everything; we’re just not considering it for this particular study.”

“I should’ve known you’d already be gathering data,” said David.

“Putting the puzzle pieces back together after billions of years,” said Deena, “I think that what happened was this. The CIs were a paranoid faction of their species that saw threats around every corner, so they engineered the Saurens. They were impossible to control, so they tried again, adding genetic material from another less aggressive humanoid species that we believe to be our ancestors to make the Mark 2 Saurens a touch less violent. It sort of worked. And then … something happened.”

“Something?” asked David.

“We don’t yet know what,” said Debbie. “But after this, the Saurens and our ancestors were free of the CIs, and the CIs and their entire species didn’t exist. The data we’ve found so far are consistent with the star that was once where this neutron star is now being the home of the CIs, or at least the planet of origin of that wrecked CI ship.”

“Maybe the Saurens got free and killed everybody,” said Deena. “Or maybe the Saurens got free and somehow caused the supernova? I’m not sure how they would’ve done that.”

“Maybe these CIs, as you call them, already had a weapon that was capable of causing their sun to go supernova, and they activated it rather than allow the Saurens to conquer them,” David surmised, “but there are a hundred variations of that narrative.”

“Their star seems to have gone supernova sooner or later,” Debbie said with a nod, “but whether that caused the CIs’ extinction or whether it happened after they were already extinct remains to be seen. But we know that somehow the Saurens and the ancestors of our people survived, while the CIs evidently didn’t.”

“As we’ve said, our explorer drones are out there scouring the sector, and there’s not one shred of evidence that they still exist,” added Deena. “And this is using all kinds of scanning technology, everything we’ve discovered.”

* * *

The probes scanned and mapped the entire nebula, which was quite a feat, considering how many light years it covered. The probes discovered many strange particles and different kinds of energy that couldn’t be explained by a normal supernova – but not one sign that the civilization that had created the Saurens still existed.

At the heart of this nebula, instead of the neutron star or normal black hole they expected, it had the gravity signatures of a typical stellar-mass black hole, but no accretion disk nor any of the radiation normally associated with a black hole. They did find an unusually large amount of dusty debris and hydrogen enshrouding the object, but it was not orbiting it and growing in density as the gravity of the black hole pulled more and more matter closer together.

After several minutes of studying the probe’s data, Debbie said, “Look at that. Its absorption spectrum is … perfect. Sharp lines with nothing between them at all. And this spatial spectrum distribution … no overdensities anywhere. Signs of pressure waves that propagate at light speed without any resistance. The thing is a huge blob of superfluid. How would that even form?”

Deena replied, “From the very best I can tell, this is a massive accumulation of quantum entanglement. That matches your superfluid theory perfectly – every atom in it is entangled with every other. It’s got gravity, but not the gravity of a black hole or even a neutron star.”

Debbie nodded as she said, “According to these scans, the object is creating hydrogen and methane as debris left over from the phase shift from space time to … “

Deena interjected, “Yeah, whatever the massively entangled substrate is, the coherence of the evaporated materials is stripped of current … don’t know what to call it, rendering of space time and the hydrogen and methane are debris left behind by the phase shift.”

Debbie repled, “Neato, you invented a new physics. Maybe we can call that monster a MEN.”

Deena asked, “MEN? Why not women?” then laughed.

Debbie replied, “What it means is a Mass Entanglement Node. The hydrogen and methane being emitted is just sort of a spacetime ash left over from the phase shift.”

Deena stated plainly, “Earth thinks hydrogen sort of clumped together and made stars all on its own. That is major foolishness. Hydrogen will not clump, but due to its internal physics will spread and dissipate instead, unless something like what they’re calling dark matter pulls it together. Thing is, if these started the process, it would explain many of the unexplained mysteries.”

“Look at the outer nebula edge readings. There’s more there than just gas, dust, and stellar debris. Nothing that appears to be intact, mostly just large chunks of debris, but debris that has the signatures of civilized manipulations.” Debbie looked up. “This was a weapon. A weapon did this. Did the Sauren do this? Did they destroy the CIs’ civilization?”

“How?” asked Deena. “They were created as perfect warriors, not scientists.”

“I hesitate to suggest it,” said Debbie, “but the Saurens weren’t the only other species the CIs manipulated …”

“The distant ancestors of ours, the ones whose genetic material the CIs used to try to pacify the Saurens?” asked Deena. “Oh, and they also fed them to the Saurens as a way to make them more bloodthirsty? I frankly wouldn’t be surprised if, given just a bit of leash, they slipped it and blew the CIs’ star up in new and interesting ways.”

“Wait …” said Debbie. “I … I think … I can imagine how to do it …” She looked as if she were going to be sick.

Deena got a rare look of horror on her face. “So … so can I. How to destroy a civilization … to trap an entire solar system in the atypical spacetime collapse of its star …”

“This … this is a paper I’m never writing,” said Debbie. “An invention I’m never inventing. I promise you and the universe right now that I will never create this.”

“Likewise,” said Deena. “I promise never to pursue that line of research. It’s … it terrifies even me.”

“Right, then, so the question is what we’re going to do,” said Debbie.

* * *

“And so,” said Deena to the assembled millions at the virtual meeting of the Andromedan Scientific Association, “it appears that the ancestors of our species did in fact avenge themselves upon their now-extinct tormentors by use of some form of weapon technology that we cannot see how to replicate, causing a phase shift in the spacetime of the system’s star. The result would have behaved like a supernova externally, but internally, it left behind a huge durable blob of entangled superfluid degenerate matter, shown here.” She clicked a button, and a holographic image appeared of the discovery they had made. “This object continues to emit generated hydrogen and even methane molecules today, and we’re continuing to study this phase shift phenomenon and the spacetime ash it leaves behind.”

Debbie added, “Unfortunately, quite a lot of Saurens were caught up in the destruction – as many of our own ancestors must have been – and the Saurens didn’t take it well. Yes, they’d also been victims of the unnamed manipulators who had created them, but those people were now all dead, and the Saurens were furious and wanted an enemy they could fight. So, as we all know, the resulting conflict raged across the Milky Way Galaxy and led to our ancestors’ fleeing here to Andromeda. And meanwhile, a hybrid race of Andromedan-Saurens has since then taken over that region of space, one which we have only recently made contact with and forged a peace treaty with.”

There were questions, which they both tried to answer to the best of their ability, but the one that threw them for the biggest loop was from Seljin Ansom, of the Lirion Sphere. “Have either of you considered running for a position on the High Council?”

“I … wh … what?” Debbie replied, flustered. “Wh … no … never! It’s never even crossed my mind! The very thought! Ugh!”

Deena simply replied, “No. I’ve never considered that. With that kind of demand on my time, how would I ever get any research done?”

* * *

David had brought the girls into a part of his palace they had never seen, a huge area with floors covered in some type of fuzzy carpets. A sunken area off to one side contained a huge audio - video area. Thick plush chairs and large pillows were scattered about in places.

As David walked into what turned out to be a food preparation area, he asked, “Are either of you hungry or thirsty? I can offer you almost anything you might ask for … within reason.”

Debbie and Deena looked at each other for an instant before Debbie replied, “Right this minute, a large glass of water or tea would be great.” Deena agreed.

Several tweedles and beeps were heard before David came from the food prep area to a large table and set a tray he was carrying on it. “Here’s the tea, ladies. I think we all need to find ourselves a comfortable place to sit and have a long chat.”

The girls grabbed a tall glass of frosty tea and divebombed several of the thick fluffy pillows. “I think this would be a good place to start,” said Debbie as she put her glass down.

David came and made himself comfy on a large pillow he had dragged over. “I think a suggestion was made …”

Debbie and Deena blurted out at the same time, “About us being …” then stopped and started laughing.

David took a long drink of his tea and replied, “Yeah, something like that. My thoughts run like this: there is a large nebula where the individuals who created the Saurens lived, and what’s left of the sun is nothing more than a large entangled superfluid. Since our science has never before seen such an object, it behooves me to ask, how about you being on the council as the foremost science advisory board, which leaves you free to do research.”

Deena replied, “David, Sir, that offer is fantastic, but I really have no inclinations …”

Debbie broke in, “I have no such desires either. I don’t think I’m actually the right material to be in that kind of position.”

David smirked as he took a drink of his tea, then said, “I don’t think you’ve quite understood what’s going on.”

Debbie asked, “Going on? Sir, the two of us have invented things that have advanced our culture thousands of years past where we were. What could possibly be going on?”

David replied, “I don’t know if either of you have realized it yet, but you’ve already been part of the ruling science council for a long time. If you wish to stay in that position, it’s fine with all concerned. If not, know there’s a place on the inner circle already reserved just for you two. Next thing, the nebula. I understand you’ve sent hundreds of your fighter-probes there to scan and do further research. From the data I’ve seen from them, there’s no indication of any life forms. There are many types of strange energy readings and an occasional anomalous debris chunk, but I don’t believe we have any worries about those.”

Debbie asked, “What about the hybrids and their zoo planet?”

David replied, “Due to the binding treaty we have with them, they’re part of us … as they’ve always been. They have some technology that’s well beyond ours, just as we have technology that’s well beyond theirs. Combining our tech and the knowledge bases … improves us to a state that we’re just now researching.”

Deena asked, “That said, isn’t there at least one of the Hybrids on the council now?”

David repled, “Yes, there are. In fact several, and one of their first proclamations was to make the both of you Inner Circle members.”

Both girls sat with their eyes as big as tea cups and their mouths open in incredulity.

* * *

“Deena Slater and Debbie Rosenburg, space inventors extraordinaire, welcome back to my podcast,” said Mr. Face. “It’s been what, four years? How are you two doing?”

“We’ve made discoveries that you literally wouldn’t believe,” Deena said.

Immediately Debbie added, “Just amazing! Science that would blow your mind! Except for any PhD’s listening to your show. They’d probably get it. Hi out there!”

Mr. Face went on, “Well, what I really wanted to get your opinion on was the sighting of what some are claiming could be evidence of extraterrestrial life. This object was recently discovered entering the solar system, and unless you’re going to tell me it’s one of yours, it’s pretty amazing. Let me put the picture up on the screen here.”

“Oh really,” said Deena levelly.

“So … it’s one of yours? Or it isn’t?” Mr. Face was staring intently at them.

Exchanging a glance with Deena, Debbie turned toward their host as Deena started typing something on her phone. “Well, Mr. Face, it’s like this. There are objects drifting out there between solar systems all the time, and the fact is that we don’t know much about them. Out there, it’s far away from any stars, and these objects don’t emit any light, so there isn’t much for telescopes to pick up. When they appear, it’s actually an opportunity, because it means we get to study the properties of what’s out there.”

“But the photo looks like the object has lights,” Mr. Face cut in. “What kind of an asteroid …”

“It’s not that it’s impossible for there to be other life in the universe,” Debbie said, “but it’s really very unlikely for any of it to come here. Space is just so big, right? For any life to come here, they’d have to have a really good reason. I mean, of all the stars in this galaxy, why pick this one?”

Deena broke in, “It could be accidental. But that would imply that there’s just so much life out there that there was a significant chance that it might come here by accident. On the other hand, if there was that much out there, why wouldn’t we be inundated with life from other planets? So that’s probably not the case. It would pretty much have to be deliberate, Debbie.”

Debbie’s eyes widened. “If it were deliberate, the question would be what they want here, and that could be a lot of things. Maybe pure research. But actual researchers would keep the visit completely on the down low; they wouldn’t want us detecting them – same reason you observe wildlife from a distance. You want to see how the animals behave without introducing extra variables into the equation. If that were some kind of spacecraft, it would have to be here for reasons that completely disregard all scientific procedures. They’d have to be here to make contact – for whatever purposes. And would that be a good thing, Deena?”

Deena had been typing on her phone again. “It would seriously disrupt the development of civilization on this planet, Debbie.”

“I don’t know, I think it’d be kind of cool to meet aliens,” said Mr. Face.

“Depends on the aliens, I suppose,” said Debbie. “Do they want to take this planet for themselves? Do they want to try to open trade, which would potentially contaminate Earth’s ecosystems with organisms or substances not native to the environment? Are they just tourists? Could their fun pleasure cruise doom an entire planet?”

Mr. Face had been checking his phone. “I’ve … just seen a report that the object has vanished,” he said. “It went behind the planet Neptune and … never came back out the other side.”

“Oh,” said Debbie. “Well, then, I guess all of this discussion has just been academic.”

“Still, something to think about,” Deena said.

“Definitely,” Debbie said. “It probably just fell into Neptune’s gravity well.”

“That likely happened to a lot of small objects in the early solar system,” Deena added.

Mr. Face said, “A scientific mystery unfolding right before our eyes, folks!”

“And you were here for it, everybody!” said Debbie.

================================ THE END ================================