FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Last chapter ended with an ominous warning light flashing on the survey ship Walküre. In this chapter, captain Ellis Bjornestad and his ersatz first mate do some figuring. Oh, they also fuck.

The adventures of Ellis and Jack continue with a resolution to the cliffhanger presented in the last chapter! Something is wrong with the survey ship Walküre_! What could it be? What does it mean for our intrepid heroes? This chapter ain't worth much, to be honest, but it shoves the plot a little forward, and can't that be somethin'? Besides, let it not be said that I can't get a serial past three chapters. This is four :D_

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

"Desperate measures," by Rob Baird

---

"That's the color it's not supposed to be, right?" Jack was looking at the red light flashing over one of the diagnostic stations. There was just enough concern in her voice that I knew she was trying to hide the rest.

"Yeah," I nodded, and used the railings on the wall to pull myself closer to the station. "But you know, it might not be so bad. Maybe it's something unimportant, like the..."

"The what?" Jack asked. "The shuffleboard room? Isn't everything on this ship important?"

The red lamp was flashing over the engine control board, although when I looked at the actual diagnostic report it wasn't as bad as I had first feared. This was not to say that it was good and, in fact, we stood a reasonably good chance of dying -- but you have to take your optimism where you can, in my line of work.

"Well?"

I patted the jaguar's shoulder. "Most things are still working."

For some reason, this didn't seem to mollify her. "Most things?"

"Well, okay. You want to break the laws of physics, right? You need a working jumpdrive, fuel to run it, and a navigation computer to tell you where to go."

Her ears flicked. "And?"

I glanced back towards the diagnostic. "You ever heard the saying, 'two outta three ain't bad'? That explosion ruptured the fuel tank across all four sections." The self-sealing tanks, which were designed to cope with micrometeoroids and other such debris, didn't work terribly well on the best of days. "Doin' some creative rounding, I figure we've lost 95% of our fuel."

"Rounding to the nearest... percent? Five percent?"

"Five. If I was rounding to the nearest ten percent, I'd say we lost all of it." I ran the numbers, frowned, and then ran them again. Nope, still the same -- math kinda sucks that way, really. "But we'll be okay. Got the reserves. I figure we have three jumps. That's one for coarse positioning, one for refinement, and one hail mary jump in reserve. We're fine."

Her ears lay flat, and she had her tail curled around her right leg as she drifted there, looking rather small. "And if we aren't? What about the sublight engines?"

"Oh, plenty of fuel for those," I nodded. "But it doesn't really matter, because the sublight drive isn't good for shit. Not unless you're real patient. We'll run out of oxygen a long, long time before the sublight engines matter much."

Jack blinked; her ears remained splayed, and her eyes stared forlornly at the flashing red lamp. "Then..."

I turned the light off. "We'll be fine. Just let the navigation computer run, okay?"

In truth, it wasn't quite as easy as all that. I was a little bit worried myself: the computer had not finished its calculations by the time we'd jumped, and that raised the unpleasant possibility that we had landed far off from our next waypoint -- which was supposed to be Lohengrin Station, a refueling outpost whose owner owed me and would, I hoped, not be inclined to report my presence to Nichi Caronia.

The problem was that a miscalibrated jumpdrive could land you damned near anywhere. We didn't really know how far, of course -- 'cause the further you go, the less likely it is you'll come back home to talk about it. I thought that I could see stars through the thin-slitted windows, but what the hell did that tell me? There are a lot of stars, after all.

In certain corridors, you can position-fix pretty immediately by looking for signals from nav buoys. But those buoys had to be placed manually, and they only started deploying 'em thirty years ago -- which means you need to be within thirty light years of enough buoys to get a fix. Not so likely.

Everywhere else, you need to put your ear to the ground and listen for pulsars, those aged husks of dead stars that flash like distant lighthouses to anyone sensitive to see them. They have their unique characteristics, these pulsars, and if you can find enough of them you can triangulate your position relatively easily.

But finding them can be a bit tricky, and this was what I left the navigation computer to do. I let Jack burn off her nervous energy on the treadmill, and folded myself up before one of the free computer stations, checking to make sure that nothing else had been broken in our brief encounter with the starship.

When I was satisfied that we were as safe as we could reasonably expect, I plugged in Robin Hood and was pleasantly surprised: it had been able to crack the ship's encryption, and to download most -- perhaps all -- of its databases. This was good news for two reasons. Firstly, it meant that the salvage op was liable to pan out, and thinking about this allowed me to distract myself from the vanishingly small likelihood that I would actually be able to make use of that information. Secondly, it meant that the computer systems used familiar encryption methods, which only further confirmed to me that the ship was not so mysterious as it first appeared.

Nearly everything in the cargo manifest had been given some sort of product code, which was, naturally, impenetrable. I was given to learn that Valiant carried twenty palettes of "M1030 TYPE II" and ten palettes of "IDS 530A[E]," for example. But then I was also made aware that she was carrying a ton and a half of platinum, and that made me happy. Platinum isn't all that common, and it has a hell of a lot of industrial uses.

I took a brief nap, and awoke three hours later to find a jaguar floating in front of me. "Ellis."

Blearily, I unstrapped myself from the wall. "What?"

"Do we know where we are yet? It's been twelve hours."

Officially the cycle was only supposed to take half of that, so there was good reason to believe that the computer was indeed finished. I drifted over to the console, and immediately saw that it was not. It was, in fact, flashing a rather irksome error: "unable to fix position -- insufficient data." I cleared the message before Jack could notice it.

She thumped softly into my side, and used her foot to steady herself. "Well?"

I skimmed through all the readouts. The navigation computer had found a number of pulsars, but none of them matched anything in the database. Not only had it not found our position, it had not even been able to narrow it down. "I screwed something up," I muttered to her.

Jack frowned a little. "What?"

"I, uh. I set the search interval too high, so it didn't match the resonance of the signal demodulator." I flipped a few meaningless switches -- setting and resetting circuit breakers for some auxiliary systems -- in the hopes that this would make the story more convincing. "Just gonna fix that and run it again."

The jaguar's look was uncomfortably forlorn. "That'll help?"

"Well," I tried to grin. "It ought to." I might've made a joke about other options -- such as the cyanide pills I had stashed beneath one of the forward consoles, for just such an eventuality. But I didn't think the jaguar was much in the mood for dark humor.

Eight hours later, when I was forced to admit that the second scan hadn't turned up anything, I began to think that I might take one just to avoid working beneath her angry glare. "So we're lost," she said, flatly. Her tail jerked as though trapped.

"Well. Yes."

"You can't even tell what galaxy we're in."

"I'm not entirely certain we're in a galaxy, to be honest."

Her feline hiss pinned my ears momentarily. "That's not helping," she snapped. "Can you jump back to where we were?"

"Uh. Well. No." I explained that the jump computer's calculations were based off of knowing one's current position, and one's destination, and the offsets required to get there. It was not possible to simply reverse a jump, without having a decent understanding of where one was.

"Where we are," she pointed out. "It's not exactly academic."

"Fine, yes, where we are." I stared at the readout from the navigation computer, stroking my muzzle thoughtfully as though that might help to resolve something. As though a flash of intuition might suddenly fix our position in a universe twenty-eight billion parsecs across. "But, uh. I have a plan."

She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at me. "Running the computer again?"

"No."

The Walküre had four probes, which I was accustomed to using as assistants in my surveying. A brief check, during which I crossed my fingers, showed that I had in fact remembered to fuel them before leaving my last station. They had fuel for four jumps each, and a reasonably intelligent jump computer.

"They'll take our current position as a starting point, jump once to a new location, and try to find a known position there. When they find it, they'll jump back here. If they don't, they'll jump another time and try again. It'll let us widen our search coverage."

For Jack's sake, I had to pretend that this was going to help. As a longtime spacer, I myself had long ago become resigned to the fact that I was going to die alone and unremarked, the result of some error or malfunction. I won't say it didn't bother me, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it.

If my jump computer had mostly finished its calculations, the odds were that we were "reasonably close" to our goal -- say, under a million parsecs off. So it was possible that the probes would return something useful -- if we got lucky, and it wasn't as though we'd been terribly lucky to that point.

"You need to eat something," I told her, an hour or so later, when I discovered that she was still glued to a porthole, staring out into the blackness. "Won't do ya any good to starve to death waitin', you know."

Her muscles tensed, and from the way she bit her lip I gathered she was trying to avoid losing control of her emotions. "I just don't know what we're supposed to do." Her voice was soft, and small. "It's easy to forget how big the universe is, if you're on a station or whatever..."

"Real big, yeah," I agreed. That self-same universe had been the burial plot for countless spacedwelling types before me, though I didn't think reflecting on this kinship would please the jaguar much. "But it ain't infinite. Probes'll come back with something. C'mon, let's have dinner."

She ate it silently, and only finished half of the water I tried to force on her. Now I regretted taking the jaguar on more than ever, and I resolved that if we managed to get ourselves back to civilization I'd drop her off at the first space station that seemed safe. Really, what the hell had I been thinking, anyway?

I budgeted forty-eight hours for the probes to begin returning, because it didn't seem likely that any of them would find their position on the first jump. It was liable to be a boring wait. There wasn't much maintenance left to do; after dinner I started up one of the computer consoles and tried to kill time. Reading. Playing stupid games.

Not thinking, because man, how stupid would you have to be to meditate on your affairs in a situation like that?

I let Jack do what she wanted, which also involved distraction. She didn't eat any more on the second day. Mostly she occupied herself silently. I had been playing a game of hyperchess, but as soon as I started to lose -- badly, as always -- I pushed myself away, and drifted into the sleeping cabin to strap in.

Not like I was tired, really, just that... well, it makes passing the time easier.

The jaguar joined me a few minutes later. We had been sleeping at mostly nonoverlapping times, but when she landed on my side the feeling was warm enough that I decided it was worth extending an arm to catch her from going any further. "You okay?"

"Bored," she said. "Nervous."

"Well, I mean, we gotta wait for the first --"

"Ellis," she muttered. "Come on. I don't want to think about it for a while, okay?" I blinked in my hesitation, and her eyes met mine with a little insistence in the gaze. "Okay?"

"Fine."

She slid her paws down my side. I was wearing only a light shirt and a pair of shorts -- climate control keeps things nice and comfortable, ordinarily. I felt for a foothold to anchor myself, and then helped her pull the shirt off.

I knew what she meant, about distraction. We took things slow, to pass the time. I caught her shirt in my claws and worked it off her with purposeful deliberateness, pausing to draw the outlines of her dark rosettes. She nosed her blunt muzzle into the side of my neck -- but when my paws got as far as her breasts, and I slipped my fingers through the fur gently, she finally started to purr. Good noise, that. Guy could grow to like it.

I nibbled and nuzzled at her bare throat when the shirt was finally gone. A few days without a shower, and her pelt was thick with her scent. I had started to get used to it -- but now, with my long muzzle buried in her velvety fur, it seemed fresh again. My warm breath ruffled the fur of her breast, and when my tongue flickered teasingly over her nipple Jack gasped. Her muscular tail looped around my leg, keeping us close.

It fought my paw as I tried to untangle her, but I wanted her skirt gone and there was no other way about it. Finally -- when I growled at her -- she got the idea and relaxed. With the skirt gone her scent became even more pronounced in the little cabin. As though I had all the time in the world (and really, what else were we going to do) I ran my finger up between her thighs to caress the slick folds of her sex. They parted wetly around me, and I felt teeth sink into my shoulder.

"Hey, watch it..." I muttered, though when I pushed gently into her, up to the knuckle, she bit me again. Damned cats, and their damned sharp teeth.

It's a little hard to do this in zero-g, for the record, particularly when your partner starts to squirm. I held her down with my other paw, listening to her purring build to a heavy rumble, but finally she became too wriggly to handle and I tugged my paw from between her warm thighs, spinning her carefully back and against the wall.

"Whatcha doing?"

Once I'd found the anchor straps where a sleeping bag could go, I fastened them around her belly, and grinned. "Holdin' ya down. Wouldn't stop thrashing." She gave a little kick, and, well, what the hell -- while I was at it, I borrowed another strap to keep her leg in place. Jack snickered. Her movement was not so constrained that she couldn't complicate my efforts to remove my shorts -- finally I had to just hold on to the wall, and let her do it.

I felt around for a suitable foothold, pressing against her smoothly. My shaft settled into place, and when I nudged up with my foot momentum pushed me into her in a fluid thrust that drove the breath from her in a shuddering gasp. I took a moment to enjoy that -- wet, tight heat squeezing me so snugly I fancied I could feel her pulse around my cock.

Carefully, for you have to be careful without gravity, I lowered my hips, and thrust again, gently. I kept my rhythm easy and slow, enjoying every shiver and twitch of the spotted cat before me as I pumped steadily into her. The fifth or sixth time, she wrapped her free leg around my hips, which made things a little simpler -- so I started to move faster, and she moaned appreciatively.

I really wanted to take my time, I swear. But it had been a couple days, and I was pent up, and she felt so. Fucking. Good. Already my thrusts were growing in urgency, and my muscles began to tense with the strain of holding myself back. I straightened, changing my position a little, and as I rocked back into the jaguar she keened in delight. Her claws raked my back, and I grunted in surprise -- was gonna have to talk to her about that one. I know they're retractable.

I couldn't get as much leverage as I wanted -- not as much as you can get on the ground, anyway. I grasped her hips with my paws. Hard thrusts, now -- desperate. Deep. Pounding her back and into the wall as I growled my need for her. Jack's back twisted as she groaned out, her paws bunching up my fur, and her hips bucked into mine with a matched urgency.

My knot was swollen, and thick, and I had to work to sink it into her with every full, yearning thrust. When I hilted in her, grinding our hips together, the jaguar's warm pussy caressed the sensitive bulge, squeezing me wetly, and I nosed beneath her muzzle. "Jack -- just -- warning you," I managed.

She could tell. I guess it ain't exactly subtle. Claws scored my sides; her purring was broken with a high, wavering mew at every thrust. I tried to pull back, and found that I couldn't, the movement jolted both of us, and Jack's groan tore from her shuddering body like surrender. When she drew her breath in again, it left her carrying my name.

I needed to fill her -- needed to stake my claim to her golden-furred body in the hot pulses of the orgasm I felt rushing onto me. I managed two more thrusts, and even as I made the second I could feel the pleasure welling up, taking hold. Warm, spreading through my body in giddy pulses as I pinned her to the wall and arched my back to sink my knotted cock as deep as I could, spurting my cum in hot ropes that spilled back around the tip of my twitching shaft.

I tried to growl and only got as far as an undignified, involuntary grunt as I pumped her with my seed. Jack did a little better -- she wailed, and I felt her contract and spasm around me, squeezing my cock as I unloaded in her. I rocked and bucked through my peak, and thanked the laws of physics that my trembling legs didn't need to support either of us as the last of the sensations worked through my utterly spent body.

Her thigh relaxed by slow degrees, but finally she let it drop, and as we panted to catch our breath Jack muffled a giggling laugh in my shoulder. "What?" I mumbled.

"You get so... rough... at the end..."

"Rough?"

"Wild." She leaned back; she was smiling with the afterglow, apparently momentarily satisfied with ignoring our straits. "Like an animal."

"Fancy that..."

"Hmph," she snickered. "It's fun knowing I can make you do that."

"Do what?"

Her paws grasped my rear; then one batted for my slowly wagging tail. "Lose control. I bet I could make you beg..."

I clicked my jaws. "Don't try it."

The jaguar winked. "I wouldn't." She didn't seem too sincere. But whatever. I'd cum, and so had she, and we were both worn out for a spell. I ran my fingers through her hair, and she stroked my sides gently, soothingly. She broken the silence a few minutes later with an unrelated question. "Have you always lived out here?"

I shook my head. "Nah. I was born on solid ground. Never cared much for it. Mom died when I was real young. I don't remember her. Me and my dad hit out early; dad had a quitclaim on an asteroid out in sector 828."

"Mining, then?"

"Yeah. When I was sixteen, I started working for UTMC; got enough to buy this ship 'bout... eight years later? Been just kickin' round known space ever since, you know? I don't like planets." This was the peculiar spacer's agoraphobia -- a natural aversion to any place with lots of people, and a horizon you could see. And an atmosphere you couldn't fucking trust to be purified. "Reckon I should settle down, but dad didn't, so, who knows?"

Jack nodded slowly through my story. "How's he doing now?"

I chewed on my upper lip, and leaned away from her to stare at the far wall. Then I shrugged; the answer was not a particularly helpful one.

"You're not talking?"

Sometimes being knotted to someone can be awkward. This wasn't a conversation I felt like having, but I didn't have much choice. "He disappeared three years ago. Ship never came back."

Indeed, her ears flattened, and she looked away from me. "Oh. I'm sorry."

Now, the truth is Kip Bjørnestad wasn't a particularly good father, and I don't particularly miss him. But I didn't need another reminder of how dangerous space can be. "Ah, you know. I've made my peace with the universe on that one. What about you, spots? Where're you from?"

"New Seattle."

New Seattle was one of the older, more prosperous colonies. Everybody lived on one of the big temperate continents -- nice white beaches, nice clean houses, nice well-kept roads. "The hell? What'd you do leavin' that behind? New Seattle's fuckin' paradise."

"Yeah, maybe if you're a plantation owner or you have friends in the government. Paradise," she scoffed, and shook her head. "My family owns a general store. It's not enough to support six kids on, especially not if you think they're ever going to get an education or leave the planet or anything. If you're one of the top people, I'm sure it is paradise. The rest of us... well... there weren't many opportunities."

"That's why you left?"

"Yeah."

Space takes all kinds, I guess. "How'd you make it off?"

"Won the lottery." The grin she offered me was quirky, and it showed just the hint of her very sharp teeth. "Winning ticket was a ride out to Tartarus with a tramp freighter."

"Lucky?"

She stroked at my arm idly. "Ah. I think anybody who was willing to suck the captain's dick got one of those tickets, to tell you the truth. I didn't tell my family how I did it, but... wasn't like I had anything else marketable..."

It had never been like that for me. Dad had taught me how to operate the controls of a starship, and how to run a spectrometer, and what to look for in an asteroid belt. When I was sixteen, I knew enough to take the exam for a master's license -- even if they wouldn't let me do it officially for another five years.

Now I tried to think about what it must've been like, looking up at the night sky without those prospects, striking out just because you didn't know what else you could do. And trading in the only currency you had, no matter how debasing. Good enough to get to Tartarus, I suppose.

And, well...

"Kinda puts us in context, huh?" I asked her.

Jack looked a little chagrinned, and I guess it wasn't really a fair question -- but c'mon, a guy's gonna ask a thing like that. "It's not that I don't like you," she finally said.

"Nah, shit, I mean. We both got what we wanted. Don't beat yourself up or nothin'. Just curious, that's all."

"I had to get off that station. I just, um." She twisted her head around to look out into the open cabin. "I just kind of assumed I'd be going somewhere more... safe."

"Space is a lot of things. Safe, hoss, she ain't."

The jaguar didn't say anything for long enough that the silence became slightly uncomfortable. Her thick tail flicked once, in the open air. She swallowed, and then took a deep breath. "We're going to die here, aren't we?"

"It's a distinct possibility," I admitted.

"I was gonna... I was going to say that I don't really want that, but I guess it doesn't really matter much what I want, does it?" Her long whiskers drooped; I couldn't tell which stage of grief she was going through. Acceptance, I guess.

We were no longer tied, exactly; my knot had gone down. But I didn't want to move, and for reasons of my irrationally soft heart I didn't want to leave her, either. I wrapped my arms around her again, snugly, and held her quietly.

The solemn tenderness was not broken until half an hour later, when an alarm chiming in the cockpit announced the return of one of my probes. When I explained it to her, Jack offered to clean up, and I pulled away from her to check on the progress of my little navigating friend.

When you're expecting disappointment, you can sometimes convince yourself of that until it doesn't really hurt when it turns out you were right. This time, though, I did feel my spirits sink a bit. Nothing -- the probe hadn't found anything in two jumps even remotely like home.

"But there are three others," Jack said. I didn't think she really believed it. Hell, I know I didn't. The other probes came in over the next two hours, and by the time the last one had checked in Jack just shrugged at the expected result. "You have another plan?"

"No. Ain't got shit. Problem is our maps just ain't... like. I mean, always been a problem, right? Navigation's only as clean as your maps are."

She laughed hollowly. "Need better maps. Can't you just buy those at a station somewhere?"

Yes, if you're willing to splurge, you can. But not all of us are such, uh, big picture thinkers. "Yeah. Unfortunately, that don't --" then a thought struck me, and I blinked. "Wait. Hold on."

"Hold on what?"

"Shut up for a sec, spots, I don't wanna get yer hopes up." I pushed myself to a computer, and began checking the data from the _Valiant'_s computer again. Sure enough, the data dump included a file auspiciously named "starmap," and it was exactly what I was looking for.

"But you have an idea?" Jack prodded.

It wasn't in a familiar format, which was a little irritating, but the data all seemed to be right. Position, period, electromagnetic characteristics. "That ship we found, I pulled her computer. She's got a map. Database is fuckin' huge -- gotta be fifty or a hundred times bigger than mine, at least. I should be able to import it, and maybe we can get lucky..."

Fatalism or no, resigned to my fate or no, I was so excited that it was difficult to enter the commands correctly, and the first couple of times I made stupid mistakes. Finally I gave up on the import all together, and just swapped the Valiant's database for my own. Taking a deep breath, I pressed the button to start the navigation computer cranking.

? possible locations

Not a particularly good start. I watched it with bated breath. The counter on the computer clicked past five minutes, and then ten, and then fifteen. Half an hour. Forty minutes --

4,420,970 possible locations

I yelped aloud, and Jack went tumbling back over her heels. She caught herself gracefully, and glared: "what was that about?"

"We've got at least one match in the database." 1,747,310 possible locations. 728,997. 322096. 63562. I rubbed at my temple, taking a deep breath and letting out a sigh -- this had been a long shot, and I was a little surprised it had even worked. But once we hit under ten thousand possibilities, it was a formality: we had been found. "Alright, we're gonna be okay here."

Jack's eyes were saucer-plate wide; her tail lashed. "Really?"

"Really." Indeed, presently the computer flashed green, letting us know that it had decided to a reasonable margin of error where we were. Now it was a simple matter to reprogram the jump computer -- and when I tried to do this, I realized that we had a bit of a problem. "Oh."

"Oh?"

I checked the database again. "I know the pulsar readings we should have for the Valiant's position, which was our last known position too. But..."

"They're not in there?"

"They're not in there," I confirmed. "Neither is Lohengrin station." I worked through the rest of my original flight plan, and everything came up empty. We had been provided a map that showed us where we were -- but it did nothing to explain where we were in relation to the map that showed where we had been.

If I had been in the mind to be curious, I would have had to admit that this only deepened the mystery of the ship in the first place. How in the hell had it gotten to a place that it didn't know about? And for that matter, why the hell would a ship built by one of us have a map that didn't show anything about known space?

"Now what?"

I bit the claw at the end of my left thumb, chewing softly as I stared at the meaningless mess of the navigational numbers. "I don't know. Just don't make any damned sense."

Jack drifted over to join me, resting her elbow on my shoulder and looking at the screen. "But it says it knows where we are."

I shrugged, which sent her drifting off. "It knows where we are on its map. But its map doesn't match our map, and I don't see where they join up. It's like there's no fucking..."

"What are these numbers?" She was pointing to the digits that helpfully followed the phrase "current position" on the screen.

I don't like being disturbed when I'm trying to concentrate, but I knew the jaguar would be insistent so I indulged her. "It's a series of coordinates. Effectively, our bearing and distance from the map's origin point."

"What does that mean?"

"The map starts somewhere. Most of our maps are centered with their origin at Caledonia, because that's where the original cartographer's guild was founded. Some of 'em are at a station, though. I mean, it depends."

"A place, though."

I shrugged again. "Sure. Whatever the mapmakers thought was important."

"Like a planet. There might be people there."

"Well..." She had a point, of sorts, though I didn't really know what I was going to get out of traveling to point zero on some strange starmap. "I suppose."

"What do we have to lose? We're going to die anyway, right?"

I drummed my fingers along the computer. I didn't exactly like thinking about things in such bald terms, but the jaguar had a point. At the very least it offered us a chance, and we didn't have so many of those. I leaned over and nudged the throttle for the jumpdrive forward, letting it spin up as I entered the necessary commands. I checked and double-checked the coordinates -- but the computer seemed relatively confident, and who was I to disagree? "Alright," I muttered. "Here goes nothing."

"Fingers crossed," Jack said, and took my paw in hers. The world froze, my muscles tensed -- and then it was over, and the computer went back to calculating our position. On a whim, I powered on the sensor arrays, too -- never know when you might find something interesting, after all.

It took a couple of hours before the computer was happy, but we'd only come in four AU off and that was close enough for me. The sensor suite was lit up brightly with lots of goodies. "Interesting. Well, it's a planetary system. Handful of big gas giants; a few smaller rocky planets. Our destination is a rocky. Third out from a pretty bright main-sequence G-type. Hmm..."

"Inhabited?"

"Well, we'll find out soon enough. Looks like oxygen, though. Odds are good there's somethin' goin' on there." I waited impatiently for the drive to come to full power. "Guess they picked it for a reason. Hold on, I'm gonna angle us for orbit. We're gonna get some gravity for a second, okay?"

Even if I knew nothing at all about the planet, it was good to have something to be looking forward to. The control stick felt reassuring in my hand as I aligned us onto the path the computer projected. Sixteen kilometers per second of delta-v; I pushed the throttle forward a few notches, and felt myself grow heavier.

Jack's hair settled down, and she swept it back with a grin. "If it's inhabited, maybe we can get some fuel and a new map? You don't recognize the planet?"

"Like I said, I don't do the goddamned things." She had a way of being so damned happy, though, that when the curt reply flattened her ears a bit I sighed and tried again. "Maybe. Have to see what we have worth trading -- you never know about these guys."

The drive decided it was ready for another round just about the time we were done with our maneuvering burn and, saying a quick oath under my breath, I jumped the Walküre again. The computer was the first to speak. "Warning. Fuel low." We had enough for only one more jump.

I rolled us so that the cockpit glass was facing the planet below us, and got a good look at it for the first time. My first impression was that it was extremely blue -- but a continent was dawning in our sight, with the unmistakable green of vegetation, beneath wispy, cotton-white clouds. Even if you don't like planets, it was gorgeous.

Jack wanted to know if there was anybody home, and I did too, so I flipped the radios on and gave a listen. Zilch. Nothing on any of the electromagnetic sensors that suggested activity. Maybe I was doing it wrong, though. I flipped the transmitter switch. "This is captain Ellis Bjørnestad of the survey ship Walküre to anyone on this channel, please respond." Nothing, and nothing when I repeated it on every channel my radio was tuned for. "Think it's dead," I told Jack, and tried to hide the disappointment in my words. Planets may not have been my favorite thing, but we were still out of fuel. "Nobody's home."

"It can't be uninhabited."

"Most planets are," I pointed out.

"No." The jaguar shook her head vigorously, sending her hair flying. "Look." She was pointing through the cockpit window to the continent slipping by beneath us. "Look at those lines. They're too straight. Those are roads, Ellis."

Well, son of a bitch. She seemed to be right -- but there was the little matter of nobody answering the door. "I don't know about this..."

"It's the home planet for that starship, right? So the people who built that starship must know something about this. So maybe there's something down there. Can this crate land?"

"Yes. But it's not going to."

"Then what are we going to do? Sit in orbit until we starve? Come on, Ellis. There has to be somebody down there."

"Maybe somebody hostile. Or... aliens... or something."

"You believe in aliens?"

I waved my paw dismissively. "No. But it's not safe." This was just my natural cautious nature, though, because she was, after all, basically right. What the hell else were we going to do? "Fuck. Fucking hell. Alright, strap in, spots."

I gave us another orbit to fix our position, and targeted the coastline near one of the darker green expanses -- for no real reason other than it was near what seemed to be the planet's equator, and that would make it marginally easier to take off again.

What I did not bother to tell Jack, because it didn't really matter, was that I had in point of fact only landed the Walküre once before, and that time I had brought it down so hard that it took a week in the shop just to get the landing struts working again. Everything is tougher when you're fighting gravity.

Nice and slow, though, that's the way. No point in fighting atmospheric friction when you don't have to, breaking parts of the ship off and all that nonsense. The main thrusters had a power to weight ratio well in excess of what it would take to keep us aloft.

It was a pretty painless entry; the sky was cloudless, and we settled down until there was a brilliant, burning blue above us. That's what atmospheres look like when you've got a few hundred kilometers of them, I suppose, but it didn't make me any more of a fan.

A few kilometers up, and I opened up the shields beneath us, so that I had a clear view of what was passing under us. Those things that they call trees -- and a hell of a lot of 'em, more than you'd have in a park or planted along an avenue. I didn't recall the word exactly.

"It's a jungle!" Jack cried happily.

Yeah, okay, that one. The coast was approaching; I banked us, and we followed flat white beaches. Jack and I saw it at the same time -- a rising, unmistakably artificial structure of concrete and metal. It was partly overgrown, but still quite clear.

The structure was nearly a kilometer tall, and slightly pyramidal, twisting in angles towards its peak, where what looked like antennas protruded forth. As we got closer, I could see that the sides were covered in windows, now grimy with age and disuse. At the top was a larger observation platform; it looked a lot like a control tower, but it had clearly not controlled anything for a long, long time.

Large, flat expanses below us were covered in dull metal that had resisted the encroaching jungle successfully. It looked, to be honest, a lot like the apron you'd see on a spaceport, and that was good enough for me. I dropped the landing struts, and brought the Walküre in carefully.

"There's something written on the ground..."

A big number "8." I nodded, a little distractedly; I'd noticed this on our approach. "Either an identifier or a bearing. "It says 28 on the other side."

"No. Words."

I fired the thrusters to bring us into a hover, a few hundred meters up in the air. Sure enough, when I followed the direction of her finger, I could just make them out. Words had been burned into the metal. Legible enough, though not in any language I understood.

COSMODROMO FEDERAL QUINTANA ROO.