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  Suffice it to say, I left the touchy-feely stuff to those emotionally equipped to handle it.

  I had Shelby draft orders awarding Meritorious Service awards to each of the remaining J’ni. These service pins doubled as universal translators that could understand the J’ni chitter.

  The Raccoon-like members of the crew were given the choice of wearing their VOX devices or the new Service medals. To a man… or whichever of the three sexes they were… they chose to wear the medals.

  I also promoted the J’ni named Sa’Mi to Lieutenant Commander. This gave Sa’Mi the same rank as McGraw – although the J’ni had less time in grade. Sa’Mi was placed in charge of the twenty other J’ni. Their primarily responsibilities included ship diagnostics, maintenance and repair. Both officers were to report to senior staff meetings. For the purpose of the chain of command, Sa’Mi was to appoint a second and was himself to report to the Chief Engineer which was a post currently held by Whiskers.

  ***

  Our journey towards the Oort Belt was far less eventful this time around. I eagerly awaited the chance to experience Skip Drive FTL travel for the first time… To boldly go where no man had gone before… as it were. It turns out that wasn’t technically accurate, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  It took the better part of five weeks to get to our preferred jump point. I had the crew go over the ship one last time. I was still concerned about several anomalous events that had occurred in the midst of battle. The facts said they were the result of a damaged ship being pushed beyond its limits. My gut told me it was something more.

  Finally, the day we had all been waiting for arrived. We were at the jump point. We were far enough from any gravity wells that our drive could safely warp space-time and create what was essentially a ripple in the fabric of space that we could ride like a surfer rides a wave.

  To me, it would have made more sense to call the damn thing the Surf Drive, but hey I don’t get to make these types of decisions. Mitty assured me that Skip was a more accurate translation of the J’ni term for the drive. Who was I to argue with the over-sized racoons?

  I had invited Lori to the bridge. I wanted her by my side as we made this historic leap into the world of interstellar spaceflight.

  “Number One, take us to 0.3 lightspeed.”

  “Aye Admiral,” Shelby replied crisply.

  “Helm, confirm shields are at full strength. Throttle up VASIMRs to one hundred and ten percent. Ready Skip Drive,” Shelby ordered.

  “Shields at full strength and stable Ma’am,” Lieutenant Heinz confirmed.

  “Sublight drives have throttled up to one hundred and ten percent. They have quite a bit more to give if you’d like to try them out Ma’am, Admiral,” Daniels added.

  Shelby looked at me. I nodded. It made more sense to try out our enhancements in friendly territory than in the middle of a war zone.

  “Very good Lieutenant. I understand you and Commander McGraw have discussed the engine and power enhancements at great length. In your estimation, what is a safe maximum load on our VASIMRs?”

  “We should be able to push three hundred percent of the original rated capacity easily. The shields and inertial dampeners are rated at well past that.”

  Shelby smiled… something that was exceedingly rare while she was on the bridge. She was stunningly gorgeous when she did that. As Lori was staring right at me with dagger eyes I pretended not to notice.

  “Throttle up to two-fifty. No sense pushing the engines too hard until we’ve had a chance to kick the tires a few times.”

  “Aye, ma’am. Two-fifty it is,” Lieutenant Daniels said with just a hint of disappointment in his voice.

  I could understand the Lieutenant’s feelings. It was tough to have a new sports car and not want to push the pedal to the metal to see what it actually had under the hood. What impressed me most was that the sounds and slight tremors in the ship that I had associated with pushing the engines near capacity were completely absent.

  The engineers at the space dock had worked miracles. I don’t know what the enemy had in their arsenal to throw at us, but one thing was for sure… the next time we met up with them, they would be in for one hell of a surprise.

  “Approaching 0.3 light speed,” Sandy announced not ten minutes later. I was impressed.

  “Throttle sublights down to ten percent as we reach the target velocity,” the First Officer ordered.

  It was a funny thing about relativistic speeds. You normally think of space as being one large vacuum. But even a third of the way towards the Oort cloud there were still stray molecules of hydrogen and what-not floating about. To a ship the size of the Gilboa, traveling at the speeds she was, it was like trying to run while chest-deep in water. Thus, the need to continue engine thrust just to maintain speed.

  I turned to our resident FTL expert.

  “Mitty, are we a go for Skip Drive activation?”

  The Archon hologram used his hand to toss up three virtual displays in front of his console.

  “The Skip Drive is online. The dark matter collectors are fully charged. The compression field shows we have obtained sufficient forward velocity.”

  “So,” I prompted, “are we a go for Skip Drive?”

  The Otter-like Archon looked at me and did that nose wrinkle thing that he does.

  “Yes, Sir. We are a… ‘go’”

  “Hot diggity Dog!” I said.

  I toggled the inner-ship comms.

  “Attention crew of the starship Gilboa. This is Admiral Riker. We are about to engage the Skip Drive. For most of us, this will be the first time traveling at FTL speeds. We have no idea what the effect will feel like. We may not even be aware of the transition to Skip Space. This will be the first time this drive system has been used in well over a year. The ship has been through a lot since then. We have done everything that can be done to ensure the drive will work correctly.

  “That said, there is always the chance of the unexpected rearing its ugly head. I need each and every one of you watching every board, every relay, every power coupling like a hawk. If something bad is going to happen… I want to know about it before it happens. The J’ni are our best assets in this part of the operation. Take your cues from them.

  “That is all… and welcome to the new frontier. Admiral Riker out.”

  I looked over at Lori. She was, as always, beautiful. Her uniform hugged her body in all the right places. Have I mentioned before that she has a lot of ‘all the right places?’ I wondered why men’s minds always seemed to drift to towards the erotic when we were about to tread where angels fear to walk. A smile must have crept onto my face. Down Boy, I thought to myself.

  Lori must have misunderstood why I was smiling. She indicated a small box in her right hand. Good, I thought. Tradition dictated that we would need that box in a few minutes.

  “Helm, you are clear to engage the Skip Drive at your discretion. Course as plotted before. Make it so.”

  “Engaging Slip Drive now,” Sandy said as she pushed a double bar handle forward at her station.

  There was a thrumming sound that I could feel in the base of my teeth. It wasn’t quite unpleasant, but it was on the verge of getting there. Fortunately, it only lasted a fraction of a second.

  “We have successfully entered Skip Space,” Mitty announced. He stared to say something more, but I did not hear it. The sound of cheering on the bridge was too loud.

  Chapter 16: A Dog’s Guide to the Galaxy…

  On July 20th, 1969 a couple of men named Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. It was the first-time humanity had stepped onto the surface of something with a substantial gravity that was not the Earth.

  What most people are unaware of is what transpired shortly after their lunar module touched down on the moon’s surface. This is a matter of historical fact and has inspired explorers in the centuries to follow.

  Like many scientists, Aldrin was a man of deep and abiding faith. It seemed the more we k
new… the more we knew… we didn’t know. The idea of a master planner… an uncreated Creator, while abhorrent to some, was profoundly appealing to others.

  Aldrin was a Christian. He asked his Pastor, a Presbyterian minister named Dean Woodruff, to consecrate a small vial of wine and a piece of bread. After the lunar module had landed safely on the moon, Buzz Aldrin said these words over the radio. They have been etched in my memory since I first attended the Space Academy.

  “I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

  During that moment of silence, he took out the consecrated wine and bread and read from a three-by-five card words first attributed to Jesus.

  “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.”

  What Aldrin did has become a sort of ritual within the Space Corps. The first person to land on Phobos, a moon of Mars, did the same thing. The same was true of Ceres and if rumor has it correct, the poor souls that crash landed in a failed attempt to be the first to walk on the surface of Mars had planned to do it.

  To my knowledge, we were the first humans to enter Skip Space. It seemed to be the perfect time to honor tradition… and maybe say thanks to the Big Guy.

  The Gilboa had a chapel. What was interesting was that we – meaning the humans onboard the ship – had not built it. It seems a connection with the divine was not limited to humanity. I still wasn’t completely sure I believed in all this religious stuff… but I did believe in luck and in tradition – within reason.

  The box Lori carried contained a small flask of wine and a piece of unleavened matzah. They had been consecrated in the chapel by one of the new engineers, a guy named Kirkland, who was also an ordained minister. The long and the short of it was that continued what had become a long-standing tradition. It felt good to be a part of something bigger than myself.

  ***

  Our stay in Skip Space lasted about four hours this time. According to Mitty, traveling on artificially induced space-time waves was something akin to throwing pebbles in a large pond. The ripples where the rock entered would spread out in all directions but would also peter out over time and distance.

  There was also the problem of gravity wells in the middle of our flight path. Running into one of them would be most unpleasant. I asked Mitty what happened to you if you were to run into a large gravity well. He was brutally honest. He didn’t know because no one had ever returned from such a misadventure.

  Perhaps the most startling revelation about Skip Space was the fact that once you entered it… you did not fall out of it until the wave attenuated on its own. To control how far you travelled, you had to adjust the size of the Space-Time perturbation you created to enter the Skip-Stream.

  What this meant in practical terms was it was far better to take a handful of small jumps then one large one. Now, a four hour jump only moved us to the far side of the Oort cloud. About half way to Alpha Centauri… just a tad over a half a parsec for those that are keeping track. Maybe one point six lightyears give or take a few feet.

  My point was we had dropped a very small pebble in the space-time pond. In the grand scheme of things, a four-hour jump was almost absurdly small. That said, I intended to make about ten more of them.

  I had two reasons for wanting to do this. First, this whole Skip-Drive thing was pretty new to us hairless apes. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. A series of small jumps would be just the thing to give us the experience we needed.

  The second reason was because the last time somebody had made a big Skip into our little corner of the galaxy Earth almost ended up biting the big one. The enemy apparently had some type of long range sensor net that could detect ripples in Space-Time. Keeping our jumps short… at least in the beginning meant we could hide our point of origin.

  The other thing we did was to shift the approach vector to our ultimate destination. By the time we got ready to make, what would come to be, normal jumps, we were a good twenty lightyears away from Earth.

  Our next five jumps would bring us to the edge of what had been Galactic Order space. Each of these jumps would take about a week. Our destination was an open cluster of stars called the Beehive Cluster or sometimes the Praesepe Cluster. It consisted of some one thousand plus stars, a good third of which were similar to Earth’s Sol. The size was something on the order of twelve parsecs.

  The intriguing thing about the star cluster was that half of all its mass was within twenty-four lightyears of each other. Earth’s nearest neighbor was over four light years away. In the Beehive nearest neighbors were often spitting distance away.

  This had serious ramifications for the alien life that lived in this cluster. Most races had been aware for thousands of years that they were not alone in the galaxy. Earth, on the other hand always suspected they were not alone but until a broken and desperate Gilboa had stumbled into our solar system we had no definitive proof.

  ***

  By day twenty we had made three big jumps. I was feeling good that things were going smoothly. After each jump we continued at sublight speeds for about a day to check over each of the ship’s systems careful. I still had a nagging feeling that something was amiss.

  At one point during our battle with the four bogies in the Sol system both Whiskers and Mitty had been convinced we had a saboteur onboard. Despite an exhaustive search, we had never been able to find definitive proof. That said, we were still plagued by the occasional, unexplained glitch.

  Mike shared my concerns. He, fortunately, had something he could do about it. The Colonel ran his Marines hard twelve hours a day, six days a week. His reasoning extended beyond simply making sure his people were prepped for action. A tired Marine stayed out of trouble. A bored Marine was the very definition of trouble.

  I was on the bridge shortly after having breakfast with Lori and Shella. It seemed the Archon enjoyed human food, especially eggs over easy.

  “Sir, I have inbound contacts. Sixteen of them,” Ensign Rodrigues reported from the sensor station.

  “Yellow alert!” I barked. Toggling my comms I called Commander Shelby to the bridge. She had just gotten off duty and was likely trying to get some rack time, but I knew she would never forgive me if we had an alien encounter and I didn’t call her to the bridge.

  I was about to call for Mitty, when, as if by magic the holographic Archon materialized beside my command chair. I nodded to him and then turned to face forward.

  “Ensign, put the best visual you can get onto the main viewscreen.”

  The sixteen ships seemed to be roughly identical in size and shape. No human would design a ship that looked like them. They were rounded rectangles with odd looking appendages hanging off at every angle. They were clearly not designed for atmospheric operations.

  I turned to Mitty. “Analysis?”

  “They are Tas Talons, Admiral. The Tas are quadrupeds that are essentially peaceful unless provoked. They are not a member state of the Galactic Order, but we have enjoyed peaceful relations since our first survey ships encountered them six-hundred of your years ago.”

  “Is it normal for them to send sixteen ships out to greet visitors?”

  Mitty shook his head in a very human gesture. “I have no record of them ever sending out more than two. The Talon fighter…”

  “FIGHTERS!” I yelled. “Those are fighters coming at us?”

  “Affirmative. The Talon fighter was designed for cargo transport escort. They carry a low yield plasma turret and two ship-buster missiles each.”

  “Ok, that doesn’t sound too bad. How dangerous are these ‘ship-buster’ missiles they’re carrying? How big a bang do they make?”

  “The missiles in question do not carry explosives. They are tipped with neutronium, an extremely dense neutron-degenerate form of
matter. They are designed to punch a hole in the side of the ships they are attacking.”

  I looked at the little otter. “Can they hurt us?”

  “Most definitely. I would recommend avoiding engagement with the Tas.”

  “I thought you said they were peaceful. What are they doing with neutronium-tipped missiles?”

  Mitty turned to look at the screen again. “They believe in peace through strength,” he answered. “It is curious that they are in this system. It is a long way from their territory.”

  Commander Shelby arrived while I was talking with Mitty. She was dressed in civilian attire… a Sari if I was not mistaken. She obviously decided that stopping to change into her uniform was time she could not afford. I was glad Lori was not on the bridge. The commander’s attire was… well… distracting… let me just leave it at… I was glad Lori was not on the bridge.

  “Was there a change to the uniform-of-the-day that I’m not aware of Commander?” I was joking of course. My First Officer was as by-the-book as they came.

  “Negative, Sir,” she answered crisply. “I was on a,” she paused as if considering her words, “on a date, Sir. I heard the yellow alert and per my understanding of section 3.1.6 of the ship’s standing orders I came directly to my duty station.”

  “I see… section 3.1.6 you say?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  I was tempted to pursue the matter further… if for no other reason than to discover who her helpless target was… but I had thirty-two ship-buster missiles to think about.

  “Commander, tie-in the ship’s universal translator and try to hail our Tas friends out there. Assure them our mission is peaceful. We meant no offense and have no interest in contesting this system.”

  “Hailing the ships now. No response.”

  “Mitty, any chance the Tas are the unknown enemy we have been fighting?”

  “Highly unlikely Admiral. The Tas are a mining culture. Their ships and infrastructure are all geared to that purpose. They are one of the oldest… if not the oldest civilization in the sector.”