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+ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
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+ END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
+
+ How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
+
+ If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest
+possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it
+free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.
+
+ To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest
+to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
+state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
+the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
+
+ <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
+ Copyright (C) <year> <name of author>
+
+ This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
+ it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+ the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
+ (at your option) any later version.
+
+ This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+ but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+ MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+ GNU General Public License for more details.
+
+ You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+ along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
+
+ If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short
+notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
+
+ <program> Copyright (C) <year> <name of author>
+ This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
+ This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
+ under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
+
+The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate
+parts of the General Public License. Of course, your program's commands
+might be different; for a GUI interface, you would use an "about box".
+
+ You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or school,
+if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary.
+For more information on this, and how to apply and follow the GNU GPL, see
+<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+ The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program
+into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you
+may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with
+the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General
+Public License instead of this License. But first, please read
+<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html>.
--- /dev/null
+$-- Copyright (C) 2019 Jason Self <j@jxself.org>
+$-- SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later
+
+You can redistribute and/or modify this under the terms of the GNU
+General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
+either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
+version.
+
+> "Space isn't lonely; it's all about perspective. You run a ship long
+> enough, and you're bound to collide with something out there in the
+> dark." --Captain Isaac Marshal, 1091 kNA.
+
+Third shift was always a pain as far as Hector was concerned. It was
+bad enough to miss out on precious sleep while the rest of the ship
+dozed comfortably in their bunks, but what really killed him was how
+boring it was. No coordinates to plot, no adjustments to make, no
+orders to follow. I can't believe I'm wishing for someone to order me
+around, he grumbled to himself mentally. Telltales flickered on the
+control station in front of him indicating the ship's status.
+Everything was running smoothly, just like it had been yesterday, and
+the night before, and the one before that. He leaned back in his chair
+and propped a foot up on the console. Napping on watch was strictly
+forbidden, but it wasn't like anything was going to happen anyway.
+
+At least, that's what he was in the middle of telling himself when the
+beeping started. A light changed from green to pulsing yellow, and two
+more that had been previously unlit now highlighted the contours of
+his face with a bright blinking red. The sound of his feet hitting the
+floor echoed through the small bridge as he began to manipulate the
+controls. Something had set off the proximity alarm. They weren't due
+at the trading post for another week, so this was definitely a
+problem. Passive sensors couldn't tell him anything he didn't already
+know - there was something out there big enough to endanger the ship
+and it was statistically likely that they were going to hit it if he
+didn't do something. Reaching across the console, his first order of
+business was to get a second pair of hands at the controls. And heap
+this responsibility on someone else, he thought, cursing his earlier
+desire for something to do. "Captain to the bridge. I repeat, captain
+to the bridge," his voice echoed through the ship's PA system. To his
+credit, his tone sounded much calmer than he felt.
+
+Cry for help accomplished, he began to frantically flip switches
+across the board. Screens lit up as the active lidar scans began
+reporting a more detailed picture of the space around the ship. Not an
+asteroid or a comet, Hector confirmed. Not a planet, either, which at
+least meant they hadn't accidentally drifted off course during his
+shift. He couldn't decide if that was a silver lining or not.
+
+"Status," came a gruff voice from over Hector's left shoulder as he
+continued to probe the system.
+
+He didn't have to look back to recognize who it belonged to. "Unknown
+contact, sir, tripped over our passive sensor bubble one minute and
+thirty-seven seconds ago. Might be space debris, or a derelict, but
+all I know so far is that it's not natural and it's on a collision
+course," reported the watchman.
+
+"Well get us off a collision course, then. We can worry about what it
+is after," the captain replied. Grey haired but physically fit enough
+to make anyone give second thought to antagonizing him, the man held
+an imposing presence.
+
+"Aye aye, captain. Adjusting course by two degrees, vertical," Hector
+acknowledged. Turning left or right would have potentially served the
+same purpose, but even small changes in angle would exponentially
+increase their travel time to the trading post over a long enough
+distance. Better to go above or below whatever this object was and
+recalibrate their y-axis accordingly later.
+
+Another body plopped into the seat at the station to Hector's right;
+this one a mess of gangly limbs and thick-rimmed glasses. "Can't leave
+you alone for more than a few hours without you getting bored and
+putting us in a game of chicken with the nearest planet, can we,
+Hector?" taunted the crew member.
+
+"Shove off, Liz, it's not a planet and I didn't do anything," retorted
+Hector.
+
+Liz, short for Elizabeth - although she would try and convince anyone
+she met it was short for Lizard - snorted in amusement at Hector's
+exasperation. "Enough of that, you two," reprimanded the captain.
+"Hector, you're chair one. Maintain pilot's duties. Liz, chair two,
+scanners. Tell me what we're dealing with here."
+
+A chorus of "Chair one, aye," and "Chair two, aye," met the captain's
+orders before the bridge fell into a professional silence. They
+weren't a military vessel by any means, but there was a discipline to
+the crew that came innate with the hazards of running a salvage ship.
+It was dangerous work. People died with little to no warning when care
+and attention to detail weren't heeded. Jokes and a lack of formality
+were tolerated but, when necessary, the Aven became the tightest run
+ship in the sector.
+
+"Might be another ship, captain," Liz reported after just a few
+moments.
+
+"Distress signal?"
+
+"Negative, sir. There's no emissions coming off that boat. No beacon,
+no communications, nothing. Their engines aren't even lit - that's why
+the computer had to take a minute to decide what it even was. The
+non-organic shape triggered the funny-business alarms, but whatever's
+over there is cold as a rock," she explained.
+
+Sensing a bonus payday, Hector turned to face the captain. "Sounds
+like a salvage opportunity to me, sir," he said, hopefully. "Should I
+slow us down?"
+
+Sitting with his chin resting on one hand like The Thinker made flesh,
+the captain didn't reply immediately. Expectant silence filled the
+bridge. Finally stirring, he shrugged slightly and said, "Bring our
+relative velocity to zero, match course, and give me an estimate on
+how much time this is going to add to our delivery date."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," Hector replied with a grin. Bending to the task, he
+began to manipulate the flight controls. From an outside perspective,
+the Aven made a sharp 145 degree turn before flipping backwards and
+firing its boosters to apply the brakes. Inside, they felt no shift in
+gravity from their seats. "Computer says that - not counting any time
+we spend salvaging - re-accelerating and course correcting will add
+roughly two days to our trip, sir," the pilot reported as they
+completed their maneuver.
+
+"Hopefully this is worth the delay," the captain mumbled in return.
+Neither Hector nor Liz knew if he was speaking to them, or to himself,
+so they agreed through their silence as they continued to monitor
+their respective stations.
+
+Time seemed to slow down now that the initial rush of activity had
+passed. It would be a couple hours until they came alongside the ghost
+ship. Liz had wandered off somewhere, only to return with half a
+ration bar between her teeth. "Mith anthn?" she tried to vocalize.
+
+Not bothering to look up from his console, Hector asked, "What?"
+
+"I said, did I miss anything?"
+
+"Nadda. We're still pinging 'em every fifteen minutes or so, but
+nobody is picking up. Starting to look like she really is abandoned."
+
+"Did we ever think she wasn't?" Liz replied.
+
+"We shouldn't take anything at face value out here," interjected the
+captain. "Liz, go wake up Chen and fill him in." Liz looked like she
+was about to protest the fact that she'd just sat back down, but
+thought better of it. Leaving the cabin, she went to wake the final
+member of the salvage ship's crew. Chen was, for lack of a better
+term, the muscle. Any operation that put suits outside the airlock had
+Chen in the lead. He'd grown up on a heavy gravity world, and while he
+wasn't the smartest spacer in the sector, his reaction times and his
+considerable strength had saved everyone's life at least once.
+
+A fresh beep came from Hector's station. Glancing down, he pressed a
+few buttons before turning to address the captain, "Sir, the derelict
+is in visual range."
+
+"Shunt it over here, then," the old man replied. Moving a gimbal that
+contained a screen towards himself, he waited for the relevant data to
+appear on his command station. Numbers began to pour across the
+display. Swiping away from the hard data on ship mass and other
+minutiae, he brought up a graphic of the ship itself. Stubby and
+bulbous, it reminded him of a collection of mushrooms growing off of
+some central log structure. There was no obvious front or back, or any
+visual place for any kind of thruster or engine. Stranger still was
+the color. The nearest star shining light on their little piece of the
+galaxy was a yellow dwarf a few hundred million klicks away, and it
+bounced off the hull of this ship like an iridescent beetle. After a
+moment of additional calculation, the computer suggested a depression
+in the hull that was - as accurately as it could guess - a point of
+entry. "This thing smells fishy as all hell, but anything this weird
+is probably worth a decent chunk of coin, too," the captain thought
+out loud.
+
+Before Hector could discuss the suspicious nature of the vessel
+further, Liz and Chen returned. Suited in standard EVA gear, the bulky
+white outfit made the small bridge seem even more crowded than it
+actually was. "We're ready whenever you are, captain," Liz said.
+Grunting in acknowledgement, the old man stood and made his way
+towards the back of the ship to find his own suit. Standard procedure
+would have one man remain behind to mind the Aven, in this case
+Hector, while the rest performed an initial valuation and then got to
+looting.Silently happy to be the one left behind, Hector wanted
+nothing to do with the strange ship now that he'd had time to study it
+more. Humanity knew that they weren't alone in space. Encountering the
+unknown wasn't the issue, not exactly. There was just something
+unsettling about the design of the ship. Something inherently wrong,
+like how certain patterns and colors would awaken an instinctual
+wrongness - a genetic memory to ward off dangerous behavior. Stay away
+from that poisonous creature, the brain says, you've never seen one
+before, but you know it's trouble.
+
+Liz and Chen wandered back out of the bridge as the moment of truth
+drew nearer. "Testing, one, two, can you hear me, Heckler?" Chen's
+baritone voice came through the console.
+
+"Don't call me that," Hector replied, holding down the transmission
+button.
+
+No laughter came through the comms to taunt him, but he knew that Chen
+and Liz were having another chuckle at his expense. Being the newest
+member of the crew came with the expected downsides, but he couldn't
+help acting the way he did. Heckler had stuck as a nickname after his
+second ever salvage job, when he constantly tried to warn Chen how
+irresponsibly dangerous he was being. The captain would have probably
+reigned the behavior in eventually, but it was obvious that he
+wouldn't get involved if he didn't need to. Chen wasn't entitled or
+inherently rude, but it was easy to lose his respect by over-managing
+him. The captain knew that. "Thirty seconds until airlock cycles,"
+reported the familiar, commanding voice. Speak of the devil. "We won't
+be deploying the tunnel or trying to pressurize against their hull.
+Too uneven, and we don't even know if their atmosphere plays nice with
+ours. Suits will be on tethers until I say otherwise."
+
+Hector didn't need to reply unless he was asked a specific question or
+the computer provided him with data the captain needed to hear, so he
+kept the line clear and just listened. Mentally counting down the
+seconds, he imagined he could feel the airlock opening as he hit zero.
+It would have been entirely in his imagination, of course. Small white
+figures emerged from the side of the Aven as he watched on one of the
+close-range visual sensor screens. Each suit trailed a braided metal
+harness that connected them to the open airlock door. They could
+retract themselves manually at any time, or Hector could choose to
+pull everyone back with the big red emergency button on his console.
+It had been drilled into him over and over that no matter how anxious
+he got, he shouldn't touch that button unless he was ready for the
+captain to physically obliterate him. So far he'd managed to resist
+the urge.
+
+"Door's locked. Should we try knocking?" Chen asked as they
+congregated around the area the computer had decided was an entrance.
+Without waiting for an answer, he pulled a small laser welder from his
+tool belt and ignited the tip.
+
+"Careful, if that ship's pressurized, you might blow yourself away
+when you put a hole in the hull," Hector reminded him, unable to
+resist his need to interject on the quiet comm line.
+
+A hand waved on the tiny screen, and Hector was pretty sure that Chen
+was flipping the camera the bird. "This is why you're a heckler,
+Heckler."
+
+"The door, Chen," the captain's voice overruled any dispute before it
+could escalate. Hector stilled in his chair, and Chen went back to
+preparing his welder. Once he had the beam tip at a satisfactory
+length, he went to work, cutting along a slight depression that could
+have been the seal of a door. Or it could have been a fancy engraving
+of the ship's name, for all we know, Hector thought to himself. The
+Aven had actually been the Scavenger at one point in time, after all -
+at least until the paint had worn off the front and back ends of the
+label.
+
+A few tense moments later, and a man-sized hole had opened up on the
+side of the foreign craft. If the interior had been pressurized,
+they'd either cut into a pocket of empty space between the hull and an
+interior hallway, or the pressure was so low that it had simply leaked
+out through the cut. One by one the shapes of the three salvage
+operators disappeared into the hole, leaving Hector to stare at their
+tether cables. "Hallways are empty. Clean, though, almost like they've
+been recently maintained. Everything's that same strange rainbow hue
+in here," Liz narrated for Hector's sake. "Doors every twenty meters
+or so. Slightly smaller than human average. Good thing Chen's head
+isn't too full since he's likely to knock it at least a couple times
+in here."
+
+"At least I don't go to school for eight years only to end up on a
+salvage ship," Chen retorted.
+
+"Low blow!"
+
+Chuckles ensued as the good natured ribbing subsided. Hector was glad
+they were having a good time, because he was a ball of nervous
+anxiety. After a few moments of radio silence, he began to grow even
+more uneasy. "Guys, you still there?" he asked.
+
+Static crackled for a second before the response came though. "-at the
+end of the hall. Going to crack it with the welder and hope the bridge
+is on the other side," Chen said through the fuzzy connection.
+
+"You're breaking up," Hector advised, "Partial copy on your last."
+
+He was greeted only by more static, with the occasional flare of
+volume. This is absolutely the last thing I need, he thought, glancing
+at the big red emergency button. They weren't quite in 'worth getting
+obliterated over' territory yet, but the urge was definitely rising.
+After another two minutes of no contact, he stood from his chair and
+began pacing. With the captain's chair and the two console stations
+jutting up in the middle of the room, there wasn't much room to work
+off his stress. As he lapped the room for the third time, "Hector!"
+shouted out over the speakers, followed by garbled white noise.
+
+Three quick, long strides put him in front of the console. Slamming
+his hand down on the transmit button, he asked, "Say again, I repeat,
+say again." Looking frantically over his screens while he waited for a
+response, movement caught his eye on the visual of the outside of the
+ship. Something dark was crawling around on the outside of the other
+ship's hull. What the hell…? he thought, moving to try and adjust the
+zoom. Before he could refocus the camera, however, one of the tethers
+went slack, and his attention was drawn back to the entrance. Someone
+slowly drifted out. Maybe they knew about the dark figure too, and
+were going to investigate? No… there was something too stiff about the
+way they were floating. Then their figure rotated, and Hector saw the
+large red blotch on the front of the crisp white suite. "Oh, fu-"
+
+A loud bang on the Aven's hull interrupted him. Flinching, he glanced
+at the door leading towards the back of the ship. His first instinct
+was to seal the compartments between him and the airlock. Halfway to
+the first set of doors, he realized he was acting out of order in his
+panic, and turned back to slam the retracting button on the tethers.
+The other two lines hadn't gone slack, and he could only hope that he
+was rescuing live people right now and not reeling in corpses. This
+was so not part of my contract, he whined to himself as he ran towards
+the back of the Aven. Through the galley, crew bunks, and medical,
+each room passed like a blur before he arrived at the airlock.
+Engineering was on the far side of the hall, but there wasn't anything
+he could do to seal that without locking himself in the back of the
+ship. Each section was divided by a large bulkhead door. Normally,
+these doors would automatically seal in the event of an atmospheric
+breach to a part of the ship. Now they would act as buffers between
+himself and whatever was out there.
+
+Yanking hard on a bright yellow handle caused a cacophony of gears and
+counterweights to groan momentarily. Each door started to slide shut
+slowly at first, then picking up speed to slam closed after a few
+seconds. When was the last time these things got serviced? Hector
+wondered. His fear was making his reactions sarcastically inane, but
+he couldn't help it. How was he supposed to process what was going on
+outside? Making his way back through each individual area, he repeated
+the routine. Pull the lever, confirm the door seals, move on.
+
+Once he made it back to the bridge, he went back to the screen showing
+him the situation outside. The outside of the other ship's hull was
+now covered in dark figures. It almost looked like they were a part of
+the iridescent pattern; like black polka spots swarming and coalescing
+along with the rainbow hues of the smooth, bulbous exterior. "Screw
+this," Hector said out loud, grabbing at the pilot's controls.
+Engaging the thrusters while people were still outside on tethers was
+a big protocol no-no, but he didn't care at this point. Engines flared
+and the ship kicked away from the assumed derelict. "Can anyone hear
+me? Are you guys there?" he asked as he flew, hoping that whatever had
+been jamming their communications wouldn't affect them any more.
+
+Only silence replied, and a grim expression set itself on Hector's
+face. He could check the airlock camera later. His first priority was
+getting the hell out of Dodge. Another bang sounded somewhere against
+the hull. Had one of those things managed to jump between the two
+ships before he'd escaped? The Aven didn't have any guns on board.
+Hyperventilating, Hector decided to try and run a series of sensor
+scans on his own ship's hull. There would be some interference from
+the overly short range, but he should still get something. Data began
+scrolling across his screen. Metal composites, radiation, things that
+you'd normally find on the surface of a spaceship. There. Something
+organic, carbon-based, unknown origin. Whatever that was, it was
+hitchhiking, and he wanted it off.
+
+"Did you seal these doors, you asshole?" Liz suddenly shouted through
+the comm net.
+
+Nearly jumping out of his seat at the sudden sound, Hector yelped
+embarrassingly. Good thing he wasn't transmitting unless he had the
+button held down. He cleared his throat, and replied, "You're alive!
+Yeah, I sealed them. I don't know what you guys found out there, but I
+didn't want one of them getting in here."
+
+"Well we are out here and we want in," Liz said angrily.
+
+Hector wanted to snap at her for laying into him when they were
+obviously dealing with bigger problems right now. Instead he asked,
+"Who's hurt? I saw someone was injured on the video feed before I
+pulled you all in."
+
+Quiet filled the bridge and Hector was afraid that the radio had cut
+out again when Liz finally said, "Chen didn't make it. I'm fine. So's
+the captain, but he's unconscious. Knocked his head when you yanked us
+out."
+
+Hector took a deep breath. He was prepared to face casualties as a
+part of life on a salvage ship, but not like this. Not from a hostile
+force. Speaking of hostile forces… "Liz, one of those things is on the
+Aven's hull, I'm pretty sure. Close that outer airlock door if you
+haven't already. I'll come back and let you farther in soon."
+
+"Soon better mean 'I'm walking back there now and the only reason I'm
+not replying is because I can't stay and press the comms button'," she
+replied, a note of fear undercutting her snark and anger.
+
+Manually unsealing each door took a lot longer than closing them
+initially had. Each one struggled to fully open. The one between the
+bunk room and the infirmary didn't want to open at all, and Hector had
+to scrounge around for something to pry at the gap with. Settling for
+a metal tube that had originally acted as a curtain rod to separate
+the ship's restroom from the common area, he managed to make a gap
+wide enough to slip through. Please, please don't close again, he
+prayed as he finished crossing through to the other side. These
+bulkheads didn't have portholes, but he could imagine Liz standing on
+the other side of the door fidgeting impatiently. He pushed the
+emergency lever back up into its cradle and waited. At first nothing
+happened, then the servo-mechanisms cranked to life and began to
+retract.
+
+Liz had already moved Chen's body and the captain's unconscious form
+from the airlock proper to the small hallway between medical and
+engineering. "About time," she said critically. Her helmet was off,
+but she was otherwise still dressed in her bulky EVA suit. Same with
+the captain. She hadn't bothered to remove Chen's, and Hector decided
+that was fine by him.
+
+"Let's get the captain on the other side of this door, and close it up
+again," he said as he moved to position himself by the older man's
+legs. Liz took his arms, and together they hobbled him through the
+door. More banging echoed through the hull, and Hector crossed his
+fingers that this thing didn't have the strength to breach the metal
+shell on its own. "What happened over there, anyway? I lost contact
+with you guys and the next thing I know Chen's body is floating out in
+front of my camera."
+
+Liz's gaze was unfocused, and when she started to reply it sounded
+almost detached. "We started cutting on a door we thought might lead
+to the front of the ship, but it was filled with these creatures. We
+don't know if it was the bridge, a dormitory, or even a brig, but they
+moved fast. Chen was at the front, of course, and one of them stabbed
+him with a spear-looking thing. The captain threw a salvaging charge
+at the entrance and we started booking it back down the hallway.
+Explosion must have taken out at least ten of the suckers, but after
+they regrouped they started coming after us on the floor, the walls,
+the ceiling…" She stopped talking, staring down at the captain's limp
+form. "He started pulling on Chen's tether, trying to get him out from
+behind the swarm, but we took a wrong turn and got herded deeper into
+the ship, so he gave up. I guess the swarm must have finished carrying
+his body the rest of the way out the front door. Then you pulled us
+back, right through the pack. It was like a haunted house roller
+coaster."
+
+Hector didn't know what to say. Deciding to focus on what he could do
+here and now, he gestured towards the medical exam table in the middle
+of the room. "Let's get the cap up on there and make sure he doesn't
+have a concussion or anything." Liz nodded wordlessly. He'd need to
+keep an eye on her, too. Watch for deeper symptoms of psychological
+shock. But right now he needed her help, and maybe giving her
+something to do would help distract her. More banging against the
+hull. "Liz, I need you to take care of the captain. I'm going to try
+and throw our hitchhiker off the ship."
+
+She nodded again, moving mechanically as she pulled up a diagnostic
+screen to check the captain's vitals. Hector quickly walked back
+towards the bridge, determined to do whatever he had to to shake their
+unwanted guest. Settling into the pilot's seat with a calm smoothness
+that concealed the knot in his gut, he began flipping switches to warm
+up various thrusters. Salvage ships were built to make minute
+adjustments while working around dangerous conditions, and he was
+going to abuse that fact now. Putting the Aven through an evasive
+course of twists, rolls, and other high-g maneuvers was easy enough to
+start. The hard part came when the internal gravity generators
+couldn't keep up with the quick and random changes that he was
+initiating. He began to feel his body being pulled around as he bucked
+the ship like a wild bronco. Inertia strained, and warning lights
+began to flicker on as he kept stressing the system. Maneuvering
+thrusters burned out when they competed to push the ship in opposite
+directions, victims of Hector's inability to precisely keep track of
+every switch he was flipping in an effort to move as randomly as
+possible. The hull itself began to groan. Another warning light
+flickered red; this one telling him that if he kept his antics up,
+he'd lose integrity.
+
+Forced into easing up on his whipping about, he flipped a master
+switch. All of the thrusters killed themselves at once, and the ship
+settled into calmness. They were probably rotating wildly, but it was
+all in one direction and the internal gravity could handle that. No
+banging greeted him when he listened intently. Time to run another
+scan of the hull. Fingers crossed, he started the process. "Well?" Liz
+asked as she appeared behind him.
+
+"We'll know in a second. How's the captain?"
+
+"He's going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up, but he'll
+be fine," she said. Between riding out the gravity dancing, and
+working the medical systems, she appeared to have recovered some of
+her composure.
+
+Data once again streamed onto the console screen, and Hector looked
+for the telltale organics. Nothing. "We're clear," he breathed a sigh
+of relief as he leaned back in his chair.
+
+"Thank God," Liz said, echoing the gradual relaxation that seemed to
+sweep throughout the ship.
+
+Bending forward to work the console once more, Hector began the
+arduous process of resetting their destination. After their impromptu,
+erratic, off-course trip, the computer struggled to re-calibrate their
+ETA to the trading station. "Might be two weeks instead of one, at
+this point," he mused out loud.
+
+Liz settled into the chair next to him, closing her eyes and propping
+her feet on the console. "It could take a month, for all I care, as
+long as the trip is nice and boring," she said idly. Amen to that, he
+thought, glancing at a blinking light on his console. Labelled
+'Transmitting,' it sat next to a looped video recording playing
+innocuously on his screen. Bulbous shapes of rainbow sheen stared back
+at him, along with bright green text showing a set of coordinates, and
+a warning. Hopefully no one else would run afoul of the hostile
+species any time soon. Chances were low that the message was even
+necessary. Space was a big place, after all.
\ No newline at end of file
projects / aven.git / commitdiff