“Hey.  Hey you.  Are you dead?”  He recognized the voice.  It was her.  I’ve died, gone to hell, and she’s here.  And hell’s cold.  Slowly he opened his eyes.  He was still in the hold.  His arms and legs were still crossed and he was slowly rolling forward.  This used to drive his parents crazy.  He’d spend hours floating in his room flipping over and over again.  Have you ever tried having a conversation with someone whose face kept spinning away from you?  I was an ass as a teenager.

“I’ve returned the air to the hold.  You can talk now.”  She wasn’t in the hold but on the monitor screen.

“No.”  Sebastian closed his eyes and continued to spin.

“No what?” 

“No, I won’t talk.”

“But you are talking.”  I really, really don’t like her.  “Look, tell me what you did to the sensors and communications.  My contacts can retrieve me and I’ll be out of your hair.  You can go on with whatever it is you call a life.”  Stunning social skills.  She must have tons of friends.

“No.  Counter proposal.  You give me the gun and stop doing stupid things.  When we make contact with your people you, and your toy, get the hell off my ship.”

“You want the gun?  You really think I’m going to trust you?”

“I’d also like you to stop talking but I think it’s more likely you give me the gun.”  The monitor went dark and Sebastian closed his eyes again.  Slowly rolling.  Several more minutes passed.

“You promise to let me leave with the other container?”  Sebastian unfolded his body using his extended limbs to slow his rotation.  He grabbed a rung on the ceiling and floated in place.

“Give me the gun and stop trying to mess with my ship.  I promise to turn you, and the container, over to your friends.  Once we make contact with them of course.”  There was no reason to tell her that was not likely to happen any time soon.  The door to the cockpit slid open.  She was standing with the gun pointed at him. 

“Alternatively I could just shoot you and figure it out myself.”  My god this was tiring.  Shoot me, don’t shoot me.  Make up your damn mind he thought. 

“Stop bluffing.  You don’t have control of the A.I.  If you did we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  Give me the damn gun and shut up.”  Her face seemed to kind of scrunch up a little and turn redder.  That’s it Sebastian, poke the angry dog.  Eh, what do I know?  Never had a dog.  After several long seconds she slowly tossed the gun toward him.  He caught it and started to examine it.

“Do you even know how to use that?”

“Sure, fast things come out of this end.  I’ll just keep that end pointed at you and we’ll go from there.”  Hell, she’s probably right though, he thought.  I’m just going to shoot myself in the foot.  The woman started laughing.  That was a new reaction from her.  Maybe she was thinking about him shooting himself in the foot.

“It’s bio-coded.  It will only fire for me.”  She’s lying thought Sebastian.  I could shoot her in the leg to prove it.  She’d live.  Of course, if she’s lying about the bio-imprint maybe she lied about the reconfigurable bullets.  In which case he’d probably blow a hole in the hull.  No need to risk it.  The gods aren’t on my side today. 

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said instead.  Sebastian tossed the gun into a storage bin and set the digital lock.  Immediate crisis solved.  Back to the problem of being screwed in the middle of nowhere with limited supplies and no way home.  He pushed past her into the main cabin and pulled himself back into the pilot’s seat. 

“Ok, you have your ship back.  Now fix the communication systems.”

“Nothing to fix.  There’s just no one to talk to.”  He looked back at her.  Her expression was confused and she kept rubbing her hand.  “What’s wrong with your hand?”

“Nothing.”  She self-consciously stopped rubbing the hand.  “What do you mean there’s no one to talk to?  Has something happened to the Itasca Waystation?”

“Oh, probably not.  It’s hard to say since we aren’t in the Itasca system.”  Sebastian smiled to himself.  See what she does with that.

“Liar.”  Well that reaction was predictable.

“You see someone put a nuclear weapon in my hold that had a half-assed construction.  I jettisoned it to keep from becoming a glowing gas cloud.  Instead it went off in the wormhole.  Bob’s your uncle.  Fanny’s your aunt.  We’re not in the Itasca system.”

“That weapon uses a smaller and more efficient design than the Navy’s top of the line models.  There wasn’t a problem with the weapon.  You must have screwed with it!”  Seemed to hit a soft spot there Sebastian thought.  He looked at her with a questioning expression.

“I designed and built it.”  Oh crap.  She’ not an arms dealer.  She’s an engineer.

“Was your degree from a correspondence program?  Because your efficient design went boom.”  Sebastian displayed the sensor data for the system on an auxiliary workstation and pointed at it.  “This is where we are.”  The woman floated over to the station.  When she grabbed the support rung she winced.

“Really, what did you do to your hand?” 

“As if you didn’t know.  Your little booby trap?  Every time I tried to override the controls I got shocked.”  Booby trap?  Sounds like a good idea.  Wish I would have thought of it.  He looked down at the A.I. console.  He’d like to ask Jocko about it but not in front of her.  A.I.s weren’t specifically programmed not to harm humans but they did have safety routines that prevented them from planning such actions themselves.  It was difficult but not impossible to override them, but Sebastian hadn’t done that with Jocko.  At least that he remembered.

“This data can’t be right.  Wormholes don’t jump to different destinations.”  There was a slightly panicked tone to her voice.

“No one has ever tried setting off a nuke in one before.”  Sebastian displayed the local star on the main monitor.  “This isn’t the Itasca sun.  There are only four planets.  By basic deduction, this isn’t the Itasca system.”

Five.

“That isn’t anyone’s sun!” she shouted.  “It doesn’t match anything mankind has ever seen, anywhere.  And it shouldn’t even exist.”

Five.  Sebastian finally noticed the messages on the A.I. console.

“Five what?”

Five planets.  I’ve detected a fifth closer to the star.  The main screen zoomed in on a portion of the star’s surface.  A tiny circle could be seen traversing across it.

“And?  Unless you’ve detected a five star hotel there I don’t see how that helps us.”

“What?  Are you talking to me?”  Oh yeah.  Forgot there was someone else here.

“I was talking to the A.I.  It’s found a fifth planet.”

“Why don’t you use a voice interface for the A.I.?”

“Its voice options all annoyed me.  I disabled them until I could reprogram one that didn’t remind me of an ex-girlfriend.”

“How long ago was that?”  First she tries to kill me now she’s a chatterbox.

“Three years ago,” he finally answered.  “And seven ex-girlfriends.”

“Do we have commitment issues?  Or are we just a compulsive asshole?,” she asked with a pouty expression. 

What did I do to deserve this?  I don’t strictly practice any religion but I don’t think I’ve violated any of them to the point to warrant this.  Maybe it’s just karma.  Maybe I died in the wormhole and this is hell. 

“Listen Buttercup…” 

“My name is…” she started with an angry tone.  Sebastian cut her off with a look and a wave of his hands.

“I.  Don’t.  Care.”  They both turned back to their respective monitors.  All in all the Sloth was in good condition.  Hull integrity was strong.  He’d swapped out fuel rods for the engine recently so they were good there.  The reserves of air and water could be better.  Food would be the issue.  And by food he meant beer.

“Hey Scruffy.” 

“Yes Buttercup?”  They both glared at each other for several seconds.

“Can’t the computer tell us where we are?” she finally asked.

“With enough processing time and a large enough star map maybe.  Unfortunately we don’t have months to wait or a star map of the known universe.”

“Which is another way of saying you haven’t thought to ask yet?”  Veronica.  That’s who she reminded him of.  Sebastian had dated her before…Suzi?  Sue?  Suzanne!  That was it.  He’d dated Veronica before Suzanne.  Suzanne who got angry when he called her Sue.  And got really pissed when he called her Veronica. 

“Jocko, do you know where we are?”  Sebastian asked slowly, enunciating each word pointedly in her direction.

“Your A.I. is named Jocko?  Who would name their A.I. Jocko?  What does that even mean?”

“Shut.  Up.  Jocko, do you know where we are?”

Space.  Oh hardy har har.  It would be annoying except Sebastian was pretty sure who the A.I. had learnt sarcasm from.  Instead of complaining or commenting he just waited silently.  That was usually what Sebastian’s girlfriends did.  For a while.

There are no star matches.  A slide show of star images progressed across the main screen.  The female stowaway, henceforth known as Buttercup, floated over beside Sebastian so she could see the A.I. interface screen.

Star densities suggest a spiral galaxy.  The images continued to shift on the screen but at a higher rate.  With a general location closer to the galactic core than the Earth system.

“Wonderful.  You’ve narrowed it down to about half of the Milky Way.”  Sebastian gave Buttercup an ‘I told you so’ look.

I didn’t say that.  I cannot confirm we are in the Milky Way galaxy.

“You think we’re in another galaxy?  How is that even possible?” asked Buttercup.  Then turning to Sebastian, “Your A.I. is an idiot.”

I didn’t say we weren’t in the Milky Way either.

“So basically, you don’t know where we are,” stated Sebastian.

Space.

A half hour later they hadn’t come to any better conclusion.  Buttercup had gone below to the berthing area to get cleaned up.  In other words, to pee.  Sebastian was left alone in the cockpit to contemplate their options.  He had already eliminated die as an option.  That option just didn’t offer much to him.  It did rate higher than find a habitable planet and start raising an offshoot of the human race with Buttercup.  Earth had Adam and Eve.  Earth-2 could have Sebastian and Buttercup.  Dying actually offered a little more to Sebastian than that option.  Getting home seemed to offer the best options but had the fewest instructions.

“Jocko, do you know where the wormhole exit is?”  It was an obvious question.  One that should have been asked seconds after they realized there was a problem.  Without a beacon micro-wormholes were notoriously hard to locate with a single small ship. 

Yes. 

“A little more information would be useful.” 

The Sloth is holding station 20 km from the wormhole.  Just inside the jump zone.  Close enough to keep a clean lock on the wormhole emissions and gravimetric effects.  Very clever of the A.I. to do that, without being told to.

“Is there anything unique about this end of the wormhole?  I mean, besides being in an unknown system.”

The parameters are statistically similar to all other destination wormholes.  Destination wormhole indicating that it went somewhere as opposed to a maker wormhole like the first one found.  The fact that all the destination wormholes had such similar properties led some physicists to theorize there was something decidedly unnatural about them.  Nature liked randomness. 

“Jocko, is there any way to tell where this end of the wormhole goes?”

I don’t know.

“Who would know?  Maybe we can give them a call.”  I need another beer.  No.  The ship is in rationing mode now.  I should wait.

There is an instructional video in the ship’s wiki-teacher covering wormhole theory.

“Couldn’t hurt.  Tell me about it.”  Apparently I owe Ms. Krause an apology for sleeping through physics class.  She always said she hoped she could be there when I realized how important physics was.  Bet she wouldn’t hope that now.

The video is titled “Wormholes and Jump Point Physics” by Professor Martin Hornblower.  It indicates an audience age of 13 and up.  You should be fine.

“You’re hilarious.  Pull it up on my station.”  Buttercup’s head rose through the rear hatch.  She was sucking on a straw and holding a silver bag in her hand.

“Hey Scruffy.  Do you have any other kind of beer?  This isn’t my favorite.”

They say that in space no one can hear you scream.  But inside the Sloth?  That’s a different story.

Next Chapter: A Snippet from Chapter 5