New Vegas: Sheason's Story

Chapter 154: The Final Frontier

You're listening to the one, the only and still the best Galaxy News Radio! We're Radio Free Wasteland, spinnin' that great guerrilla sound for any willing to fight the Good Fight. I'm your host, Three Dog, and I'm here... for you. Now, it's time for some more music: It's Dinah Washington, singin' about that "Destination Moon." Are you noticing a pattern, children? Because there's definitely a pattern!

You know, I can accept the fact that we're in space. No problem. I mean... we're going to the Moon, after all. So that makes sense. I can also accept the whole alien mothership thing. The appearance and advanced technology used by the Roadkill, the fact that Chris has an alien blaster, his interest in the downed UFO... all that adds up to a big alien something, so I suppose this fits the bill. It makes sense. I can accept that. That's not what's throwing me off here.

No, the thing fucking with me right now is the sudden and unexpected sensation of vertigo that is currently hitting me like a fucking freight train. On the one hand, the sight was undeniably majestic. The inky black void of infinity stretching out forever with the shining blue jewel of Earth below me truly was a magnificent sight to behold, and was something I never expected to see.

And that's kind of the problem, really I couldn't prepare for this. I was very much aware that I was staring out into infinity, and the only thing separating me from nothing was what looked like a thin sheet of glass. I knew what nothing could do to a man. All the horribly painful scenarios I'd seen in sci fi holotapes were flashing through my head like an incredibly gory slideshow of exploding heads and blood boiling out of my ears and a body spiraling off into the depths of space forever to slowly suffocate and freeze to death and... and...

oh fuck me everything is spinning why is everything spinning please make it stop

"Right, so... run this by me again?" Cass said somewhere ahead of me, as the four of us walked along a curved corridor. I grit my teeth, and tried to keep my cool if only on the surface. Just focus, Fisher. Compartmentalize. Keep moving.

"A few years ago, I was abducted by aliens!" Chris said, matter-of-factly. "But as it turns out, I was just a little bit too spicy for Yog Sothoth!"

"Wait, who?" Cass asked. Honestly, I wasn't bothering to be confused. I was just glad for the distraction.

"Nevermind, it's just a figure of speech." Chris continued. "The point is, I promptly escaped, killed all the aliens, had a really climactic showdown in low orbit with another alien mothership, and took this place all for myself! It was just that easy!"

"Somehow I doubt that," I heard Tuera mutter quietly behind me. I snorted out a laugh, but tried to stifle it.

"Nah, I got all that," Cass shrugged, lacing her fingers behind her head as she walked. "What doesn't make sense is... well... you've got this big-ass spaceship, right? What th' fuck do y'even need that Roadkill thing'fer if you can just zip about in this thing?"

"Well, the teleporter doesn't work without coordinates, for one thing!" Chris explained. "If I tried to teleport to a place I've never been to in person, I could wind up torn in half or teleported into rock or something! So, I just use the map data in my Pip Boy if I want to fast travel anywhere, and that means going there in person first. Besides... if I used Zeta to travel everywhere, I'd miss out on so much stuff," He started counting off on his fingers as he spoke. "Adventure, loot, caps, interesting people, fascinating stories... Zapping past that is just no fun!"

"So, how big is this ship, anyway?" I finally grunted out. Just focus on the inside, Fisher. Don't look out the window. Focus. Compartmentalize. Chris spun around on the spot, raised a finger, opened his mouth... and then froze. Cass, Tuera and I paused as well, looking at each other and up at him in confusion.

"Did he just shut down?" Sue squeaked from Cass' chest. "I didn't think he was a robot."

"Uh... Honestly? I'm not sure," Chris finally said, after a very prolonged delay. "You'd have to ask Sally for the best answer, because she knows this place better than anyone. But to be honest, even I don't know how big this place is. Not really."

"But don't you live here?" I asked. Chris nodded.

"Well, yeah, but..." He paused, scratching at the back of his head. "Look, I've had to do spacewalks on the outside of this ship, right? And the exterior dimensions don't seem to gel quite right with the maps I've made of the interior. Every now and again, I'll come across another part of the ship that I've never noticed before, or I'll find some bits of non-Euclidean, alien geometry somewhere... like, a window deep in the interior that looks out into deep space, or rooms that should overlap each other but don't, and hallways that seem much longer or shorter than they should be..." Chris leaned forward, and whispered to us, in a comical conspiratorial manner: "It's subtle, but I'm utterly convinced this ship is slightly bigger on the inside."

That statement was met with dead silence.

"I know it sounds nuts, but hear me out," he turned on his heel and started leading us back down the hallway again. "I've seen a lot of crazy things on this alien spacecraft. Dark Energy teleporters, the extra dimensional gateways linking the decks, that one hypercube I found and almost got lost in for a month, the quantum tunneling drive... This place is just a gigantic middle finger to the laws of physics. The Zetans seemed really obsessed with spatial manipulation and pocket dimensions." Chris paused and cocked his head to the side, thinking; all of us stopped with him. "Not quite as obsessed as they are with Giddyup Buttercup toys, but still. It's a close second." Again, dead silence for a few seconds.

"Do you really expect us to believe that?" Cass asked, breaking the silence.

"I believe it," I said, earning me a bit of a strange look from Cass and Tuera. (At least... I think it was a weird look from her. It was hard to tell with the helmet.) I just shrugged. "Hell, I've seen stranger stuff in the Big Empty," like a gigantic jigsaw labyrinth of moving test chambers underneath the Big Empty crater run by a power mad AI, I didn't say. "And alien teleporters are clearly A Thing That Exist. So why not?"

"Considering that we're in a completely different part of the ship now and you still haven't noticed..." Chris grinned broadly. "I'd say it's pretty believable!"

The three of us looked around and sure enough we were no longer in that same corridor we'd been in when we'd stopped. The four of us were standing on a raised platform on the edge of a large spherical room, dominated in the center by a huge glowing pillar that was humming and pulsating slowly. It looked like an engine room of some sort, complete with dangerous looking machinery, steam vents, and cris-crossing catwalks covered in chrome.

"The fuck?!" Cass shouted hysterically, looking around. "How the hell did we get here?! Weren't we just "

"Sorry about that!" A young sounding feminine voice echoed from somewhere above us. "But you guys were taking too long, so I tapped into the teleport matrix to speed you up a bit."

CLANG!

A metal vent fell down from the ceiling above us, clattering against the chromed metal deck plates with a ring. Cass, Tuera and I all looked up just as a tiny teenage girl in dirty engineer coveralls and combat boots dropped right into the middle of us. She looked up at us with a smile and a wave, brushing her dirty blonde hair (mostly tied behind her head in a long ponytail) out of her eyes. She had a strange metal device attached to her left arm it was definitely alien, and wasn't a Pip Boy, but looked like it served roughly the same purpose. Every pocket of her coveralls seemed to be overflowing; chock full of strange and exotic alien devices of unknown purpose.

"Hello!" she beamed, speaking in a playful sort of sing-song. "I'm Sally, Zeta's second-in-command and chief engineer! Pleased to meet ya!" She extended a hand to us while Chris loomed over her with a raised eyebrow.

"You're Zeta's only engineer, Sal." She had to crane her neck to look up at Chris; the size difference between the two of them was absolutely hysterical.

"Would you rather I call myself Stella Skyfire?" She reached up and flicked Chris right between the eyes; he recoiled with a yelp. "Eh, Captain Cosmos?" She started pointing and laughing at him as Chris rubbed his face. Tuera was the first of us to step forward, as Cass and I were just looking on in confusion.

"Aren't you a little young to be an engineer?" she asked, her tone completely level. A bit... too level, in fact. Was she silently freaking out like I was? At least Cass was freaking out externally about the utter absurdity of our situation.

"Hey now," Sally leaned forward indignantly, placing her hands on her hips. "I'll have you know, I'm older than all of you! Probably." She folded her arms across her chest in what I can only assume was supposed to be an indignant gesture. "I'm two hundred and sixteen years old, thank you very much! I think that's quite old enough to be chief engineer of a starship, so there!" As if to punctuate her thought, she stuck her tongue out at Tuera... and then Chris reached around, grabbing her in a headlock. "GAHK!"

"You were frozen for most of that time, Sal!" As he spoke, he bopped her on the head gently and gave her a playful noogie to her vocal and quite apparent annoyance.

"Let me go, ya big lummox!" She started laughing, flailing in his grip, and trying to punch him in the side of his head. "Lemme go! I'll bite yer legs off! Raarrghlgh!"

"AHEM." Tuera grunted out loudly. "If you two are quite finished, we have work to do." The two of them paused in their playful mock-fight, and they both got back on their feet.

"Right, the Enclave HQ!" Sally nodded, snapping her fingers. "That reminds me. You didn't say in your message where we're going. Where are we going?" Chris looked momentarily sheepish and grinned, scratching at the back of his head.

"Wellll... the thing is... we're going... to... the Moon." Cass and I looked at each other curiously, wondering why he was so embarrassed.

"AH-HAH!" Sally shouted, clapping excitedly and pointing straight at Chris. "I knew it! Pay up!" Chris sighed and shook his head.

"Man, this trip is becoming expensive..." he laughed. He noticed our confused expressions and clarified: "The two of us had a bet about where we were going to eventually find the Enclave headquarters." Sally swatted Chris against the side of his metal arm.

"He thought it was gonna be somewhere like Alaska or Hawaii. Maybe an old military base overseas, like in Germany somewhere. You know, someplace sensible or practical! But I told him this: 'It's you! Your life is completely ridiculous, and it'll end up being a secret Nazi moon base, for sure,' but he didn't believe me!" She patted his chest and rubbed her fingers together eagerly. "Now, come on. I've been waiting to collect on this for two years!"

"Hopefully, we'll all live long enough for you to waste it," Chris said cheerfully. "But Tuera over there is right, we have work to do. Think we should show them the War Room?" Sally nodded, turned on her heel without a word, and tapped a few buttons on her wrist mounted alien computer. There was a rumble of moving machinery at the edge of the platform, and suddenly the metal began to rearrange itself turning into a staircase leading down.

"Follow me, I know the way," Sally said as she hopped down the stairs. "And I promise no air vent escapes!"

"That's what you said the last time I got lost in Waste Disposal..." Chris grumbled, following her down the stairs.

The 'teleportation matrix' on this ship feels strange, simply because... it doesn't feel like anything at all. I walked forward, stepping on an orange metal disk on the floor, there's a barely perceptible shimmer, and suddenly I'm in a completely different location with no loss of momentum whatsoever. No yanking sensation in the pit of my gut, no vertigo, no... nothing.

I looked around this new room, to try and figure out where I was now. Like everything else on this ship, there was chrome everywhere, but quite a lot more besides. He called this a war room, but it honestly looked a lot like a trophy cabinet mixed with an armory. There were dozens of weapons mounted on pegboard walls, but they were all labeled and quite a few of them looked like they'd exploded from the inside. Broken pieces of those humanoid robots we'd fought littered several of the tables, with signs poking out of them that said things like "SHOOT HERE MORON!" Off in the corner, I saw what looked like half of one of those flying wings.

There were also multiple different suits of damaged power armor, also labeled like the weapons and robots. X-01: "Advanced," X-02: "Adv. MkII," X-03: "Hellfire," and so on. The numbers went all the way up to X-06, which read "?" but I could tell (even through all the melted pieces and bullet holes) that this was the type of armor worn by the Enclave troops that teleported into Vegas.

I wandered deeper into the room, to try and see what I could find. Hidden behind several pairs of power armor was a map of the US mounted on the wall; it had dozens of push-pins and twice as many lines of colored string connecting them. While the teleport matrix disk hummed over and over again, I just took in all the details of the map. All the labeled pins were Enclave bases Chris had "visited," complete with a few pictures and base layouts here and there, to fully drive home just how big each base had been. Sure, I'd heard him before when he listed off the names, but I didn't quite realize...

Raven Rock. Adams Air Base. The Joliet Arsenal. The Redstone Arsenal. Fort Bragg. Fort Knox. Fort Hood. Tyndall Air Base. Parris Island. Minot Air Base. There was even a marker for a place called CFB Edmonton in fucking Canada! How could there possibly be this many?!

"You have questions," Chris said, appearing at my shoulder. I'll give him his due: for someone that huge, he can move silent as a cat. I nodded slowly, my eyes never leaving the map.

"Y'know... before this afternoon, I was under the impression that the Enclave were a bunch of a beaten-down old timers. Just a handful of old fucks, still fighting the same war they lost 40 years ago. At least, that's what it sounded like whenever Veronica or Arcade brought them up..." I turned to Chris, gesturing at the map. "This... this is insane! And this isn't even counting that moon base we know fuck-all about! Where the hell are they getting all this manpower?!"

"I have a few theories," Chris said with a shrug. "Nothing I've ever been able to prove, but they all revolve around that place." Chris pointed at a spot on the map, and I leaned in to read the label. It was Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but there was another, smaller note under the name:

"... who the hell is Gary?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it," Chris said with a nod. "We've got other things to worry about." He grabbed me by the shoulder, spun me around, and I realized that there was a new table in the middle of the room that hadn't been there before. Had I just not noticed it because of everything else in the room, or was this more of that bizarre alien techno-sorcery architecture?

"Alright, stop flirting you two," Sally's voice called out to us; she popped up from behind the table with a chromed metal rod some kind of alien tool in her hands. "Get over here. We're burning daylight." Sally flicked a switch somewhere and the emitters began to hum and glow. And then they flickered and shut off. She gave the table one solid THUMP! with the tool in her hands, and it came back to life.

"No we're not! We're in space," Chris shot back with a smile. "Day is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It's not applicable."

Sally glared up at Chris, who just grinned broadly. Without a word, she very calmly threw the metal tool in her hands, and it smacked him square in the middle of his forehead. He yelped, flailing in an overzealous and highly comical fashion.

"Don't be a smartass!"

"Jesus, dude!" Cass yelled, recoiling from the sudden outburst. "Calm the fuck down!" Sally, however, just waved it off dismissively.

"Pfft. C'mon, Chris has been hit in the face with exploding tank shells before. He doesn't care."

"It's true!" Chris chimed in with a smile, holding up the tool that had been thrown at his face. "Sal gets to blow off steam, and I get my hydrospanner back! Everyone wins!" He scratched at the side of his head, inspecting the metal rod in his hands and muttered quietly: "I wondered where this had run off to..."

"We're getting off topic," Tuera leaned against the table, growling at us irritably. "I'm not sure we ever got on topic... We need to plan our attack."

"Wait, that's what you think this is?" Chris asked, apparently confused.

"I thought that's what this was!" Sally said indignantly. "That's why I brought out the holographic planning table!"

"I just brought you guys down here so you could see the kind of hardware we're up against. Granted, you -" Chris motioned at Tuera "- probably know more than any of us, but still." Tuera stared at him, her expressionless helmet conveying her intent perfectly. Somehow.

"So. What is the plan of attack?" She asked. Chris shrugged.

"I dunno. I'm not really good at the whole 'plans' thing. I make shit up as I go, so usually my 'plan' is attack." Tuera hung her head and sighed, and Cass laughed, batting me in the side.

"Fuck me, no wonder you two get along so well," she said. I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

"We still need to-" Tuera began, but halted the instant she heard the teleport matrix at the other end of the room activate. Everyone we knew about was already here... so who was coming? In an instant, she drew the two energy pistols strapped to her hips, and I pulled out That Gun; the two of us pointed our guns at the orange glow above the platform. Neither of us fired as an olive-green Mr. Gutsy robot materialized in the air above the disk.

"HAH! Excellent!" The robot bellowed, in a gruff voice like an old-world drill sergeant. "Looks like your new recruits are locked, cocked, and primed for combat, sir! That is good!" Tuera and I lowered our guns more confused, than anything else. The floating robot made a beeline for Chris, and used one of its three arms to salute up to one of its three eye cameras. Chris returned the salute crisply.

"Sergeant! It's good to see you, RL-3. What are you doing below decks?"

"SIR!" The green robot barked. "Science officer Brown thought you could use some grenades, sir!"

There was a very long pause.

"...grenades?" Chris asked, uncertainly. RL-3 wobbled in place, as if thinking.

"She might have said 'help,' sir," RL-3 finally replied. Sally buried her face in her hands, trying desperately not to laugh. She failed.

"Alright, so," I did my best to keep from laughing as well. "What's the plan?"

"I got an idea," Cass said, holding up a finger. "Why'n we just blow up th' Moon?" She looked around at the stunned faces all around her, and pointed at Chris and I. "Oh, c'mon! Don't even try an' tell me you two weren't thinkin' it! Things fuckin' explode around th' both of you motherfuckers!"

"I like your moxie, soldier!" RL-3 laughed raucously, hovering around us. "You found us a good recruit, this time!"

"You know, I'm no expert on this," Chris coughed nervously. "But I'm pretty sure blowing up the Moon is a bad idea."

"That's rich coming from you," Sally laughed. "Aren't you the guy who once said 'if your problem can't be solved with high explosives, it just means you're not using enough?"

"I... ah... Okay, yeah, you got me there." Chris shook his head. "But c'mon, it's the Moon. We can't blow up the Moon!"

"So, not th' whole thing, then," Cass came back, clearly having a lot of fun with this; Tuera was off to the side, rubbing the side of her helmet. "How 'bout we just blow up th' part under th' Enclave base? Th' Moon's got so many craters, I don't think anyone'll notice a few more."

"Destroying it is kind of a given," I said. "That's why we're in a spaceship in the first place."

"She does have a good point," Sally chimed in. "We could always use the Death Ray. I mean, I am fairly confident that I've got the cooling system issues worked out from the last time we tested it out..."

Cass eyed Sally with a raised eyebrow, and very quickly shuffled her way over to me, whispering in my ear: "Did she just fuckin' say Death Ray?" I nodded.

"I believe she did, yes." As the two of us were talking, Chris was fiddling with some controls on the edge of the table, finally making some use of the damn thing. The emitters glowed brightly and hummed, creating the shimmering image of... of... what is that supposed to be? A map?

"Yeah, we're probably going to start with the Death Ray," Chris said, trying to fine tune the hologram. "Because one, it's the Moon, so no collateral damage, and two, it's the Death Ray, and I love firing that thing because it's awesome."

"We once spent a week in the asteroid belt, firing it off at anything that looked at us funny," Sally explained, turning to Cass and I. "Basically we were playing 'Asteroids.' With actual asteroids."

"That was an excellent campaign, make no mistake!" RL-3 bellowed in agreement.

"But I don't want to rely on the big green beam of doom," Chris finished his thought, smacking the table once more for good measure. Suddenly, a semi-transparent dome appeared in the air above the 3D map. "For one thing, I'd be prepared to bet money that this Moon base has a plasma shield, like that one we saw above Minot, remember?"

"Wait, plasma shield?!" Cass blurted out. "Th' fuck is a plasma shield?"

"I say we just roll with it, at this point..." I whispered in her ear with a laugh. "You know it's only going to get more nuts from here."

"Another bet, huh?" Sally asked, ignoring Cass' confusion. Chris nodded in response.

"I've lost a lot of money on this trip, and I'd like to make some of it back."

"A plasma shield isn't all we have to worry about," Tuera muttered, leaning against the table to get a closer look. She pointed at something near the edge of the map, and looked back up at Chris. "You said this is a map of Minot Air Base, yes?" Chris nodded. "These are SAM emplacements along the edge. Surface-to-air missile batteries. Control Station Enclave in the Pacific had similar defenses. The Lunar Base will definitely have them." Chris furrowed his brow at her words.

"You sure?" he asked. Tuera nodded curtly.

"The Enclave are paranoid, and justifiably so. Whatever defenses you've seen in the past, the Lunar Base will have all of them and more. I'm sure of it." Tuera looked back down at the map, scanning the image for a few seconds before looking back up at Chris. "Do you have maps of the other bases you've attacked?"

"Well... yeah, I do, but shouldn't you know more than " Chris began, but Tuera cut him off swiftly.

"I haven't been to an Enclave installation in 40 years," she said. "For the last thirteen, I've been going from mission to mission in the wasteland, getting resupplied by airdrop and orders by com. You seem to have more intel on modern Enclave tactics and bases than I do, so lets put it to good use..." She looked down at the holographic map again, drumming her fingers against the table. "The only way this will work is if we have a plan. A well-oiled plan." She looked up and stared at Chris, the yellow eyes on her helmet flashing slightly. "And what's the most important part of a well-oiled plan?"

"Seriously? I fly by the seat of my pants all the time, why are you asking me?" Chris tapped his chin thoughtfully, and shrugged. "Pfft. Alright, I dunno. Being one step ahead?"

"One step ahead isn't a plan, kid..." she scoffed. "Two to three steps ahead, though? Beating an enemy's move before it's even made? That's a plan." Tuera started slowly nodding. "That's what I do best."

After about an hour or so, we all made our way to the bridge of this alien mothership. At least, I think it was an hour. I'm honestly not sure how much time had passed, because the clock on my Pip Boy just kept flashing "N/A" at me in big, bold letters. Not only that, but... we were in space. Kinda hard to tell what time it is when there's no horizon.

And we certainly had quite the view of that 'no horizon' in front of us. At the far end of the bridge were four tall windows, like the kind you'd see in a sunroom or conservatory, providing us with a panoramic vista looking out into deep space. I think I must have been getting used to this, because I wasn't getting hit with the same level of vertigo as before.

"Well, here we are!" Chris strode past us, and flopped down into the captain's chair right in the middle of the room. "This is where the magic happens!"

Out of everything I'd seen so far on this ship, the bridge definitely looked the most hap-hazard. While there was certainly a lot of alien technology (and quite a lot of chrome besides), there was just as much human made crap wired up into everything. It reminded me a lot of what the Penthouse looked like after I first installed Yes Man into the mainframe, and April and Emily started making themselves at home. And it certainly looked plenty lived in, with the neon Nuka Cola sign, the Galaxy News and Captain Cosmos posters, the strings of Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, and the tiny toy dinosaurs perched on every console.

"Oh! Hi!" I heard a cheery voice from the front of the room, and a woman appeared, climbing up a set of stairs I hadn't noticed before. "I was wondering when the new arrivals would get here! Always keen to meet new people!"

The woman was a redhead in an old RobCo jumpsuit underneath a dirty labcoat, and she had a pair of glasses perched on the end of her nose but as she rushed up to greet us, I realized that they had no lenses. She grinned broadly, shaking my hand and looking at me with a crazy, wild-eyed enthusiasm that almost reminded me of Dala. I wasn't quite sure why at first. And then:

"By the way don't mind the smell!" She said with a nervous laugh. "I was just testing out a few chemicals, but it's perfectly safe to breathe really!" Ah, that explains it. She's a mad scientist! And then I thought about that. Oh fuck. She's a mad scientist.

This will not end well for me, will it?

"Ladies and men, meet Moira Brown, chief science officer aboard Zeta and one of my oldest friends," Chris said, lounging in his chair and idly spinning back and forth.

"This is more of a hobby, really!" she said, stepping back after shaking all our hands. "I consider myself more of a researcher and a publisher these days. You should see the new printing press I put into Craterside Supply a few weeks ago! It's huge!"

"Maybe we'll schedule a field trip after we finish with the Moon," Chris said, flicking the hula girl mounted on end of the chair's arm-panel. "Speaking of which, have you figured out how long the trip is going to take?" Moira nodded several times, almost dislodging the glasses on her nose, and rushed over to one of the control panels on the wall. She pulled a pencil out of her labcoat and quickly tapped a series of holographic buttons with the eraser. The lights flickered and dimmed, and a large hologram appeared in front of the windows; it looked like the Earth, the Moon, and a curved, dotted line connecting the two, complete with several blocks of floating numbers.

"Absolutely! The safest way to get to the Moon is going to be the sublight engines. If we maintain a solid cruising speed of 13 kilometers a second, we should get there in just about eight hours!"

"Wait, hold th' fuck up!" Cass brushed past me. "Why's it gonna take eight hours? We're in a spaceship! An alien spaceship, at that! Can't this bitch go faster'n light?" Behind me, I heard Sally let out a groan.

"Oh, man. Here we go again..."

"Well... yes... and no," Chris said with a shrug. "This ship has a faster than light drive-"

"No, it doesn't!" Moira leaned against one of the railings, cutting him off. "I keep telling you, the warp drive doesn't actually make us go faster than the speed of light, because we're not accelerating when it-"

"MOIRA!" Chris shouted, holding up his hands to try and get her to stop. "I know this, and you know this. But I don't think our friends want to spend the whole eight hour trip up here listening to the two of us bickering about special relativity, relativistic quantum physics, and trying to explain the concept of 'R.' I'm trying to make things simple enough to understand." Chris spun the chair around to look at us once more. "Like I was saying, this ship has an FTL drive, but it has a very sticky throttle. So to speak."

"The first time we tried it out, he aimed us at Jupiter." Sally said, leaning around Tuera. "But within seconds, the ship was in orbit around Proxima Centauri. It took us four months to get back to Earth."

"The Moon is one light second away," Chris continued. "I don't want to risk an overshoot, so I think we'll cruise around at 30,000 miles an hour. Which is nothing to sneeze at, let's be honest!"

"Seems reasonable," Tuera muttered quietly.

"Besides," Chris leaned back in his chair, and smiled. "This will give us all plenty of time to rest up, eat up, and gear up. If tomorrow ends up as crazy I think it's going to be, we're all going to need to be fresh. So! Without further ado..." Chris swiveled around, and pointed at the windows. "Engage!"

Moira pressed a button on a nearby console. The deck below my feet shuddered, and the stars beyond the window began to shift. As we all started to leave, I heard Chris and Moira talk about one last thing.

"Hang on. Someone's missing..." Chris snapped his fingers. "Oh, right! Elliott! Hey, Moira? Have you seen Tercorien?"

"Yeah, he's in the Med Lab. When he found out we were going to the Moon, he wanted to make sure we had enough adapted biogel in stock."

"That's a good idea. We may need some on-the-fly patching up when things get loud. And at least he's not going through the archived captive recordings again..." Chris chuckled. "We don't have time for another one of his theories about why the aliens were abducting people."

There were bedrooms on the ship that Chris had set aside for us to use, but... it was pretty obvious that wasn't what they were supposed to be. All the furniture looked like it had been brought onto the ship from Earth; the bed had definitely seen better days. But it was reasonably comfortable, and as I lounged on the cot I realized I was actually enjoying the view beyond the window, if nothing else.

I think I was finally getting used to the sight of deep space. Maybe it was because it just looked like the night sky now. Without a planet in view, it didn't make me feel like I was falling.

Knock knock.

"S'open," I called casually, not really wanting to get up. The door hissed and slid open.

"Hey man. Can't sleep, so I thought I'd bug ya," Cass casually sauntered into the room; I sat up, and she sat down on the bed next to me. Like me, she'd discarded all her gear somewhere, but she wasn't wearing her hat or leather jacket either. She looked around and whistled. "Fuck, yer room's small as mine, innit?" I shrugged.

"Eh, it's not so bad. Hell, I can't even count the number of times I've had to sleep in my car, or on rocks out in the wasteland..." I chuckled, wrapping an arm around her shoulder; she leaned into me. "This is cushier than I was expecting, to be honest."

"Yeah... yer right. Not s'bad... Oh!" Cass snapped her fingers, sat up straight, and reached behind her. "I got a present for ya." She grinned... and pulled out the alien blaster, handing it to me.

"The... where'd you get this?" I asked. Cass smiled and prodded the side of my head.

"Where d'ya think, numbnuts? I grabbed it from th' trunk've yer car before we left. I talked t'Chris, an' he's got plenty've spare ammo. So now I can finally see what this thing does!" I looked at the alien weapon in my hands with a smile and a laugh, pulling Cass against me in a hug.

"And that's why I'm glad you're here, Cass. You're always looking out for me..." I trailed off when I realized she wasn't looking at me. She was looking down at the floor, just sort of staring blankly at nothing... and then she reached over, resting a hand on my knee. I set the alien pistol aside. "Cass? What's wrong?"

"It's... just..." Cass started shaking her head. "We're in space, dude! Fuckin' space! This is... nuts." She looked up at me, and that was genuine worry in her eyes. "Are we in over our heads, here?"

"Probably," I said with a shrug. "But we're gonna be fine. I know it." Cass looked confused.

"How? How d'you know that? Fuck, how th' fuck are you not freakin' th' fuck out 'bout all this shit?"

"Oh, trust me..." I chuckled, drawing her in closer. "I've been freaking out plenty. But that doesn't do us any good, so I guess... I've just decided to roll with it. Accept the madness, and move on."

"Yeah?" she asked. I nodded.

"Yeah. This world is batshit, make no mistake. And after all I've seen, it's made me realize..." I turned to Cass and grinned; she smiled back, stronger than before. "The only way to stay sane is to go just a little bit crazy."