Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“That looks promising,” she said. “Let’s triangulate.” She set up another jump of just a few light-hours. When she hit “enter” the star shifted quite a ways behind them, and the computer popped up a window with its position and distance. “Okay, we’ve got a lock, and it claims it knows where Gal. Fed. is in its orbit. I’m setting that up in explorer mode, too… and here we go.” She hit the button, and the star became a bright sun. And off in the distance, a winking light drew their eyes toward a space station.

It was a long, flattened-football-shaped thing, with stuff sticking out of it at all angles. It looked a little like a pile of scrap metal, but Trent had seen pictures of it in magazines, and he knew that some of those booms were over a mile long, and the whole body was at least fifteen miles from end to end. It was impressive as hell, fitting for a seat of government. It was also receding at several thousand miles an hour.

“Looks like we’re in for a long vector translation,” Trent said. “Let’s at least let them know we’re here first, and find out where to go.” He turned on the radio and switched to channel 19. He didn’t hear any traffic, so he keyed the microphone and said, “Break one-nine for anybody at Galactic Federation headquarters. This is Trent Stinson requesting permission to come aboard.”

He let off the button and waited a few seconds, and a voice responded, “Welcome, Trentstinson. You are welcome to come aboard, but please don’t attempt the docking yourself. Too many pilots have miscalculated, with unfortunate results. If you’ll shift to channel twenty-nine and transmit a ten-second signal, we will locate you and send a tug out to get you.”

“Hot damn,” Trent said to Donna. “Valet service.” He keyed the microphone and said, “That sounds good to me. Shifting to twenty-nine.” He tuned up ten channels and said, “Trent Stinson on channel twenty-nine, saying sure, come get us. We’ve had more than our share of trouble with this damned navigation program anyway. It took us twenty thousand light-years out of our way, and we spent damned near a week tryin’ to figure out how to get back home. We’d love a ride in.” He let off the microphone and asked Donna, “Was that ten seconds?”

“I think—”

“We have your position,” the voice responded, “and we’re sending the tug now. It’ll take us a few minutes to match your velocity. In the meantime, if you’ll tell us your species, we’ll determine which part of the station to take you to.”

“We’re human,” Trent said. “From Earth,” he added, somewhat reluctantly.

There was a pause, then, “You are Trent Stinson, of Rock Springs, Wyoming?”

Trent raised an eyebrow. Donna smiled and said, “You’re famous.”

“Infamous, more likely,” Trent said. He keyed the microphone and said, “That’s me. Do I know you?”

“You know part of me,” said the voice. “Several of my units once belonged to the being you knew as Tippet.”

Tippet was the alien butterfly that Allen and Judy had met on their first trip, who had turned out to be just one member of a vast hive mind on board an interstellar starship. Tippets were all more or less interchangeable units in the same being, so talking to any of them was like talking to them all. Trent and Donna had met the original on their last trip into space, and they had gotten along famously, after the initial exchange of death threats.

“Well hells bells,” Trent said, “Howdy, old buddy! How’ve you been?”

“Divided,” said the alien. “Tippet’s experience was too valuable to keep to itself, so it shared half of its members with other hives. I am mostly Potikik, a governor hive from our home planet, but I have Tippet’s memories and some of its temperament now. I remember meeting you aboard Tippet’s ship several months ago. Are you still travelling in the same red pickup?”

Trent laughed. “Yep. It’s a little worse for wear these days, but it’s the same one. Are Judy and Allen still hanging out with you guys?”

“They’re here,” said Potikik. “They’ll no doubt want to see you, but their time is limited. They have no extra units to divide their labor, and running the galaxy is hard work.”

“No doubt. I apologize in advance, but I’m afraid we’re going to make that job even harder.”

“Oh? In what way?”

“I don’t know if you realize what the United States is up to, but they’re bombing the shit out of anybody they don’t agree with, and generally making life unpleasant for everybody else. We’ve got to put a stop to that.”

“Ah, yes. Human internal politics. I’m sure they would be happy to discuss it with you.” There was a crackle, then the same voice said, “This is your transfer pilot. Please disengage your hyperdrive engine and refrain from maneuvering while I adjust your velocity for docking.”

Trent saw a flicker of motion out his side window and turned to see a spherical framework of metal beams just a few dozen feet away. It was maybe five feet across, with six arms and six big bell-shaped rocket nozzles evenly spaced around its surface. It drifted closer, and one of the arms reached out and the grapple at its end closed around the roll bar just behind the cab. Trent could see a little glass bubble about the size of a softball in the middle of the framework, with an iridescent blue butterfly floating in its midst, its legs manipulating tiny control levers. Potikik, or one of its hive-mates.

Donna quit the navigation program and unplugged the hyperdrive connector from the back of the computer.

“We’re ready,” Trent said through the radio.

There was a brief moment of disorientation, and they popped out close to a gas giant planet. It was icy blue and dimly lit. Where the sun had been a moment ago, now just a bright star glowed.

“Long ways to go for a vector translation,” Trent said.

The butterfly didn’t reply for a second, but then it said, “Excuse my delay. My mind needs a moment to reset itself after a hyperspace jump, and now that we are away from the hive, my higher functions are mostly artificial. But in answer to your implied question, we have no planets closer in. They have all been eaten by the space stations.”

“Eaten?” Trent wondered if it was his turn to reset his brain, because he couldn’t have heard that right.

“The stations are biological,” said the butterfly. “Engineered, we believe, by a civilization long gone, but they are self-sustaining. They live on sunlight and reproduce by feeding on any matter they encounter. They long ago filled this solar system as far out as sunlight would power them.”

“Oh.”

Donna said, “There must be a hell of a lot of them, if they ate the planets .”

“How many of these space stations are there?” Trent asked their tug pilot.

“Millions,” the butterfly replied.

“All just waiting for people to come live in ’em?”

“Who knows their purpose? But we have colonized several without incident.”

“Huh. They’ve got breathable air in ’em and everything?”

“We import it. We’ve pressurized different sections with different mixtures for different species.”

It was mind-boggling. Millions of space stations, just waiting for anybody who came along. Somebody was thinking ahead.

They fell outward from the gas giant for another couple of minutes, then their pilot said, “Translation will be complete in ten seconds,” and ten seconds later they jumped to within spitting distance of Federation Headquarters.

The station did look organic up close. The long booms visible from a distance looked more rounded, with habitat modules sticking out like mushrooms from their surfaces, and long vine-like tubes connecting them. The core of the station was lumpy and peppered with round ports and windows, like eyes peering out through holes in a blanket.