Janea awoke to the sensation of someone licking her face.

Fortunately, that someone was her dog and not one of her crewmates. Her brown eyes blinked open, and she gazed up at the little white ball of fuzz floating above her, flipped upside down. The little dog, Snowy, panted and wagged her tail excitedly at the sight of Janea waking up. She was fruitlessly dog paddling in the air in an attempt to get closer to Janea.

We're in zero gee. That couldn't be right, Albatross was supposed to be under thrust for another thirty hours. So, either Janea had managed to oversleep by almost two days, or the main drive had cut out. Again. Janea smushed her face into her pillow and gave a muffled shriek of frustration.

It’s a wonder we don’t go bankrupt with how often this damned heap of a starship shits the bed.

The thought had barely been formed in her mind before Snowy crashed back down into Janea, knocking the wind out of her. After a brief, startled yelp, Snowy seemed happy to be on her own four feet again, and excitedly crawled over to Janea and sniffed her relentlessly.

Shoving the fuzzy face away, Janea sat up in her bed. Maybe Sandra was just doing some quick maintenance? Her confusion turned to concern when the engine cut out again and she was left floating cross-legged in the air. She held Snowy in her lap and absent-mindedly pet the stubby pooch while she pondered. Maybe they’re just testing it?

Her thoughts were interrupted once again as she was suddenly flung against the wall. She’d managed to cushion Snowy with her body, so no harm was done. She’d expected a sore back, but the force that had flung her to the side had been surprisingly…light. That was a maneuvering burn! Why the hell are we doing emergency maneuvers?

The ship’s elderly, diluted alarm sang a morose, drawn out tune, and Lance’s voice came over the intercom. “Action stations! Action stations! We’re under attack!”

“SHIT!” Janea yelled, clutching Snowy and propelling herself away from the wall. She snatched up the emergency kennel and stuffed the shrieking canine into it. It was a cramped little thing, designed to provide a safe, stable, airtight place to put a small animal in the event of a spaceborne emergency. Snowy was not exactly a devoted fan of the device, hence the shrieking.

“Trust me girl, you’ll like it a lot better in here than out there.” Janea said, as she activated the kennel’s magnets and it attached itself to the floor. Ignoring the tiny dog’s howls she propelled herself out of her room, slapping the door control on the way out. She was shooting down the hallway when the thrust suddenly returned, and Janea had the wind brutally knocked out of her again as she face-planted onto the hallway floor. I am going to strangle Lance if I survive the next five minutes.

The hatch to the control room opened, and-with the thrust still simulating gravity-Janea came in at a brisk walk.

“What the hell is going on?” Janea said, struggling not to let her fear make her shout.

“Strap yourself in. Now.” he said with a terrifying calm.

Janea obeyed immediately, and she felt her blood turn to ice water. If there’s one thing she’d learned about the ship’s easy-going pilot in the time she’d known him, it was that he only started giving orders when things were really, really bad.

Akito and Sandra came into the control room, and Akito spoke first, his gravelly baritone sounding equal parts afraid and annoyed. “What the hell is-”

“Both of you. Strapped in. Now.” Just like Janea, they immediately obeyed, all blood draining from their faces as they did so. Lance didn’t make a habit of giving orders to the people who signed his paychecks, a fact that was not lost on the couple.

When he saw everyone was strapped in, Lance spoke. “Diln Raider, pounced on our ass out of a particle cloud. Nearly barrelled right into its mass driver barrage.”

He laughed bitterly “Dodging that shit woke me up real good. I’m lucky I didn’t splatter you three against the wall.”

He looked at one of his monitors in disgust, then transferred it over to Janea’s console. It was the sensor read out. The fear subsided, and the old tried and true Space Force training kicked in as she suddenly became a sensors officer again. She gazed at the sensor contact, and then at the image the Albatross’s telescopes had produced of it. It was a brutally efficient design, little more than a set of modular containers bolted to a drive, with nothing protecting it but a few strategically placed Whipple shields meant to guard against micro meteors and little else. Its most stand out features were its trio of light magnetic cannons, which it had fired its initial volley with, and the light laser cannon mounted on its nose, which looked for all the world like a gigantic camera.

Looking at his own console, Akito spoke up. “Why are we going away from civilized space? Aren’t we going for help?”

Lance grimaced at that. “That rail gun volley was never meant to hit us, it was meant to force us into an evasive burn in the direction of their choosing. It put us on a vector heading in the opposite direction of help. The longer we run, the further away we get. If we try decelerating, we jump straight into their waiting arms. Crafty bastards.”

“A-...are you sure it’s Diln? That doesn’t look like a Diln Fleet ship to-” Sandra started.

Lance tapped a key on his keyboard. A decidedly unpleasant barrage of alien noises poured out of his speakers, but it was soon overlaid with the classically dull synthetic voice of a translator software.

“Attention unidentified freighter, this is the Diln ship Krashtfivlnier , operating under the authority of the Supreme Commander of the Diln Hegemony. Decelerate immediately and prepare to be boarded for a contraband inspection. Attention unident-”

Lance tapped the key again and the speakers fell silent. “It’s a Diln ship. Privateer, most likely.”

Akito swore. “Is there anywhere left in this galactic arm that isn’t overrun by those bastards?”

“ ‘Contraband Inspection’? Does anyone fall for that?” Janea asked incredulously

“Any particular reason we aren’t dumping the cargo and running like hell?” Sandra asked. Akito looked like his soul had left his body as the amount of money he was about to lose was calculated by his brain.

“Won’t do any good.” Lance said.

“They’re faster than us?” Janea asked.

Lance snorted “Everyone is faster than Allie. She accelerates like a pregnant hippo, and that’s when she’s not loaded up with a fat stack of cargo containers. We might buy a few more minutes if we dump the cargo, but it’ll be more useful as extra mass to put between ourselves and that laser.”

“That’s our plan? Just sit there and take the laser pulse?” Akito said, having recomposed himself.

“You’re the captain, pal. I just fly the ship. If you’ve got an actual plan, I’d love to hear it.” Lance said.

Akito sighed. “None that aren’t just as likely to get us killed as they are to work.”

“Detecting a big heat buildup on that bogey!” Janea said, slipping into that accursed military lingo she could never seem to completely rid herself of.

The thrust abruptly cut again, and Lance swore. “ I thought we’d have more time. They’re way outta range for a flashlight like that. Must be a custom build, some kind of long range disabler, for cooking through engine modules with one long range pulse.”

There was a slight weight on the crew as the maneuvering thrusters fired.

“What are you doing?” Akito asked.

“Flipping us over. Don’t want some trigger happy idiot frying us in one shot when they get into close range. Beyond that, I have no ideas.” Lance turned to the other three crew members.

Janea looked at the various images of the ship produced by the Albatross’s telescopes. “Damn, those radiators are white hot. I don’t think it’s going to be shooting anything for a while yet.”

“...in that case, I think we still have a play to make.” Akito said.

He keyed the comm, “Attention Diln ship, our propulsion is out and we are at your mercy, we are standing by to be boarded.” A synthetic rendering of the Diln tongue was fabricated by the ship’s computer, and a translation was made of the message and beamed to the Diln ship. The vessel burned on an intercept vector.

“So, you planning on dying as a slave in some Diln factory, or do you actually have a plan?” Lance asked.

Sandra looked thoughtful, then she seemed to have a sudden realization, and she reached over and slapped Akito’s shoulder. “I told you to get rid of those things. If we ever run into a customs officer who gives a shit, we’ll be thrown in prison!”

Akito looked back with a shit-eating grin. “Aren’t you glad I never listen to you?”

She smacked him again.

—

Albatross drifted, and the Diln raider came alongside, attempting to drift parallel and align its docking clamps. As it drew close, trap doors in Albatross’s side opened, and a flight of six rockets, little bigger than those that would come out of a man-portable launcher, shot out. They were cheap, unguided, useless beyond absurdly close range. Yet, they sheared through the measly converted-freighter hull like a hot knife, and detonated their dirt cheap chemical explosives. The entire raider went up in an explosive decompression.

It was an ambush weapons system. It had been designed for exactly this scenario, to serve as a hidden shiv against pirates and raiders. Unfortunately, criminals could get their hands on them just as easily, and after the loss of many law enforcement ships and crews, the various governments of the galaxy decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and banned them.

While its illegality was its final downfall, in truth it had never been a particularly popular weapons system before hand. Not because it wasn’t effective, but rather because it was a bit too effective.

Albatross received a demonstration of this as the explosion of the Diln ship scorched her hull and battered her with debris, sending her into a spinning, ragged vector.

—

“The reactor is cooked, it would take a miracle to get it working again outside of a drydock, but that doesn’t even matter, because our drive cone got melted to slag as well. Even if we could fire the engine, we’d just blow ourselves up.”

Sandra turned and gave a baleful look to Akito.

“Well, we’re not going to die in a Diln factory, but we are going to starve to death. Or maybe we’ll freeze first. Brilliant plan, my love. Your genius knows no limits.”’

“Whine all you want, the fact is that we’d be naked and shivering in their cargo bay by now if we hadn’t used that thing.” Akito replied defensively

“I…know, love. But you can maybe understand why that doesn’t exactly leave me feeling very optimistic, yes?” came his wife’s tired reply.

Janea fiddled with her console, trying to scrape together a distress signal with the ship's battered comm laser.

Lance looked over at her. “You’d be as well to shut it down and save us the power. The signal would’ve had a hard enough time making it that far through Dark Space when the comm laser wasn’t recently-exploded. A carrier pigeon would probably be more reliable at this rate.”

She gave him an annoyed look. “You’ve got a better idea, then? Cause from where I’m standing it looks like we’re going to die without help.”

Lance took a while to respond. “...I might, actually. Been looking at the star charts and survey logs we downloaded on our last stop in port. Systems in this area are all a whole lotta nothing, for the most part, but there was one that got flagged for investigation by a survey probe a while back. Supposedly, it detected possible signs of a life-bearing world in this system here. It also detected what might have been artificial light emanating from it.”

Janea looked at him for a long moment. “...you’re joking, right?”

Akito was looking at the probe data of the system himself. “Lance, this is a white dwarf. I’m no astrophysicist, but the simple fact that it exists means that it has died in spectacular, apocalyptic fashion, destroying every planet in its orbit. How would there be a life-bearing planet there?”

“Maybe it's an extrasolar capture?” Lance replied defensively.

“If it’s in the habitable zone of a white dwarf, then that means it’s tidally locked. Not exactly ideal conditions for complex life.” Janea chimed in.

“Even if there is an alien civilization-and there almost certainly is not, I will add-what’s your plan for when we magically get there? This isn’t exactly the same as asking the neighbors for sugar.”

“He’s too young to get the joke, love.” Sandra said.

“Yeah, but he’s old enough to get my point. What exactly makes you think they could, or would help us?”

“We can trade our tech. Teach them how fusion works, or something, in exchange they manufacture a new drive cone for us.” Lance said, increasingly agitated.

“How would we even get there, our drive doesn’t work, remember?” Sandra said.

Lance was quick on the reply. “We’re already headed in the general direction of the system, just a few burns from the maneuvering thrusters and we can get a straight shot to them. From there we just time our exit from Dark Space to be roughly in the star’s habitable zone. Then we perform whatever burns we need to in order to orbit the planet, and then we make first contact.”

Janea snorted. “I’m no pilot, but I think it’ll be a little more complicated than that.”

Akito interjected. “Let me get this straight, Lance. You want us to burn our precious, irreplaceable propellant to set us on a vector towards a star that-by its very nature-is unlikely to have any planets, in order to find a planet that-by its very nature-is unlikely to have intelligent life, to make contact with a pre-space civilization that-by its very nature-is unlikely to have even considered the possibility of aliens existing yet. And then, you want us to make first contact with them, a task that none of us are remotely qualified for. To top it off, all of this is based on a few quick flyby pictures taken by a cheap survey probe. Am I on the money?”

“Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“Perfect.”

Lance looked at each of his three crew mates for a long moment.

“Do any of you have a better idea?”

—

“We’ve got enough energy in the capacitors for one antimatter transfer to the transition drive. Once we transfer into realspace, we won’t have any way to return, we’ll be fully committed.” Sandra said

Akito snorted. “I think we became ‘fully committed’ around the time we used up most of our maneuvering propellant to alter our vector.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. It means that we’d better hope the weather’s nice on that rock.”

“Our fearless leader, everyone.”

Janea rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, you’re both hilarious.”

Sandra turned serious again. “Once the capacitors run dry, the antimatter containment unit will switch to its emergency backup RTGs to maintain containment. We’ll need to eject it before we attempt our orbit burn.”

Janea was confused. “Why? We kind of need that antimatter to, y’know, leave.”

“Because if we screw up and crash into that planet, it’ll just be like a meteor impact. If we screw up and crash with the antimatter core still on board, it will be like a big nuke going off. A really dirty nuke, thanks to those RTGs. Assuming there’s actually people down there, we’d be screwing over an entire civilization just to save our own skins. We can’t do that. It’s not right.”

Lance chimed in. “We can strap it to some of our probes, use their engines to make an orbit of the star. It would be a really shitty orbit, but it would at least be somewhere that we could potentially pick it up if we follow the transponder.”

“Works for me. Awfully optimistic, but it works.” Akito said.

—

Albatross would drift for a few more hours, and the crew took the chance to catch a few hours of sleep. Janea let a decidedly unhappy Snowy out of her kennel (and cleaned the panic-piss out of it) and then strapped herself and the dog to her bed. By the time her alarm woke her up, it was ten minutes to transition.

Lance was already at his pilots console when she came to the control room, and Janea and the other two crew strapped themselves in.

Lance spoke. “Alright folks, transition in three…two…one…”

A transition event was simultaneously magnificent and incredibly dull. From the perspective of Dark Space, the Albatross was there, and then it simply wasn’t. No flash of light or radiation. Just something…to nothing. From the perspective of real space, there was absolutely nothing at a certain point in space, just as there had been for billions of years, then the Albatross was there. No flash, no effect. The ship simply appeared out of nothing. Organic eyes often struggle to process the sight. A biological mind simply wasn’t equipped to process such things. In the biospheres of life-bearing worlds, something did not just abruptly appear where there had previously been nothing one nanosecond before.

Janea sagged into her chair. “Sensors are detecting a rocky terrestrial world…and artificial light emanating from it.”

The weight of the discovery hit the four humans at that moment. They, four tramp spacers, were about to completely change the course of an entire civilization’s history. And they were going to do it so that they could ask them if they had any fusion reactor parts to spare. The absurdity of it made it strangely easier to process.

“So…now what?” Janea asked.

“We decelerate.” Lance said.

Akito snorted. “With what?”

Lance gave a wane smile. “Anything we can.”

—

The mass of cargo containers floated away ahead of Albatross. The crew watched them go on the ship’s cameras. With the stack of containers gone, Albatross’s true, much less impressive size was apparent. It looked essentially like a squat cylinder with an engine bolted onto its rear. It had a large “plate” on its top that the stacks of cargo containers it was tasked with carrying rested upon. It was a hull configuration so common it was practically universal: engine, power plant, and crew module at the bottom. Propellant tanks and other important bits at the top. All of which was encased in a layered hull that protected against spaceborne debris.

Its decks were oriented perpendicular to the thrust, enabling the powerful fusion torch to simulate gravity for the crew when under thrust. With the Albatross’s drive dead, her crew currently drifted in freefall. At the top of the ship, the electromagnets that aided with loading and unloading cargo had been repurposed into a makeshift magnetic cannon, which had propelled the stack of cargo containers ahead of the ship. It served the dual purpose of removing unnecessary mass from the ship, and aiding in the deceleration

Akito tapped at his console. He had been an enlisted tech in a weapons department on a Space Force ship during his mandatory service, and was thus the closest thing the Albatross had to a tactical officer (in addition to being captain). Thus, when the Albatross had to fire its very meager weapons systems, he was the one who took charge of it. These weapons amounted to a pair of point defense guns on either side of the hull which served as a relatively effective defense against the low-quality guided munitions the average pirate ship might have. Her guns had never been fired before outside of tests, but now-at Akito’s command-they unloaded their entire ammunition supply in front of the Albatross. The streams of bullets flew past the cargo containers. The recoil added even more to the deceleration, but Albatross was still moving faster than the Voyager probe had moved back when it had been the fastest man-made object. It would take more than the recoil to slow the ship.

A small door opened in the side of Albatross’s hull, and out of it came a small vehicle. It was the ship’s lander, used to allow the crew to visit ports in the far-flung systems that lacked proper space infrastructure. It had a powerful chemical thruster able to safely land the entire crew in a variety of gravity wells. It now served as the primary means by which the Albatross might hope to achieve orbit.

Lance carefully piloted the lander remotely, docking with the Albatross’s clamp. Then, he ponderously turned the Albatross itself, carefully rationing his movement to avoid using more of the precious maneuvering thruster propellant than he had to. Eventually, the ship was flipped on its side. Lance fired the lander’s drive, and the crew was thrown against their restraints as the inertia of the burn struck. After an unpleasant amount of time spent like this, the thrust was cut.

Lance breathed an exhausted sigh of relief as he examined . “This is the most ragged, half-assed orbit I’ve ever made…but it’s an orbit.”

The crew all let out the breaths they’d been holding.

Lance swiveled to face them. “Well, now we dump all of our water into the lander’s fuel synthesizer and hope it's enough to land.”

—

In the hours waiting for the fuel synthesizer, the crew passed the time by examining the world below them that was their only hope. It was, indeed, tidally locked. Its day side was a boiling desert, and its night side was a freezing desert. In the middle, along the prime meridian, a strip of life grew. It had a range of biomes, with climates determined by proximity to the day or night side. Curiously, the signs of civilization could be seen mostly in an arid patch of land in the northern half of the western hemisphere, smaller than Australia.

Akito looked grim at that. “If they’ve only managed to spread that far, then they might be a lot less advanced than we might have hoped.”

Sandra scoffed. “Akito, they’ve got electricity. If they’ve figured that out, everything else is just…details.”

Akito raised his hands in defeat. “Alright, you’re the engineer. I suppose I should be happy that they’re here at all. Sorry I gave you shit for it, Lance.”

The pilot shrugged. “Can’t really blame you. I thought it was a longshot too. Hell, it still might not work. No guarantees that they won’t just club us over the head and vivisect us.”

“Well, on that lovely thought, I want to let everyone know I’ve finished sending the first contact package.” Janea said.

“What’s in it?” Lance asked.

“It’s a Mak Re first contact program, it comes standard with most ships. It’s basically an algorithm that reduces language to its most fundamental concepts. You transmit it to an alien computer, and then they ‘fill in the blanks’ with their own language. This creates a kernel that the translation software can build off of.”

Akito looked surprised. “How exactly does that work?”

Janea snorted. “Hell if I know. We had, like, one lecture on it in the academy. I’m lucky I remembered it existed at all. Still, it’s from the Mak Re, it’s gotta be good. Nobody does xenolinguistics like the squids.”

“What if they don’t have computers?” Lance asked, tapping the image of the alien planet on the computer screen with his finger.

“Then I hope you're good at charades.”

“Hilarious.”

Sandra interjected. “How do we tell them where we’re landing?”

Janea grimaced. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Akito put his face in his hands. “That’s kind of important for the whole ‘peaceful intentions’ thing.”

“...how about a pictogram?” Lance asked.

“Well, there’s a whole lot of reasons why that might not work. First of all, it involves making the assumption that they not only see light, but see it on a roughly similar spectrum to ourselves.”

“I don’t know about the spectrum, but judging by their use of electric lights, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that they have eyes. Besides, there’s records of pictograms working with past historical first contacts. Sapient minds are by definition capable of reasoning, and carefully designed pictograms can appeal to that.” Sandra said.

“I can make it!” Lance said excitedly.

His three crewmates looked at him with surprise.

He looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “One of my electives in the academy was graphic design.”

This time it was Janea putting her face in her hands. “God help us.”

—

The crew had taken the time to empty their bladders before donning their environment suits. In addition to wanting to avoid the unfortunate situation of having to pee while attempting to land on an alien planet, the handful of milliliters of propellant that might be synthesized from their urine could very well be the difference between life and death.

Clad in their vacsuits, and with Janea carrying a sedated Snowy in her kennel, the crew of the Albatross piled into the lander to face their fate. The lander detached from its mothership, and Lance took it in on a carefully plotted descent brun. The stubby little ship was engulfed in fire as it streaked through the atmosphere. The heart rate of every human aboard spiked as the lander rattled and groaned at the strain. Lance’s face was like granite as he piloted. He hoarded his fuel like a miser for the majority of the descent.

Then, he fired the thrusters, and the crew was thrown against their restraints by a very unpleasant amount of gees. Slowly, surely, the inertia petered out, and there was a clank and a thud as the lander came to a rest on the dusty surface. The crew gave a few desperate sobs of relief.

Lance unstrapped himself and wobbled to his feet, still a little disoriented from the flight. He stretched, laughing. “And with a whole 3% of our propellant to spare! Hold your applause, please.”

He turned to his crewmates and chuckled. “Well, the easy part’s over.” He turned towards the lander’s hatch.

“Now we start the hard part.”