Archaeologix
“It’s a funny business you’ve gotten yourself into, kid—reading the layers of time hidden in objects.”
(Part 2 of “The Misfits” series)
After we got back to the Lettered Systems from Texini on that first run, the Commodore put us space grunts right back to work. Ren hardly had a day or two to take in the Founder’s festival on Omega-J, but at least she got that.
We found out quick our new lives weren’t going to be all apocalypses and space mysteries like some adventure series we used to watch as kids and wonder about, pining after a life of non-stop action in space. It was a lot like the military in that respect. A lot of formality and boring details, followed by a lot more waiting around.
Speaking of formality; this is Hale Burch, Captain Yankee-Chaos, log entry eight, following a run that could be categorized as a space adventure of the first order. One big enough to change perspectives on the shape of things, humanity’s place in the universe, the power of black holes and black magic, and a host of other mysteries. No small things.
After that first run of ours on Texini, my other log entries got real short and mundane. Picked up dignitary X and delivered to Farrah Cylinder in Delta-Fina; picked up Commissioner Y and delivered to the Omegas for congressional hearings. What they wanted from us more than anything was a head for the shifting landscape on the fringes of the conflict. We could read such things, so we became more like a private security service than anything—a safe ride for important people. Our charge was for things to stay uneventful, and I’m not sure we could have been any better at it.
We were starting to think the greatest hazard in our new lives was going to be death by the long, slow, monotonous grind of space boredom. Then the Commodore pinged me halfway between Delta-Mu and Ennis to tell us to abort our next VIP shuttle service pickup and make our way to Athos. We had a new date with a pair of archaeologists who had the need for a ship and a crew that could navigate through dangerous space, by which she meant the combat zone. Much as we didn’t like taking Rishi in there, she was game. All part of the job, she said. I think she was getting bored too.
We didn’t know it at the time, but those archaeologists were going to be more trouble than any of us bargained for. I suppose I should back up by saying, I needed Rishi to look up what an archaeologist even was for me. Turned out there wasn’t a lot of cause for their kind on a planetary ring or a space cylinder where most of us lived. The only ancient civilization any of us had even heard of was, well, Earth obviously, and the artifact on Kappa-363-B.
Cruising through the Western Battery with the Etterans and Trasp about was always no small matter, and we didn’t have much choice if we wanted to make our pickup on schedule. So we plotted our dropouts in interstellar space as far from Burning Rock, Richfield, and Dana Point as we could, skewing our course toward the areas we thought the Etterans controlled; then we stopped off at Port Cullen for a brief reprieve before heading on to Athos in damn near record time from the far side of the Letters, figuring that the head archaeologist would be impressed that we’d arrived so soon. Turned out we were destined to be wrong about everything on this run.
“All the way from the Letters,” she said when we met her at the terminal on Moses-Mesui, salty as a dried pin-steak. “Might as well have sent you from Charris.”
The archaeologist, Dr. Kita Bankara, looked us up and down, poorly masking what seemed like disgust to all of us. I’d have thought ill of her and might have presumed she had a thing against veterans like me and Sōsh and our metal parts if she hadn’t looked Leda up and down with the same contempt. About the only one she didn’t cuss out with her eyes was Ren, who, let’s face it, is near impossible to dislike.
The first point of contention was when I told her we’d need to stick on Moses-Mesui for several hours while we re-provisioned. We had been out almost three months straight, except for the stop on Port Cullen.
“Why didn’t you do your shopping there?” Dr. Bankara asked me when she came to inquire as to why we hadn’t already taken off.
“We thought it was more important to get here fast and pick you up. We don’t have any details, such as how long we’re going to be out for, so we didn’t know how to provision.”
“We’ll need to load gear on Iophos, where we’ll be picking up my assistant,” she said. “You can send your Harold out to shop when we land there.”
I should have put my foot down right there, or I guess both prosthetics as the case was, but I figured it was best to start off the relationship with as little friction as possible. Turned out I was just giving Dr. Bankara license to bark more orders at us, but, you know, hindsight.
Off to Iophos we went. Didn’t even stay on Athos for long enough to refuel.
When we got to Iophos, we were met by a shipping container filled with enough cargo to fill up Yankee-Chaos’s back storeroom and half the hallway between the medical bay and crew quarters, and there was no loading crew to move it.
“All this gear is necessary?” I asked her.
“It obviously is, or it wouldn’t be sitting in the loading area,” she said. “My assistant will be along shortly to instruct you on how to load it.”
“Care to tell us how long we’re going to be out for, so I can instruct Harold on provisions.”
“Yes, Mr. Burch. Plan for twelve months.”
“Twelve months, you say?”
“I was clear, no?”
“Two things. If I’m going out with you for a year, you’re going to learn to call me Burch, just Burch. And two, you better get a lot less salty, and fast, or we’re not lasting a year, I can assure you—”
“Ah,” she said, completely ignoring me, “there’s Carolina now.”
She walked off to greet the girl stepping our way. And if Bankara was as salty as a pin steak, the sight of Carolina was a ray of sunshine. Both me and Sōsh couldn’t help staring her way.
“Scrape your tongues off the deck, boys,” Leda said, appearing out of nowhere from behind us, “That one’s two tiers out of my league even.”
Leda looked Sōsh up and down.
“Bet you wish you’d opted to have them put the rest of your face back on right about now.”
“Maybe she likes tough guys,” Sōsh said.
“If I meet one, I’ll let her know where she can find him,” Leda said, walking over toward the young assistant.
While they were milling about outside, I stepped inside and called Harold down to go shopping for provisions, told him to take Kristoff with him. Thing was, poor Kristoff was still rail thin, struggling to put the weight back on, especially since we’d run out of coconut bars three weeks back. Ren took to calling him Juice, because he seemed to drink a thousand calories a day, and pretty soon the rest of us were calling him Juice too. He needed a new identity anyway, which is another story for another day, but the short of that one was that we figured to start the process with a nickname. So Kristoff became Juice. I gave him the ship’s digits and told Juice to get as many coconut bars as he wanted. And I told Harold to send back a crew of loaders for all those crates.
When I went back out into the loading area, Sōsh and Leda were already moving crates around, to the horror of the young assistant.
“Not those, please,” Carolina said, gesturing for them to put down the boxes gently.
“Aren’t they for the back, you said,” Sōsh said.
“Yes, but the equipment in them is for the forward sensory anchor. It’s very sensitive.”
“Do you want us to install it?” Leda said.
“It needs to be installed in space,” she said. “Onsite. Leave those for your Harold, please. He’ll have to install them on the anchor when we get to our destination. We can’t even fly with it attached it’s so fragile.”
They were vacuum crates, so the kid urged them to put them down like they were made of Athosian bell glass.
Things were going well.
“Hale Burch,” I said to the kid, extending my hand.
“Carolina Dreeson,” she said, shaking my hand—my good hand, that is.
“That’s a famous name.”
She shrugged. “The only one my parents gave me.”
“There’s a lot of Dreesons,” I said. “You?”
She made a gesture, sort of circling her finger around and then bringing it down to a point in the middle, as if to imply she was right in the center of the bullseye.
“So?”
“My father is Barnard Dreeson,” she said, looking a little embarrassed to say so. I wasn’t sure why.
“So this archaeology business is what, a hobby of sorts?”
“More of a passion, Mr. Burch.”
“Just Burch,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but don’t be surprised if I come to you to figure out what’s going on with this little excursion. That professor of yours is a little…”
“Temperamental is the polite way of putting it, Burch,” Carolina said. “Some people use less charitable words.”
“Bet she doesn’t talk to you like that, Ms. Dreeson?”
She shrugged.
“Thought as much,” I said. “Anyway. I’ve got Harold sending back some loaders. Use them. My crew, I think you’ll come to like them, but sensitive equipment isn’t exactly our specialty.”
“All the same, Burch. Whether she ever says it or not, both Dr. Bankara and I are happy to be aboard.”
“Yankee-Chaos is at your disposal,” I said. “Sort of.”
The kid smiled and stepped back toward the boxes to make sure nobody touched them till the bots got there to load them properly.
“What do you think, ship?” I said to Rishi in my earpiece.
“A year out?” she responded. “I think I’m going to dump that archaeologist on the first rock she’s dumb enough to go digging on.”
“Be nice,” I said.
“That is me being nice.”
Once we got the loaders back to the ship, those bots got things situated according to Carolina’s liking in short order. Only problem was we ended up waiting on Harold and Juice to come back with the groceries, which irked Dr. Bankara to no end. Carolina, Leda, and Sōsh spent some time getting to know one another in the atrium, which was actually a nice feature of Yankee-Chaos’s line. Most ships produced in the early years of the fighting didn’t have much of a view, but Yankee-Chaos was more of a transport vehicle than a fighting vessel, so our common area had a pretty decent skylight, which in the afternoon on Iophos made for a comfortable warm light that kept the place looking cozier than usual.
They were sitting in there when Juice and Harold came back with a pair of loaders to pack the food cabinets. Just as they arrived in the ship, Dr. Bankara came out, presumably to bark at me to take off immediately.
“Who is this man?” she said.
“That’s Juice,” I told her. “One of our crew.”
“Why didn’t I meet him on the way here?”
“He was working on his robot in the back, I guess.”
“He looks gaunt. Is there something wrong with him?”
“He’s getting over a medical issue,” I told her.
“Thyroid?” she said.
“Minor bout with an apocalypse,” Juice said. “Happy to meet you, ma’am.”
We all chuckled, including young Carolina, who couldn’t help herself.
“It’s doctor,” Bankara said, ignoring Juice’s extended hand. “Do you think we could cram any more crew on here, Captain?”
“If we chuck about half your gear out the airlock, sure,” I said.
She didn’t much care for that comment.
“Anyway,” I said. “We’re loaded and damn near busting at the seams. Rishi just needs a destination.”
Bankara handed me a tablet, and the destination sure was a shock. Kappa-363.
“Sure about that, doctor,” I said. “Could be a bumpy ride.”
“Quite sure. Your job is to mitigate the risk. Presumably why the Letters Command sent you.”
“We’ll do what we can. Last we heard the Etterans controlled the system, but that’s a hot area we probably shouldn’t linger in too long.”
“We’ll stay as long as possible, or necessary,” Dr. Bankara said.
“At least it’s not Trasp territory,” Sōsh said.
“Are we good, Rishi?” I said.
“Setting a course, Burch,” Rishi answered.
And that was takeoff.
As much as it tried the patience of the salty doctor as we took to calling her behind her back, we had to take a cautious approach to the Kappas. Even though the Etterans currently controlled most of the Kappa systems—as far as we knew—they’d been aggressive in recent months. It was becoming difficult to tell the two sides apart, at least as posturing went. And I well knew they wouldn’t be happy about any vessel showing up in contested space. If we’d told them we were coming, they’d have said no and blasted us if we showed up anyway. Neither side had time for archaeological expeditions.
We were all curious as hell as to what these two archaeologists were up to, but Dr. Bankara told us it was all classified, and Carolina, for as much as we all liked her, she wouldn’t say a word neither. The only thing they told us apart from a set of coordinates was that it was imperative they had time to set up their gear and examine the object they were after, which apparently was just an ordinary old asteroid, at least as far as they were telling us.
I figured if they weren’t being open with us, I had no intention of being open with them. So I had Rishi do her best impersonation of an ordinary ship’s AI and asked her to glean whatever information she could off them. She was a good enough spy that Rishi and I had a decent picture of what was going on by the time we were preparing to jump into Kappa-363, just not the why.
Rishi brought Harold in to double check her calculations on the final jump. Thing was, if we wanted to go in unseen, we were going to need to drop out in that asteroid field. Otherwise, any Etterans hanging around would have eyes on us almost instantly. So it would be touchy. And we’d need to get to work right away, which meant a busy day for Harold.
Carolina had all the gear for that special sensor lined up and ready to go for as soon as we jumped in.
When Rishi was ready, we hit it, a twelve-hour shot to the head of a pin, and there we were floating right beneath the target: A54-3Z4X.
Harold had studied the install specs for their special sensor gear, so he had all the part and tools lined up and ready to go. It was still a two hour install, though. Bankara insisted we hide as tight to the asteroid as possible to decrease our exposure. It wasn’t any type of flying Rishi couldn’t handle, but a person on that kind of spacewalk would have been more than a little disconcerted. Didn’t bother our Harold none, though.
As Harold was out fixing the sensor to the forward anchor, I approached Carolina Dreeson.
“I know where we are,” I said quietly. “I’d like to know why.”
She looked surprised. “I’d like to tell you, Burch, but it’s something you’ll have to take up with Dr. Bankara. Or maybe you should ask your ship. Don’t think I don’t see you talking in your ear all day.”
I was starting to suspect that this excursion was something far more important than me and Rishi figured at the outset. Carolina Dreeson? What were the odds that of all the archaeology students on Athos, the daughter of one of the most powerful families in the galaxy would end up on our ship for this mission. That was no coincidence. Powerful people don’t trust anyone better than their own.
I went up front to check in with Rishi, and hardly got up there before she sent me back.
“Bankara’s prepping the girl for a spacewalk,” Rishi said.
“What the hell?” I said.
Rishi pulled up the video on the front screen.
“Not on my life,” I said, heading toward the rear airlock.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said to Bankara, when I got back there.
“What does it look like, Mr. Burch? I’m sending my assistant out to survey the site.”
“Not solo, you’re not. Not a chance in hell. We’re in a war zone, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“There are no troops waiting for Carolina on that asteroid.”
“Or we wouldn’t be here, yes,” I said. “But this girl, smart as she may be, has zero training in combat readiness, situational awareness, or risk assessment in a war zone. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, she’s also Barnard Dreeson’s daughter.”
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about any of that right now.”
“No, sorry, Dr. Bankara. I am responsible for the safety of everyone on this ship. There are two options. She stays onboard, or my people go with her. That’s non-negotiable.”
“Unacceptable.”
“Leda, Sōsh, report to the airlock,” I said, then I stared down that salty archaeologist to let her know I wasn’t budging.
She shook her head at me, scowling.
When Leda and Sōsh showed up, I told them they’d either be suiting up to escort Carolina on the walk, or they’d be locking both archaeologists in their bunk room.
“We’re all ex-military,” I told Bankara. “We know what classified means.”
“Very well,” Bankara said.
“Full gear,” I said to Leda and Sōsh. “I want a two-minute turnaround on my mark, and not a hair on that girl’s head out of place when you get back.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Sōsh said.
They started prepping, and by that time, Harold was back in from his spacewalk. Bankara was ready to start scanning the asteroid, so she asked me for Harold’s help, seeing as she was sending her assistant out the airlock.
“Is that sensor of yours going to alert the Etterans?” I asked her.
Bankara paused to consider. “Highly unlikely,” she said. “More likely they’ll see us than pick up the scanner somehow.”
“What is it?” I asked her. “Or is it classified?”
“It’s a neutrino pulse emitter. Should give us a 3D map of the asteroid to the molecular level.”
I wondered how long she was going to pretend we were still at an asteroid. I suppose as soon as Sōsh and Leda floated inside that ancient artifact and came back with a story to tell.
“I’ll need your ship’s AI to help process the data,” Bankara said, “to reduce the time we spend on site.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll have Harold set you up at the comm station.”
Bankara held the space walkers until the scan was finished—took about five minutes to shoot the whole field. I asked if I should send Harold out to disassemble and take in the scanner, but she said there may be some follow-up to do based on what Carolina found onsite. So we left the sensor out there and dropped our three walkers just above the asteroid’s surface. Rishi got me a clear view of the three of them floating toward a round outer door and then entering a dimly lit corridor.
“What are you seeing, Rishi?” I asked.
She answered in my earpiece. “It’s the second Kappa Artifact, all right. Most of the files on that are sealed, so I can’t compare like-for-like, but what else could it be?”
I stepped away from the comms station to the head of the ship, where Rishi projected the data she was processing from the professor’s scanner.
“Any idea what they’re looking for in there yet?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “But they’re floating along the inner wall. They’ve got the girl on tether. I’ll let you know.”
“Good.”
Leda was flying the skiff, which was about the only thing I felt good about. From what we could gather, they were looking for a specific marking on the interior walls, but Carolina was having a difficult time locating it.
“This might be something people with our skills could help with,” I told Bankara as I returned to the comms station, “navigating in difficult territory.”
“She’ll get it,” Bankara said.
I made a gesture toward my swatch to let her know the clock was ticking.
Juice came down to watch, and Ren was there too, looking on from behind the comms station. There’d been enough old tales about the Kappa Artifact that even though they didn’t know what Rishi and I knew, they also kind of knew what Bankara was looking at.
It was another ten minutes or so later when Carolina piped back in. “I’ve got a plot number, I think. 4638. Sending visual now.”
“Confirming,” Bankara said.
“Is that it?”
“Confirmed, Carolina. I’d like images of the entire plot and the seven around it. I’m locking in your position.”
I had Rishi in my ear telling me what they were looking at. Markings of some kind.
“They’re totally different,” Carolina said.
“Open channel,” Bankara said back to her assistant.
“Nice to know what we’re not supposed to know,” I said.
I shouldn’t have said it, but it felt good to get under that salty skin of hers. She shot me a dirty look.
“Look alive, Burch,” Rishi said. “Eyes on two Etteran starfighters. I’ll get you a bearing.”
“On my way,” I said. “Heading up toward the front. “Sōsh, Leda, Rishi’s tracking two.”
“Got it, Burch,” Sōsh came back.
When I got to the front, Rishi had a clear line of sight, which meant the Etterans did too. If we were lucky, we’d blend there in the shadow of that asteroid and they wouldn’t be inclined to look our way or to scan us.
“ETA?” I said to Rishi.
“If they jump in?” she said. “A minute, a little more?”
I had a nervous tick that I’d developed in the field when my unit was out, tapping my forefinger against my thumb over and over. I heard it now, though, on account of the prosthetic—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
“I’m calling it,” I said to Rishi. “Leda, get her out of there. You and Sōsh double-time it back now.”
“Received,” Sōsh said.
I heard Bankara bellowing at me from the back of the ship.
“Plot your moves, ship,” I said. “I will not have you taking fire.”
“Roger, Captain,” she said.
Then I flew back to tell that salty professor to shut up and strap in. I told Juice and Ren the same. Then I sent Harold to secure the airlock.
“The neutrino emitter,” Bankara barked at me. “We can’t go anywhere until it’s secured.”
“It’s as secure as it’s getting for now,” I said. “Our people take precedent.
“ETA, Leda?”
“One minute,” she came back.
Ren and Juice were secured in the atrium by then. Bankara was glaring at me but knew better than to say a word.
“They’re on us Burch,” Rishi said. “Changing course. And jumping.”
“Hell,” I said. “Get that airlock open, Harold.”
I pointed at that archaeologist. “You stay strapped in no matter what.”
I rushed back up front to watch the viewscreen fixed on the door of that artifact and track the Etterans coming in. I strapped in myself.
“Put out our ID and let them know we’re a scientific survey ship,” I told Rishi. “Might distract them enough to put them back a few seconds.”
Rishi started transmitting.
“The second they’re in that airlock,” I told Rishi.
“They’ll get bounced to hell, Burch,” she said.
“As long as we don’t get blown to it,” I said. “Your mark, ship.”
“Harold,” I said. “We’re jumping the second they’re in. Secure that Dreeson girl at all cost.”
It happened fast. Almost simultaneous to the Etterans jumping in, Harold had the airlock door secured. The Etterans jumped out firing on us. Rishi’s burn flipped us over and around that rock in half a second, just before the bolts started blasting the asteroid’s surface. Then Rishi jumped us out of there. Even I felt like my heart was in my feet, and my feet had been two years gone nearly to the day.
As soon as we were stable, I shot back toward the rear, grabbing Ren and Juice along the way. “You, stay,” I shouted at the archaeologist.
Carolina was floating, safe in Harold’s arms it seemed. Sōsh had gotten banged around and had a cut on his forehead, but he’d managed to grab rail with his prosthetic hand, which had kept him from bouncing off the walls like Leda had. She was out cold.
“Bring her,” I told Harold, pointing to Carolina, who was wide-eyed and shaken, but seemingly unharmed. “We’ve got Leda.”
I noticed just then that Harold’s leg was broken clean in two, hanging on by the dermis. But we were weightless at the time, so that could definitely wait. Me, Ren, and Juice wrapped up Leda and boarded her to the medical bay.
Leda had a few broken ribs and presumably a concussion. Ren got to work in there with Juice, who, it turned out, had some medical training himself from when he was younger on Charris. He’d been correct about being a handy guy to have around. I left those two and Harold to their work and headed up front to confer with Rishi. She’d pulled some new info from their data files when Bankara looped her in.
Yes, that was the second Kappa-363 artifact, which we were almost certain of, sure. But there were others, which nobody else knew about, at least according to any database Rishi had accessed since her digital apotheosis. Presumably, traveling to all those other artifacts was what the year’s worth of groceries was all about. But Rishi still didn’t know what they were hunting for at that first site, and why it was worth nearly getting shot to hell for. As soon as things settled down, we agreed, it was time to clear the air.
Just then, Harold came in, his left leg flapping behind him like a boot with no foot in it. He told me what had happened in the airlock, frame by frame, said he’d broken his leg deflecting Leda away from young Ms. Dreeson. It sounded like the right call from the way he described it. He also said Leda was now conscious, and healing rapidly, thanks to the nanites circulating in her blood—part of his calculation, of course.
I let Rishi set the course—as long as it was out of the Kappas, naturally. If I’d had my way, it would have been back to Athos to drop off our guests. Instead, I went down to check on the one I liked and the crew member I liked a hell of a lot more than her.
“You good?” I said to Leda when I got down there.
“Little bump,” she said. “Don’t know what the fuss is about.”
“And you?” I said to Ms. Dreeson.
“All right,” she said, wincing slightly. “I presume it was your order to your Harold?”
“I can vouch for us warborgs to take a hit. I’m sure you’re tough for a kid from Athos, but even I don’t want Leda landing on me at seven Gs. Get some rest.”
Bankara tried to pull me aside on my way up to quarters, but I told her it could wait until we were well out of the Kappas and we’d all gotten some rest. Plus, seeing Leda and that kid laid up like that affected me. Always had whenever I’d seen my people injured, maybe more than killed even. It brought some things back.
It was my fault. I never should have let them off the ship without knowing what they were after and the urgency of it. That was on me. I’d also taken the archaeologist’s word on the neutrino emitter being undetectable to the Etterans. It was also possible we’d tripped a sensor in the belt on our way in, but we couldn’t know now. Anyway, we’d gotten lucky.
The following morning, I called everyone to the table in the atrium, which made eight of us, including Harold, but of course Rishi was there as well. Leda had her right arm up in a sling, but apart from that and Sōsh’s stitched-up forehead, the only sign of damage was Harold’s busted leg, which Juice promised to get to work on after our little breakfast meeting.
“I’m happy to go on,” I said. “Under the condition of openness. We show all our cards and you show yours,” I said to Bankara. “Complete honesty.”
“Burch,” Harold said. “In the spirit of honesty, would now be okay?”
He’d asked me if he could apologize to Leda the night before and I told him to let her rest. I figured it was a decent way to start. Harold explained the moment to her, overexplained if you ask me—angular momentum, calculations, percentages and all that. Practically put up a chart.
“So you kicked me into the bulkhead for the sake of Carolina’s pretty smile?” Leda said. “That’s what you’re telling me, carbon fiber?”
“It was the best outcome in the moment for everyone.”
Harold couldn’t tell, but she was busting him big time. Sōsh burst out laughing, and Leda did shortly after. He tried to explain.
“Harold,” I said. “You’re good. Bygones. It was my call. Thanks for getting the truth council going. I’ll go next unless anyone objects.”
No one did.
“I am at fault for all of it. I never should have let anyone off the ship under those circumstances, and we escaped disaster because we were lucky, not good. That’s part one.
“Part two is that we, by which I mean Rishi and me, know we’re after the Kappa artifact and that it’s not the only one of its kind.
“Part three is that we go no further until you, Dr. Bankara, come clean about why.”
“What is the point now?” she said. “Your exit from the Kappas almost certainly destroyed the neutrino emitter. That first stop was to calibrate it so we could scan the others.”
I noticed Ms. Dreeson cast a bit of a glance over toward Bankara. Rishi had noticed it too.
“Should we return, then?” I asked Bankara, “or is there another way?”
“Possibly,” she said. “We should go forward. We’ll just have to examine the sites ourselves—more space walks.”
“Spacewalks are a lot easier without Etteran starfighters stalking outside,” I said, “presuming we’re going where I think we are.”
“And where do you think we’re going, Captain Burch?”
“Well, nowhere until we know why the urgency, if we’re being honest.”
“You have orders,” Bankara said.
“He doesn’t go unless she says so, isn’t that correct, Burch?” Carolina said. “What’s so special about your ship’s AI, if we’re putting all our cards on the table?”
I laughed. “Well, you sly little fox. And here I thought we were outfoxing you.”
“Wait, what is happening?” Sōsh said.
“I have no idea,” Leda said.
“The little one’s the boss,” Ren said. “Try to keep up, you two.”
“Oh,” Leda said. “Oh!”
“Actually, it’s her dad’s the boss, right?” I said.
“Benefactor and interested party,” she said. “Boss is a strong word in this case, but he does expect a return here. Your ship’s AI, Burch? What am I missing?”
“Rishi’s a person, not an AI,” I said. “One of the elder Maícons uploaded her to keep her from dying in combat.”
Carolina shook her head, scoffing. “It’s always a Maícon. Most troublesome model.”
“Be careful how you speak of any Maícon around here,” Rishi said.
“Well, ship?” Carolina said. “Introductions are in order.”
“Rishi Sarol-Companys, formerly of Blaire Athol cylinder of the Delta-Fina group.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rishi,” Carolina said. “And I presume you two have been spying on nearly everything we’ve done? So what don’t you know, Rishi?”
“Exactly how many alien artifacts you know about, and why you’re after them,” Rishi said.
Carolina exhaled, and stared across the table at Dr. Bankara, who shook her head. “I presume you’re not taking us anywhere—”
“Until we know everything,” Rishi said.
“I’ll brief you and Burch,” Carolina said.
“No good,” I said. “Come one, come all, Ms. Dreeson. No more power games, no more secrecy—oh, and in the interest of full transparency, Juice over there wasn’t joking about surviving an apocalypse. That actually happened.”
“Well, congratulations to you, Mr. Juice, whoever you may be.”
Sōsh burst out laughing, which got Leda going as well.
“Most interesting breakfast I’ve had in a long time,” he said.
“Oh, this hasn’t begun to get interesting yet,” Carolina said, sighing. “You will all be debriefed and are bound by the nondisclosure arrangement through the military contract with the Letters, I’ll remind you now and again when we part.”
“Of course,” I said.
Then Carolina explained the entire wild tale. “When that second Kappa artifact was discovered, the initial people who happened upon it found that it had unusual properties.”
“We saw as much in the scans,” Rishi said. “Unusual energy fields.”
“We think they’re powered by micro black holes, but the tech in those artifacts is far beyond us. Its existence was publicized briefly at the time when it was first discovered by amateur archaeologists, and then the information was quickly sequestered. What almost no one knows is that a second party, a very clever second party, figured out exactly how the first party found the site, visited the artifact, and went inside.”
Sōsh shrugged. “So?” he said. “We were just in there ourselves. It was a big empty cylinder.”
“We did not go in. We were in a giant antechamber,” Carolina said. “The woman who went in claimed to have lived an entire simulated life on Earth in the twentieth century of what our historians call the common era, right at the dawn of human space travel. The truly interesting thing about her claim was that when she was cross examined by our most learned historians of the era, she had details that far outstripped their knowledge—things even people in the columns couldn’t have known.”
“So it couldn’t be verified then?” I said.
“Fittingly enough, we sent a Maícon to the archives of the First Son, which confirmed her accounts. The specificity of these historical details was impossible—I mean things no one in the Battery would ever even think to know.”
“Like what?” Ren said.
“Sham, My Gallant, Twice a Prince, and Private Smiles,” Carolina said to a table of blank stares. “Those were the names of the losing horses in the greatest horse race of the twentieth century, which she claimed to have watched on television, for example.”
“Like, horses horses?” Juice said. “They used to race them?”
“Apparently,” Carolina said.
“How would that work?”
“It’s not important,” Carolina said. “It was correct in the archives, though. And every other detail that could possibly have been corroborated down to street names, political figures, songs—everything. Which means one of two things.”
“Either those aliens know us better than we know ourselves and built her a perfect sim in that cylinder,” Rishi said. “Or…”
“Correct,” Carolina said, looking around and then gathering that a few of us rock hoppers hadn’t fully caught on yet, “they actually sent her there.”
“Ooh,” Ren said. “Well that is unexpected.”
“And these artifacts, we believe are seeded throughout the galaxy. We know they talk to each other, and we believe we can trace them back to their origin, either a mothership or a home world somewhere in the galaxy—if this race of aliens is even from our galaxy.”
“Guess that explains why you hardly blinked when I told you our spaceship was a person,” I said. “Yours was bigger.”
“Very colorfully put, Mr. Burch.”
“So our plan is to go after these super-advanced aliens and do what exactly, Ms. Dreeson?” I asked her.
“Investigate their nature and, if possible, determine their intentions.”
We all sort of looked around at each other.
“Well, that’s certainly one plan,” I said. “Speaking of the people of Earth, though, I think they had an expression about leaving well enough alone—had something to do with waking up sleeping animals. I was trying to remember which one while we were playing Sabaca the other day. It wasn’t horses.”
“That’s very clever, Burch,” Carolina said. “It’s not like that hasn’t occurred to my father or me or Dr. Bankara. This is why we’re going with one ship, limited weaponry, with the deliberate understanding of what we’re doing, rather than some hapless expedition stumbling upon first contact and behaving rashly. Our charge is to go, very delicately, and see if we can establish contact with these newly discovered neighbors of ours.”
“One last thing before we talk all this out,” I said, pointing at Dr. Bankara. “Is she really that salty, or was that all part of the act?”
It was dead silent at the table for a moment before Carolina couldn’t help laughing. Dr. Bankara looked dead-faced over at Carolina and then around the table, jaw hanging open, appalled at my bluntness.
“I guess you solved that mystery, Burch,” Leda said.
“She is my mentor, and you will show her the respect she deserves,” Carolina said.
I nodded and gestured for everyone to settle down.
“That’s better,” I said. “Now that we’re all on level footing, I propose we assess what the next steps are, and we clear this with my boss, Ms. Dreeson, before moving forward.”
I had a long talk with Rishi first and then the others. I was surprised at how quickly we came to a consensus. The sentiment was that none of us had survived the things we had so that we could go tuck our heads in a hole and hide from the universe. We’d found ourselves in a unique position with our unique experiences informing us, and we were ready for what came at us, super-aliens or whatever. Even Kristoff or Jonathan or Juice or whatever we were calling him that day, he was surprisingly gung-ho for a reforming luddite. “Secrets of the universe,” he said. “Those don’t get revealed to many. A chance at that is worth risking our lives over.” So we decided to poke the donkey or wake up the sleeping osterich or whatever the case was.
Carolina filled us in on what they’d been looking at in the second Kappa Artifact. Turned out that Bankara had discovered that the wall markers inside the artifact had changed slightly between each of the times it had been visited and catalogued over roughly a century. The marking Carolina had been inspecting back at Kappa-363 was at a key spot in the artifact. Carolina believed that they’d figured out what that specific marking symbolized—communication channels, essentially what that artifact was talking to. And, they believed that with a few other images from the other sites, we’d be able to extrapolate a map of the entire network of alien artifacts. It was a hell of a theory.
Meanwhile, I sent poor one-legged Harold out to assess the damage to the professor’s neutrino scanner. Scanning would be a lot safer and faster than spacewalking into every one of these cylinders ourselves. It occurred to us, too, that eventually these aliens might not be so welcoming about us poking around in their sleepy cylinders. Our luddite friend Juice also proved extremely useful on that front too. Harold determined the two of them could fix it, but he’d need a few delicate prints to be executed, especially on the receiver panel, which was a very particular type of nano-glass. Only Bankara had any idea how the thing worked. It was beyond Rishi even, but Juice printed it, and Harold installed it, and the whole operation ended up taking about four days. To top it off, to test the thing, Juice ended up scanning Harold’s busted leg so he could print him a proper splint. And while they were doing that, Rishi and I spent those four days with Carolina charting out our course of action. That little delay ended up working out great. Sure, Bankara was still salty about us breaking the gear in the first place, but she was the one who chose to leave the scanner out on the hull in Etteran space anyway, so we weren’t going to let her give us a hard time about it.
Less than a week from blasting out of the Kappa-363 system, we were at our second mark, an asteroid way out in the boundary systems circling a star that only had a number. As far as we understood, it had only been visited the one time by the group that had scanned for these artifacts nearly twenty years prior.
Carolina and Dr. Bankara were confident they’d be able to scan the wall, but after several hours, despite what they said was decent resolution considering the unit’s compromise, they hadn’t been able to agree on which set of markings corresponded to the earlier excursion’s notes.
“Would it help if you went in?” I asked Carolina. “As far as we know there’s no Etterans and no Trasp this far out.”
“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “We don’t have a third reference point like we did back at Kappa. We’ll have to try and decrypt the whole wall. And if we can’t, we may have to wait—who knows how long, maybe decades—until the markings change again.”
They had the readings they needed, though, so we pressed on to the next artifact—another five days’ worth of jumping into uninhabited space, way past the boundary systems. I spent most of that time playing Sabaca with Leda and Sōsh. Juice would come and join us every now and again, but he wouldn’t play for any kind of stake, which Sōsh didn’t much care for, even though he was definitely warming to our new luddite friend. Ren, meanwhile, tried to make herself a useful assistant to the two archaeologists and Rishi as they tried to solve the galaxy’s most perplexing puzzle.
“We only really have that one reference point,” Rishi said to me one of those nights. “It’s like knowing a single word in a whole novel and trying to extrapolate the plot. Could be the only word we have is ‘but.’”
“Is that ‘but’ with one T or two Ts?” I asked her.
“Whichever you like, Burch,” she said. “Maybe we’ll figure out more the farther out we go. Could be we got another word entirely.”
From then on out, we averaged about a new artifact every ten days, and we were cruising so much the zero G time was starting to make even young Carolina cranky. Leda didn’t atrophy much with the nanoblood she had pumping through her in reserve. Me? With my robolegs, all I had to do was hit the bands a couple times a week. Everybody else, though—even Sōsh, who had a left half to attend to—had to fight over treadmill time. And poor Juice was still bone-thin, working to get some heft back to him when there wasn’t much of anything there to begin with. That was about all the goings on. Here we were again drowning in rushes of excitement only to be awash in boredom for ages between.
Each stop only seemed to deepen the difficulty of solving the puzzle of the code on the walls of the artifacts. Rishi likened it to adding about another million words to that novel she was talking about. For me, it was too complex to even try to pretend I knew what they were decrypting, or failing to decrypt as the case was.
By the time we got to the twelfth site and scanned the wall, we had no new ideas and no more artifacts we knew about. Carolina and Bankara had been certain that the key to locating other artifacts was in the code itself, but that just wasn’t panning out.
Carolina wanted to press on, but I was reluctant to fly any farther from home, especially if we didn’t have any real assurance we’d find another artifact as a waypoint. I was for exploring the unknown as much as any space captain, I suppose, but by that point, we’d been out nearly four months and had made exactly zero progress on their code. After a long discussion we compromised. We wouldn’t double back for another four weeks, but we wouldn’t go any farther unless Rishi and the archaeologists made progress.
I had Sōsh and Harold go out and tether up an asteroid on a line so we could get a little spin G while we let our problem solving team grind away at that code. Ren, Rishi, Dr. Bankara and Carolina spent nearly sixteen hours a day working at their puzzle while me, Sōsh, and Leda played chess and Sabaca. Juice and Harold, meanwhile were doing work on Kristoff’s dusty old robot George, which he’d got some upgrades for back at Port Cullen, intending to give the brute a bigger brain.
I have to admit, I’d all but given up hope two weeks into spinning around that tethered asteroid, turn after turn. And to be honest, I was missing Rishi a little. Even though she was there, we’d gotten in a nice pattern of talking each night to recap, discussing things. She was so focused on the puzzle, I didn’t want to draw her away. She ducked in on me one night, told me she was taking a break—not that she needed it the way the rest of us needed sleep or anything. She just wanted to take a step back. She asked me what I’d been thinking about with all that downtime.
“Actually, that girl,” I said. “The one who went into the artifact. I was thinking about it, going back in time. Can you imagine being stuck back there on Earth, knowing about the future, about the worlds that would grow up out here around the Battery, the thousands of systems, the trillions of people. I don’t suppose anyone would have believed her if she’d told them what she knew. What do you think, Rishi? Do you think the artifact simulated it, or could those aliens have really sent her back there, transferred her consciousness or whatever?”
Rishi was quiet.
“Can I ask you, ship, do you experience time the same way since, you know? I mean if they can do send someone back like that, time must not be what we think it is.”
She still didn’t answer.
“You there still, Rishi?”
“Shh,” she said to me.
A few seconds later, she came back. “Sorry, Burch, I gotta go.”
Eight hours later, she’d cracked the code. It wasn’t so much a language or calculations but a map of all those artifacts barking out their positions through time, from their placement millions of years prior right up to the moment Carolina and our crew had rapped on their door.
“They must experience time differently from us,” Rishi told me after showing the map to the group, “all at once, and not at all—as though it were a solid object but also not even there. Entropy is real, but time is just a perception of it that can be warped or even not perceived at all. It’s very complicated, and I don’t think we’ll understand until we meet them.”
Toward that end, Carolina had us untethered and flying off to the next artifact to confirm Rishi’s map almost the second our little conference adjourned. If Rishi’s findings were correct, we had the location of every one of the artifacts talking to their network, and they were all over the galaxy. There was even one back toward Charris that nobody knew about.
“What do you suppose your father will make of that?” I asked Carolina that night after we’d all eaten.
She sighed. “My dad’s not really the type who warms to things that are out of his control.”
“You don’t say?”
“Yeah, really,” Carolina said, smiling. “Family trait, I guess. We’ve made a lot of very deliberate choices on Athos to build the society we have. A lot of those decisions came down from my direct ancestors. When I think of who my father is, Burch, I have to remind myself how much he has to live up to.”
“It’s a funny business you’ve gotten yourself into, kid—reading the layers of time hidden in objects.”
“You know, Mr. Burch,” Dr. Bankara said, “you’re proving to be not nearly as flat and one-dimensional a person as I’d thought.”
“Why, doctor, I think that’s the kindest thing you’ve said to me this entire trip, and I’m still not sure whether it’s a compliment or an insult.”
I actually got a smile out of her. Everyone else laughed.
“It’s not our fault,” Carolina said when the laughter had died down. “People are wired to forget how little control we have over the universe. The layers hidden in ancient things, Burch, they remind me it’s okay to let go.”
“That’s a healthy manner of being for one in your family line, Ms. Dreeson. Me, I get a reminder about my place in things every time I need to recharge my legs, or walk for that matter. If we wake up these creatures or rouse their interest, or whatever, let’s hope they don’t feel inclined to give us another lesson.”
The following day, soon after lunch, we dropped out at a system as far from human civilization as people had been since we’d left Earth. There it was, the next artifact, sitting exactly as Rishi’s map had predicted. I was equally impressed and troubled. These beings, whoever they were, had basically left a trail that mapped out every last outpost in the galaxy—not the action of a race that felt like they had anything to fear from anyone around them. And right in the middle of Rishi’s map, a few thousand miles from the inner ring, there lay the mothership, or the homeworld, or whatever monster was awaiting us.
“It’s a long run out there,” I told the group. “Leaves us almost no room for error on the way back. Safe play would be back to reprovision at the boundary worlds.”
“That’s eight months, Burch,” Sōsh said. “Besides, Juice don’t eat much if it comes to that.”
That brought a muted smile out of everyone. I surveyed their faces. Only one who looked apprehensive was Ren.
“And you, Ren? Good to go?”
“I’m not going to lie,” she said. “This whole business scares the hell out of me, Burch, but I’m a scientist at heart. This has the potential to be the greatest discovery, maybe ever. I’ll die for that.”
“We forge on?” I said.
No one objected.
“Ship?”
“I concur, boss,” Rishi said. “We go.”
So she set a course and we tightened our belts, played chess and Sabaca, and tried to forget about every horror story we’d heard about a single ship out in lonesome space. And, after nearly half a year, we came to find out that Bankara was actually nearly personable over a game of chess, provided she was winning. So Leda did her best to whip her salty ass at every opportunity. None of the rest of us could beat her.
I remember asking Juice one day whether he was glad he’d asked to stay on with us misfits, crammed into our little bucket for half a year with hardly the room to stretch his skinny legs.
“You forget where you found me, Burch,” he said. “No place I’d rather be. Abject boredom. The mysteries of the universe. Greatest adventure of my lifetime, and I outsmarted the apocalypse.”
That was before the climax of this whole ordeal, which all happened so very fast and unfolded as follows.
Nearly six months out from Kappa at that point, Rishi dropped us out a short hop away from the X at the center of her celestial mystery alien map. From that distance, we’d hoped to get a peek of something ahead. But it wasn’t a total surprise when we didn’t pick up a thing. None of the other artifacts looked any more conspicuous than the space rocks around them. So we all talked about it one last time and decided to jump in there and see what we’d see.
When we jumped in, there was clearly an object about mid-system pulling on the planets, but we couldn’t get a decent picture, as it was shrouded in darkness, and for some odd reason, the starlight wasn’t hitting it in any natural manner. Then, as if somebody hit a switch to turn on the welcome lights, the entirety of this structure began to glow an eerie blue. The ship was pyramid shaped and so massive as to be hardly fathomable—not so much a ship as an ecosystem or a world unto itself. Scale is always difficult in space, but from our distance, the ship was the size of Athos—not the planetary ring around Athos, where four trillion people lived, but the gas giant herself. And the lights were on.
We were all up front, crammed into the forward area of the bridge, trying to get a view with our own eyes out the viewing panel. I was about to say something about, no turning back now, since they’d put the lights on for us. Then suddenly, we were all a lot closer than any of us ever wanted to be.
It must have been like that woman who was transported back in time, because we all appeared elsewhere—in the ship was my best guess, because it had a similar dark look to it that the artifacts did, almost like back stage of a show—the inner workings. Then suddenly, it was all black around us with an eerie white glow around the edges. There was gravity. We were all there, even the two robots.
It sounds unbelievable, but before we had a chance to really react to the sudden shifting of our senses from place to place, there was a face. A non-distinct face—neither human nor alien.
I suddenly felt obligated as the captain to greet whatever intelligence was at the heart of the situation, but before I had the chance to, it greeted us in its own manner.
The bots dropped, went completely inert, and as much as you try to intellectualize not caring about a non-sentient thing such as Harold, it’s hard not to care about a human-shaped object with human behavior and a human face. I didn’t like the feeling one bit. We all looked around at each other. I happened to be standing beside Carolina Dreeson. She was shaking. I was about to reach for her to reassure her when we all dropped too. It’s difficult to say even in hindsight what happened. Nearest I can put it into words, we had all the information sucked out of us almost instantaneously. It was a blinding pain that lasted not even a second, or at least it seemed so. We just found ourselves on the floor disoriented.
We got up slowly, helping each other off the floor. The bots, too, clicked back to life and stood. Again, I was about to speak but was pre-empted.
“You have evolved,” it said, and it sounded slightly surprised.
Then, most shocking thing of all, Rishi appeared, floating right in front of us, not in any aethereal sense but in her own body. It was Rishi. She’d shown me pictures of herself from before. And she met eyes with me clear as day. A strange mix of shock, terror, and delight came over her.
“Interesting,” the voice said.
Then it looked past Rishi, to us, and simply said, “Go home, little ones.”
Then we were all back on Yankee-Chaos, crammed onto the bridge looking out the window at that ship.
“Rishi!” I said.
There was no answer.
I panicked. I started shouting out at open space as though it could hear me. I wasn’t having it. Not unless I knew she was okay. It was Sōsh and Leda had to calm me down. I was ready to fly in there and cut a hole in that thing’s hull to get her back. Maybe a minute I went on like that, half losing my mind before I came to my senses, realizing I had obligations to the rest of them.
Then, in an instant, that alien ship vanished and the stars changed. And if my eyes didn’t deceive me, we were floating static in space just astride the Kappa Artifact—five months journey in the blink of an eye. I was alone on the flight deck, looking out at the asteroid.
“Look alive, Burch,” Rishi’s voice echoed in the room. “Eyes on two Etteran starfighters. I’ll get you a bearing.”
“What?” I said. “Rishi? You’re okay.”
“Are you?” she said. “You may want to get the others back on board before those Etterans get here, boss.”
“This can’t be happening,” I said.
Then she ordered the team back onboard herself. I headed back to the atrium. Dr. Bankara was seated at the comms station looking just as dazed as I was. I heard Rishi trying to talk Sōsh and Leda back to the ship. Luckily, Carolina had her wits about her and knew we were in a moment.
Juice and Ren were sitting there, dumbfounded, watching things unfold just as they had before.
“Strap in, I guess,” I told everyone, heading back up front to do the same.
It happened almost identical to the first time, only Leda was able to cover up her chest with her arm, so her humerus got broken instead of her ribs. Otherwise, identical. Only we knew. All of us except Rishi, it seemed.
The chronometer was set back to that day we jumped out of Kappa-363. All the data we collected—gone. Rishi swore she’d experienced none of it. Broke-legged Harold, the same. But we all knew. It was the oddest feeling.
This time, Carolina was hardly bothered by the sudden jump out of Kappa. She barely let Ren even examine her, just brushed off the ordeal. Leda had braced a little better this time, so she didn’t lose consciousness, just kept cussing Harold out for breaking her arm. He was confused because she kept saying, “You did it again, you damn bot. You kicked me into the bulkhead again.”
Ren stayed in there with her, but the rest of us gathered around the table in the atrium.
“The artifact,” Carolina said. “It’s just like before with the woman who got sent to Earth.”
“Except we didn’t go inside,” I said. “Me, Bankara, Ren, and Juice were still on the ship.”
“Maybe you don’t have to go inside for it to work,” she said. “It’s trying to deter us.”
It was almost unbelievable, but we knew her well enough by then to know what she was thinking. She wanted to go after it again.
Sōsh, bleeding above the eyebrow from the identical cut from months earlier, looked over at Carolina and said. “Even if we didn’t go nowhere, that thing gave us fair warning enough. This mission is over, Carolina. Over.”
She took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she looked over at me.
I concurred. “Some things are beyond us.”
Even Dr. Bankara agreed.
So we patched up Leda, got the ship in order, and started back to Athos.
Along the way, we talked about it, whether it had been real or not. Five months of our lives. It was real to us—certain games of chess, the stories we’d told each other about ourselves. It all felt like it had happened. We talked about that lady who’d gone back in time, and the more we thought about it, the more we doubted. It had seemed as real to us as it had to her. I still remembered the names of the horses from her vision from when Carolina had told us—that’s how real our journey had seemed. Where did we go?
“Time’s a funny thing,” I said to Rishi the night before we got back to Athos. “You said something about it being fluid, flexible. It was you that figured the whole thing out, you know.”
“I’m sorry, Burch. I don’t remember,” she said back to me.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You know I nearly lost my mind when it took you from us. Even if you remembered the trip, you wouldn’t remember that. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
“Thank you, Burch. I just wish there was something I could do. You all seem so sad.”
“No, it’s not sadness. It’s…it’s like it’s too overwhelming to process. Bigger than us, you know. Those emotions were real to us. Then, suddenly reality tells you something different. I felt those things, though.”
“I believe you,” she said.
“You know I love you, kid,” I told her. “I didn’t tell you before I lost you, but I’m telling you now so you’ll always know it.”
“I feel the same,” she said. “I wouldn’t be with you all if I didn’t.”
One thing about Rishi I knew, she always told me the truth. It sure felt that way. But she also knew how to keep her secrets.
The following afternoon, we were back on Athos, touching down in Ithaca to drop off Carolina and Dr. Bankara at the spaceport outside the city.
Bankara smiled at me as she departed. Shook my good hand too.
“Stay salty, Dr. Bankara,” I told her. “We wouldn’t have you any other way.”
“Mr. Burch,” she said to me, “take care of yourself. And your crew.”
Carolina stuck around until the loaders had taken off all the gear. Then, just as they were finishing up, Barnard Dreeson himself arrived to pick up his daughter. I caught a glimpse of him through the glass in the gateway.
“Ms. Dreeson,” I said to her as she was getting ready to part from us.
“Carolina, Burch, please.”
“Carolina,” I said.
It was strange. I had about a million things I wanted to say to her. Lessons learned, about the struggle to remember how small we were. Being awash in things beyond our control. About the decisions coming her way and how they always trickled down to the legless suckers like us on the other end of them. But it was almost like we’d shared enough to know. We didn’t need to say any more.
“I’m not going to forget you,” she said, embracing me around the neck. “I’ll call you if I ever need a ride out to the Letters.”
“And we’ll gladly take you,” I said. “So long as the boss approves.”
Carolina said her goodbyes to Ren and Leda and Sōsh, and then she went inside to tell her dad about the time we broke the universe. At least it felt that way to all of us.
So how do you keep a log like that? I guess you do what I’ve done. Start at the beginning and tell it through as best you can. Then you move on to the next one a little wiser. At least that’s the goal anyway. Until the next one. This is Burch of the Delta-Gamma Guard, Captain, Yankee-Chaos. End log.