Penelope's Secrets

Chapter 2
Champagne in Starlight

Space...

Somewhere in the Scythian solar system a space ship is hiding. It's hard to hide in space - when you don't know the local region well. But the Scythian system seems to have only one planet which is occupied, and there is little or no space-bound activity. The occupants of this ship have chosen a solar orbit, which is not quite 180 degrees out of phase with Scythia itself. Taking into account the speed of light, and the different orbit lanes which they inhabit, this ship keeps itself within an arc that is always eclipsed by the Sun. Although they will eventually need to fire their engines to maintain this position - they can remain stealthed without doing so for at least a couple of weeks.

To find this ship you would need an anti-stealth technology which is better than the one they are using. And what they have is very good. But the laws of physics don't like being messed about with, and if you knew roughly where to search you would eventually find them. It would take a long time. The probability of detecting the ship using a random search pattern is so small that the occupants regard it as not worth worrying about at the present time.

The ship itself is large. In fact it's huge in comparison to the number of people it's carrying. Most of the volume must be taken up with cargo or other material. You don't take an empty space ship across several star systems of space. There are apparently just eight people on board. Six are males: in a frozen sleep waiting to be activated at the right time. The other two are female and they have just opened a bottle of champagne. They clink real glasses. This seems to be a celebration.

The two woman are reclining on cushions facing each other with a deep chilled bottle of champagne and some snack food between them.

"This was a bloody good idea" said Marina. "How many more bottles of this stuff have we got?"

Chloe refills both glasses, "Another two bottles for immediate consumption if we get that far, and a little bit more to celebrate the next couple of milestones."

"Bloody milestones! From the point of view of the champagne, are we counting this as two or one?"

"I'm counting it as two. The eagle has landed was one. And getting the signal that the eagle hasn't been gobbled up by anything nasty is two. I was going to get this stuff out anyway for the first one, once we'd got ourselves hidden. Getting the OK signal so fast is just a bonus."

"So" counting on fingers "if I take the milestones we still have left, and multiplying by whatever, there must still be quite a lot of this stuff left. I don't know where you've got it hidden, because believe me, a couple of times on this trip I have had a really good look around for something nice."

"Just take it from me Marina, you'll never find the stash. It's extremely well hidden. But when the next one comes up - I'll get another couple of bottles out. In fact I'll get one out of the cooler now. This one appears to have evaporated."

She moves in an unexpectedly wobbly fashion into the galley and returns with another.

"Whatever you do - don't drop it."

"That seems to have gone straight to my head. Don't worry," as she sits back down without damaging the treasured bottle, Marina looks relieved.

"I know what you're thinking, and it won't work," says Chloe refilling their glasses. "I switched off the internal logging systems so you won't find the rest of the bottles, before we've earned them. Anyway, I didn't put them all in the same place."

"Damn. I'll let you off this time, since you've done a really good job on crew morale, considering you've only been in charge for less than a day. You haven't got a stash of real coffee as well by any chance for later on have you?"

"Afraid not. That went a long time ago. A moment of weakness."

"I'm really shocked that you could give in so easily. But on the other hand, I seem to remember we had a celebration then. I don't suppose there's any chocolate as well?"

"There is but I'm saving it for the next signal."

"Well I hope that Carlos doesn't forget where his little buttons are, because if the locals don't kill him than I will. And I think that in any court of law I would be let off. This bottle's half empty. You sure there's another one?"

"Yes."

"Good, then it's safe to swallow. You know this must be the best bit of this expedition so far."

"I agree, but probably not for the same reasons."

"Well, here we are, just the two of us alone, with God Almighty inspecting his creation, and Rumpelstiltskin and his merry men still locked up in their little coffins, so I think it's time we had a serious chat about a few things."

"You're probably right."

"I don't know where to start Chloe. I'm going to forget about our little games of passing the parcel with Carlos, because I hope that with half a planet full of men, we can soon become adult about these things."

"I'm sure it can't have been that much fun for Carlos in the last couple of weeks."

"Well I think if he'd managed to break his neck on landing, it might have affected this milestone, but I hope you would've had the decency to break out this champagne anyway."

"To mourn his passing you mean?" Chloe giggled a bit.

"Something like that. Speaking of passing, I'm just going to take a little walk. My bladder has just been hit by a couple of pints of cold champagne. Back in a minute. Whoops. I'm just going to check how much is left in the bottle. I suppose I can trust you. Right - won't be long."

When she returns, she is swaying slightly, and flops into the cushion with her arms carefully held away from where her glass is standing, to avoid knocking it over. "Before we start our serious conversation. I just want you confirm the champagne situation. You said we were celebrating two milestones?"

"Yeah."

"Well, how come then, we've only got three bottles? Three into two doesn't go, and unless you were planning to wake up sleeping beauty, and knowing what a wonderfully logical mind you have beneath that hard exterior, I am going to ask how many bottles are there really left in the cooler?"

"Another, two."

Marina smiles in triumph. "That's the right answer. Anyway I had a look just now, but I wanted you to confirm. So everything must go."

"I don't think it will keep very well, now that it's out in the open. Do you think we'll get through four bottles?"

"Or die in the attempt. That would be a good one wouldn't it, if Carlos sent us the come and pick me up signal, but we were dead of champagne poisoning. But then that's why we've got the backup crew isn't it? Let's have a look." inspecting the bottle "We're half way through now. I've got a slight headache that's starting somewhere, but I'm going to drink it away. I'm sure we'll manage between us."

"Marina, I think you should know that I'm sorry for some of the things that I may have said or done. And I wanted to say it, when I was a bit drunk. And I hope that after this voyage we can become friends again. You really are a very good navigator, because you actually got us to this place. I know we've said a few things about getting us lost now and again. But we were only joking."

"It didn't seem very funny from where I was, with you two going on about it all the time. But I'm going to forgive you everything because I've got a very forgiving nature, and I think this champagne idea was a very good idea. Especially not telling me about it before. So it's a very nice surprise. But I really do want to know about some of the other things you haven't told me, and then I'll shut up."

"Ask me anything Marina. Fire away. After all, one of the things we're celebrating is that you got us here. And if you did accidentally die of champagne poisoning, the computers will find the way back. But try not to die just yet."

Chloe wobbles a bit, after making her speech, and slumps back, spilling a little drop of champagne down her chin.

"Got to be careful."

"Careful Chloe, that's what Carlos and I used to call you, on the rare occasion that we had any conversation. But I'm sorry for that, because I realize it must have been just as hard for you, or even harder keeping some things secret, like the coffee, and the champagne, and you said something about chocolate.."

"It was going to be for the next milestone but as long as we're not going to eat it all I'll go and get some. Anyway I think it's my turn to go for a little walk."

Marina sighs. "Before you go, the two things I"m going to ask you, which I will forget if you come back with chocolate, and you might as well bring the next bottle. The two things are:-

"First:- why do we have so little in the way of essential supplies like chocolate and champagne, when we're in a ship that's the size of an intergalactic transporter. And don't tell me it's tractor parts, and beads for the natives. Because how the hell did we know what we were going to find if we got here, and the other one is

"Second:- how come we've got an antisocial geriatric stuffed in the ice box as part of our backup? I know he doesn't look like a geriatric. But some of the bits of the computer archives that I have successfully hacked into - include his basic personal details. I mean, I know that this expedition was done a bit on the cheap, but unless all the data entry on him was all done wrong, he's about fifty years old. Couldn't we get any younger volunteers? Like children or something."

"Marina, I will tell you everything, but I must dash."

"Hang, on you can leave the bottle."

"Yes, sorry, you're right."

"And bring another one back with you."

"OK."

Marina gets through the last of the second bottle, and is just wondering where Chloe is, when she comes back, looking a lot more cheerful, and lightly swinging the third bottle.

"You've been sick." Marina says accusingly, reaching up for the bottle.

"Just a bit. I feel a lot better now. I must have had some sort of electrolyte imbalance or something. I think I need to drink some more champagne, to restore the balance again."

"Fine, but fill mine first. Then you're going to tell me the dark mysteries."

"OK. I will. Shit I forgot the chocolate. Hang on to the bottle, I won't be long."

She goes into the galley, and soon comes back again.

"That was quick. You couldn't have had it hidden in the galley, I looked."

"It was hidden in one of the rehydrated coffee packs. It might smell a bit of coffee."

"Brilliant. Never mind. Just give me half. Oh a bar each! Does chocolate go with champagne? I can't remember. Oh well, it does now. No don't sit over there. Come and sit down here. That way, if one of us falls over, the other one has to catch her, and stop her from knocking over the bottle."

"You'd think," said Chloe, carefully stepping around the bottle to sit beside Marina, "That in this modern day and age, when people can fly half way around the galaxy, that someone would have invented something by now to hold a bottle of champagne on the floor to stop it getting accidentally kicked over."

"Perhaps that's something you should invent when we get back."

"If we get back, I'm going to spend all my money on champagne, and by then there'll be so much of it saved up that it won't matter if I kick over the odd bottle."

"Well, we haven't got there yet," said Marina, "Lifting the bottle carefully to the opposite side from where Chloe was sitting. Just let me know when you need a top up. Now, are you sitting comfortably? I think it's dark secrets time."

"It's difficult to know where to start. The reasons we're here are pretty odd really if you don't know the background and they have a lot to do with history and personalities. But basically we are an expeditionary ship, just as everyone's been told. That part is perfectly true. It's just that we're not the first one to come here."

"I never believed that expeditionary stuff and I don't believe it now. We don't have the right crew mix for one thing. There's not enough. Come on be honest. This is a private enterprise get rich scheme isn't it? Someone found something that's pretty good and we're coming back to make the most of it. Am I right?"

"I wish you were Marina, it's just that we don't know what happened to the first expeditionary ship, because it never came back."

Marina chills. She preferred her own alternative theory to this one.

"It can't be. There would have been an investigation or something. Some fuss. I can't remember anything like that happening" she slows down as realization dawns " for a long time."

"That's it you see. It happened about fifty years ago, to a ship called Explorer 408, and there wasn't much fuss made about it at the time. You see the non return of a long range expeditionary ship is a bit of non event. I mean, when do you start to get worried? After five years? Too soon. Six or seven years? By the time people started wondering, there wasn't a lot of interest. You know what these things are like. People get interested when these expeditions are launched, and they get very excited when they come back. But if they don't come back at all, there's nothing to actually trigger a fuss."

"So what happened?"

"At first there were a couple of theories, you know the usual ones:- technical malfunction, some kind of disease or catastrophe, but when you consider that we've been sending out expeditionary ships for hundreds of years, and that the systems are incredibly reliable, and repairable and have backup, and the crews are specially chosen to maximize the success of the crew's survival and dynamic compatibility..."

"Not like us you mean..."

"No, not like us. We don't meet those conditions. A properly selected long probe crew has a lot more people for a start, that's why the ships are so large."

"I know all that. That's why I could never understand how we ended up as a team of three on an expeditionary ship it didn't make sense. And it doesn't make any more sense now. There's more to it isn't there?"

"Yes. Can I have some more champagne? I won't spill it, I think I might be sobering up, and I don't want to do that just yet."

Chloe reaches out her glass, which is shaking slightly. She shivers. Marina reaches to her other hand.

"You're finding this hard aren't you?"

"Yes. You see, I'm the only one of us who knows the whole truth. Carlos thinks he knows. And he does know more than you at the moment. But he doesn't know the whole story."

Marina doesn't let go of Chloe's hand. Chloe gulps down the contents of the glass, and tries to smile. But the effect is grim.

"There was a lot of debate about what happened. And it really was important to try and understand because a lot of expeditionary ships were going out. But almost every single one came back. It was so unusual for them not to. In the end the first investigation came to the conclusion that there must have been some sort of failure, but there was also a very small chance that maybe the crew had found a planet which they liked, and decided to stay. I mean it was pretty unlikely, but it made everyone feel happier leaving that in as one of the possible explanations."

"From what we've seen of the planet from space, I'd be inclined to go along with that theory. It looks like a nice world. Unspoiled, not too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if Carlos came to the same conclusion. Isn't that the reason we stayed on board? To avoid temptation..."

But Chloe's body language was still cold and spelt danger.

"Marina, I said the 'first enquiry' came to that conclusion."

"You mean there was another one? I don't understand. Why should they go back into looking at something for which there's no evidence either way?"

"Normally they wouldn't. There would be nothing to be gained, and a lot of time and effort wasted. But about fifteen years ago a young graduate research student was doing some work on probability and system modelling as part of a background study on mission success profiles. It was supposed to be routine. Everyone had looked at the same data before, and pretty much come to the same conclusions. Whole books have been written on why expeditionary missions are designed the way they are. The subject was understood a lot better than it used to be. Failures were very rare. This was just part of the normal treadmill of learning the subject."

"What happened?"

"This student was living with someone who was doing a degree in archaeology at the time. During one of those discussions that takes place when you're trying to explain what you do to someone from a completely different background , some questions were asked about methods and data etc that made some of the original conclusions look incomplete."

A rare insight made Marina ask "Are we getting personal here?"

Chloe smiled, and admitted "Yes. My mother never warned me about the dangers of having an enquiring mind. I didn't realize it would get me here."

She lifts her glass "Any more left?"

Marina lets go of her hand for a moment and tops them both up.

"Plenty. But how do we get here from a look at some numbers? Don't forget, us pilots do our fair share of maths as part of our basic training."

"What happened was that Chuck, my companion of the time and budding archaeologist kept asking basic questions at the kind of data and assumptions we were looking at, basically suggesting that an archaeologist would not be allowed to draw such sweeping conclusions from such limited data. He suggested that in the period we had looked at, only one ship had not come back, and so the sample we were looking at was too small. He asked if there was any way we could look at a bigger set of data, by going back in time to see what had happened in the past.

I explained that the whole point of the exercise was to look at mission reliability, and that in previous times things were organized in such a completely different manner, that it would be impossible to make any meaningful correlations. Besides which, the data on the missions and ship designs would be organized in a completely different way, and in most cases impossible to get hold of. Even if we looked at every trans system flight that had taken place during the last five hundred years the poor quality of the data and the problems of converting it would make any real comparisons meaningless. You wouldn't be comparing like with like. Ship designs had changed. The crewing and objectives would be completely different. In those days there were a lot more failures. The designs of missions improved, and the failures stopped. About the only thing that modern missions had in common with those in the past, was the fact that people were going out into space. To boldly go etc...

"I realized later that Chuck wasn't being serious, and this was only a light hearted comment, but I thought that maybe he had a point. Of course, it would be impossible to make a mathematical study of earlier missions because the data wasn't reliable, and any comparisons would be pointless because of the changes, but the idea of having a look anyway kind of got a hold on me.

"Until that time, I had been a promising kind of student, but I started to spend a lot of time just reading up old stuff about missions that had very little documentation at all. It became an obsession. When it showed up in poor grades, my tutor was furious and said I was wasting my time. I'd spent two years as the best student in my group. Now I was the worst. Finally I came to a decision to just take a year off, and get the problem out of my system."

"That must have been pretty drastic. Couldn't you do it as a research project?"

"Researching what? My subject was applied maths. I was looking at history. Not only that, but a period of history that's so modern and well documented, from the history point of view that no-one was interested in any of it apart from the politics and the economics, which was pretty dull stuff. I wasn't really too sure why I was looking at it myself. But I got hooked on reading about these old missions and trying to find out more about them. My tutor was right. There wasn't really much of a basis for doing any comparisons. If there were mathematical models, they were completely different, or looking at things at a much lower level. But there seemed to be a romance in those earlier missions and sense of adventure that was missing later on. I became quite involved in the personality side of things too. It turns out that a number of commanders from those early missions became addicted to the mission process as their way of life, and as soon as they got back from one trip they would immediately volunteer for another."

"Seems like a hell of a boring way to spend your life to me. But talking of personalities what happened to lover boy?"

"Initially Chuck was supportive, and especially proud of the fact that he had made the original suggestion that started the whole thing off. Unfortunately, later when it got more serious, and I dropped out of the course, things got strained. I was no longer the successful soul-mate he had started dating. From his point of view I had gone a bit strange. Some of our mutual friends even blamed him for starting the rot. The pressure eventually became too much. So we split up."

"Typical men. Lead you into the shit, and leave you in it when they finds it's deep. Still your year off, must have been successful otherwise you wouldn't be here. They don't normally hand out the command of star ships to neurotic females."

"When it came to applying for my final year I really thought I'd blown it. I'd spent most of my time just researching stuff that seemed to have very little to do with the course I was doing. It was more like reading historical novels in the raw, but with the romance and most of the plots missing. I wasn't too sure, even if I really wanted to restart the maths. I felt very insecure, about myself, and my career. In the end I decided to pull myself together. I was going to read about just one more mission history, and then take a vacation, and try to get myself back into shape for my final year."

Marina yawned.

"I'm sorry. I know I'm rambling on a bit. But that was the most traumatic year of my life. I really didn't know what I was doing, or what I wanted to do."

"Something must have happened to change that."

"The final mission of a commander called Norton. He was one of those career explorer guys, who never spent too long back in civilization and always went off on the next deep space probe. There was nothing else he could really do. After all those years in refrigeration and away, he'd lost touch with any family. The only thing he was really good at was planning and running missions. He always got them back. No matter what. That's part of the reason he was always offered another. Although he was a bit of an eccentric, his expeditions had always succeeded in their objectives, and overcome disasters that no others ever had done."

"I had become very interested in him as a person. Some of his ex crew had written books about their missions, and really admired the way he worked. It was difficult to find all the references because they were spread out over many years, but I managed to track most of them down. By that time, I'd already researched outline data from hundreds of missions, but the ones he took part in, I read up in more detail. This was going to be his final mission before retiring. I looked on it as a kind of treat, and had deliberately not looked at anything that followed. I was hoping that maybe he had written some memoirs of his own, and that I could read them on my holiday as a catharsis to get it all out of my system."

"Let me guess what happened."

"You're right. He never came back, and surprisingly, there was a fuss. Because by then he was regarded as having a charmed life. But eventually it was all forgotten. So many ships didn't come back in those days. It was hardly worth noting. I felt quite sad. Although he'd been dead for hundreds of years, I had got personally involved. As part of my tidying up operation, I took some of the numbers and co-ordinates from his mission and put them in my database. I didn't really have a lot to show for a year's work. I used to run projections and correlations on everything I had, to get different views of looking at the data. Multi-dimensional graphs in colour, video animation of changes. You name it, I analysed it. Apart from some systematic design problems which caused multiple failures and were eventually designed out, everything looked random and unconnected. Just for the hell of it, when I entered the last set of numbers, I ran everything one last time."

"And."

"Commander Norton came here to this system. The Explorer 408 was headed here too. They were one hundred and fifty years apart, but they never came back. With all of space to choose from that seemed to me like too much of a coincidence."

"So no-one had ever connected the two events before?"

"Why should they?"

"What did people say when you told them."

"The coincidence theory was the standard knee-jerk reaction. Both ships failed from system malfunction. But my tutor who was familiar with the Explorer 408 said that it made the history more interesting, and could be construed as reinforcing the romantic view at the time of Norton's disappearance, that there was something in the system that attracted the crew to stay. This theory circulated briefly in the popular media of Norton's day as the "Fairy Princess" story:- Norton and his crew found an inhabited world which was so attractive that none of them ever wanted to come back.

"Although it was impossible to prove what happened to either expedition, my tutor said the coincidence would add interest to this episode and he suggested that if I wrote up my findings in the right way, my otherwise wasted time off could be salvaged. Although he also said that spending a year to write a footnote to history was perhaps not the best use for my talents."

"It could have been worse. You might have found nothing and been branded as an unreliable emotional romantic. But obviously, from the fact you're here, it paid dividends."

"It wouldn't have done me any harm if I let the matter rest there, and being a little bit older and wiser after my year in the wilderness, that's where I left it as far as my public face was concerned. In some of the more advanced textbooks the coincidence was temporarily added as a footnote."

"But I didn't really believe it. I had got quite deeply immersed into the character of commander Norton. He always came back. That was his trademark. Even if they had found a paradise world and the rest of the crew wanted to stay, he would still insist on bringing the ship back, even by himself."

"You said, this was to be his last mission. Maybe he changed his mind? Or maybe he died..."

"My instinct told me otherwise. But I realized what would happen if I tried to create an argument based on my personal understanding of a legendary character who lived two hundred years ago. So I kept quiet, went back to the course and finished my degree. I even went back to being a normal person and started having relationships with men again. Only this time I was a bit more careful in choosing."

Marina laughed, "You avoided archaeologists?"

"I started dating navy personnel, and worked my way up to astronomers, because I wanted to find an expert in signals who could help me test out another theory I had."

"So the relationships didn't last very long?"

"Not until I found out what I wanted. You see the problem with the Explorer 408, is that the only way we could ever confirm the "Fairy Princess" theory would be if we sent another ship. This system is so far away from ours, that even if we sent a signal to say "we're happy and we're staying" it would be hundreds of years before we ever received it."

"Yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff. Don't forget who piloted us here. You can hyperspace a ship, but not a signal, unless you've got a relay, because you need a local energy source to make the transition. So light and radio waves take a lot longer to travel than star-ships in hyper space."

"I realized that we could never find out what happened to Explorer 408, but it would be feasible to pick up signals from Norton's ship, if they had ever sent any. Only nobody had ever had a good reason for looking before. Then I found out that these man made signals are precisely the kind that most astronomers need to filter out and are regarded as the background pollution in electromagnetic space. Even hundreds of years ago, it was known that man made signals could mess up astronomy, so the frequencies and signalling methods were standardized a long time ago, in such a way that they caused least disruption to physical events, and could be easily filtered out."

"I guessed that if Norton had sent any signals back, that they would have reached and passed our system about twenty years earlier, and it would be very difficult and expensive to try and capture them. But I also knew the type of person he was, and that he wouldn't leave such a thing to chance. If he was going to send a message, it would start out on a tight beam aimed at our system to maximize the chances of it being picked up, but also he would probably repeat it in an endless loop, so that for as long as the transmission equipment was working, it would keep sending out the same message."

"By that time I knew enough about signal theory to appreciate that if someone was sending you a signal, even from very far away, and if you knew the likely frequency of the carrier, and you knew where it was coming from, and that the message was likely to be repeated, there was a reasonable chance that you could run a series of long term correlations and integrations that would eventually let you read it. If you had the right equipment."

"The right equipment has always been around, because radio astronomy systems have been in operation for over two thousand years, and it wasn't too hard to persuade my - at that time companion - to spend a bit of time to try and see if anything was coming in."

"Most of this kind of data is just collected on an ongoing basis, and archived. Sometimes it's decades before astronomers look at this stuff. And if they are doing a specific research study they can focus on things by collecting the data from multiple locations, which sharpen up the data, if you're looking in a certain direction, and apply space-time correction. So my companion had a trawl around. But the signal we were looking for was so weak in comparison to the random background that it was likely to need weeks of real-time integration before anything was found. An enormous quantity of data and computing access was required."

"Anyway, the long and the short of it, is that we did find what looked like a possible carrier signal, coming from the right direction and in the expected bands. But we had to put in a lot of requests for more archive data, equivalent to about a month of real-time transmission before we got a recognizable signal. By then, what we were doing, had got the attention of Naval Intelligence, because traditionally they own and control all inter-system communications and our archiving requests must have triggered someone to have a look at what we were doing. So within a couple of hours of decoding a readable signal, we got a personal visit from Navy Intelligence and there was a total security clampdown."

"Gosh, I didn't know that sort of thing still happened" said Marina. "The biggest scandal I can remember was when some Naval commander tried to hush up an affair he was having with the wife of one of the entertainment channels. But what was the message that got them so excited?"

"Something along these lines. Commander Norton had reached the Scythian system. It was inhabited by human beings from a political hegemony we knew nothing about, presumably sundered from the rest of civilization as we know it some-time during the dark ages. There appeared to be some kind of space war in progress, and we should be very careful if we approached this region again. The signal was being sent by a pilot ship that had been despatched as soon as they had realized what was going on, and in such as way that they hoped it would not be tracked, because it wouldn't start transmitting until it was well clear of the system, and it was going at a low speed such as a inter-system comet. The message also said that they would try to return with the explorer ship at maximum speed if at all possible. But if they had not returned, we should assume the worst:- that they had been destroyed by hostile forces."

"And this is where we are now? I can't believe this. I've piloted us across three years of uninhabited hyper-space to get blown up? I thought the reason we were being careful about the initial contact was because we didn't know what level of civilization to expect and we didn't want to cause any culture shock, and you're saying we've come into a war?"

Marina, had let go of Chloe. It was now Chloe who took her hand back and gave support.

"Marina, I really don't know. From what we've seen up to now, I hope that all we've found, is what we seem to have found. A quiet agricultural type world, with some technology, that's probably some kind of backwater. Remember, the message we picked up was sent out nearly two hundred years ago. If there was a war going on in this region at that time, it's probably just a dim memory even in their past. We didn't see any signs of recent destruction on the planet, and they would have shown. We haven't even seen a single space ship enter or leave the system, and we've been watching for over a week. So there's probably nothing to worry about at all. But it was decided that someone should come here, and that we would be very careful, and we would be prepared just in case, and that we would definitely get back, no matter what."

Marina protested "But why weren't we told what we were coming into? Does Carlos know?"

"Carlos doesn't know a damn thing about the message. He would've been suspicious if we didn't tell him anything, because of the precautions we've been taking about the initial contact. So he knows about Norton and the later ship. But that's as far as it goes. So as far as he imagines now, they probably decided to stay here, if they got this far. Or crashed. or died of some disease. He does know this is an unusual configuration for an expeditionary ship, but he's been told that it's due to budget cut-backs, and because this project didn't rate the same head count as a primary mission. He doesn't know the real reason we're here. He doesn't even know enough about astro-navigation to tell anyone properly where he comes from. He's just a poor ignorant lamb, who hopefully hasn't been led to the slaughter."

Marina laughed. "Poor Carlos. I always hope he might have hidden depths. But it seems I was wrong. You deliberately chose someone who was shallow and naïve and charming so that if any hostiles tried to brainwash him they wouldn't find anything. It's quite sad really, and funny at the same time. Still, I expect that if there was a war here, everyone involved in it must be long since dead. But on the off chance that we might have found some hostile natives, just what are we carrying on this ship Chloe? I do hope it's something a more useful than a powerful radio so we can send out a final SOS?"

"You could say that," said Chloe. "Rumpelstiltskin is actually a naval commander. Some of the other packing cases that are hidden around the ship include a couple of other freezer units which include a tactical fighter crew. Most of the rest of it includes enough advanced weaponry and missiles and scout ships to destroy any hostile fleet we may come across, and still have enough of a ship left to beat a hasty retreat. But obviously I hope it won't come to that. So, now you know as much as I do. Now that my soul is unburdened from its dark secrets I do feel a lot better. How about you? Have I gone back to being a non person?"

Marina smiled. She was really feeling quite thrilled. "Well this certainly changes some of the characteristics of our boring old mission doesn't it. Here was I envying Carlos - for getting off the ship first. But it looks like we might be a lot safer up here. Meanwhile he gets eaten by natives."

"He hasn't been eaten yet, and we'll be safer if and when we activate our local commandoes. In the meantime it's just down to you and me."

"Do you know how the weapon systems work?"

"I've had a bit of training, and I did a lot of simulations when you probably thought I was doing other things. I think we could probably deal with anything of a low level unexpected nature. Don't forget, they have to find us before they can do anything, and so far we haven't even seen anyone that could be looking."

"Hm, I wouldn't be in a hurry to activate our action men just yet. I was just starting to get used to not having any men around. In fact, I think I'm just going to fall asleep on the floor here."

"Come on," said Chloe, "why don't you come back to my room, and I'll confess my most guilty secret of all."

Marina looked up in mock surprise "Chloe, if you're going to say what I think you're going to say, then I'm really not surprised. But I'm really too tired and too far gone. You'll have to get me another bottle of champagne and talk to me nicely tomorrow morning."

"That wasn't actually what I had in mind. But you never know. Still, if you come back to my room, I will activate the first part of the naval re-activation programme."

Marina lifted an eyebrow, as Chloe put her arms around her and together they struggled to their feet.

"Obviously you've led a life that's been sheltered from the ways of the military. There are three things they never go far without."

"Really, and what are they?"

"First, a good supply of space torpedoes without which they can't fight any battles or win any wars. Second, an excellent supply of real food and real coffee, without which they can't function. I'm shortly going to steal some of the real coffee, but as you've now been officially inducted as one of the emergency naval crew, I don't think I'll get court martialled. And thirdly, well we'll find out when they're activated whether they've bought their own amusements, or expect us to provide them."

"Chloe, I think this mission could be quite fun."

"Let's just see what we feel like in the morning shall we?" said Chloe, as she tucked Marina into the wall side of the bed. "I just hope we don't have to worry about anything worse than a hangover hitting us during the next twenty four hours, because that's going to be quite bad enough."