Chapter I

The creature in the tank moved softly in the still black water. The suction cups on its tentacles fluttered delicately and its large head pulsated rhythmically. The creature appeared to be sleeping. Its pale white skin slowly changing color as the creature dreamt, one complex pattern morphing into the next. It was hypnotic to watch.

"Are you a man of faith?"

"I can't say that I am," answered Orien. On the large screen streaming a feed of the sleeping creature, a black and yellow pattern was slowly emerging. The pattern was eerily similar to the pigmentation of the shuai-jan, a deadly viper native to Orien's home planet

"Does it know we're here?"

"The Great Mind knows many things."

"Well, have you told it I'm here?"

"We tell it nothing. It is the Great Mind that tells us what fate has ordained."

The creature's tank was a fully enclosed sphere suspended in mid-air by powerful magnets. Technicians in the control room below observed the creature through video feeds and myriads of other sensors. From where Orien was standing, he could make out the bottom half of the tank through the window in the conference room he had been let into.

"How large is it?"

"In the physical world it weighs almost 250 tons."

Orien nodded as if the creature's weight meant anything to him. The acolyte that was interviewing him wore a grey cowl. Her head was shaved and on her wrists, interlocked symbols had been engraved into her skin. Her eyes were crystal blue and inscrutable and made Orien feel anxious. There was something off about her. About the whole place.

"And you say it wants me to do what?"

"The Great Mind requires you to ferry a message across the stars."

Orien nodded uncommitted he was still transfixed by the image on the screen. When he was a boy, his sister had been bitten by a shuai-jan viper. He and she had been playing in the tall grass near their parent's remote mountain cabin. Suddenly, she had yelled out in pain and fallen over. Lying writhing on the ground, an ominous dark cloud just below her skin had begun to spread out from two tiny red bite marks on her ankle. Orien had run for help as fast as his young legs would take him. He still remembered the drive down the winding backroads of the mountain as clearly as had it been yesterday. His mother had been driving, while his father attended his sister in the backseat of the car. He had sat paralyzed on the front seat clinging to the armrest in the door.

"Can't you just beam the thing's message wherever it needs to go?"

"We question not the designs of the Great Mind."

Orien nodded again. The menacing black and yellow pattern on the creature was slowly fading as a new pattern began to emerge.

"Well, for the right price I'll ferry your message wherever you want it."

The acolyte bowed slightly.

"The will of the Great Mind be done."

* * *

Orien breathed relieved as he stepped back onto his ship. He stripped as the outer hatch of the airlock closed behind him. A moment later, the airlock was bathed in the harsh ultraviolet of the sterilization process.

"Have we been offered the job?" the ship wanted to know.

"We have," Orien answered and accepted a clean set of clothes from a waiting drone.

The ship and Orien communicated telepathically via a chip implanted in Orien's brain.

"They want us to travel to the Desalon-system with a message."

"That is more than seventy thousand light-years."

"I know."

"It will take us several months travelling at my peak velocity."

"I know."

"And they only want us to carry a message?"

"Apparently."

"Did they not communicate with us using a superluminal communication array? Why not use that?"

"Evidently it's a rather important message."

"How much are they paying?"

"300,000 credits."

The ship fell silent for a moment feigned the emotion of surprise, presumably this was for the benefit of Orien.

"300,000 credits to deliver a message!"

"That's the job."

"What is the catch?"

Orien shrugged and squeezed through the slowly opening inner door of the airlock.

"Surely there is a catch."

Orien shrugged again and made his way to the ship's small mess hall where he sat down at the table. A drone appeared a moment later with a tray with food and beverages. The ship fell quiet as Orien ate but he could sense its frustration about the incomplete mission parameters. "We'll see once they give us the mission specs. I haven't signed any yet," Orien finally proffered as he downed the last of a cup of juice.

"We are in dire need of the credits. I am running low on fuel and have put off several important repairs to converse energy."

"I know. That's why we are out here dealing with these lunatics."

"Indeed."

"Do you think it really gives them orders?"

"The creature in the tank?"

"Yeah."

"Perhaps, but more likely there is a man behind the curtain."

"I guess. It's ridiculous either way … to have built a station all the way out here in the nothingness."

"It does seem a peculiar allocation of resources."

Orien and the ship, who went by the uninspired designation of Y-h57, had been working together for close to five years. They had met on an orbital station, Louis VI, above a backwater gas giant. Orien had been working in one of the station's refineries processing hydrogen and converting it into energy crystals. The pay had been good but little else about the job had been bearable. After several years of bouncing from one system to the next in search of easy money, the job at the refinery had at once been what he had been looking for and everything he was running from. Y-h57 had ended up at the orbital station after spending three decades serving in the Unionist fleet. By design, Y-h57 was a heavy-duty scout ship, a military oxymoron which had let to the ship's unceremonious decommission from the fleet before having earned the right to download into the Unionist central matrix. Over several years, the ship had tried to earn enough credits to upgrade itself or perhaps even secure it a place in a private matrix somewhere. But Y-h57 had fallen short as a mercenary. Without a crew, the ship had only been able to accept missions that paid little more than the cost of the fuel burned and often less than the depreciation the ship accrued.

"With 300,000 credits we could get an extra server bank."

"You could get an extra server bank."

"Extra processing power would allow me to operate the virtual reality facilities in higher resolution."

"Hmf," grumbled Orien .

Orien and Y-h57's partnership had not proved particularly fortuitous as of late. In the beginning, they had been practically swimming in lucrative contracts. Their first contract smuggling energy crystals from Louis VI to the embargoed world of Silustria had been wildly profitable. Off that one contract, they had been a quarter of the way to being able to afford a new stardrive which would allow Y-h57 to travel faster than almost any privately held ship (as far as the the publicly available archives of ship instrumentation were concerned) which, at least in theory, would lead them to land even more lucrative contracts. After two years of working together Orien and Y-h57 had finally bought their new stardrive. It had been a day of triumph and celebration. But their victory had quickly soured. The cost of Y-h57's new tremendous speed was an almost insatiable appetite for fuel and as the galaxy spiraled slowly towards war, the purse strings tighten across known space. Hiring agents were growing ever more concerned with fuel-efficiency and more and more willing to wait an extra week or two if it meant saving a few thousand credits. Dawdling solar sail ships got orders these days that a year or two ago would have gone to Orien and Y-h57. It was a sad state of affairs and the reason why they had flown beyond the boundaries of known space and into the nothingness of the interstellar void.

They had heard the rumors years earlier. An apocalyptic cult had somehow managed to build or buy - or perhaps steal - a deep space research station and deployed in the vast empty region of space, which separated the Unionist Republic from the rest of civilized space. The cult, rumor had it, was a generous client but not all ships that went to call at the cult's station returned.

"There is someone knocking on me."

"Hmm," answered Orien and looked up at the screen fixed above his bed. They had been waiting in the hangar of the cultists' station for close to three hours; Orien sleeping most of that time. On the screen, a slight figure cloaked in the grey cowls preferred by the cultists could be seen tapping lightly on the cuneate hull of Y-h57.

"Are you receiving any data transmissions?"

"None that I can perceive."

"The woman … erm … Asia I think, assured me they would send the mission specs shortly."

"Did she specify how?"

Orien swung his feet over the side of his bed and began putting on his shoes.

"I suppose not."

"It seems they are hand delivering them."

"Of course they are."

"Remember to request a fuel deposit before you sign any contract. I barely have enough fuel to get us back to the closest starport."

"Got it," Orien said aloud and got up.

The figure in the cowl tapping on the ship had eyes like those of the other acolytes, crystal blue and inscrutable; eyes like deep blue chasms. Orien looked at the acolyte for a long moment through the one-way window of the airlock. Her face was roundish and she looked naively innocent. Only a single symbol adorned her thin wrist. Her head was shaved.

"Let her in," Orien thought and the ship obliged. With a metallic sigh, the metal maw of the airlock opened and revealed Orien to the acolyte on the other side.

"Blessed be the Great Mind," the acolyte said and bowed deeply. Her voice was light and airy, and barely audible above the hum of the machines working in the hangar.

"Sure," said Orien and motioned the acolyte to enter the air lock chamber.

The acolyte bowed demurely and entered the ship.

"Better scan her," thought Orien.

"In progress," answered the ship.

Orien pulled down a tip-up seat and sat looking expectedly at the acolyte. She remained standing and looked around the air lock chamber with wide eyes. The maw of the outer hatch of the airlock closed behind her with the soft hiss of air escaping.

An uncanny silence hung in the air for a few moments as Orien tried to figure out the situation.

"My scans are coming up clean. I do not believe she poses any immediate risk to me," the ship thought "or you".

"Reassuring as always."

"So have you got the specs for us to review?" Orien finally asked.

"Specs?" The acolyte looked at him puzzled.

"The mission specifications … the route you prefer us taking, any cargo requirements - I assume you have your message on some sort of secure data enclave." The acolyte shook her head slowly as Orien continued. "Our delivery window, drop-off coordinates." Orien licked his lips. "We of course also require a fuel deposit. Seventy thousand light-years. That's a big ask."

"I estimate it will cost us 50.000 credits to travel to the Desalon-system if we fuel up at unlicensed fueling stations," the ship projected into Orien's head.

"We are going to need," Orien paused and looked into the blue vortexes that were the acolyte's eyes "150.000 credits up front."

"You are pushing it," the ship thought acidly.

The acolyte looked puzzled for a moment.

"So when do you want the rest," the acolyte asked.

"Upon delivery."

"Would it not be easier to transfer the entire sum immediately?"

Orien blinked.

"Yes it would," thought the ship.

"I guess," stammered Orien.

The acolyte and Orien again looked at each other in awkward silence.

"So when do we leave?"

"We?"

"The Great Mind have anointed me carrier of its message."

"There's you catch."

"No passengers," the ship thought sternly.

"I was told we would be delivering only a message," said Orien. "That was the understanding I reached with your … colleague … Asia."

"And I am the medium through which the message is carried."

"No passengers," the ship thought again.

"300.000 credits is a lot of money. Up-front no less."

"I am not a passenger liner."

"That's fucking stupid reason to pass on 300.000 credits."

"But we are passing on this."

"She looks real quiet."

"Humans, as a rule, are not quiet. Would you willingly ingest a potentially harmful parasite?"

"I would if the parasite were paying me 300.000 credits."

"The Great Mind has endowed me with 500.000 credits in the event you hesitated," the acolyte said and smiled nervously.

"We are not passing on that," thought Orien.

The ship fell quiet in Orien's mind for a moment. Patrolling the outer edges of the Unionist sphere of influence, the ship - while still in active service - had been attacked by a group of brazen privateers who had boarded Y-h57 and killed off its crew and begun breaking down Y-h57 mental defenses in an attempt to take over the ship. Had it not been for the prompt arrival of reinforcements, the privateers would likely have succeeded and Y-h57 would have become a prisoner of its own hardware. The experience had left Y-h57 extremely wary of letting anyone board it - even Unionist personnel - which likely had been part of the reason why the ship had been decommissioned. Y-h57 had only allowed Orien aboard after intensive scans and mental examinations had demonstrated Orien's vast ineptitude when it came to handling sophisticated technical systems.

"500.000 credits upfront solves a lot of our problems," Orien thought trying to convince the ship. "You get your server bank and perhaps we harden some of your sensitive system."

" She can stay in the airlock for the duration of the flight ."

"She is not staying in the airlock for months on end. She'll need to eat and sleep and shower."

"Do you accept the terms lain before you by the Great Mind?" asked the acolyte.

Orien held up a finger. "I'm thinking about it."

"We're accepting the offer."

"If we are letting her onboard, I am going to watch her 24/7. She will not get a moment of privacy."

"Fine by me."

"And we detouring to the closest independent shipyard and upgrading my core systems. I need internal combat drones if this is the kind of business we are going to accept."

"We accept the terms," said Orien and extended his hand to the acolyte.

"And my systems needs to be harden against electronic warfare."

"The Great Mind will be pleased," the acolyte said and bowed a third time. "I am Haero."