Timaset didn’t need a ship – especially not a flying museum piece! And as far as he knew, a dodgy plasma injector could drop you smack into a wormhole ending somewhere on the other side of the universe with no way back. Well, he could always sell the damn thing. Couldn’t he? He could use the money. Damn, he could always use the money! Maybe the crew would want to buy it over from him?

An idea was forming in his mind. It was only rudimentary, but in the circumstances, it could be called a plan. He loathed the alien for attacking them, without any provocation. He hated the way it was smashing up his ship – and all of them – with hardly any effort or regard for life at all. “How’s that message coming?”“Umm – they must be jamming us, sir – I can’t get through.

The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so much a final frontier as an ultimate frontier; the ultimate frontier – as wide as it is deep. Stars shine coldly in the unimaginable blackness. Out of the darkness, a tiny speck caught the distant light of stars – a tiny gray speck that, as it moved, seemed to grow larger, catching the light just so until it revealed itself to be a ship.

He thought about it for a minute. The kitty was only around seven thousand give or take a gold tooth and some coinage – minus the ship – which must’ve been worth well, a lot more than seven thousand, even in scrap metal. An alarm was going off somewhere, faintly.

Looks like they went crazy and started cacking each other.’ Lisa said to me as we walked through the ship, searching for a single survivor. There were what looked to be barricades in the corridors. The elevator doors were shot through from the inside. So were the sides and the roof!

On screen, sir." Pankow said. That seemed to explain everything. On screen was a distant angular speck that could only be a ship. Marnetti broke a rather tense moment by arriving. Ortez groped for the arm of his command chair and sat down, his eyes fixed on the viewscreen. Marnetti went to his station.