Stryker sat on the left most of three comfy chairs in the middle of the bridge. They were red synthetic leather and could completely recline, came with a massage feature, a drink dispenser, and had a privacy forcefield feature the previous owners of the Second Prize had installed. It didn’t take too much to imagine the uses of a fully reclinable massage chair with a privacy dome in the middle of a bridge of a starship. The rest of the stations had regular chairs with the standard drink holders.

  At the front of the bridge, there was the helm and ops and going around the room, there was the science station, tactical, communications, and another one with lots of blinking lights, screens, and controls that no one really knew what it was for, but there was a crew member there nonetheless. No one really knew the crew member’s name who was posted at the unknown station, but they had been there since the maiden voyage and the captain seemed to think they were important to the operations of the ship so most people just left it alone.

  As the second in command, Styker would make a point to learn the crew member’s name or at least ask the captain, as he should know the ship inside and out. However, he had a more important task than figuring out the identity of the unknown crew member, he had to get a particularly austere alien creature to purchase upgrades.

  “The cards say that he will soon go on a long journey,” Couslensor Joy said. She sat on the other side of the captain in the third luxury chair and used the fold out table feature to spread her Tarot cards to help her psychic ability.

  “He’s already on a long journey,” Stryker said. “We are taking him to Common III. Helm, how long at curve factor 8 will it take to get to Common III?”

  Curve speed was named for the fact that starships would ride the curvature of space like a wave by bending time and space around it. Luckily, the inventor of Curve Drive Engine completely forgot Einstein's equations so they didn’t have to deal with any inconveniences of traveling at relativistic speeds such as the twin left on Earth aging 80 years or inconveniences like cosmic speed limits.

  The engineers who invented the teleporter pad realized that omitting inconvenient physics also helped with the inconvenient fact that when matter is disassembled and reassembled by a teleporter the original is destroyed and a copy is created in the other location. So rather than murdering people and letting their clones run around on the planet, only to murder the clones and have new clones run the ship when they come back, the engineers could just make a little whoopsie with the physics, and allow a person to be disassembled and reassembled in another location and not violate any laws by sensible physicists.

  Thus an entirely new branch of flexible physics was created when it was convenient to the plot, like traveling at Curve 8 not causing any weird time dilation effects.

  “Two weeks,” Ted said, fully confident that two weeks would also pass for anyone outside of their reference frame. Ted wore a uniform with the yellow accents of the rank and file Star Cheap employee. He was a decent enough pilot but slurped the last of his chocolate shakes. Since Star Cheap encouraged their employees to mix work with leisure, he brought a chocolate shake to work every day and would sometimes slurp it at inopportune times.

  “Maybe the trip back is the long journey!” Squealed Counselor Joy.

  “What we need to do…” Stryker ventured, “is find out what he likes to do on vacation.”

  “But he’s not on holiday.” LLM said from the ops station. “He is High Jopnop of the Thorsolian Alliance, a religi-oligarch. They practice Austerism and seek divinity by wanting for nothing.”

  “That’s the keyword, oligarch. He has money, and we need to tap into that money while he is here.”

  “How do you get a person who wants for nothing to buy something?”

  “He bought a ticket on our vessel, didn’t he?”

  “That’s because he has to get to the conclave of the Jopnops on Common III.”

  “Everyone has something they want, we just have to figure it out.”

  Before they could ponder any further, an alert flared up on the tactical station. Security Chief Gwarf, a sasquatch from the planet Earth wearing the black security uniform, tapped on the screen and said, “There is a strange energy reading coming from the Captain's ready room.”

  “Go check on him,” Stryker said, and Gwarf moved to comply. Contrary to popular belief, sasquatches did not have a funny gate as depicted in the late 20th century photographs. Those photographs were wookies, the most famous of which landed a supporting role in a popular 20th century film franchise.

  The wookies were a distant North American cousin. The sasquatch were native to Siberia and not discovered until climate change had allowed Russia to hold burning man festivals and the first ever sasquatch caught on film was videoed telling the festival goers to “turn it down because he had work in the morning.” Sasquatches were legendary for their tempers and Gwarf was no exception as his prime method of dealing with any situation was evisceration.

  While humans were the most prolific of races and often compared by the rest of the galaxy as bunnies or may flies, just eating and fucking their way through life. The other native sentient species of Earth such as the reptile people who lived in the center of earth, the sasquatches and all their cousins like wookies and yetis, the bird people of Mount Shasta, and all the others in the remote areas of just about every continent on Earth, weren’t nearly has reproductively robust and not discovered by humans until the former United States in a historic moment, actually passed a bipartisan bill.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The “Find Them Aliens Act of 2053” funded expeditions around the world to look for immigrants to deport and found other sentient lifeforms, which was generally counted as a win because they found entirely new groups to remove from the planet. Launching yetis into space revitalized the space race and ushered humanity into a brave new area of monetizing other planets. The windfall of economic activity allowed private industry to buy Earth’s bankrupted governments. Through mergers, consolidations, corporate takeovers, etc., the entire Earth government was owned by Amagoogfaceapple or Fapple for short.

  Gwarf was placing explosive charges on the locks for the Captain’s office when the door slid open and the captain came out. His ball-et (bald mullet) was pulled back in a ponytail which was unusual for the captain. The man normally wore it with a true party in the back. Stryker dismissed it as the man toning down his look for the benefit of their guest.

  “Is there something wrong?” the captain asked.

  “No,” Gwarf said and began to pack up his munitions.

  “Ah, number one,” the captain said and strode across the room to Stryker.

  “Number two,” Stryker said. “You’re number one.”

  “Ah yes,” Captain Peecurd said. “What I mean to say is you’re my number one man. How fast can this ship go?”

  “We’ve gotten to Curve 9.6 during stress testing.”

  “Do you think we can get to Curve 9.8?”

  “Theoretically but it’s never been tried, even by the IF.”

  “Then let’s be the first. Make it so.”

  “I must remind you that Star Cheap guidelines doesn’t permit flying any guest faster than Curve 8 as the fuel cost to time saving ratio–” LLM said.

  “I’m aware of the guidelines. Ted. Engage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ted said and dialed in the command. The stars on the view screen shot past at a faster rate. Once the speed ticked up to Curve 9.2, the ship began to shake. Because accelerating anything beyond 9.2 took enormous amounts of power, it would take a little time even to get to 9.3. Stryker decided to get to the bottom of it before he would have to worry about keeping the ship together.

  “Captain,” Stryker asked. “Can I talk to you in your ready room?”

  “Of course!” Peecurd said with a smile. “My door is always open.”

  ***

  Peecurd stood in front of his fish tank watching the water ripple from the vibrating ship. Stryker stood and waited for the Captain to speak. After a while, Peecurd turned to him, and said. “Do you trust me number one?”

  “Two, I’m two,” Stryker said. “But yeah, we served together for years in the IF. People die when you can’t trust your fellow soldiers.”

  “Then you need to trust me now. Sometimes we do things because we must, not because we like it.”

  “What about the value-add?”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure that part out.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what we are doing? It will go a long way in reassuring the crew.”

  “All I can say is that it’s a priority and the orders come direct from Star Cheap. Now, is there anything else?”

  “No sir,” Stryker said and left the office.

  ***

  Captain Peecurd woke up with a pounding headache on a metal bed. His stomach lurched and he looked around for anything that resembled a toilet or a sink. While aliens across the galaxy were generally human-like bipeds, interior design philosophy didn’t evolve parallel to Earth and the two holes in a center platform in the middle of the room had an equal chance of fulfilling his needs.

  Not having the luxury to explore, he vomited into the nearest hole.

  “That’s the food dispenser,” A blue alien with the aforementioned forehead ridges wearing a gray cloak sat on a bed identical to Peecurd’s. There were two other beds in the room that were empty. A door with an alien control panel was located between the two empty ones.

  Above the only exit was either a camera, laser, or both, and the control panel was in an alien language that was not detected by Fapple Translate. All Star Cheap employees were injected with nanomachines that would allow them to hear and read all known languages in their native tongue. Frapple Translate was one of Earth’s first exports as entire alien religions finally wanted to know what they were saying in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Unfortunately, religions' tendency to make up information for anything they didn’t know had caused many holy wars making the Breakfast at Tiffany’s franchise some of the bloodiest films of all time.

  The room was devoid of anything else other than the table in the middle that had a hole for waste and other for food. Not that Peecurd was very hungry at the moment.

  “Water,” he gasped. “Where do we get water?”

  The blue alien pointed to the hole that he had used to eject his stomach contents.

  Peecurd sat back on the bed holding his head.

  “Maybe the prison guards will bring you water?” the blue alien suggested. “Though, there haven’t been any guards since I’ve been here.”

  “How long have you been here?” Peecurd said.

  “About five days.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I was just minding my own business, collating papers, have you ever collated paper? It’s quite relaxing. I’m level 32 in Office Sim 10. I really love Earth games. Do you play Earth games? What am I saying? You’re an Earthling, of course you play them.”

  “You know that Frapple is just getting free labor out of you.”

  “The subscription fee isn’t all that bad.”

  “That’s even worse! Now you were playing a video game, and then what happened.” The captain steered the conversation back on course.

  “Right so I was playing a game and when I took my headset off there was this spherical probe. Right in the middle of my living room! It shot this beam at me, thought I was getting scanned. And I was thinking that maybe this was it. This was finally my chance to get an anal probe. Do all humans get anal probes? What am I saying? Of course you get anal probes, you’re human! But instead of being abducted, I ended up here. Hey, why aren’t you wearing a dress?”

  “I think you were abducted,” Peecurd said.

  “Oh goodie? Do you think they’ll give us an anal probe?”

  “I think it’s a little more sinister than that,” Peecurd said and glanced at the weapon above the door. Instead of pointing at the room, it was pointed at him.