"Hey, Nish." Dylan smiled as she slithered onto the flight deck.

"Hello. Sorry I'm only just now joining you. I've been storing the supplies I bought."

Dylan flicked a sidelong glance at Lorkis and grinned. The mekharan kid had brightened instantly at the sight of a female of his own species but appeared to remember what he was told about all the women on the ship being married. Lorkis kept his smile in place but didn't even bother to introduce himself in his usual flirty manner, quickly focusing instead on the holofield.

Nishara put all four arms around Dylan and they kissed. When they parted a few seconds later, he held her lower-left hand and they joined the rest of the crew around the circular console at the rear of the flight deck.

"I hope I haven't missed anything," Nishara said. Her face turned a darker shade of brown and she added, "Or kept everyone waiting."

"Nope, you arrived just in time. We're just getting started." Cora smiled, gave her a kiss, and turned back to Ralissa.

"Here's what we know so far," Ralissa said. "Fifty years ago, the Galactic Expeditions deep-space explorer ship George Vancouver vanished while surveying the trinary star system known to Terrans as Beta Persei, or Algol, ninety-three light-years from Earth."

She touched a button on one of the control panels and the old ship appeared in the holofield. It was one of Gal-Ex's earlier efforts, back when they focused more on function than form. Basically a three-hundred-meter pole with four centrifuges along its length housing crew quarters, labs, and so on, with a command module at one end and the main engines at the other.

"I remember skimming through history textbooks in school mentioning the Vancouver and the rest of its fleet," Kolya said. With a sheepish grin, she added, "I kind of wish I'd paid more attention back then, but I didn't expect I'd ever need to know a lot of the stuff we were taught in school."

"I know the feeling." Dylan chuckled and turned back to the holographic display.

"The last transmission from the Vancouver stated an intent to investigate what the captain called an ‘anomaly,' accompanied by scans taken minutes before the ship's disappearance," Ralissa continued, turning toward Cora. "Those readings matched scans conducted by a number of other ships over the last few centuries, including yours. Specifically, the scans you performed during your disappearance."

"The space-time rift we used to get here from wherever we were before?" Cora glanced around at her crew.

"You think the Vancouver ran into the same thing?" Dylan wondered how many other ships had been zapped across the universe in the same way. In fact, if those rifts could open near planetary surfaces …

How many unsolved disappearances throughout history might've been caused by anomalies like those?

"Yes," Ralissa said with a quick look around at everyone. "The rifts have been popping in and out of existence for as long as my species has been exploring space, and the mulathi have records of occurrences even farther back. Almost all of them have been short-lived, lasting only hours or minutes, sometimes mere seconds, but a few remained stable."

Grishnag nodded. "One of those stable rifts was how humans reached Hell's Heart and relocated my people to Earth so they could conduct mining operations without harming the local population."

"Yes. We've never figured out what causes them. According to our records, the Vancouver appeared near a mulathi scientific outpost in the star system Terrans call Beta Orionis, or Rigel, roughly eight hundred sixty light-years from Earth." Ralissa paused to let that sink in before adding, "That was seven hundred years ago."

"Whoa," Kolya muttered.

"That turned out to be their first encounter with humanity, though of course, they had no idea at the time," Ralissa continued. "A ship was sent out to try to make contact, but the Vancouver turned around and reentered the rift, giving the mulathi ship barely enough time for a thorough scan plus a few vids and still images. Then the rift vanished before they could send a probe through."

"I've been searching archive records from the past thousand years," Lorkis added. "Haven't found any indications of the ship appearing anywhere else, but I haven't gone through all the data yet."

"As far as we know," Ralissa said, "this is the first time the Vancouver has popped back up since its initial disappearance. We're guessing another rift opened long enough for it to pass through. All we know for sure is that the ship's transponder beacon suddenly started broadcasting again and its navigation system reconnected with the jumpgate network."

She leaned over and swiped a finger across a touchscreen. The ship in the holofield blipped out and was replaced by a massive blue-white star.

"And that's where it reappeared. Gamma Orionis, also known as Bellatrix. Two-hundred-fifty light-years from Earth, but still close enough that we haven't done much with it aside from detailed surveys, some mining here and there, and setting up a few research outposts." Ralissa smiled. "There's actually some fascinating stuff we've found there, but we'll get to that in a moment."

"And this is what a shonari scout ship found when it investigated the ping on the jumpgate network." Lorkis nudged the touchscreen and the image changed to a barren wasteland of a planet with the Vancouver transiting the hemisphere facing the ship's camera.

"Here's where things get interesting." Ralissa braced her hands on the console and stared at the image. "The Vancouver's orbit is decaying. Our scout ship informed Gal-Ex as soon as they identified the Vancouver, and since it'll enter the atmosphere in less than a week, they needed to get someone there as quickly as possible. My government worked out a deal with them and selected my team. We'd just finished a job, we're close enough to get there in a few days -- before Gal-Ex could put together their own expedition -- and having a couple of Terrans on the team didn't hurt, either. Cora's ship was the first one ready to depart without a destination already determined, so she and her crew were hired to transport us to Bellatrix."

"We're happy to help out." Cora smiled. "I've never been to Gamma Orionis since it's farther out than Terrans had explored before my ship vanished, and it still is."

"So we'll be the first people from Earth to take a look around, then." Dylan glanced at the other females as he slipped his arm around Cora's waist. "The first of any of our species, in fact."

"I think you've got quite an adventure ahead of you, then." Lorkis beamed and waved his upper-left hand at the planet. "Gamma Orionis isn't old enough for its planets to have developed breathable atmospheres and indigenous life, but there it is, anyway."

Ralissa leaned closer to the projection and shook her head slowly. "That's Gamma Orionis b. From what we've found during our surveys, it has a breathable atmosphere and once had an ecosystem and a few dozen outposts all over the planet. Long ago, at least. The species that once lived there isn't known to us and may be extinct, but it looks like they were advanced enough in planetary engineering to shape the environment to suit their needs. But something devastated the surface thousands of years ago. Some of the outposts are still intact, but others are falling apart."

"That's scary," Kolya muttered. "And kind of depressing."

"It gets even better," Lorkis said. "We've seen that pattern over a large area surrounding Earth. There's an area of roughly two hundred light-years around your world -- though in a few directions it stretches out a bit farther -- where remnants of advanced civilizations have been found, but nothing that's still alive."

"Huh. I wonder what happened?" Dylan stared at the planet in the holofield. The land near the equator was clearly desert, and much of the rest just looked like … dirt.

Donovan shivered and focused his gaze on the Vancouver, possibly an attempt to avoid looking directly at the planet. Kolya raised an eyebrow, seemed to ponder her next move, and then reached over to place her hand over his.

He turned his hand over and intertwined his fingers between hers. Her eyes widened in surprise, then she flashed a brilliant grin.

Lorkis spoke again. "I've got a couple of hypotheses about this. One is a plague that spread from world to world, but humans were spared because they were so technologically primitive back then. Not worth making contact with, I suppose, and they couldn't travel to other planets and be exposed to whatever it was. The other is a species that considered advanced civilizations a threat and wiped out the ones within reach."

"Berserkers." Grishnag sighed. "Terrific."

"Something like that. But because humans had barely invented the wheel back then, they weren't considered a threat. Or maybe they just weren't noticed."

"Well, whatever it was," Ralissa said, "Earth got lucky."

"Ugh." Donovan shivered again. "If it hadn't, humanity could've been wiped out before we even got started. None of us would exist now."

"Which means there would've been no one to build and program Cora, and set her free once she became sentient." Dylan glanced around at his wives and a cold sensation oozed through his guts. "No one to create the first anthros, either. And I wouldn't have been born, so I would never have met any of you."

"And humans wouldn't have been there to rescue my people from our own homeworld," Grishnag muttered. "Given how hostile to life Hell's Heart was, we probably would've gone extinct a long time ago."

"And since Cora wouldn't have been there when the rest of us met," Nishara muttered, "and couldn't have rescued us from the simulation we were trapped in, all of us would've died when the star turned into a supernova."

"I don't even want to think about that." Dylan shivered and Grishnag put her arm around him. "Any of it."

"Yeah, good idea," Kolya said. "Get back on topic before we all end up having nightmares."

Cora flicked her glowing red optics from the image to Ralissa. "What about rescuing the Vancouver's crew?"

"It's possible the ship has only been gone for a few hours or days, from the crew's perspective, though if there's anyone onboard, they haven't attempted to communicate -- or even send out a distress signal. It could've been drifting for centuries or longer, and just happened to pass through nearby rifts. If that's what's happened, then there won't be anyone to rescue."

"Do we have any idea what condition the ship is in?"

"Our scout ship didn't approach it. Since it's not one of ours, we don't have a right to board it and start poking around. We had to get permission from Galactic Expeditions to salvage the ship for them. So, we'll find out what shape it's in when we get there."

"Okay, then." Cora smiled. "Anything else we need to know?"

"This covers the basics. We can go over the details later -- plans for boarding the ship and bringing its systems back online, recovering data, having a look around the planet while we're there, and so on."

"Sounds good. It's almost lunchtime, so that can be the next order of business if you're done with the briefing."

"Several of us skipped breakfast, so that'd be wonderful." Ralissa grinned.

"Okay. I'll show you to the mess hall."

"I could definitely use some light and uplifting conversation after those ‘hypotheses' we just heard." Donovan kept his hand in Kolya's as they followed everyone through the door.

"Yeah, me too."

He grinned and nudged her shoulder. "I have a few ideas for dessert, too."

"Oh." She matched his grin. "I just might want to start with dessert and skip the main course."