The Great Galactic Score!

34

34

Demi stood, awestruck, at the magnificence of creation. Or, rather, destruction. The closer they came to the enormous black hole at the centre of the galaxy, the more she came to understand the nature of life itself. An endless cycle of birth and death. An inevitability of mortality. The colours. The accretion disk had far more detail to it than she had previously expected. Whole planets and moons fell into the gravity well and broke apart as she watched. The black hole sat like a representation of death for the entire universe. Or DEATH, depending on which books you read as a child.

"I've seen better?" Briyun had returned, holding a cold can of Water Plus in her pudgy fingers and grimaced at the portrait of celestial majesty upon the skin-flap view screen. "I once saw an otter the size of a house build a dam that flooded a planet right up to its mountains? Good eating?"

"Shush! They'll hear us!" With a hissed whisper, Demi looked at the Water Plus can and suddenly needed a drink. "We're in silent running mode."

"Silent what?" Friss laughed and fell back upon his captain's chair, newly regrown from the floor. He raised his head. "DWAIt CORPS ARE A BUNCH OF THIEVES! See? They can't hear a thing. We are in space. In space, nobody can hear you scoff at cosmological beauty."

Demi felt a little stupid at that, but only a little. She'd seen holo-movies, transcribed from old data streams from the Earth-That-Was. They had 'silent running' all the time in their space battles, where defiant captains found a way to win in no-win situations with little more than badly coded messages between them and their first officer. Firing torpedoes after catching their enemies unawares.

She felt a little disappointed about that and settled down into a chair Lodka grew for her. So far, along this journey, nothing remotely cinematic had happened. Well, apart from the fleet of drone ships surrounding a planet. And the appearance of Brenda, the AI moon with a grudge. And possibly the time she had accidentally destroyed a moon while trying to turn off the news. Apart from that, nothing exciting had happened. If you also didn't include all the death, the maiming, the arena fights, and the enormous cake that Bognrd had thrown out of an air-lock in a huff.

"Don't they have, you know, sensors?" In the very centre of the black hole, Demi could see a large structure, now. The station where they were headed, hidden in a place no-one could try to reach and survive, unless they had an organic ship and the MacGuffin-Hawking Temporal Gravitation and Event Horizon Compensator. "Does Lodka's cloak really work that well."

"Ah, see, that's the thing." Friss reluctantly dragged his eyes from the view and leaned upon the arm of his chair. Something beeped excitedly and Friss poked a finger at a button to stop it. "It's very clever. What she does is, and it's genius really, she turns a shade of black with the occasional light on her surface. Brilliant and works a whole lot better than using lasers and containment fields and meta-materials to hide a ship."

"Is it 'genius'? Really?" For a short time, Demi had felt the nervousness she had experienced, since first meeting Friss and Lap, had started to dissipate. Or, at least, become used to it. That nervousness returned. "Because it just sounds like someone holding a leaf in front of their nose and calling it camouflage."

Friss scowled at her as though she had said the most ridiculous thing anyone had said since the beginning of time. He started to say something, only for Lap to interrupt. A series of crackles and crinkles and rustlings from the Planeian made Friss look even more confused and then his face brightened.

"You're absolutely right! A demonstration is needed for our disbelieving crew member." He spun his captain's chair back to face the view screen, held up a finger and looked as though he had something serious to say. Or take a long visit in the loo. It wasn't altogether clear. "Lodka, I want you to drop the cloak for exactly one second, then raise it and adjust course in case they take a long look at where we were. Engage!"