"Are you in a delicate condition, Vickie?" Eve took the news cheerfully. "Just a bit." The candid reply. "How great!" Eve exclaimed happily clapping her hands. She turned to JS whose expression was more aghast than cheerful. He cleared his throat: "What does 'just a bit' mean? To be or not to be... pregnant, this is the problem. There's not 'half pregnant', or so I was told." Then he added: "But perhaps that's only for humans." "It's just a drafted project, a probability in a mathematical imaginary field as the Nowhere is. I can develop and bring it physically to light or leave it, indefinite, forever. It's up to me, to us." The plea quality of Vickie's voice made JS ill at ease, but touched Eve's heartstrings. "You truly want this child, Vickie!" Vickie gulped: "I'd love it!" "She'll be very welcomed!" Eve was delighted by the news. Shocked to the marrow, JS decided to clarify the situation straightaway, at the risk of appearing callous: "What does it mean... physically? do you enlarge, go slower, have the cravings, be in labor... When will the delivery be? I gotta know. Don't forget we're still hunted down by the Rogues and 3TC." "No, none of that!" Vickie shouted feeling him worried. "It's like.. like..." "Like a software!" Eve burst out. "That's it! I develop my baby-to-be in the Nowhere from a DNA code. I don't swell, no side effects. The baby-ship will be cast in a physical body summoned by her sire or her captain-to-be." JS heaved a sigh of relief. Suddenly a sense of fraternal possessiveness gripped him. "How could this happen? Should I call out the cad?" Vickie giggled. Eve grokked. Clapping both of her hands over her mouth, "Oh, Jay!" she uttered. The suspect struck him like a bullet. "Me! no way!" JS's Adam's apple bobbed as a yo-yo. But a smile flickered across his face, the humor of the situation not entirely lost on him. "I know my goods are good, but that's out of my league! A 2.5 miles battleship is too much also for my generous size!" He grinned puckishly. "I feel terrible about that, Jay." Vickie admitted. "No captain ever wanted to die for his ship. They coupled just to ascend to the stars. I translated your DNA. If you didn't make it, I wanted a sparkle of you forever." "It's OK, Vickie!" JS's lips quirked in a saucy, little half smile. "You sired a ship!" Eve enfolded him in her arms. He held her close and grinned with wry boldness: "It's not a waste barge, is it, right?" "Nooo! she's a beautiful frigate!" Vickie protested while the alarms announced the jump off the hyperspace. The 9th moon of Planet X7 was a frozen ball of rocks and water ice Laetitia immediately nicknamed Hoth. Its iron-rich liquid core originated the moon's magnetic field and its tectonic activity. A thin atmosphere allowed a meager bacterial life in the subterranean salt seas and in the caves generated by volcanic activity and meteorite impacts. The planet had been abandoned for thousands of years but the scanner still identified some man-made structures underground. "We've to explore this basis. Everything we find will be shared in public. We owe it to the past greatness of S'skash!" JS announced on holo-tv. "A nail on the huffers' coffin!" he grinned privately. At the abandoned, dilapidated base the recce-team warned JS that someone had blown up the main bulk doors. JS arrived and ordered to free the door for the crew from ice. At last the door swooshed open. Dim lights still lit up the place. Their movement snapped an engine hum. "It's a hangar of an ancient ship!" Vickie mind-whispered. JS nodded, his eyes caught by the frozen, cocooned corpses scattered around. "There was a massacre." S-Li whispered. "They killed each other." Those corpses shook the S'skash crew more than the Yttrium Mines killing ground. In the mists of history S'skash killed other S'skash. "He brought all to hell with him." JS engraved the epitaph indicating the armored vehicle gunner. --- Thanks