Magellan's Dream

Captain Duncan stood at the helm of his ship, amidst wall-wide screens blinking back and forth, and calmly observed the slaughter on the main viewscreen. The Shivans attacked unexpectedly; a mass drop from warp, their arrowships appeared from the blackness of space like a hive of angry hornets, and swarmed the XB-163 Invincible from every possible attack angle.

"Shields," he said into the tense air of the command deck, with only the slightest intonation of a question.

"Sixty-eight percent, sir," Lieutenant O'Halley answered, his voice interlaced with the beeps from his instruments.

"Weapons," the captain said in the same voice.

"Starboard black hole generators are still dead," Sargeant Bell said from behind the glow of instrument panels. "Port side gravity collapse cannon is charged and ready."

"Hard turn, vector one-eight-point-five," the captain said. The viewscreen slowly shifted upwards and to the right, bringing a view of thin red veins appearing spontaneously in space and quickly vanishing -- the engine trails of maneuvering Shivan arrowships.

"Turn? Duncan, what the hell are you thinking?" Councellor Bradley King barked, furiously gesticulating at the red traces. "They'll rip us apart if we stay here too long! Get out of this system!"

"Councellor, we've dispatched more than half of their ambush fleet with just this ship," Captain Duncan replied, unperturbed. "A few more shots will liquidate the entire fleet, even with only a single cannon operational. Mr. Bell," he turned to the weapons specialist. "On my mark, fire the port side cannon. Nobody is ripping us apart, King."

"Not the aliens," King grumbled. "The board. This ship's an investment, Duncan. An investment from powerful people. You'd do well to remember that."

"Don't worry," Duncan replied quietly without looking at King. A hint of a smile, a twitch of the lip. "They'll complain a little, and then hang medals on me. Mr. Bell," he raised his voice again. "Three, two, one, mark."

King turned away from the main viewscreen as the black hole on the left side of the ship collapsed, and the resulting tear in reality ripped apart another third of the alien swarm. Duncan, swelling with pride of his ship and with righteous anger at the annoyances that dared to blind-side him, was forgetting that his tool of vengeance cost more than several countries' combined gross domestic product. The board of investors won't care if he destroyed the Shivan homeworld itself with the Invincible; the ship was carrying experimental technology which took years to design, and still needed years of testing to perfect. If there was as much as a scratch on the hull once Duncan was finished, the board will flay him for it. And things had gone farther than just a scratch; there was already a disabled starboard gravity collapse cannon.

But there's no stopping a charging bull, King thought and sighed. He had done his duty in warning him. Now, that bull better be ready for the consequences of his actions.

A blue light illuminated the deck momentarily, punctuated by shrill alarms. King looked at the information screens surrounding him, but quickly realized the flash came from the viewscreen, from somewhere just beyond the immediate battlefield.

"Captain!" O'Halley shouted. "Massive warp signature, bigger than a flagship, hostile configuration! It's Shivan! I've... I've never seen anything like it!"

"Focus in on it," Duncan ordered.

The combined fireworks of burning hull fragments, dying engines, and exploding fuel cells was quickly replaced by what at first looked like an enormous red blotch on the camera. As the viewscreen adjusted and brought the image into focus, the enemy ship more closely resembled a tree frozen in crimson amber. Through the transparent gelatin-like substance that made up the hull, one could observe strange pods, needles, and spirals nested close to each other and all of them linked to a central stem running the length of the vessel.

Duncan immediately recognized it; so did King. Both have heard whispers of a ship described like a giant bloated leaf or a red aquatic plant. They were passed along by long-distance freighter pilots, pirates, and scavengers, none being credible sources, as far as the government was concerned. Only when the jumbled report from the sole survivor of a deep scouting party into Shivan space reached the Ministry of Defense two months ago were the rumours finally officially considered and discussed.

"The Sathanas," they both whispered.

The dazed silence in the deck lasted only a moment, with Duncan being the first to find himself.

"Lieutenant, vector three-six-point-two, now," the Captain barked. "Mr. Bell, weapon status."

"Port side cannon five percent recharged," Bell said. "Starboard cannon malfunctioning."

"Re-route power to the starboard cannon," Duncan said. "Overload the available black hole generators if you must. We're going to take that sucker down."

"Duncan, this is insane," King said, but the Captain ignored him.

"On my mark, Mr. Bell. Three, two, one, mark."

--- --- ---

It was a meadow like all other meadows. She was a bee like all other bees. They were flowers like all other flowers.

The bee, waking up early in the morning, buzzed for half a mile before getting to the flower field. Energy was precious to such a small organism doing such heavy lifting, and she was determined to make the best of it. After all, what's the use from the extra pollen if she exhausts herself before actually reaching the hive?

But work is done faster when one starts it with a good mind-set, a truth applicable not only to bees, but to humans, and to fishes, and to many other things, no doubt. So she landed onto the closest flower, steeping deep in pollen, before setting out to gather nectar from another.

--- --- ---

"Impossible," Duncan mouthed.

The gravity collapse cannon, naturally, ripped the Sathanas in half. Somewhat less naturally, the two halves fell right back onto each other, sending out little jets of gelatin from the resulting crack. In moments, the gel mended, and the hull looked as if it repaired the damaged channels within it by itself. The Invincible wasn't so lucky.

"Sir, black hole generator number six is critically damaged," O'Halley shouted over the alarms filling the deck. "It sent a feedback pulse through our systems. The surge fried seven of our processor cores. This leaves us with only five terahertz of combined processing power, half of what we need for warp travel."

"Somehow, 'I told you so' doesn't even begin to cover it," King said, though he didn't need to. Only the same pride that pushed Duncan into an unstoppable aggressor kept him from lashing out and swinging a fist at somebody.

"Port side cannon ten percent charged," Bell contributed with a hopeful tone of voice.

"We're breaking off the attack," Duncan finally said. "Vector two-two-zero. Accelerate to jump speed."

"Sir, warp travel is--"

A loud bang interrupted O'Halley. The ship's deck shook, prompting King to grab onto the nearest support rail to keep himself upright. The viewscreen showed the needle-like structures inside the Sathanas detaching themselves from the dreadnought, each carrying small blobs of the hull materials with them. The blobs splashed over the Invincible's shields, thinning them for easier penetration by the needles -- which then exploded several feet above the hull. The Lieutenant started reading a damage report.

"Carry out the order, Lieutenant," the Captain cut him off. "Mr. Bell, deploy the Magellan Core."

Sargeant Bell stared for a moment, and was about to ask the Captain to repeat, certain he misheard; but Duncan jerked an impatient nod at him before Bell could say anything. The latter exhaled and flipped a switch normally housed under a transparent box, as to prevent accidental triggering. A black polyhedron slowly descended into the room, swinging a little in mid-air over the deck. It hung by a mane of multicoloured wires which disappeared somewhere into the tunnels of the service passages between the decks of the ship.

King could only sigh again. Of course, the experimental technology that they were here to test was their only choice now, if they had any hope of survival. But this would be its first deployment outside of a lab. The experiment was supposed to have been carried out under carefully controlled conditions, with all on-board computers recording events, checking metrics, and calculating efficiency, as well as keeping track of the many thousands of other variables processed by the device. What a mess: the ship wasn't fully functional, the Core wasn't fully calibrated, the Captain wasn't fully competent...

Another needle missile burrowed through the shields and rammed against the ship's hull. He could offer a thousand reasons not to launch the device, but survival just happened to be a heftier reason than all the others. He kept his peace.

"We are at jump speed, Captain," O'Halley said. "Warp drives are ready for launch. Estimated three-thousand node jumps to Earth."

Three thousand, King thought. On a crippled ship. So much for getting home before Christmas.

"Input coordinates for Earth and launch the Magellan Core on my mark," Duncan said. "Three, two, one, mark."

--- --- ---

The day was going well for the bee. The sun wasn't too hot, the wind wasn't too strong. The birds were singing and not eating the bee, and no bears could be seen in the area that would threaten the hive. It was just herself and the meadow.

But then a rare sight arose in front of her. Just across the meadow, through the clearing, there was a small bush of roses, the old favourite back at the hive. Perfect! It was almost queen season. Nothing made better royal jelly than rose nectar.

However, just flying directly to the rose bush would be a waste of energy, considering the reasonable amount of normal flowers between herself and the roses. If she were to fly to it now, she would only be able to pick up just a tiny amount of nectar to carry home safely. So she made the most difficult decision she was capable of: she made a bargain with herself that she'd work through the yellow flowers to the red ones, and then carry as much red nectar as she could after that. But surely she would remember the path to this bush, and come back later for more.

But Nature was having none of it. Almost as if in vindictive glee, a gust of wind ran through the meadow; the flowers all tumbled and rearranged themselves. Some more up, some more down, some more left, some more right. The path she wanted to take to the rosebush was no longer feasible. How cruel of you, Nature, the bee would think if its little bee brain was capable of such complex thoughts. But really, it was all in a day's work. Once the wind settled, she rose into the air, and hovered over to the next closest flower.

--- --- ---

"Impossible," Duncan mouthed again. This time, so did King.

They arrived home in a matter of minutes for a trip that was supposed to take months in the most agreeable of conditions. Half of their sensors were knocked out by the power surge, the other half was malfunctioning, so they were flying blind -- even on full processing power, navigating the four-dimensional, ever-changing space-time sheet without sensors would involve painful guesswork. The Magellan Core had access to several outdated maps of the warp node network, and used those as the most reliable source of information.

"I'll go... file a report," King said after long seconds of silence. No one spoke; most were still wiping off tense sweat from their eyebrows in slight disbelief at still being alive. Nobody looked at the viewscreen, where the glorious sight of the World Space Station floated into view. But after requesting port permissions from the station, and after the beat-up ship docked to it like a suckling piglet at a sow, sanity began winning over. "I suppose the experiment was a success, then," he laughed uneasily.

"Yeah." Duncan's voice was distant. "I suppose it was."

The crew left the deck one by one, some for refreshments, some just to talk to someone to make sure they really weren't stuck in a cruel magic trick. But as the shock wore off, all wondered what sort of magic was encased in the black polyhedron. Alas -- state secret and all that.

After everyone left, King patiently unhooked each cable from the Core, then went to put it into its special case entrusted only to him. But first, he unscrewed it in half, and removed a crystal from its center, bringing it to his eyes.

Inside was a bee, frozen in eternal hibernation, with spiderweb-thin wires running from its head to connectors on the bottom of the crystal. A black band circled around its midsection, with one word inscribed on each side: MAGELLAN.

"Thanks, little buddy," he said to the bee, and put the device back into its case.

Inspired by this.