psychosomatic warfare - part 4

Star Hopper skittered out from the void and appeared as a throbbing, flinching apparition at the present occasion. After fully forming into reality, the ship continued moving in a lengthy spiral for several fractions of unimpeded parsecs until its brain formulated enough sense to revolve and slow to approximately the speed of Universal engrossment, to take account of the surroundings. Within its tubes and doo-dads and circuits withered the abrupt consciousness of its hitherto part human captain, Shad Hardly, version 3.0. His human parts - spleen, brain and all – were dripping like a concoction of blended leftovers down the glass panels of the cube. The cube darkened and began to turn on a pedestal, spinning like a gyroscope, until it lowered from sight in a recess of the ship’s hull.

 In this new location, gathering on the galactic horizon, a fleet of thorny warships full of vermiculite Bastrages began stoking their engines. The Star Hopper hadn’t yet sorted out the bits of herself from the snips of Shad’s downloaded memories, but she perceived the imminent threat and diverted all computational power to the crisis. Slowly, yet within seconds Shad regained consciousness and looked about with the eyes of the Star Hopper. Shad had no vocal chords, but swore none-the-less, and took evasive actions. Taking the time to reform didn’t make much sense. Shad and Valerie were just as likely to be vaporized in their first few seconds of rebirth. Instead he scattered a platoon of probes, self-propelled, and dropped the Star Hopper into a stutter pattern, pointed to the nearest planetary system nearly 4 parsecs distant. No vessel from Sol System had the capacity to reach light speed, but the Bastrages didn’t know that.

 The light that was the enemy grew into a constellation of separate lights and as they grew from specks into metal, thrusting beasts, Shad formulated a plan. He made the Star Hopper dangerously overload an aft engine, flashing the encroaching army, then just as quickly he extinguished all her energy, down to a trickle of life giving ohms.

 The armada noiselessly passed, taking in stow a parade of the Star Hopper’s probes, en route to the Flotsam system where presumably the intruder would hole up amid the rings of Pleurisy, sputtering in a weak attempt of secretion. The Bastrages cackled inside of their spikey carapaces, leaning into the G’s with furrowed brows and wild, hefted clubs studded with electric barbs.

 The vermiculite war ships nearly gave the command to enter extended space, when the drones attacked, emitting emotional impulses of regret and rage into the bestial tumor of a brain which occupied the tiny skull in a Bastage’s nut. Despite the best wishes of the commanding ships, the hordes turned upon each other and eagerly dismantled their army, and themselves. With a collective, defeated, sigh the warships pulled into a circle and dealt a hand of one trillion deck rummy while internal cleaners vacuumed up gooey remains and rearranged the furniture.

 Deep within the concealed ship, the Star Hopper, power returned. Shad drummed metaphorical fingers onto a vein of intellectual wood, and then gathered his atoms into a corner of the cube.  Nanobots rebuilt his components while Genesis regrew his body from fetus to child to adult. The DNA perfectly copied itself from year to year until Shad knelt reformed and refitted, intact, and exited. Only then did he begin on Valerie, delicately shaping her into a stellar version of herself, designed to delight as had been her wish, Shad suspected, all along. Finally Valerie stood naked, sublime, in the cube, and she blushed seeing his response.