Aetherspace bumped and jostled the ship while I stared out the window, idly drawing geometric patterns in the condensation. It was cold out there today, and I really liked it. I could almost see snowflakes swirling past the window, like we were flying through a blizzard at night on a new moon.

“I can’t believe those assassinations are still going,” David said over at the table where the boys were all playing cards.

James looked up. “The corporate and political ones? Like uh, what’s his face? Councillor McLennoel?”

“Yeah, he was the first one,” David agreed.

“Nice,” James said absently, placing a card down on the table. The others groaned. I had no idea what’d just happened. “I always hated that guy.”

David frowned and met the other man’s stare. “He was a prick, but… random murder isn’t cool.”

James shrugged and scratched his blond head with a disarming smile. “It was precision murder actually, but yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”

“His death is why Digital Humans and SAI got recognised as actual people in the law,” Cerri said, speaking up for the first time during the conversation. “He led the opposition to the Digital Minds Act.”

The four boys playing cards all looked over at her, while Warren —who for some reason was not classified as ‘one of the boys’ in my head— stifled a smile of amusement and kept his eyes on his hand.

Roger, who was ever the most intelligent of the four, asked slowly, “Sooo… are you saying that these assassinations were from you lot?”

Cerri shook her head, maintaining a poker face. “No, I’m not saying that. Just, that’s what happened after he died. That’s all.”

“Right,” he replied, shaking his head in exasperation. To the table, he placed one of his cards down and said, “Platinum wasp. Can anyone beat it?”

A rapid series of thoughts occurred to me all at once, and my eyes widened as the idea sprang into my head like some sort of mini-Athena. If I added multiple small ring stabilisers, four should be enough, and then had them— oh, and I could use some of the new alien processing hardware to make them much more intelligent— Ah! But what about when they needed to exert force against something? Ring stabilisers were good for keeping them up, but if any real force was needed— yeah, so four limbs, just like Bundit. Suction clamps on the manipulators…

I shot to my feet like I’d been electrocuted and blurted, “Bees! Bunblebees!”

It was the perfect name for the perfect little helpers. I rushed out of the door without even bothering to bid everyone goodbye. Not that we did that here. We all lived on the ship so goodbyes weren’t really a thing we had to do. Anyway, it was time to jury-rig some parts together and see if it worked!

****

Our progress towards the first interesting star system was slow, because Gloria and Cerri had to carefully plot a way forward through the aether clouds. When we finally arrived in the new system, it was to a distinct lack of fanfare.

“Anything on the scopes?” Roger asked, glancing back at Cerri from the captain’s chair.

Cerri held up a finger to stall while she methodically checked over the readings. “Nothing moving. No ships that I can see so far. As for the system, we have… yes, six planets. One gas giant that was probably a brown dwarf at some point. Its orbit is extremely close to the star, and I have trace amounts of gas in the intervening space, so the star appears to be sucking it dry.”

Over the comms, I heard Ed stifle a snort of amusement.

“The other one is acting as a shield at the edge of the system, and the rest of the planets are rocky earth-like worlds scattered between,” Cerri continued, ignoring the interruption. “Dense asteroid belt out past the shield giant.”

“Wait, four habitable worlds?” David asked, also over the comms.

Cerri shook her head, then seemed to remember that he couldn’t see her and elaborated, “In science, an earth-like is basically just any lump of rock that is in the same ballpark size as earth. There is only one planet that I’d tentatively describe as habitable.”

“Any signs of life?” Roger asked, cutting the other boys off from any more questions. We did have a job to do after all.

“I’m getting very high concentrations of oxygen, plus some ozone,” she said, pulling up a window on one of her screens. “Methane is at low, but statistically significant levels. Combined with the relatively low levels of carbon dioxide and moderate levels of carbon monoxide, I’d say that the planet has an abundance of plant life, but not a whole lot in the way of insects or animals. What’s odd to me is the preliminary images we’re getting.”

She finished by flicking a gesture on her screen, sending a blurry image up onto the main bridge display. We all stared at the world in a confused silence, until Warren finally said, “Black and grey clouds? That’s weird. What’s in them?”

“Water, mostly,” Cerri shrugged. “They’re clouds, after all, but— huh. Quite a few other substances too, let me run a chemical match… okay, yes. I’m getting what appears to be something close to normal woodsmoke. The darker clouds have more in them.”

Now that I looked at the image again, it did actually look like the planet was wreathed in a layered dress of blacks and greys. Between the clouds, I could just make out a reflective surface that might be water, and there was definitely some green amongst the brown.

Then I realised something that made my throat go dry. “So it’s like… a forest fire world? That’s terrifying.”

“With that much oxygen in the atmosphere, it probably doesn’t take much to set it ablaze,” Ed said, surprising me with his knowledge on the subject. That is, until I remembered he used to be a volunteer firefighter.

Roger, who’d been leaning an elbow on the arm rest while he pondered the information his crew had given him, leaned forward and ordered, “Take us in a little closer, Gloria.”

We’d dropped out of aetherspace just inside the shield giant’s orbit, and it was in a relatively stable area too. On the other side, I mean. Space is space. The relatively flat nature of the aetherspace nearby allowed Gloria to skip us another five light seconds into the system.

When we came back out, no alarms went off, and nothing had moved in the system. Everything was quiet.

“Coast seems clear of hostiles,” Cerri said. “Keeping an alarm set for any movement. As for the planet, bringing it up on the display now.”

Now that we were closer, within two light seconds, the image was good enough for us to see two things. First, there were a lot of fires on the surface. The second and far more important thing, was that the world hadn’t always been devoid of animal life.

Vast and ancient metropoli sprawled across most of the major land masses, ruined and scorched beyond any original recognition. Around the planet, a glittering ring of orbital debris indicated that the civilisation that had once inhabited the world had achieved some form of space flight.

"What do we do now?" Warren asked into the silence on the bridge.

Cerri cleared her throat and pulled a screen closer to herself. "Now we figure out who these people were and what happened to them. The planet seems safe enough for the ship. Can we take her down, Roger?"

Roger steepled his fingers and stared up at the main display, where the world rotated ever so slowly through its 34 hour day and night cycle.

Finally, he turned and looked back at Cerri, eyebrow raised. "Why?"

"So we can learn how to stop the same happening to Earth. This world would have looked very similar in its prime," my girlfriend replied calmly. "Something happened to it."

"Plus, I bet you we could find some sealed ruins with some cool alien tech inside," Ed interjected over the comms. "It's the first alien world we've found, that we can land on after all. Yeah, it's extra crispy, but are you really going to tell us we're just going to fly past it?"

"Fine, fine," our captain sighed, motioning to Gloria. "Take us in, please."

Our pilot engaged the sublight engines and our ship approached the planet. Pretty soon, it was visible outside the window as a star that was rapidly becoming a small sphere, and then an orb that filled the window almost entirely. Planets were huge, even the relatively small ones that terrestrials like us called home.

Atmosphere scorched our hull as we dropped through it in our descent towards the surface. Out the main window, I watched the city we’d chosen approach at a rate of knots that made my head spin. God, but spaceships were fast.

We blew through the first layer of clouds in a rush, trailing mist and soot behind us. Then another layer of clouds disappeared into the proverbial rear view mirror, and we gained a view of the surface. Hard scrub clung to the ruins of the city wherever it could, fighting for what scant light made its way past the clouds and smog.

The ruins themselves were a rugged sort of architecture, obviously designed more for function than form. We were landing in what looked like an industrial sector though, so maybe there was an area with pretty buildings and stuff.

“Extending landing gear,” Gloria informed us while she slowed the ship to a crawl. The deck shuddered beneath me, and we came to an abrupt halt. Touchdown.