"Let me make sure I heard you right, Andrew...did you say...a dreadnought? Those look like fighters from my angle." Matt said with a hint of shock lining his voice.

"That's because we're so far away, Matt...look at the gravity well that ship is leaving on scanners. That ship is massive...I'm talking probably at least half the length of the Pittsburgh Debris field in New York.

"Good...God...who or what would have the resources to build something that large?"

"No idea. I'm detecting functioning weapons on the ship but either they haven't seen us out here or they have no intentions of powering weapons to blast us out of the sky. It seems all vessels are in some kind of mathematically complicated drifting pattern, none of the engines are powered and from what I can tell, life-support is still functioning."

"So whatever is on that ship could still be alive...or whoever..." Matt said trailing off. "They could help us, Andrew."

"Lets be real here, Matt." Andrew said turning around. "There are several flaws in your idea that we could be helped by them. One, we don't know if they are hostile or friendly. Two, their ship is damaged and they may think us to be hostile and blow us out of the sky. Three, they are in no position to help us, they're out of fuel and drifting around a gas giant for hell's sake."

"All good points, but any race that can manufacture a ship of that size and create a complex mathematical drifting pattern for all those other dreadnoughts orbiting the ship? They have to have some kind of technology to help us."

"They're just going to hand it over?"

Matthew opened his mouth and then closed it again musing to himself.

"I say we approach it slowly." Andrew continued. "Get scans of it as we fly in and pray to God they don't decide that we're hostile and try to murder us and everything we've worked for, for the past five years."

The sensors pinged as three other ships jumped into the system. Not as large as the ship in orbit, but battleships nonetheless.

"Three battleships?" Matt asked. "That's unusual."

"Coming to claim their damaged ship maybe?"

"It's a possibility."

The two watched the sensors closely as the ships scanned the system. Upon finding a new object in the system, the ships changed course, straight for Jupiter.

"Sh*t, they're coming at us and they're charging weapons to boot." Andrew said grabbing the controls and wresting them in the direction of the massive ship.

"Andrew! What if--" Matt started.

"If they're the same people as the one's who just started chasing us? Well...I guess we're just going to have to pray they're not."

Weapons fire lanced around the small fighter as it neared the massive ship. The closer they got, the larger the ship became in the window of the cockpit.

"You still praying?" Andrew said through gritted teeth and he pitched, yawed, and rolled the fighter to avoid the weapons fire that was now almost searing the hair off their heads.

"I'm more praying that the Jupiter doesn't fall apart at the seams from all the maneuvers you're putting it through. This thing is only a testbed for more designs you know, it wasn't even tested in combat yet."

"Well, we sure as hell are now. I designed it to be as nimble a fighter as it could be so that if we got into a situation we could double it as a fighter."

"You forgot one thing, Andrew...GUNS."

"Shut up and sit down before you get hurt."

The small fighter lanced towards it's target with the massive battleships in close pursuit. They were now almost on the gigantic ship and nearing what appeared to be it's landing bays...though all of them were sealed shut tight as a button.

"Those bays are closed Andrew..." Matt said pointing from the seat in the back.

"I know, keep praying..."

The ship was approaching the bay doors at impossible speeds. Andrew gritted his teeth harder.

"Andrew..." Matt said in a more worried tone.

"Just shut up!"

The bay door slammed open with a thud and the small fighter flew through with ease. The doors slammed shut behind them as they maneuvered the ship to a stop inside the bay. The sound of weapons fire emanated from the ship...the massive ship had opened fire on their would be pursuers. Within minutes, the sound of battle had ceased.

"That was close..." Andrew said breathing hard and falling back into his seat.

"Yeah...how did you know those doors would open?"

"Intuition. Maybe I just guessed the people of the ship would see us in trouble--"

"How did you know they weren't..."

"The designs were way different the closer I got to each, lead me to believe either this was a wreck, or someone was on board. With the mathematics required to keep those ships drifting in the pattern they are in, someone had to be on board. Check this bay, see if there is oxygen around."

"None, mainly Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen. Looks like it 's coming from life-support. Guess this race doesn't breathe oxygen."

"Get the emergency space walk suits I packed in the emergency kits. We're going for a walk."

The two men opened the door to the fighter and looked out. Andrew nodded to Matthew. Matthew threw a piece of metal outside the ship's shield and watch as it hit the floor with a thud. He looked to his wrist computer and looked to Andrew.

"Looking at about 1.5 times normal gee forces for us. You're going to feel a bit heavier than normal, fatty." Matthew said with a chuckle through the suit's headset.

"Artificial gravity AND life-support?" Andrew said ignoring Matthews comment. "Definitely someone still alive here."

"Well, that's my consensus. I recommend we get back inside through the airlock of Jupiter and try to raise them on the radio before we invade on their ship."

"Tried that already, I'm guessing their ships makeup and metal is preventing radio signals from extending outside their vessel. We're dead silent out here."

Matthew cursed under his breath as he himself slid outside the shield and felt the weight difference. Andrew did the same and they activated their lights on their suits.

"This bay is MASSIVE." Andrew said to himself looking around. "I'll guess it's at least the size of a planet long ways in here."

A sound emanated from the distance, traveling quickly towards the two. Both men ran quickly back to their ship and peered out from behind the ship. What appeared to be a vehicle moving at a fast rate of speed came to rest just on the other side of the ship. Matthew looked to Andrew and shrugged. Andrew continued to look at the vessel. Two creatures emerged. Unarmed, and non armored. They looked at the ship with great interest and talked to one another in an excitable language.

The creatures had interesting characteristics. Four arms, two from what appeared to be shoulders, and two from the mid back. They had upstanding ears on the top of their head and bug like eyes, no nose, and a LARGE mouth with razor sharp teeth. They didn't appear hostile, rather curious, like children. They were about as tall as Andrew was.

Andrew narrowed his eyes and stepped out from behind the ship. Matthew tried to stop him, but he would either die, or he would make first contact. The aliens saw him and jumped. They chattered something to one another in an alien language and placed headsets on their heads. Each of them approached Andrew slowly and cautiously. Andrew activated his speaker system on his suit."

"He-ll-o." he said slowly. The aliens looked at him sideways and chattered something between them and then tried to speak to Andrew again. "I can-not under-stand you." The aliens continued chattering and pressing buttons on the headsets they had donned. The alien on the right said something Andrew understood.

"<Garbled Language> understand?"

"I almost understood you." Andrew said quickly.

The aliens laughed and pressed their headsets one more time before speaking.

"Hello, alien. Welcome ship." the alien on the left said slowly.

Andrew was dumbfounded. Matthew passed out behind the ship with a thud.

"I'm...Andrew..." Andrew managed to finally say.

"...we Glid. Welcome ship."

Andrew nodded slowly and understood. Translators. Each alien beckoned to follow. Andrew shook his head and tapped the ship, indicating they would stay with the ship. Each alien looked to one another and said "Understand. Bring leader you." They climbed aboard their ship and dissappeared out of sight.


Matthew came around a few minutes later. Andrew told him what happened after he had passed out while onboard the Jupiter.

"It sounds like they're bringing their leader to us." Matthew said.

"Sounds like it...I don't like it much. I can't figure them out." Andrew said pacing. "They seemed very curious of us though. Almost like children."

"Maybe they are children in their culture."

"Maybe...I still can't get over that we just made first contact."

"So, what now?" Matthew said.

"Not much we can do besides wait and hope that they don't try to eat us."

A series of light taps woke the two the next morning. Matt got up and groaned; the small bunk of late had been leaving him with a kinked back and neck. One vigorous stretch and a yawn later, Matt reached the door. A muffled thump sounded from somewhere in the back of the ship, followed by half-muted noises that could have been cursing.

"...and what the hell was it doing in the intake chute?" Andrew rounded the bulkhead with a much smaller version of the locals in tow, which looked not in the least apologetic. Rather, the small one was grinning from ear to...no, Matt decided, that analogy most certainly did not work on this species' biology. Regardless, it wore a most self-satisfied expression on its face.

"Beats me, Andrew. Might be what the knocking on the door is though." He palmed the door open to find the two Glid who had first met them--at least he thought it was them--standing in front of him. The one on the left had a hand raised as if to knock again, but on seeing the two men standing there, he lowered his hand to his side.

"Ah. There *a series of syllables*. Come, come!" The one on the right gestured, and turned as he did so, walking quickly towards the vehicle they arrived in. Matthew and Andrew followed. The smaller Glid scuttled off and settled on the roof of the other vessel, staring at the visitors.

As the party approached the ramp that served as an entrance to the other ship, a soft taptaptaptaptapthunk, taptaptaptaptapthunk approached them from inside. What could only be described as a very, very old Glid greeted them, walking on all six limbs, one of which was missing a hand.

"Good morning. I'm Andrew, and this is Matthew. Your kind are the Glid?" The elderly one glanced at the two attendants, who conferred quickly in a rapid-fire nasal language before a query to the other. The old one said something, much slower, at which the two nodded and turned to Matt and Andrew.

"Speak." The small one on the roof slithered to the edge and peered over.

"About what?"

"Anything. The *a series of syllables* needs...voice sample."

At this, it clicked for Andrew and he gestured excitedly to Matt. "Of course! They need a sample vocabulary for the translator headsets. It's doing very, very well with the limited pool we've given it so far, but the more input we give it, the more accurate it will be. I feel kind of foolish, not realizing it before."

"Oh, get off it. You got it before I did. Do you have any ideas for wha..." Matt was interrupted by a small, flying, six-limbed reptiloid.

The small flying creature landed on the metal flooring of the bay and peered at the ship. From what Andrew could only guess, the creature was in deep thought while looking at Jupiter. The small creature began flying around the ship, nodding to itself as it did so. Eventually, the small creature returned to the older looking Gild and began chattering away at it. The Gild nodded slowly to itself as the small flying creature continued to chatter. This went on for about five minutes before abruptly ending.

Slowly, the older Gild rose to it's rear feet. It was much taller than the others and wore what appeared to be rank on it's "uniform", which was the only name Andrew could give it. The creature looked from Andrew to Matthew in a quizzical manner then it began to try to speak English. Though, the creature did a terrible job at it.

"You are them with us?" it said.

Matthew looked to Andrew and mouthed "What?" Andrew shrugged and looked back to the alien. The alien looked to the others and tried again.

"Are you them who attack us?"

"No, no. We are friends." Matthew spoke up.

"Friends." The alien repeated and began tapping the headset searching for the word. "Ah, friends! Friends!"

"Yes, friends. We mean you no harm. We are explorers from a place called Sirius."

The alien tapped the headset more less looking for the meaning of the words. He nodded slowly and then began to speak perfect English.

"It took a while, but I think the headsets finally have enough of your language stored for me to speak properly. Does this sound ok to you?"

Matthew stared gaping with his mouth open. "Incredible." he said.

"Indeed. Very."

"Will you walk with me...I'm sorry I don't know your races name, friends."

"We're Human...and we don't know your name."

"In your language my name would be far too complicated to say. However, my rank is Most Senior and you can call me...Zrig."

The creature named Zrig began to walk slowly around the ship as Andrew and Matthew followed.

"Your home, where is it? We have never heard of this 'Sirius' you speak of."

"It's very far away." Matthew spoke up. "Approximately 2/3 across the galactic disk and 4 million plus lightyears away."

Zrig processed this data through the translator and pushed a few buttons on it to add the new words to the dictionary they were rapidly assembling for English. When he realized what Matthew was saying, his bug eyes got VERY large.

"Did you say 2/3 of the Galaxy?!"

"Indeed. This drive allows us to skip through subspace at a rapid pace and ignore the typical restrictions by normal jumphole oriented drives. We didn't expect it to fling us across the Galaxy completely."

Again, Zrig tapped the headset, assembling the language that Matthew had just said to him. The alien's eyes got larger still.

"You are..." he tapped the headset again. "You are...engineers?"

"Well, Andrew here is, I'm an astrophysicist by craft. Andrew is the brains with engineering. He's the one who built most of the designs for the Jupiter here. I just provided telemetry data for the ships computer so we wouldn't get overly lost. Most of the systems on board the ship were designed by me also."

The alien, once again, tapped the headset.

"Ah, I see...well friends...if you would help us we would be eternally grateful. If a race such as yourselves can create a piece of technology that can allow you to, what was the word, skip, across the Galaxy itself...maybe you can help us with a problem."

"I'll do my best to help you in the interests of continued friendship between our two races." Andrew said.

"To explain how and where we need your help, I must tell you a story to tell you another story. For a very long time we have been here, orbiting this planet. Our ancestors from long ago put us here after the ship was crippled. Since then, we have been reproducing on board this ship. It is our home. Many of our older systems are locked out to us. Things such as offensive weapons, shields, and other systems have been completely locked out by our forefathers. We do not know why, and we can only use our defensive weapons against enemies that may pursue us. For along time, we have been attacked by a group of hostile creatures known as the Dgrelli. They are a brutal race who have no compassion for anything but obtaining technology for themselves to conquer any system that they come across. In the attack just before you arrived, they had managed to cripple one of our drives. If it stays this way, the ship will lose it's orbit around this gas giant, and we will crash to the surface."

The alien stopped for a moment to get it's breath before continuing. This story was taking a lot out of it, it seemed.

"We ask your help in securing our ship from them...and perhaps unlocking these locked systems for us so that we might be able to repair our ship and leave orbit to discover our nature...to discover where we come from and why we have been here for so long."

"We will do our best. We will make a copy of our ship's database. Everything about our race, our history, our knowledge, and everything else for you to take a look at. It may help you to understand us more."

The Glid looked to the side and then back.

"We can do the same for you if you wish, all you will need is a translator like the ones we posess and we will give you access to our history on board the ships computers as you attempt to unlock the locked systems for us. Thank you...Andrew and Matthew. You both good...Humans."

"The last good Humans it seems." Matthew mumbled. The alien looked to him and turned his head to the side like a puppy. Zrig considered this and did nothing.

"We will be in contact. We must make preparations for you to come on board our ship. Tell me, what kind of...gas to you breathe?"

"Oxygen and Methane with some Nitrogen."

"Interesting, that is what we breathe when we are not trying to conserve energy...we will activate this in the life-support systems so you do not need to wear your suits. We will be in...contact."

The alien named Zrig climbed aboard the vessel that had transported them all there and disappeared into the depths of the ship. Andrew looked to Matthew.

"Well that went well..." Andrew said.

"At least we didn't get eaten." Matthew replied.

Weeks went by. Andrew was no closer to fixing the broken components on the ship and Matthew was no closer to deciphering the Glid's lockout codes on the systems aboard the ship. The Gild estimated that the ship would crash to the surface in "two human months". Andrew only had about a month to figure out what happened to the engines and where it went wrong in order to prevent the ship from crashing to the planet. The ship was so massive though, that he was having problems finding the problem in the ten engines that powered the ship.

Matthew wasn't having any luck either. The number of systems and programs embedded into the ship's computer matrix was into the trillions. Each system had a subnet of over a quadrillion interfaces each with its own lockout code. He had never seen something so advanced. Neither Andrew nor Matthew had had much sleep in the last few weeks trying to get the Gild's ship up and running again...but that wasn't all that was wrong.

There were history files located on the data the Gild gave them that were locked out to anyone from viewing. Why a history file would be locked out was beyond Matthew, but on his few days of off time, he would pour over the files and attempt to unlock them. This was one such time. The history files were nothing like the program files onboard the ship's systems, it was different. The makeup of the files was older, more refined than those that he had been digging through for weeks. He zoomed out with the file viewer at the files. He identified each file one by one, piece by piece. He saw a pattern; could it really be THAT easy?

The door to Jupiter slid open with a thud and Andrew stumbled in looking like he had just crawled out of a chimney.

"Evenin'." He said as he shuffled past Matthew, looking like he was about to keel over.

"Evening. Hey, Andrew, I think I found something." Matthew replied.

"Ungh." Andrew replied climbing into the makeshift shower the two had designed.

"Each file has a piece of code in their encryption that is useless, it has no use."

"That is what useless normally means..." Andrew mumbled from the shower. "Get to the point."

"It's a code."

The water abruptly shut off and Andrew peaked out.

"Really? What do you think?"

"I think we need to unlock this history file and find out what's really going on here."

Andrew finished showering and poured over the history files with Matthew for a few hours. Matthew's theory was correct; the code in the files was a...code. Within a day, the two had unlocked the history files. Files upon files upon files poured out of the archive. Andrew and Matthew were dumbstruck. Matthew opened one of the log files, an earlier one dated a few centuries before their arrival on the ship.

The log file, according to the translator, described genocide of an entire race by the Gild during war times. The Gild were terrible marauders, evil, sadistic, maniacal creatures bent on killing anyone who did not bend to their will. They destroyed countless planets ecosystems just to punish races in their empire. The more the two read, the more disgusted they became. They found a file dated just before the history was locked.

It read: To our descendants. We are cursed. We have committed terrible, atrocious, deeds in the name of our "empire". We wished not to have to do these things to our old friends and those we were allied with...but orders were orders as our admiral said. Eventually, some Gild down in engineering rebelled against him, killed him in cold blood...we had nothing more to do...no orders. We jumped as far away as we could...as far from the empire as we could. We arrived here, after our jump drive was burnt out. The only thing left to do was to put our ship into an orbit with *series of clicks* orbiting the vessel...protecting it from harm. These history files will not be deleted, but locked until there comes a time where they are able to unlock them. Know this, our children, we did not want to go through with these deeds...they were forced upon us...know that we are cursed...but you are free.

Andrew lay back in his chair.

"Now the real question...what if this empire still exists? What if we free them and allow them back to their home. You saw what it said...Admiral. In our culture that's high ranking. The translator translated that so that we knew they were high ranking...that's the commander of an entire fleet...this was their flagship." Andrew said.

Matthew nodded slowly. "Let'€™s dig through these files, see if we can find the unlock code from these, maybe some kind of documentation on the engineering of the ship, get it fixed, and see what they say about their history...we'll go from there. We need to get some sleep for tomorrow; it's going to be a long day."

The two turned into bed on the cots...both thinking of ominous tidings of what would happen if they released this behemoth unto the galaxy once more.

"We should tell them." Andrew said. "Push comes to shove, we'll be able to jump back out of here using this gas giant and we'll never have to see them again. The Galaxy is a big place."

"You're missing the point, Drew." Matthew said. "If their old civilization still exists..."

"Who knows how long ago that was? There was no time stamp and the Gild on the ship now have no basis for time of how long ago they were stranded here! That could have been thousands of years ago."

"...and what if it's not? We could be releasing something back onto the Galaxy that's just...evil. They were meant to unlock the files themselves, when they possessed the ability to do so. Not by us, a foreign race."

"If we don't, they crash into the planet. Those files and systems that are locked out are their only way to get their self repair systems back online and give them a fighting chance against that hostile race they were talking about. If we don't do this, they die, and we're responsible for the genocide of an entire race."

Matthew stood up suddenly and looked out the front of the ship. "If we do this, we give them the information and leave. I don't want to be here to watch them learn of their past deeds. We don't help them repair the ship. They will possess the knowledge to speed the repairs to the ship and the self repair systems will do the rest. That's my stance on the matter."

"I agree, it's a fair point." Andrew placed his hand on his friends shoulder. "Are you ready to do this?"

Matthew looked to Andrew. "I am, lets give them the information."