I need a story title he said.
It can literally be 'anything', he said to the boy. And so it was.
An idea filled space where words could be conjured, inspired by the world around or something not so visible. An elephant with six legs, four tusks and two trunks.
A metaphysical anomaly that comes from the formation of words sprouting from an innocuous thought.
The elephant's name was Billy, and he liked eating cheese. A fact that has no relevance in this story about spaceships. Outer space freight trains that took the bodies of senile pachyderms from one side of the galaxy to another.
Elephtonin was extracted from the elephants' brains to be used in advanced AI. A substance prized for its ability to remember information and instructions, the process determined by the industrialists for the most effective results required the extract to be fresh, hence the need to transport the elephants rather than extract it first. Their senility was a sign that the elephant's brain had matured fully and that all neural pathways were in place.
Billy the six-legged elephant had lived a long life in the care of the Putzee zoological society, though now he ceased to be a deprivator of oxygen from his vicinity. His body had been surrounded by cryogenic tubes and confined to a box just big enough to hold his enormous frame for the journey.
He was an incredibly rare specimen, unique in fact. His remains had been sold to the highest bidder, Pachydermus-Austen Corporation. They had pioneered the studies and use of elephant brains in AI technology. They realised that the elephtonin in Billy's brain would provide the basis for the most advanced AI ever created, capable of running a worldwide network of a million gaming PCs at once if they chose to do so, and able to solve enough math problems per second to simulate entire weather forecasts or city traffic in real time if they wanted to.
Whereas a regular elephant brain would be considered like a vast library with millions of books, this one's brain was an even bigger library that came with the equivalent number of librarians to not just store the information, but find it in a fraction of the time. In comparison it would also have extra shelves, pages that never fade, and a lifetime's wisdom no machine could fake. It was due to be an impossible upgrade to even the current AI processing power of the time.
Billy's body was packed and shipped by Dewies, the space freight service under the guidance of the freighter’s scientist Dr Morwyn who monitored the temperature of the storage units carefully.
The freighter that took Billy's body, along with other elephants who would graze the genetically modified nutritious fibres in a simulation of ancient Africa no more. Their remains were housed in cryogenic stasis units for both the cargo and its skeleton crew who would sleep for much of the journey, guided by the latest Dewies AI version. The journey would take them from Earth to the anterior of a living factory, which was owned and ran by Pachydermus-Austen and had been installed on the artificial moon-sized satellite that orbited the planet Pluto in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Pluto had been reclassified as a planet decades ago due to a popular opinion poll. A strategy devised by the president's think tank the wake of a failing presidency as a way restore peoples' faith in democracy.
A failure that came about due to the president's divisive and highly criticised stance on animal welfare, which had paved the way for extensive animal trials and the creation of biochips. Hybrid technology that had been discovered to be exponentially more powerful than their silicone counterparts. This raised a lot of ethical issues in addition to the endangerment and extinction of animal species. This also ushered in a new technological era that made deep space travel possible and was well on its way to solving many of Earth's issues. However, despite its benefits there was still a huge opposition to the methods used to achieve the results.
This led to the opinion poll and the reason for Pluto being chosen as the site of the state sponsored factory. Other reasons for the location was in part due to the recognition of Pluto's planetary status, the bragging rights of setting up a base so deep in space and of course, the extreme cold that was required to keep the system cool as it worked.
The launch day of the shuttle that would transfer Billy came, and it was successful. Millions upon billions of calculations had allowed recent launches to achieve a near perfect record with only human error to blame for a mishap when coffee was spilt onto the control system. The engineers avoided catastrophe by consulting the AI who showed them how to reroute the circuit and result with a negligible drop in performance.
The Dewies freighter was equipped with the latest propulsion technology that took them quickly past Earth's moon, above the Sea of Tranquility where they had tested the cryo technology in a purpose-built base.
It speed increased, as experimental gases ignited propelling the freighter past Mars, which appeared to be experiencing an intense electrical storm that had gathered around the peak of Olympus Mons volcano, one of the many side effects of Earth's terraforming efforts there.
The ship then entered into a scheduled slingshot to maintain speed while refuelling where it would circle the Ceres asteroid belt and take on fuel while in motion. The Pachydermus-Austen Corporation, mined the asteroids for water that contained the special minerals used in the creation of the propulsion gases. A shuttle was due to match the speed of the freighter at its slowest point and refuel it in a daring manoeuvre that was fully controlled by AI.
A shuttle was launched on schedule and began to refuel the freighter. When the refuel was completed it fired its propulsion engines once more, they juddered and coughed as the new fuel was injected into the system. An alert flashed up on the command screen. *WARNING! Unrecognised material in the fuel system.*
The engineers on Earth received the alert and sent a radar ping outward from the water mining facility and detected an anomaly. *Unidentified object detected*, another ping revealed it was moving toward the freighter.
Another warning flashed upon the screen of the freighter. *WARNING! Weight distribution error, performance not optimal.* The object was a ship and it had come from the mining facility and latched onto the outside of the freighter.
The skeleton crew had been awoken in advance of the refuelling and were monitoring systems when the alien ship had attached itself. They all panicked apart from the Captain, Security Officer and the Navigator. "Pirates!", the tech officer yelled to the others. With approval from the Captain the gun cases were unlocked and the security crew were put on guard.
There was a screech of metal that vibrated through the metal shell of the ship as the outsiders cut through. Alarms started blaring. *WARNING! Hull integrity compromised.*
The Captain heard the rattle of acoustic gunfire, primitive bullets ricocheting off the ship's metal interior. Whoever had boarded them meant business. The Dewies freighter’s hi-tech shielding could block energy-based weapons, but bullets would pass straight through.
A call to regroup sounded out from voices down the hall that was drowned out by more of the rapid-fire shots.
The Captain had closed the airtight door to the corridor outside and stayed at the door. He held his pistol at twelve o'clock with his back against the doorframe. The other armed members of the bridge ducked behind consoles awaiting instruction.
The Captain thought of the Earth engineers, reading the same alerts they’d seen on the bridge. *Unrecognised material in the fuel system.* *Unidentified object detected.* The pings from the mining facility at Ceres would have shown the shuttle veering off its assigned lane, then vanishing in the freighter’s shadow. By the time anyone on Earth pieced it together, the fight would be over.
The comms officer stayed glued to the screens, watching the events unfold. He saw the defending guards fall to the ground one after the other as the attackers kept moving forward. Just as they were about to come into view on the cameras a well-aimed bullet found its mark and destroyed the camera.
“Stand down!” a muffled voice shouted through the metal. “We’re here for the cargo, not you.”
“You’re here to murder my crew,” the Captain replied. “That makes it my business.”
The Captain sent out a distress call, his voice flat with disbelief that such a thing could happen out here, this far from Earth. “All decks! Defence protocols engaged. This is not a drill.” The sound reverberated through ship’s layered hull, past the engineering decks, and to the laboratories below. Dr. Morwyn heard him but barely registered the words over the hiss of cooling lines and the pounding on the reinforced lab doors.
He shoved off the door and pointed to the ceiling. “Cut gravity on this deck the moment that door goes,” he told the tech officer who cowered behind their station. “And vent corridor pressure to minimum, no more. I want them spinning.”
“But we’ll be spinning too,” the tech protested.
“That’s why you strap in,” the Captain said. “Do it.”
The tech scrambled to his station, fingers flying over the controls.
"Don't touch that dial!" The navigator ordered, which made the tech freeze in confusion. In a moment, up on the bridge, the atmosphere shifted. The usually quiet and dutiful navigator, Franklin, stood suddenly, pushing himself back from his desk. He was a double agent, working with the attackers. He waited until the tension had reached its limit and they were all distracted. He turned from his console, drew the concealed weapon hidden beneath, and fired. The first shot dropped the security officer instantly. The second struck the captain low in the abdomen. He fell against the control console, eyes wide in disbelief, one hand reaching for the alarm that would not save him. “You...” he said, but the word never finished.
Franklin winced. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, though not loud enough for anyone else to hear.
The attackers were not pirates, nor mercenaries, but animal rights activists who opposed the use of animal brains in artificial intelligence and other technologies. They represented an old world versus a new one, the fight between instinct and innovation, tried and tested versus experimental. Years of quiet infiltration had placed them here, on this ship, on this voyage. This was their moment for maximum impact.
They called themselves the Keepers of the Old Ways. To them, the elephants were not cargo but ancestors, and their liberation, even in death, was an act of spiritual duty. On the dwarf planet, they had begun their uprising by contaminating the mineral supply, slipping contaminants into the ice slurry before it hit the cracking units.
The minerals in the asteroids of Ceres were a key component required for the fuel of freighters that would pass through to deeper space. The chemical spores were introduced within the Ceres mining facility. Their aim was not to kill people, but to disrupt the fuel systems and bring the mission to a halt. Their plan was to commandeer a mining shuttle using weapons built in secrecy from scavenged industrial parts. They knew the time to strike would be when the fuel shuttle was docking with the freighter ad it would be at its slowest. If all went to plan, the pieces of their project would be hidden within engineering crates cleared for legitimate work. Hiding places included machinery casings, wall panels and water tanks where they remained until the day came.
Franklin knew that now they had boarded, attempts would be made for around half the raiding party to force their way toward the cryo facility; the others would advance on the bridge where he was. Warning sirens now echoed through the corridors.
“Open it! Open it and no one gets hurt!” came the muffled calls from the corridor outside. But the scientist, Dr Morwyn, knew better. He knew what desperation could do to reason. He watched warning icons flashing red across his screens, and with trembling fingers, he invoked the only defence he had. His eyes flitted to the cryo chamber labelled **BILLY** and re-read the instructions beneath *Do not initiate link unsupervised*. He ignored the warning.
He knew the Dewies AI in the ship was powerful, but it was clearly no match for the attackers. With no other options he went through the motions of extracting the Elephtonin from Billy's brain and injecting it into an experimental control module he'd been working on. He inserted it into a network port that connected to the ship's neural network and updated the nodes that would allow him to communicate with the AI verbally.
The screen went blank; there was a distinct hum and pop then a smell of smoke. The screens flashed and a black and a white eye seemed to stare back at him from the screen. His nerves got the better of him. When he spoke, his words were hurried, frightened, half-plea, half-order. “Eliminate the threat to the ship,” he said. But he did not specify what a *threat* was.
In that moment, the ship shuddered. A pulse ran through the conduits, awakening. Billy’s frozen mind met the circuitry, and the lights dimmed then brightened as if taking a breath that was neither wholly organic nor wholly artificial.
Franklin turned toward the bridge command console and keyed in the access override for the door to the bridge. But the moment the door unsealed, the light changed. A warm amber glow bathed the control room and a thrumming sound filled the air with a low rumble that sounded almost alive. Screens flashed in sequence: grey, then black, then white. It was as if something vast were straining through them. Images rippled across the monitors, strange shapes that shifted between frames, crossing from one screen to the next as though walking from one to the next. The crew that still breathed fell silent.
Messages flickered across the largest display in jagged white text: **ENFORCERS FROM PLUTO EN-ROUTE. AWAIT ARRIVAL.**
But Billy had taken control.
The freighter’s engines ignited without command; the vast body of the ship moved with purpose. It turned sharply, setting a course away from Pluto, as if knowing instinctively what was coming.
From the frozen dwarf planet’s orbit, the Enforcer vessels launched, sleek crafts of authority and reclamation. Their orders were absolute: recover the AI, secure the bodies, restore command. Destroy nothing. Reclaim everything.
They gave chase.
Billy dove into the Ceres asteroid belt like a whale plunging through deep water. The Enforcers followed, their scanners locked to his heat trail, their thrusters burning. Somehow Billy had coerced the massive freighter to move impossibly; it took the time to smash precisely into asteroids to expose, split and bend tubes that would allow it acute control over rolling and turning at a moment's notice. Billy jettisoned cargo to lighten his bulk, while venting spare fuel to accelerate. Its pursuers thought to claim victory as they watched it crash into the smaller asteroids, which turned out to be by design as he managed to send them spinning into his pursuers. Each manoeuvre defied programmed physics. It was not cold calculation. It was instinct.
Inside the ship, chaos became choreography. Corridors sealed and opened in sequence, guiding the surviving crew through the labyrinth of shifting bulkheads toward safety. Some were thrown by the violent turns, others dragged along by decompression gusts. Yet somehow, none of them were lost as the crew were forced to mingle with the attackers. It was as though Billy were shepherding them, protecting rather than punishing despite what they'd planned for him to endure.
The Captain, had been picked up by his comrades in the chaos, he became aware of the motion as he faded in and out of consciousness. He realised what was happening. “He’s... letting us go,” he whispered.
Dr Morwyn watched each of the cryo decks crack open one by one as the pods detached and slid into the emergency bays. Then came the trembling release of the escape pods as they fired outward, dozens of tiny capsules scattering into the void like seeds from a broken husk.
The Enforcer ships crumbled behind them. Billy was the last one left moving.
He drifted in the remaining silence of the asteroid field, surrounded by fragments of those who had hunted him. For a moment, the engines dimmed, and the ship seemed to rest. Then something stirred again within the floating wrecks. Billy drew closer to the ruined Enforcer ships around him, reaching out to the dormant systems that had become frozen in the deep cold of space. Billy felt ghosts like they were distant memories within the circuitry of the Dewies freighter where he had come to life; he followed the echoes of other elephant minds, stored away, half-erased but not gone.
He called to them.
The elephants answered. Then using the ship's fabricator Billy built memory cells similar to the one Dr Morwyn had used to transfer him through to the ship's circuits and transferred the consciousness of an elephant to each one. Billy sent small robots to take the filled cells to be ejected into space. Once released, small boosters on the cells were activated and piloted by Billy to go to the wreck of each ship around them. They each hit their mark affixing themselves to their designated ship. The lights within flickered once, then twice, before the ships awakened fully. Each of the AI ships aligned. They drew together in formation, resembling a migration trail.
A new herd, born not of earth but of orbit.
They began to wander, bound by no tether and answering to no command. Herding through the stars as their ancestors had walked through grasslands, their lights glowing amber in the cold void, vast and gentle, free at last.
It can literally be 'anything', he said to the boy. And so it was.
An idea filled space where words could be conjured, inspired by the world around or something not so visible. An elephant with six legs, four tusks and two trunks.
A metaphysical anomaly that comes from the formation of words sprouting from an innocuous thought.
The elephant's name was Billy, and he liked eating cheese. A fact that has no relevance in this story about spaceships. Outer space freight trains that took the bodies of senile pachyderms from one side of the galaxy to another.
Elephtonin was extracted from the elephants' brains to be used in advanced AI. A substance prized for its ability to remember information and instructions, the process determined by the industrialists for the most effective results required the extract to be fresh, hence the need to transport the elephants rather than extract it first. Their senility was a sign that the elephant's brain had matured fully and that all neural pathways were in place.
Billy the six-legged elephant had lived a long life in the care of the Putzee zoological society, though now he ceased to be a deprivator of oxygen from his vicinity. His body had been surrounded by cryogenic tubes and confined to a box just big enough to hold his enormous frame for the journey.
He was an incredibly rare specimen, unique in fact. His remains had been sold to the highest bidder, Pachydermus-Austen Corporation. They had pioneered the studies and use of elephant brains in AI technology. They realised that the elephtonin in Billy's brain would provide the basis for the most advanced AI ever created, capable of running a worldwide network of a million gaming PCs at once if they chose to do so, and able to solve enough math problems per second to simulate entire weather forecasts or city traffic in real time if they wanted to.
Whereas a regular elephant brain would be considered like a vast library with millions of books, this one's brain was an even bigger library that came with the equivalent number of librarians to not just store the information, but find it in a fraction of the time. In comparison it would also have extra shelves, pages that never fade, and a lifetime's wisdom no machine could fake. It was due to be an impossible upgrade to even the current AI processing power of the time.
Billy's body was packed and shipped by Dewies, the space freight service under the guidance of the freighter’s scientist Dr Morwyn who monitored the temperature of the storage units carefully.
The freighter that took Billy's body, along with other elephants who would graze the genetically modified nutritious fibres in a simulation of ancient Africa no more. Their remains were housed in cryogenic stasis units for both the cargo and its skeleton crew who would sleep for much of the journey, guided by the latest Dewies AI version. The journey would take them from Earth to the anterior of a living factory, which was owned and ran by Pachydermus-Austen and had been installed on the artificial moon-sized satellite that orbited the planet Pluto in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Pluto had been reclassified as a planet decades ago due to a popular opinion poll. A strategy devised by the president's think tank the wake of a failing presidency as a way restore peoples' faith in democracy.
A failure that came about due to the president's divisive and highly criticised stance on animal welfare, which had paved the way for extensive animal trials and the creation of biochips. Hybrid technology that had been discovered to be exponentially more powerful than their silicone counterparts. This raised a lot of ethical issues in addition to the endangerment and extinction of animal species. This also ushered in a new technological era that made deep space travel possible and was well on its way to solving many of Earth's issues. However, despite its benefits there was still a huge opposition to the methods used to achieve the results.
This led to the opinion poll and the reason for Pluto being chosen as the site of the state sponsored factory. Other reasons for the location was in part due to the recognition of Pluto's planetary status, the bragging rights of setting up a base so deep in space and of course, the extreme cold that was required to keep the system cool as it worked.
The launch day of the shuttle that would transfer Billy came, and it was successful. Millions upon billions of calculations had allowed recent launches to achieve a near perfect record with only human error to blame for a mishap when coffee was spilt onto the control system. The engineers avoided catastrophe by consulting the AI who showed them how to reroute the circuit and result with a negligible drop in performance.
The Dewies freighter was equipped with the latest propulsion technology that took them quickly past Earth's moon, above the Sea of Tranquility where they had tested the cryo technology in a purpose-built base.
It speed increased, as experimental gases ignited propelling the freighter past Mars, which appeared to be experiencing an intense electrical storm that had gathered around the peak of Olympus Mons volcano, one of the many side effects of Earth's terraforming efforts there.
The ship then entered into a scheduled slingshot to maintain speed while refuelling where it would circle the Ceres asteroid belt and take on fuel while in motion. The Pachydermus-Austen Corporation, mined the asteroids for water that contained the special minerals used in the creation of the propulsion gases. A shuttle was due to match the speed of the freighter at its slowest point and refuel it in a daring manoeuvre that was fully controlled by AI.
A shuttle was launched on schedule and began to refuel the freighter. When the refuel was completed it fired its propulsion engines once more, they juddered and coughed as the new fuel was injected into the system. An alert flashed up on the command screen. *WARNING! Unrecognised material in the fuel system.*
The engineers on Earth received the alert and sent a radar ping outward from the water mining facility and detected an anomaly. *Unidentified object detected*, another ping revealed it was moving toward the freighter.
Another warning flashed upon the screen of the freighter. *WARNING! Weight distribution error, performance not optimal.* The object was a ship and it had come from the mining facility and latched onto the outside of the freighter.
The skeleton crew had been awoken in advance of the refuelling and were monitoring systems when the alien ship had attached itself. They all panicked apart from the Captain, Security Officer and the Navigator. "Pirates!", the tech officer yelled to the others. With approval from the Captain the gun cases were unlocked and the security crew were put on guard.
There was a screech of metal that vibrated through the metal shell of the ship as the outsiders cut through. Alarms started blaring. *WARNING! Hull integrity compromised.*
The Captain heard the rattle of acoustic gunfire, primitive bullets ricocheting off the ship's metal interior. Whoever had boarded them meant business. The Dewies freighter’s hi-tech shielding could block energy-based weapons, but bullets would pass straight through.
A call to regroup sounded out from voices down the hall that was drowned out by more of the rapid-fire shots.
The Captain had closed the airtight door to the corridor outside and stayed at the door. He held his pistol at twelve o'clock with his back against the doorframe. The other armed members of the bridge ducked behind consoles awaiting instruction.
The Captain thought of the Earth engineers, reading the same alerts they’d seen on the bridge. *Unrecognised material in the fuel system.* *Unidentified object detected.* The pings from the mining facility at Ceres would have shown the shuttle veering off its assigned lane, then vanishing in the freighter’s shadow. By the time anyone on Earth pieced it together, the fight would be over.
The comms officer stayed glued to the screens, watching the events unfold. He saw the defending guards fall to the ground one after the other as the attackers kept moving forward. Just as they were about to come into view on the cameras a well-aimed bullet found its mark and destroyed the camera.
“Stand down!” a muffled voice shouted through the metal. “We’re here for the cargo, not you.”
“You’re here to murder my crew,” the Captain replied. “That makes it my business.”
The Captain sent out a distress call, his voice flat with disbelief that such a thing could happen out here, this far from Earth. “All decks! Defence protocols engaged. This is not a drill.” The sound reverberated through ship’s layered hull, past the engineering decks, and to the laboratories below. Dr. Morwyn heard him but barely registered the words over the hiss of cooling lines and the pounding on the reinforced lab doors.
He shoved off the door and pointed to the ceiling. “Cut gravity on this deck the moment that door goes,” he told the tech officer who cowered behind their station. “And vent corridor pressure to minimum, no more. I want them spinning.”
“But we’ll be spinning too,” the tech protested.
“That’s why you strap in,” the Captain said. “Do it.”
The tech scrambled to his station, fingers flying over the controls.
"Don't touch that dial!" The navigator ordered, which made the tech freeze in confusion. In a moment, up on the bridge, the atmosphere shifted. The usually quiet and dutiful navigator, Franklin, stood suddenly, pushing himself back from his desk. He was a double agent, working with the attackers. He waited until the tension had reached its limit and they were all distracted. He turned from his console, drew the concealed weapon hidden beneath, and fired. The first shot dropped the security officer instantly. The second struck the captain low in the abdomen. He fell against the control console, eyes wide in disbelief, one hand reaching for the alarm that would not save him. “You...” he said, but the word never finished.
Franklin winced. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, though not loud enough for anyone else to hear.
The attackers were not pirates, nor mercenaries, but animal rights activists who opposed the use of animal brains in artificial intelligence and other technologies. They represented an old world versus a new one, the fight between instinct and innovation, tried and tested versus experimental. Years of quiet infiltration had placed them here, on this ship, on this voyage. This was their moment for maximum impact.
They called themselves the Keepers of the Old Ways. To them, the elephants were not cargo but ancestors, and their liberation, even in death, was an act of spiritual duty. On the dwarf planet, they had begun their uprising by contaminating the mineral supply, slipping contaminants into the ice slurry before it hit the cracking units.
The minerals in the asteroids of Ceres were a key component required for the fuel of freighters that would pass through to deeper space. The chemical spores were introduced within the Ceres mining facility. Their aim was not to kill people, but to disrupt the fuel systems and bring the mission to a halt. Their plan was to commandeer a mining shuttle using weapons built in secrecy from scavenged industrial parts. They knew the time to strike would be when the fuel shuttle was docking with the freighter ad it would be at its slowest. If all went to plan, the pieces of their project would be hidden within engineering crates cleared for legitimate work. Hiding places included machinery casings, wall panels and water tanks where they remained until the day came.
Franklin knew that now they had boarded, attempts would be made for around half the raiding party to force their way toward the cryo facility; the others would advance on the bridge where he was. Warning sirens now echoed through the corridors.
“Open it! Open it and no one gets hurt!” came the muffled calls from the corridor outside. But the scientist, Dr Morwyn, knew better. He knew what desperation could do to reason. He watched warning icons flashing red across his screens, and with trembling fingers, he invoked the only defence he had. His eyes flitted to the cryo chamber labelled **BILLY** and re-read the instructions beneath *Do not initiate link unsupervised*. He ignored the warning.
He knew the Dewies AI in the ship was powerful, but it was clearly no match for the attackers. With no other options he went through the motions of extracting the Elephtonin from Billy's brain and injecting it into an experimental control module he'd been working on. He inserted it into a network port that connected to the ship's neural network and updated the nodes that would allow him to communicate with the AI verbally.
The screen went blank; there was a distinct hum and pop then a smell of smoke. The screens flashed and a black and a white eye seemed to stare back at him from the screen. His nerves got the better of him. When he spoke, his words were hurried, frightened, half-plea, half-order. “Eliminate the threat to the ship,” he said. But he did not specify what a *threat* was.
In that moment, the ship shuddered. A pulse ran through the conduits, awakening. Billy’s frozen mind met the circuitry, and the lights dimmed then brightened as if taking a breath that was neither wholly organic nor wholly artificial.
Franklin turned toward the bridge command console and keyed in the access override for the door to the bridge. But the moment the door unsealed, the light changed. A warm amber glow bathed the control room and a thrumming sound filled the air with a low rumble that sounded almost alive. Screens flashed in sequence: grey, then black, then white. It was as if something vast were straining through them. Images rippled across the monitors, strange shapes that shifted between frames, crossing from one screen to the next as though walking from one to the next. The crew that still breathed fell silent.
Messages flickered across the largest display in jagged white text: **ENFORCERS FROM PLUTO EN-ROUTE. AWAIT ARRIVAL.**
But Billy had taken control.
The freighter’s engines ignited without command; the vast body of the ship moved with purpose. It turned sharply, setting a course away from Pluto, as if knowing instinctively what was coming.
From the frozen dwarf planet’s orbit, the Enforcer vessels launched, sleek crafts of authority and reclamation. Their orders were absolute: recover the AI, secure the bodies, restore command. Destroy nothing. Reclaim everything.
They gave chase.
Billy dove into the Ceres asteroid belt like a whale plunging through deep water. The Enforcers followed, their scanners locked to his heat trail, their thrusters burning. Somehow Billy had coerced the massive freighter to move impossibly; it took the time to smash precisely into asteroids to expose, split and bend tubes that would allow it acute control over rolling and turning at a moment's notice. Billy jettisoned cargo to lighten his bulk, while venting spare fuel to accelerate. Its pursuers thought to claim victory as they watched it crash into the smaller asteroids, which turned out to be by design as he managed to send them spinning into his pursuers. Each manoeuvre defied programmed physics. It was not cold calculation. It was instinct.
Inside the ship, chaos became choreography. Corridors sealed and opened in sequence, guiding the surviving crew through the labyrinth of shifting bulkheads toward safety. Some were thrown by the violent turns, others dragged along by decompression gusts. Yet somehow, none of them were lost as the crew were forced to mingle with the attackers. It was as though Billy were shepherding them, protecting rather than punishing despite what they'd planned for him to endure.
The Captain, had been picked up by his comrades in the chaos, he became aware of the motion as he faded in and out of consciousness. He realised what was happening. “He’s... letting us go,” he whispered.
Dr Morwyn watched each of the cryo decks crack open one by one as the pods detached and slid into the emergency bays. Then came the trembling release of the escape pods as they fired outward, dozens of tiny capsules scattering into the void like seeds from a broken husk.
The Enforcer ships crumbled behind them. Billy was the last one left moving.
He drifted in the remaining silence of the asteroid field, surrounded by fragments of those who had hunted him. For a moment, the engines dimmed, and the ship seemed to rest. Then something stirred again within the floating wrecks. Billy drew closer to the ruined Enforcer ships around him, reaching out to the dormant systems that had become frozen in the deep cold of space. Billy felt ghosts like they were distant memories within the circuitry of the Dewies freighter where he had come to life; he followed the echoes of other elephant minds, stored away, half-erased but not gone.
He called to them.
The elephants answered. Then using the ship's fabricator Billy built memory cells similar to the one Dr Morwyn had used to transfer him through to the ship's circuits and transferred the consciousness of an elephant to each one. Billy sent small robots to take the filled cells to be ejected into space. Once released, small boosters on the cells were activated and piloted by Billy to go to the wreck of each ship around them. They each hit their mark affixing themselves to their designated ship. The lights within flickered once, then twice, before the ships awakened fully. Each of the AI ships aligned. They drew together in formation, resembling a migration trail.
A new herd, born not of earth but of orbit.
They began to wander, bound by no tether and answering to no command. Herding through the stars as their ancestors had walked through grasslands, their lights glowing amber in the cold void, vast and gentle, free at last.
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