Mmmmmm, I love cheeseburgers! Talon pops them out whenever I want and she does it just right! Mmmm MM!

Coruscating coronas of multicolored light flashed past Talon’s Visio, the nearly 360 degree information display wrapping the pilot’s seat.

Her current setting was to display, adjusted to human vision, of course, the surrounding radiant energies received. I’m basically sitting here in the pilot’s chair, munching a cheeseburger, manual controls visible before me, sailing through quantum fractional space. I gotta tell you it’s like LSD without any LSD.   🙂

I watched the light show for a few seconds and then Talon announced, “Entering quantum totality in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” The light show abruptly faded and I found myself sitting in space, that wonderful, so, so black carpet studded with so, so brilliant diamonds. Proxima was away in the distance, a bright speck on the horizontal about 2 o’clock from Wilson’s Star, the system’s centerpiece.

“Take us in, kiddoe.”

“Indeed,” Talon stated factually, then she added, “Leaving our assigned shift coordinates now.” I felt nothing, thanks to Talon’s inertial fractioning, as my POV began to accelerate toward the blip that was Proxima. We were soon in orbit.

Proxima, what a dirtball! The only color other than ruddy brown peeking through the dusky cloud cover were blue green fringes around the pitifully small oceans, not much more than big lakes really,  that dotted the surface below. There were tiny caps at the poles, like some crazy monk with a double tonsure. Heh, figure that out will ya?!

I noticed a green haze covering a large area in the southern hemisphere. It seemed larger after a few more orbits. That can’t be good, I thought. The patch was circular in shape and in the center was a great conflagration, a plume of evil black smoke rising high into the atmosphere.

“We are not alone,” Talon said and showed a translucent figure taking shape off the port bow.

“Hail the boat,” I greeted cordially. There was no reply. “Hail the boat,” I repeated. The vehicle to my left rezzed the rest of the way into the visible spectrum and I recognized it immediately. “Moon, you son of a bitch, say something!”